53 The disappearance of literary men

This is a brilliant and very important article that brings up something society should act upon swiftly, lest it risk long-term deteriorating consequences.

Some of my favourite excerpts follow. First, on the primary thesis:

if you care about the health of our society — especially in the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster — the decline and fall of literary men should worry you.

That was succinct. So also is this next paragraph that discussed why one ought to read fiction, something for which I have made a passionate case myself for as long as I can remember:

These young men need better stories — and they need to see themselves as belonging to the world of storytelling. Novels ... entertain, inspire, puzzle, hypnotize. But reading fiction is also an excellent way to improve one’s emotional I.Q. Novels help us form our identities and understand our lives ... This is why we need a more inclusive literary culture, one that will bring young men in from the cold.

Quoting bell hooks:

“There remains a small strain of feminist thinkers who feel strongly that they have given all they want to give to men; they are concerned solely with improving the collective welfare of women. Yet life has shown me that any time a single male dares to transgress patriarchal boundaries” — something I am convinced that literature enables men to do — “the lives of women, men and children are fundamentally changed for the better.”

Not all issues are split along gender lines. Better lives for women is critical, but is not mutually exclusive of a society where young men read and write more—a society with more literary men. If anything, such a society will be more feminist.