{"id":9109,"date":"2021-07-13T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-13T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9109"},"modified":"2021-07-12T21:04:51","modified_gmt":"2021-07-13T01:04:51","slug":"still-again-men-shunning-women-authors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9109","title":{"rendered":"Still? Again? Men Shunning Women Authors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"reading\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Periodically authors get motivated to revisit  a persistent question, Why Won\u2019t Men Read Their Books? It\u2019s pretty discouraging to think that a big chunk of the population who might read a mystery\/crime book, who say that\u2019s their favorite genre to read, will dismiss out of hand the one they\u2019re working!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An article by the gender-masking MA Sieghart<\/a> in last Sunday\u2019s Guardian<\/em> newspaper takes up the issue once again. \u201cFemale authors through the centuries, from the Bront\u00eb sisters to George Eliot to JK Rowling, have felt obliged to disguise their gender to persuade boys and men to read their books. But now? Is it really still necessary? The sad answer is yes.\u201d Sieghart set about to document that for her new book, The Authority Gap<\/em><\/a>, through a survey she commissioned from Nielsen Book Research. The result? \u201cMen were disproportionately unlikely even to open a book by a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take top-selling female authors. Less than one reader in five is male. Then take top-selling male authors. Almost half (45%) of their readers are women. Clearly, women are much more comfortable reading across gender than men are. A question of quality, you ask? No, Sieghart says, pointing out that women authored nine of the ten best-selling literary novels of 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve puzzled over this a lot in previous posts<\/a>. Now Sieghart takes the issue beyond a marketing conundrum, suggesting a more serious problem underneath. By cutting themselves off from the ideas, imaginations, experiences, and perspectives of women, as expressed in the books they write, men limit their ability to understand half the world. It\u2019s a familiar-sounding argument from another domain when she says, as a result, men \u201cwill continue to see the world through an almost entirely male lens, with the male experience as the default.\u201d The stories women tell\u2014and the women themselves\u2014will be niche, when in reality, they are not niche stories; they are human stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Periodically authors get motivated to revisit  a persistent question, Why Won\u2019t Men Read Their Books? It\u2019s pretty discouraging to think that a big chunk of the population who might read a mystery\/crime book, who say that\u2019s their favorite genre to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Still? Again? Men Shunning Women Authors - New data on how few men read books by women","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,174,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-first-draft-blog","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2mV","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9110,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9109\/revisions\/9110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}