Men, Fiction, and the Death of Empathy

The bookish male is dying out. 

The bookish male, when spotted in his natural habitat, will most likely be found engaging a blushing woman in conversation about just how very interesting he finds Virginia Woolf’s writing, whilst a tatty paperback protrudes from the back pocket of his Carhartt jeans, and his round, tortoiseshell spectacles slip charmingly down his nose. 

The fact that the Instagram account @hotdudesreading (where you can find rare sightings of the above, tote-bag-clad and all) has over 1.2 million followers highlights this is an endangered species that women very much do not want to die out. 

Almost two-thirds of novels are bought by women, according to Nielsen BookData. This is not a statistic I find impossible to believe. My male peers, when they do read, tend to prefer reading the autobiographies of impressive male celebrities, politicians, or war heroes, believing non-fiction provides them with a practical education that fiction just does not. They seem to crave reading about real-life people doing real things, looking for male role models whose success or bravery they can emulate. 

Young men tend to harbour a greater obsession with financial success, and subsequently a greater fear of failure than their female counterparts. Alistair Brown, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Modern Literature at Durham University, insists that a “cult of productivity is still imposed more on men than on women.” For young men, fiction is a time-wasting endeavour, filling their brains with silly stories rather than the meaningful life skills they can find in the pages of non-fiction books.

The novel, from the moment of its conception, was a product intended for women. In the 19th century, reading was a feminised activity: an outlet for the stifled passions of upper-class debutantes. Men, however, should be out working, earning, and learning, not sprawled on a chaise longue, novel in hand. It’s an entirely female domain to sit around and think and feel. Men simply don’t have the time.

Reading fiction still tends to be a female pastime. Book clubs are mainly populated with women gathering weekly, armed with large glasses of red wine, beginning with intellectual debate, and, as the bottle empties, turning to teary revelations of deep-rooted insecurities. 

During my seven years at an all-girls school, we regularly discussed fiction, exchanging recommendations across the literary scale, from JD Salinger to Colleen Hoover. We were able to pass lunchtimes with animated discussions of a novel we’d all enjoyed, instead of who had gotten with whom at the last social. A triumph against the Bechdel test, at last. 

Readers often claim that there is a correlation between increased levels of empathy and reading fiction. Reading fiction is the closest we can get to first-hand knowledge of someone else’s lived experience. Natalie M. Phillips, a cognitive scientist, has proved that, whilst reading, your brain’s motor cortex (associated with physical movement) is activated, as are the areas associated with sensory experiences, such as the olfactory bulb (associated with smell). So when you read an author’s detailed depiction of a summer’s day, your brain mimics the same neural activities that it would be if you were under the same hot sun and smelling the same sunflowers as your novel’s protagonist. You are neurologically closer to becoming empathetic.

Plenty of research has shown that women are generally more empathetic than men, but whether this is solely due to biological differences, or is influenced at all by reduced reading levels amongst men is hard to prove. I do wonder if reading fiction was both normalised and encouraged for men and boys, would men have less of a hard time opening up to one another about their emotions? Perhaps we could even challenge the age-old proverb, “boys don’t cry.”

I harbour a utopian vision of an all-male book club (although perhaps Tennents would be the galvanising fluid, rather than red wine), during which a group of young men exchange glaring insights into Jane Eyre (I fear I’m becoming too self-indulgent with this choice) and, as evening turns into night, pour out long-buried emotions to a congregation of listening ears.

The tote bags and tortoiseshell glasses would follow, naturally.

Illustration by Clodagh Earl