I noticed on social media (mostly bookstagram) that it is nearly always the women reading Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Sally Rooney, Madeline Miller.
And a lot of men reading solely male authors – Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Bukowski, Palahniuk.
Do people purposefully read authors from the same gender or is it a happy accident?
by Famous_Obligation959
6 Comments
This question is bait. If someone does have a preference then of the two available choices, obviously one of them makes you an asshole to state while the other is perfectly socially acceptable.
I tend to lean toward female authors, but recently the books that stick with me are male authors.
Not sure as to the why though. Maybe I was more willing to give the books a chance based on the covers (I know but there is some small part of my brain that goes “oh pretty color”) where as the male authors tended to be a bit… plain?
I don’t think people do it on purpose, unless they’re consciously trying to diversify their reading. It’s mostly an accident. Whether it’s a ‘happy’ accident or not is up for interpretation. I think it’s probably bad that people are reading only authors of their own gender, if only because that’s a very arbitrary way to limit your reading. There are many great books by authors of any gender.
Some people will also argue that there’s an injustice here. Women authors have been historically ignored by the largely male literary class. Often this is followed up by the argument that we ought to read women authors now to make up for this historical injustice. Or they’ll argue that it creates a kind of narrow mindedness in men who fail to challenge their ‘male perspective.’ Here’s an piece which makes something like that argument: [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/why-do-so-few-men-read-books-by-women](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/why-do-so-few-men-read-books-by-women) Whether these arguments are sound is unclear to me.
I do choose to read mostly women these days, after a lifetime of reading mainly men’s voices and men’s representations of women’s inner lives as part of that.
I’m interested in our experiences, and I’m especially on the lookout for historical insights; how women in the old days thought and acted, as they were less likely to write or have their writings preserved.
This is partly because I don’t have a close family and don’t know anything about the women from more than one generation ago, but I like to try imagining them somehow.
I read plenty of both. Some genres trend heavily male and others heavily female, so if I read widely it’s hard not to.
I suspect that the men who don’t read many female authors (or the women who don’t read many male ones…this does happen, but is less common) just don’t read very widely. They’ve found their niche they like, with maybe a secondary one for variety, and that’s where they stay.
I normally don’t have a preference, and some of my favourite books have been written by men.
However if I’m reading for comfort or escapism I do have a preference for women authors, with a few exceptions.