Men don’t like reading women. But should we care?

ICYMI: my article for Book(ish) Magazine

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“The self-indulgent memoir of an unpleasant, sexually incontinent, dysfunctional bore.” 

No, not the blurb for my autobiography, but an Amazon review I came across for Lisa Taddeo’s novel Animal. 

I, on the other hand, adored Taddeo’s follow-up to Three Women. The protagonist, Joan, gave such an unnervingly honest narrative of female rage and desire that it was as though a mirror had been held up to my innermost, mouldy thoughts. It was refreshing in its depravity. It was an invitation into an entirely uncensored mind. 

I do not, however, think that just because I enjoyed a book, everyone else should like it, too. But I did find this particular review quite funny. After all, what is a memoir if not self-indulgent? Was Joan supposed to give us 300+ pages of polite chatter about the various goings-on of other people in her life? Should we dismiss her because her thoughts (as a woman who has suffered a cocktail of misfortune at the hands of the men around her) are not always very “nice”? 

The review in question was, as you might imagine, written by a man. This in itself is, depressingly, quite rare, given that only 19% of readers of the bestselling female fiction authors are men, according to Women’s Prize. There is a common thread, then. Men do not typically like reading about women.   

Self-indulgent monologues are nothing new. Not for male narrators, anyway. In fact, some of the most celebrated works of the last 500 years have been white men taking us on a big ol’ internal journey. Now, I rather like Catcher in the Rye, for example. But if the protagonist in question - dealing with feelings of depression, angst and alienation as they do - were a woman? I’m not sure as many men would agree with me anymore. 

You can imagine that it’s the same for most canonical ‘self-indulgence’. 

If Nick Carraway were a woman, she’d be told to get a life—to stop interfering with other people’s love lives. Wordsworth’s poetry would be seen, not as a job, but as a hobby. And don’t even get me started on how bat-shit a female Captain Ahab would come across to a male audience. Society simply wouldn’t bother giving her airtime outside of a “Mad Bertha” character. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that we jump to call a woman “dysfunctional” when she controls an introspective literary narrative. Perhaps it comes down to the fact that men simply aren’t used to hearing women speak for any lengthy amount of time, or with any real honesty. 

“Perhaps it comes down to the fact that men simply aren’t used to hearing women speak for any lengthy amount of time, or with any real honesty.” 

“She breasted boobily down the stairs” has now become an amusing cultural reference for how men write women in literature, but it’s honestly not that far off, even in contemporary works. The correlation here is plain: if men ever want to get good at writing women in fiction, they’re going to have to start reading us. And, though it may come as a surprise, women can be unpleasant and dysfunctional. They can also be sexual outside of male desire. But they’re still worth reading about. 

This isn’t a call to action. I actually side with Roxane Gay when, in response to the Women’s Prize statistic on male readership of women’s work, she said: “Do we really care if men read women or not? Year after year we write pieces trying to convince men to read us. I simply don’t care.” It’s more that, if men want to progress further than I’ve-clearly-never-touched-a-boob-in-my-life” imagery, then it’s a must. 

As women, we’ve been at it for the last 500 years. We’ve come to know the intricacies of the male mind like the back of our hand—whether we wanted to or not, I might add. So, if you want to keep up, it’s your turn now, fellas.   

For more writing and poetry, follow me on Instagram @alannaduffield