Men And Books

Books.  Apart from the occasional celebrity who claims never to have read one (as if ascribing at least part of their success to the fact) we all love them.  We read them on the bus, we have a pile by our beds, we even take a carefully chosen stack on holiday.  But what about differences between the genders?

Well, I would usually subscribe to the semi-cliché that men mostly read biographies and books about wars, while women mostly read novels.  Of course, the reality is more complicated than that, but apparently there are nonetheless fairly clear demarcations.

A study of the reading habits of men and women made a few years ago by two UK academics revealed that men tended to list as their favourites “angst-ridden books showing intellectual struggle, violence, personal vulnerability, catastrophe and the struggle to rise above circumstance”.  This, the study contended, showed “an overwhelming reluctance [by men] to place themselves within the domestic sphere,” with the overall impression being one of a lack of progress beyond “puberty reading.”

Women, by contrast, were found to prefer more emotional, domestically focused novels, “[using] much-loved books to support them through difficult times and emotional turbulence … as metaphorical guides to behaviour, or as support and inspiration.”

So there we are – in literary terms, men are permanently adolescent and women are sophisticated emotional self-medicators.  The entire Booker Prize judging panel should be made up of women, and men shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near publishing because they are barely more than daydreaming schoolboys.

Well, yes and no.  It certainly looks as if men like more fantasy in their reading, preferring lone roaming cowboys to suburban-living office workers.  But does that make them immature?  Maybe it’s actually just that men just use literature in a different way from women.  If women do indeed tend to use books for emotional engagement and even self-help, is this in some absolute way definitely better than men using them to indulge their need for fantasy?  It’s a bit like saying that using eggs to make a meringue is better than using them for an omelette, without any comment on the quality of the two dishes actually cooked.

If men cite some literature from their formative years as having made a big impact on them, it doesn’t mean that all they have ever read since then was the same book, over and over again.  All it shows is that men tend to identify with a particular type of story – one, incidentally, that seems to have maybe a bit more to do with the male experience of life.

Of course, most studies (even academic ones) looking at gender differences through such subjective means are mostly going to be a matter of interpretation, and more and more of the people conducting them feel they need to look for a headline.  But I do think that writing off men’s literary appreciation because it fails to exhibit some arbitrarily chosen quality is maybe just a bit too facile.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make an omelette and finish Starship Troopers.

Contact the author here: thewhy@morningquickie.com