The boys are reading Butter

Might this fix the manosphere?

Usually, the only book I ever see pop up again and again on the tube is Ghosts by Dolly Alderton (closely followed by her memoir, Everything I Know About Love, then her latest novel, Good Material). They have, without exception, always been carried by millennial women. (I’ve heard stories of single men using Dolly Alderton as ‘props’ in as catnip for the opposite sex but I think this must be seen to be believed.)

Anyway, the book to blow Dolly Alderton’s oeuvre out of the water is Butter, by Asako Yuzuki. I’ve spied its thick wad of yellow on the Victoria line countless times on my daily commute, and its owner has, almost every time, been male. It’s an excellent book, and its translation has become a publishing hit, but considering I wrote a newsletter two years ago about fiction’s gender divide – women make up 80% of fiction sales, and I gave up trying to talk to my male friends about anything but non-fiction a decade ago – I find this curious.

What is it about this tale of a female serial killer in Tokyo, who seduces greedy, rich men through intricate dishes, told through the viewpoint of a female journalist, written by a little known female author, that seems to have bridged the divide? Considering the few male characters are peripheral, and either misogynists or losers, I find this all the more interesting.

My (admittedly limited) observation coincides with a scattering of new thinkpieces about fiction’s gender dynamics, notably an op-ed by David J Morris in The New York Times. “The disappearance of literary men should worry everyone”, ran the headline, focussing not on the imbalance of male fiction readers this time, but male fiction writers.

New data from the NYT fiction best-seller lists revealed their dwindling number: in 2004, half of the authors on the list were women, now three quarters of the list are women. Morris extrapolates from this that many ‘marginalised’ young men are falling into sinkholes of ‘video games and pornography’, while the ‘thinkers’ are congregating in toxic ‘manosphere’ spaces on the internet, pledging allegiance to people like Andrew Tate. Morris writes: “These young men need better stories — and they need to see themselves as belonging to the world of storytelling.”

I am not sure of the logic here. If marginalised, young angry men were writing novels instead of sitting on Reddit, maybe they would become better writers. But would they become any less toxic?

Reading, certainly, has been proven to increase your capacity for empathy and think of people, and worlds, outside of yourself. So, yes, it would help if angry young men read more novels. But it depends what kind of novels – I’m not sure how much an Andrew Tate disciple would have his worldview challenged by, say, John Niven’s Kill Your Friends, or, perhaps, much of Cormac McCarthy, Hemingway, Norman Mailer or Philip Roth. It is possible to find echo chambers within literature too.

Men do, the data has shown, make up a large readership of fantasy and sci-fi, but the genre, also dominated by male writers, has been accused of idealising and marginalising female characters, or flattening them into archetypes.

Might angry young men become better people if they read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, which beautifully centres two, lonely alienated men? She has been praised for being able to write male characters brilliantly – but then again I’ve only read this in pieces written by women. And, come to think of it, my biggest issue with Intermezzo was that while the men were complex and fascinating, I found the female characters marginalised and idealised – many of the women in Rooney’s novels could be likened to the frail, beautiful creatures in male fantasy worlds.

Looking through the comment section of the New York Times – always a refreshingly civilised experience compared to UK comment sections – and readers have clustered around the same anecdotal evidence. Men want to read things explicitly marketed to them, or written by other men, whereas women tend to read anything.

I used to think that was true. Until about 2018, I would say my reading tastes, across genre and gender, was highly varied. In fact if anything they skewed male, since the majority of our English literature curriculum is (or at least was) written by men: Shakespeare, Salinger, Orwell, Steinbeck, Donne, Webster, etc. At university it was the same story, except in French. When I worked at GQ, I was recommended books by male authors by my male colleagues.

But then perhaps as a result of the media’s first person industrial complex, combined with social media’s prioritisation of trauma dumping, I began to read a lot of female memoir and autofiction. Since the end of Franzen mania, the only male authors I can recall reading from the past five years have been Cormac McCarthy, Brandon Taylor and Douglas Stuart. The rest have all been the ‘buzzy’ memoirs and novels from the female writers of the moment. The other day I walked into WH Smith to have a look at the book displays, and the ‘best new fiction’ table was all female titles, while the adjacent ‘classics’ table was 90% male.

There have been reports that the reason behind this imbalance in new fiction is that publishers – largely made up of women – do not want submissions from the publishing’s once ubiquitous middle-class, white man. Considering that, historically, we have heard rather a lot from them, I don’t think a pendulum swing in the other direction for a while is bad one. And to be honest, we’ve probably heard rather a lot from middle-class, white women now too – the pendulum hasn’t swung far enough.

Nevertheless, it can be boring to hear from just one gender. At one point last year I remember saying on my podcast how much I was craving to read novels written by men, just to hear a different voice, which is how I ended up reading John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (which I loved, but was so violent and depraved it genuinely turned my internal monologue hateful for about a week). But my point is that women can find themselves stuck in reading silos too.

Take today’s Romantasy craze, largely driven by women, with Rebecca Yarros selling 12 million copies from her Empyrean fantasy series within two years. Not only will we have women clustering around a single genre, like men do with sci-fi and fantasy, but the idealisation of men might also become a problem. As a friend of mine wrote in a Telegraph piece on the genre’s appeal: “It manages to pull off the rare feat of achieving male characters who are both extremely stereotypically masculine – lots of muscle and dominant tropes, and obviously filthy sex – but also feminine, with lots of fragility and emotional depth”.

Another interesting point in that NYT comment section suggests that, in a society which centres male value around money, literary erudition is no longer desirable, because it is not particularly lucrative. The average man doesn’t want to be a public intellectual, he wants to be a CEO. And women are not looking for a man of letters, but ‘a man in finance’. (Although Dazed would disagree.)

Which is all to say, the alleged death of the literary man is complicated, while a literary man is not always an enlightened man. And, considering there are recent reports of a ‘female’ manosphere, with 36% of Gen Z women thinking ‘feminism has gone too far’, and conservative female influencers such as Brett Cooper reshaping Right-wing media, perhaps, in a few years, Morris will have to widen his scope.

In the meantime, perhaps some of those literary men on the Victoria line reading Butter will be inspired to to put a pen to paper. And if they can’t get their proofs read by women in publishing, perhaps they can take a leaf out of George Elliot’s book and try a female pseudonym for size.

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