A lack of male protagonists is making it harder to get young boys into books
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
What the English faculty in colleges and schools need is to work with the authors of the "Levelling genre" or "Isekai genre" and modify those books with the reading abilities of those boys according to their grades while keeping the credits with the original authors.
Second of all, claiming that boys only like action heroes is frankly offensive and stupid. Boys are not intrinsically less capable than girls.
Edit: i said what i said. I am not just replying to the above text but decades around parents who think less of boys.
I am no pearl clutching moralist, but having the mainstream publishing industry push softcore smut onto young girls and even virtue-signaling about how girls read a lot of books, is not something I'm comfortable with.
It's like selling cigarettes to kids, and bragging about how they seem to like them.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is not the height of literature, but I wouldn't say it's harmful.
That said, I don't have a daughter of reading age, so actual parents might have better takes on this.
A boy (or girl! They're allowed to read, too now, like Belle) buying a copy of The Hobbit doesn't help much, they need consumption of the new mass-produced stuff to keep the machine running.
Where does this nonsense come from? I didn't nor did anyone I know. I snorted any kind of adventure books but superpowers? Nuh uh, boring and cheapest of plot devices, and yes, I thought so at 7.
My parents brought me to the library every two weeks and let me read whatever I wanted, I think that's most important. Also, show you read yourself, and if you don't, wonder why.
You could fix it. Drop the levelling, keep the portal story-- portal stories can be fun, C.S. Lewis and Astrid Lindgren have done portal or portal-adjacent stories and they can be fun.
I don't think a fixed portal story is necessarily attractive to idiot-readers though. I think popularity of Isekai or levelling stories might have more to do with impatience and inability to tolerate uncertainty.
It's really hard for me to believe American kids suddenly can't get enough books with male protagonists. If that's the case, the fault must lie with whoever's choosing books for those kids.
But if I convince them to read New Shit and the Current Thing then everything is golden.
Imagine how the teachers felt who suggested Potter before it went big. That’s a high many will chase.
"come on Timmy, I bought you the Shakespeare box-set, get to reading!"
I’m only talking about picking up books. Please don’t take this out of context. Or in context?
Really a pity. Another big store opened 100m from them. Hope they get their ass whooped.
We may not like what it says about the world.
> Out of curiosity, she compiled a database of 2026 releases and combed through them, analyzing their protagonists. Umesi found[1] a surprising disparity: Girl protagonists outnumbered boys by a ratio of 2 to 1. Some categories, such as realistic fiction and mystery, were especially lopsided, she told me, with ratios of more than 3 to 1. “Girls are taking over!” she said, with a laugh.
> Umesi’s survey offers just one snapshot of the publishing landscape. But others I spoke with in the children’s-book business shared the perception that today’s protagonists are predominantly female. The dearth of male protagonists, some told me, has made it harder to get boys in this age bracket interested in reading.
> The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde, even to the boys themselves. Kids rarely state such preferences outright, Melissa LaSalle, the children’s-book buyer at Old Town Books, in Alexandria, Virginia, told me. Their parents sometimes will, albeit “in a slightly embarrassed way.” Of course, individuals might not connect to a book for any number of reasons: sense of humor, narrative stakes, cover art. “But the unifying theme that I hear resoundingly from parents of boy readers,” LaSalle said, “is, at the end of the day, there are not enough boy protagonists.”
Oodles of graphic novels these days, plus all the formulaic initial books like Magic Treehouse and Box Car Children, and then you blow their minds by slipping them The Great Brain, The Mad Scientists’ Club, Tom Sawyer, The Dark is Rising…
Certainly this is one possible hypothesis.
There are plenty of other cultural pressures for boys to read less than girls, though. For example, the prominence of male-dominated sports could be drawing their attention.
I’m wondering if the causal arrow goes the other way: fewer male readers leading to fewer male protagonists.
If that’s the case, we are already looking at the market correction, we just don’t like it.
When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.
I'm not clear on what exactly you mean. My best guess is: "media is produced to satisfy an audience's desires" but I'm not even confident that's what you mean.
Media is produced to satisfy an executive's desire, which is often based on what they think the audience wants, but sometimes is based on what they think the audience should want.
I dont even mean cia/military-backed ultra patriotic movies from hollywood of the past, eveeybody simply has their opninion and even journalism is rarely objective.
according to whom? do you have any examples?
I support grants for authors to create a wider variety of literature. Too bad the NEA and NEH have been slashed to ribbons.
Apart from that, it feels dumb to make this a competition.
Jeez, how far from common sense are some people nowadays.
“But even if the backlist contains a wealth of fiction starring boys, that’s not always a help to today’s young readers. Laura Gardner, a veteran middle-school librarian in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, told me that although some of the classics still stand up—kids love Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and its sequels, along with the I Survived series—many students have a hard time getting into literature from past decades. Thanks to the disruptions of the pandemic, middle schoolers are coming into Gardner’s library with lower reading levels than they were when she started her career 17 years ago. But even the high-achieving students, she’s noticed, can’t be coaxed into picking up a book for fun unless it’s action-packed. “If the pacing isn’t pretty quick, then you’re going to lose the kid,” Gardner said. Older titles tend to feature more descriptive language and longer chapters; they start with more exposition, and have plots that unspool more slowly than today’s attention spans are used to.”
Meanwhile, it used to be a standard talking point that girls need more female protagonists to identify with, same with other protected classes.
It would be nice if the arguments were applied consistently.