Ross Barkan, on why women are reading more than men:
If more books were published by men with explicitly masculine themes, would there actually be a wider male readership? It’s the old chicken-and-egg dilemma. The audience won’t emerge because the product isn’t there, and the product isn’t there because the audience is elsewhere. Men, obviously, can read and enjoy books by women, but there is the sticky biological reality that, on balance, women will probably prefer reading women, and men may prefer reading men.
This claim is baffling to me on multiple levels. Factually there just isn’t any credible research demonstrating that reading preferences are gendered this way. On the contrary, the classic study on this by Philip A. Goldberg suggests something quite different: that both men and women prefer books by men. It surprises me that Ross is evidently unaware of this, because he has a degree in English and most English grads, at one point or another, encounter this study in discussions of cultural biases against women in literature. But that study is also a bit beside the point, because despite its infamy Goldberg’s finding was put out to pasture nearly 40 years ago. Though pop journalism occasionally hypes up dubious commercial data that supposedly demonstrates gendered reading preferences, the scientific consensus at this point is that there is no significant evidence of a discernible trend.
Even if one isn’t familiar with all of this research, however, there is plenty of reason to be skeptical of that sort of claim. Ross’s “sticky biological reality” falls squarely into a genre of gender essentialism that is often completely baseless, particularly when it comes to claims this ambitious, but that has been growing in popularity in recent years. Just logging onto Twitter, for example, it took me about five seconds to find this:
If you haven’t been mercilessly trained into reflexive skepticism of claims like Ross’s by now the only explanation I can think of is that you are a man, since the biology of male brains make them more gullible than women. See how easy it is to just make this kind of stuff up?
What baffles me more than anything, however, is trying to figure out how this got past Jacobin’s editors. A lot of the criticism of Jacobin is wildly overstated, and for this reason I always hate to pile on when they publish something ridiculous — but I don’t know how you read that sentence and not think
Okay, a lot of people are obviously going to get mad about a statement like this, and it really has nothing to do with socialism whatsoever. Do we really want to publish it? Ross is already facing serious challenges to his integrity as a writer; do we really just want to assume that he is sitting on some research here that he didn’t bother to cite? Maybe we should run a quick fact check…
Looking into this, it appears that Jacobin has replaced the word “biological” with “gendered,” which I suppose is better than nothing. The better thing, of course, would be to remove the line altogether.
Refer enough friends to this site and you can read paywalled content for free!
And if you liked this post, why not share it?