The question has been hurtling through think pieces, op-eds, and ominous headlines over the past few years: Have American men stopped reading? Specifically, have they stopped reading fiction? And is that why the world is so bad now?
The most recent entry in this genre came in December, when David J. Morris, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, theorized in a New York Times op-ed that the disappearance of literary men is a contributing factor to Donald Trump’s dominant performance with the manosphere. The conversation is so persistent that writer Jason Diamond declared in GQ back in August, with some resignation, “We’re Doing ‘Men Don’t Read Books’ Discourse Again.”
Reading fiction has assumed the same role as therapy in public discourse: something good for one’s mental and emotional health that we should all do in order to be better citizens, and something that men — particularly straight men — are simply choosing not to do, to the detriment of society. Essayists and critics have been hitting this note for several years, but it has acquired a new darkness since the 2024 election, when men seemed to break decisively for Trump. If men had been willing to read novels, the idea is, perhaps Kamala Harris would be preparing her inaugural address right now.
These observers are pointing at something real. Men did appear to favor Trump by a significant margin in November, although we’re still waiting on data more concrete than exit polls to tell us how far that trend really goes. Many men do seem to have found themselves isolated in a media silo full of toxic visions of masculinity, one that probably helped radicalize them toward Trump and his acolytes this past election season. They also seem to read fewer books in general than women do, and they probably read less fiction than women as well.
Yet the idea of men who need new stories but refuse to read them is also exaggerated and hyperbolic. It has become its own kind of story. It’s a legend, one that’s been repeated for years, haunted by zombie statistics and dubious facts. Its continued flourishing says a lot about what our culture worries about and all the things we hope will heal us.
The untraceable zombie stat heard around the internet
The truth is that most American adults, regardless of their gender, simply do not read very many books at all.
According to studies by the Pew Research Center spanning 2011 to 2021, Americans read an average of 14 books per year — likely pulled up by the number of rare super-readers taking down dozens of books — but a median of just five books per year. Generally speaking, college graduates are more likely to be book readers than people without college degrees. Adults between the ages of 18 to 29 are more likely to read books than adults over the age of 65. And women read slightly more than men do.
A difference of 10 percentage points and six minutes, respectively, are probably not enough to power a series of think pieces about how men’s refusal to read is a national crisis.
Pew’s 2021 study says 73 percent of men say they’ve read a book in the past year, compared to 78 percent of women. Those numbers are up a tad from 2016, when 68 percent of men said they’d read a book compared to 77 percent of women. Overall, we’re looking at pretty consistent stats over the course of the last decade: Roughly 70-ish percent of men read at least one book a year, and roughly 80-ish percent of women do. Meanwhile, according to the Department of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey of 2023, women spend on average 0.32 hours on leisure reading per day (about 19 minutes), while men’s daily reading time averages out to about 0.2 hours (12 minutes).
These disparities are all meaningful and measurable, but a difference of 10 percentage points and six minutes, respectively, is probably not enough to power a series of think pieces about how men’s refusal to read is a national crisis. To get to the numbers that drive the discourse, we have to turn our attention specifically to fiction, the central concern of a number of these articles.
The vast majority of these pieces contain a version of the following sentence: “Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the US, Canada, and Britain.” Sometimes it gets inverted: “Women account for about 80 percent of the fiction market, according to multiple surveys conducted in the US, Canada, and Britain.” I found variations of the sentence going back as far as this NPR story from 2007. As early as 1997, the New York Times was speculating that women might buy 80 percent of fiction without actually citing a survey. The statistic appears in Morris’s New York Times article from December, and in the 2020 book Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives by University of Exeter professor Helen Taylor.
An 80 percent to 20 percent gender split is the kind of eye-popping statistic you can absolutely build a discourse around. Yet do any of these sources ever cite any of these alleged multiple surveys? They do not. And here is where I, your humble guide, find myself trapped in a labyrinth of old data as I attempt to hunt down a zombie statistic.
In the US, the best source for publishing sales data is the industry tracker Circana BookScan. I wrote to them and asked for their thoughts on the 80 percent number. They said they didn’t break out their data by gender and could not help me, but that 80 percent “seems quite high.” They added that under previous ownership, BookScan was affiliated with a service called Books & Consumers that did track the genders of book buyers on a regular basis, “So it is possible that stat came from there.” They add that statistics from before 2020 should be used with extreme caution “because the market has shifted considerably during and after.”
I then wrote to Morris and Taylor and asked if they would mind sharing their citations with me. Taylor said she read the 80 percent number in several places and thought she had received confirmation from Nielsen BookData, the UK counterpart to the US’s Circana BookScan. She added that learning that BookScan doesn’t break out their data by gender was a “big surprise.”
I reached out to Nielsen BookData to learn their thoughts. They replied back that they didn’t track book sales in the US and Canada. “As for the 20% stat, I’m not sure where it came from but it has never been the case, at least for the UK,” they added.
BookData did confirm the rest of Taylor’s statistics, showing that in 2017, UK women bought 63 percent of fiction, while men bought 37 percent. The numbers don’t quite match the 80/20 split Taylor cites earlier, but the distinction is certainly suggestive, at least for buying patterns in the UK.
Meanwhile, Morris very kindly sent me a link to a blog entry on the Author’s Guild website which repeats the 80 percent claim, sourcing the data to a now-deleted blog entry apparently by a motivational speaker. He also sent me an economic study provided to him by a New York Times fact-checker that analyzes how a flood of women authors changed the literary marketplace but contains no information about the gender of book buyers. Neither of these links led me to a study showing that 80 percent of fiction book buyers are women.
It doesn’t look like anyone has actually fact-checked this question in quite a while.
There is some evidence that in the US, men read less fiction than women do, or at least that they did before the massive changes of the pandemic — but those numbers are a lot closer to the modest 10 percentage point difference we saw looking at reading habits in general. A 2017 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts found that while 42 percent of US adults had read a novel or short story in the past year, the numbers broke down to 50 percent of women and 33 percent of men.
So, do American men read less fiction than women do? Probably. Do they read so little fiction that women buy 80 percent of all the units in the marketplace? Maybe. It doesn’t look like anyone has actually fact-checked this question in quite a while.
Are there still male literary role models?
Readership numbers aren’t the only concern of essays about men and reading. One of their recurring assertions is that men need to be able to think of fiction as something masculine if they’re going to engage with it and that the role models who used to fulfill that need are less ascendant now than they were in the days when the Jonathans of Brooklyn were the most prominent voices in American letters.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the literary man, or lit bro, used to be a recognizable Type of Guy, enough of an archetype that he was easy to parody. He was at the core of Keith Gessen’s novel All the Sad Young Literary Men in 2008 and Dana Schwartz’s viral hit Twitter account Guy in Your MFA. Ironic misandrist blogs of that era used to complain that lit bros didn’t read enough books by women.
The lit bro seems to be much less in evidence in the Type of Guys online these days. He may have been superseded by the extremely online guy, or maybe the podcast bro. Yet if he’s less of a recurring character in online discourse than he used to be, I’m not sure it’s because there are no more high-profile literary men to whom aspiring young lit bros can look up.
Men won the National Book Award for fiction in four of the last five years: Percival Everett in 2024, Justin Torres in 2023, Jason Mott in 2021, and Charles Yu in 2020. They have won eight of the past 11 Pulitzers for fiction. Meanwhile, novelists like Alexander Chee, Garth Greenwell, and Brandon Taylor have become perennials on critical best-of lists. When it comes to prestige, the literary man appears to be thriving — he’s just, crucially, less likely to also be straight and white than he used to be.
Even with the ascendancy of a genre like romantasy — written largely by and for women — male authors are still heavy hitters in sales, too. In the New York Times bestseller list for combined print and ebook fiction for the week of December 22, for instance, seven of 15 titles were written by men, with appearances from perennial over-performers like James Patterson and Nicholas Sparks, who are well-matched with romantasy heavyweights like Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros.
Meanwhile, publishing itself is overwhelmingly staffed by women, with a 2023 survey by Lee & Low finding that 71 percent of publishing’s workforce are cisgender women and 21 percent are cisgender men. The numbers get knottier, however, further up the ladder. Women compose 63 percent of the executive and board-level staff, meaning that the question of who is gatekeeping publishing is not exactly cut-and-dried.
So why are we convinced men have stopped reading?
Here’s where we’ve ended up: Men are slightly less likely to read than women are, and they’re probably also slightly less likely to read fiction, although the margin is not the yawning gap it’s usually presented as. Male authors continue to sell well and win awards. And while it’s true that women make up the vast majority of publishing staff, men are overrepresented at the executive level.
At the same time, the “problem” of men who no longer read is presented as one that is urgent for the culture to address. So how did we get here? We don’t know for sure. But I have a few theories.
The Zynternet bro is the most visible male archetype of the year, the first to present itself to our collective cultural imagination when we think “man.” And no, he does not read.
2024 was in many ways the year of what writer Max Read calls the Zynternet, as in dudes who chew a lot of Zyn nicotine pouches: “a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings — mostly but by no means entirely male.” It’s arguably the community that most of the “why did men pick Trump” postmortems are talking about, and what Morris is referring to when he laments that too many young men are turning to figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate for intellectual stimulation.
The Zynternet bro is the most visible male archetype of the year, the first to present itself to our collective cultural imagination when we think “man.” And no, he does not read.
That’s not necessarily a new phenomenon. Novels have been considered feminine frivolities since the Victorian era, when women first emerged as a major book-buying market in Europe. Novels, which were about fantasies that had never occurred and frequently dealt with love and marriage, were thought to be most proper for women, whose sphere was the home. Men, who would have to take on the strictures of the outside world, were thought to be better suited for journalism and nonfiction, which would prepare them to take action.
Some of those beliefs are, at the very least, still subliminal in Western culture. Tate was echoing a version of them when he declared, “Reading books is for losers who are afraid to learn from life. So they try and learn from the life OTHERS have lived. But you never REALLY learn unless you lived it. You must feel it to believe it. Books are a total waste of time. Education for cowards.”
Tate and Trump are avatars of the worst possibilities of the Zynternet, the worst version of what its vision of masculinity might look like: prizing instinct over education and action over research. It makes sense that those on the left, searching for a way to save young boys and men from the influence of the manosphere, would land on reading fiction as a solution. Certainly it’s not an option that the proudly anti-intellectual Tate would ever offer his followers. (Jordan Peterson would, though, which is perhaps a sign that we shouldn’t get too starry-eyed about the curative power of the written word for men looking for direction.)
We’re living in a moment in which a lot of people on the left are afraid for the souls of men. They’re searching for spiritual solutions, and in a post-secular world, books are one of the few objects left that can summon a virtuous aura of salvation. We don’t necessarily need evidence to believe that they can work miracles.
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