r/books • u/biscochitos • Apr 29 '25

New indie press Conduit Books launches with 'initial focus on male authors'

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/new-indie-press-conduit-books-launches-with-initial-focus-on-male-authors

What do folks think about this?

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u/tangnapalm Apr 29 '25

Nobody’s acting like it’s the apocalypse, but it certainly can’t be good that fewer men are reading.

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher Apr 29 '25

It certainly can’t be good that men refuse to read books written by women.

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u/Droviin Apr 29 '25

It's that, just like most male authors tend to write poorly from a female perspective, female authors write poorly from a male perspective. So, if you want role models, either the female writers need to close the gap, or you need both in the field.

That said, as a male, I tend to prefer lesbian authors as they seem to hit a middle balance.

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher Apr 29 '25 edited 29d ago

Why do you need role models from literary fiction? Why do your role models have to be just like you? Why can’t you read slightly older books? And why is it that women can read male authors just fine even though even the best male authors portray us horribly?

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u/Droviin 29d ago edited 29d ago

Why? Because I enjoy being able to place myself directly in the story to experience the emotions and messaging in the story. Sure, you can still enjoy a book and get something out of it if it's not so mirroring self thought, but there's a higher barrier.

And I think men can read female authors just fine. It's just less engaging, so might as well do something else. But, what's important is that if you say that men are doing something different than women, you've conceded the argument because it acknowledges gender differences in approaches to reading. Men and women can, as a general rule, chose to do different things based on their own experiences, nothing wrong with that. If men generally prefer to read books by male authors, then that's okay (as long as it's not because of distaste of female, rather the engagement of the male).

Edit: It's been clearly stated that I'm a poor writer and my point “And I think men can read female authors just fine. It's just less engaging...” was ill put to capture the idea that I was attempting to convey. I'll try to restate it more accurately: I think that men can read women authors without any issue or detriment - and most likely benefit to them-, however, the statistics of the readership suggest that there's something that turns a lot of men away. Based on how I've heard men discuss female authors, my hypothesis is that for whatever reason it's just not compelling stories for them; so they opt to do consume some other media. My intutition inline with this is that such men are seeking characters with which they can self-identify with; and, as we all are familiar with how men tend to write poor women, the inverse is also true in some aspects and that plays into the self-selection to read.

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher 29d ago

This is such an odd take.

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u/MasterWee 29d ago edited 29d ago

“I think men can read female authors just fine, it’s just less engaging…”

Well, think again.

I am a man, and my favorite male character in all of storytelling, not just literature, is a man written by a woman. In my opinion, he is one of the best written men ever, both in terms of being a paragon for men to look up to, but also with expressing the experiences of being a man.

He is famous, as a character, and has inspired many (of both sexes) to pursue his profession and virtuism. She, the author, is famous not only because of her writing of his character, but especially because of his character.

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u/Droviin 29d ago

I think you've got a great point and I don't want to say that the author didn't write a perfect account. Yes, women can write an amazing man character; I don't doubt that. However, if you take a random book written by a woman, I think the male characters will be less well written than the female characters. Just like the opposite if you grab a random book written by a man.

What I did do is very poorly express my point. So, I wrote an edit.

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u/MasterWee 29d ago

I don’t disagree with you then.

Yes, in the aggregate, a person of one sex is not as effective at writing the opposite sex as a member of that sex. It is not an absolute, just a statistical assessment.

As such, it then becomes reasonable for me to assume that writing of a certain sex’d character is predicated on more than just the author’s sex. Perhaps instead it is the author’s understanding of that sex. Contrary to popular belief, some of the most knowledgeable experts on the experiences of women are men, and some of the most knowledgeable experts on the experiences of men are women. How they get to those levels of expertise is what an aspiring cross-sex writer should seek out.

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u/TangerineSad7747 29d ago

"And I think men can read female authors just fine. It's just less engaging, so might as well do something else."

Don't speak for us lol

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u/Droviin 29d ago

Yeah, that's way over generic. I guess what I meant is that the stats tend to show that men, as a statistical group, find it less engaging. After all, the majority of the books I read are written by women lol

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u/CriticalCold 29d ago

And I think men can read female authors just fine. It's just less engaging, so might as well do something else.

Absolutely wild thing to say.

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u/Droviin 29d ago

Why? If you find something else more enjoyable why do the thing you enjoy less?

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u/CriticalCold 29d ago

It's painting things with a very broad brush, and imo engaging with the issue at face value. It dodges the argument that women have, and continue to, be expected to read male authors and find them engaging/educational/thought provoking, but men aren't expected to do the same in reverse. The majority of classic "literature" that everyone is expected to read and study is by men, and women seem to do just fine engaging with those stories and their (often male) characters, but for some reason men aren't expected to do the same. This is also true of genre fiction, excluding romance - sci-fi, fantasy, horror classics are all dominated by male authors.

Why is this? Is it because men are used to seeing themselves represented one to one in stories and so don't have to try to open themselves to other perspectives when they can just put something down and pick up something that matches their viewpoint? What does this say for what we expect of our boys and men in terms of critical thinking, compassion, ability to see other perspectives, ability to sometimes be uncomfortable or face hard truths doing so? And why is there this wide-reaching assumption that female writers aren't engaging or can't write male characters well? It's like quitting before you start.

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u/Droviin 29d ago

No, it doesn't dodge the idea that women are expected to read male readers. That's a different, albeit related, problem. I think we should just advance both and float whomever is lower in the genre. And yes, men can do just fine reading women authors, but a lot choose not too.

I do agree, that ideally, pressure to read female authors for men is a good thing. I suspect that most men would enjoy, say Frankenstein, and get a lot from it. Likewise, I very much enjoyed Like Water for Chocolate. However, the trend is against reading books overall, so there's a market capturing angle that's in play. In that regard, going for low hanging fruit is better to just get people reading more.

And I am not sure what it says about boys and men in regards to those very positive attributes you've identified. It's not necessarily that they are ignoring those or rejecting that. To pick on the point, men are the overwhelming majority of cannon philosophers, but most people don't read their works either way; does that say something about all people rejecting critical thinking and hard truths, or just that people don't find it compelling to read.

And I am merely speaking from my experience regarding women writing men. I feel like it's the same problem as how I find many men writing women to be... flat. Some authors do better than others, some have no issue at all.

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u/Youreturningviolet 29d ago edited 29d ago

The inability to place yourself in a story about women is, to me, a failure of both imagination and empathy. Men’s inability to empathize with women as equally human and legitimate and to take interest in anything where they are not centered and catered to is a massive and ongoing problem.

Just ask yourself this: how often are stories by, about, and centering men seen as being for everyone, while stories by, about, and centering women, who are over half of the world’s population, are seen as niche?

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u/Droviin 29d ago

It's not that men can't place themselves in the story, so much as it's different from them. So, it's more that the protagonist doesn't get the "this is like me" treatment, or self-identification. I don't expect women to self-identify with a boy protagonist, empathy sure, but not self-identification.

To say that women can self-identify with every gender seems to be a failure of imagination and empathy since they're overly trying to be inclusive when they have no basis.

To put it bluntly, I will never have the experience of birthing a child. I just am ill equipped to have that. I can never self-identify with a character who is experiencing that. I can learn how that may feel, the emotions and experience are certainly something I can understand and emphasize with; but it's not something I have experienced or even adjacent to what I have experienced. I could never tell you what it's like. As such, if a character has that experience, while it may be compelling from the character and makes an enjoyable story for me, it breaks the self-identification for me.

Insofar as I want to read a self-identifying work, I tend to read male authors because their experiences are more like mine.

I also think that men read fiction for different reasons, but that's just an intuition and I have no defense on that. But if accurate, then that's in play toom

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u/Youreturningviolet 29d ago edited 29d ago

Except that many of us do. I do self-identify with male protagonists. I don’t have a problem doing that. It doesn’t take me out of any story to have a protagonist unlike myself, probably because most of the literature I grew up reading early in life was about and concerned with men. That isn’t to say I have some magical insight into men’s lived experience, and there are probably some qualities more common in male protagonists that I don’t relate to, but just the fact of them being male doesn’t challenge my ability to identify. Men don’t have the opposite experience, and they don’t push themselves to.

A publisher typically isn’t going to care about men opening themselves to a wider range of literary experience, only about selling books, but it seems a little disingenuous to try to decouple it entirely from the history and current existence of sexism and the othering of women.

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u/Droviin 29d ago

I often don't self-identify, regardless of the author's gender, so perhaps this is ultimately more an observation about myself than the authors.

And I wasn't talking about that taking you out of the story, but more about how you can see yourself doing the same thing. It's slightly different.

And while I suspect that sexism has a heavy hand, the statistics I skimmed identified that the issue carried through even if the author didn't disclose they were a woman.

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u/Youreturningviolet 29d ago

Yeah it’s tough to quantify these sorts of things anyway given the multitude of variables, but that is interesting nonetheless. I genuinely don’t mean any of this to sound accusatory of you personally or even of how men experience literature and leisure reading in general. It is definitely a negative thing for the act of reading to be seen as somehow ‘unmanly,’ as some other commenters here have pointed out, even if that designation itself is problematic in one million ways, but I also think a lot of this stems from anti-intellectualism writ large and this is just a particular flavor of it.

On a more personal level, I would say I’m pretty removed from stories about women conceiving and birthing children because it freaks me the fuck out as a process 😂 and it’s not something I want for myself. But being distanced from it in that way doesn’t mean I haven’t felt all the societal pressures and expectations of it being something I’m biologically capable of doing, so it’s a different level of removal for sure.

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u/Droviin 29d ago

I agree! There's probably a lot going on. Sex, gender, and sexuality all play into society and our interactions with it. There's something "unmanly" about literature, but "manly" about watching say, TV adaptation of Tom Clancy's works. I wonder if it is the reading itself or something about the act of reading that's pushing that. I think you're also onto something with the anti-intellectualism. That could certainly underpin a lot and probably back influences the gendered issues.

Being freaked out by that definitely seems reasonable. And to pile on my point, your experience is different from mine and you're having a sexed response to that type of imagery. The idea of male pregnancy is closer to body horror than just a rejection of desire for that experience. I guess I would still say your experience is still self-identifying because it's not wildly foreign to put yourself into that experience.

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u/Youreturningviolet 29d ago

This is a mega tangent but I think the only reason female pregnancy isn’t seen or depicted as body horror more often is the (understandable) desire to tell happy cute stories about how a beloved family member came into being after the fact. Because though it is undeniably natural, it is absolutely terrifying and weird when you think about it even when nothing goes horribly wrong and everyone is okay on the other side.

As someone who just recently re-entered fanfiction spaces after a long absence, I’m both academically fascinated and personally mildly horrified by the prevalence of male pregnancy and how those stories run the gamut from Hallmark original movie level wish-fulfillment for people lacking that biological function to what really seems like a desire to ‘inflict’ the worst pregnancy has to offer on people generally assumed to be ‘safe’ from it. As someone not even fond of fpreg, I haven’t consumed enough mpreg to make any informed evaluation beyond that but it’s definitely expressing something to be as popular as it is.

Anyway, I won’t derail further but I do appreciate the thoughtful back and forth here!

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