"The only men who read..."

How scared should the hoes in your life be?

This is fine. The hoes should be terrified.

Years ago an associate of mine (male) invited me to listen to his favorite book podcast. He had found it through his (now ex-) wife. I tried listening to it twice and couldn't stand it no matter how he tried to persuade me.

In addition to the books being boring as hell, the host (foid) had an excruciating fake persona behind the microphone. For years this man kept trying to get me into the podcast, which apparently enjoys a large listenership and there are even get-togethers at cabins in the fall.

“They'd love to have someone like you, there aren't any blue-collar men in the group. They're all academics or gay guys.”

I pointed out that this was due to the reading lists for the show being high-brow femlit, argyle-scented historical dramas, or otherwise gay stuff that held no interest for me. This podcast would never touch The Dresden Files, for example. Red Rising was out of reach. They'd only talk about The Hunger Games in terms of female empowerment and whether Katniss should've picked Gale.

If these podcasts and book clubs gave a damn about guys like me showing up, they would read something that guys like me want to read.

But they hate those books. They hate why they appeal to us. Ergo.

What are guys reading?

My used paperback of The Iliad has some dude's workout scrawled inside the front cover. I think that says something. (It says he was a quitter because the workout was simple, and he ditched the book.) But really, there's a primal difference in the sexes that we insist on rejecting or overlooking at our peril: men want to be strong and read about strong men who punch other men (strongly) because they are right about something, and they’re mad that the other guy is wrong.

Men prefer war. Women prefer peace. Women specifically prefer peace that they created (which is why when everything is going good, the average woman will start some s*** so she can take credit for fixing it.) Men definitely want peace with their women—it’s the whole reason they go to war. This instinct is deeply spiritual and biological. Thus our choices in reading material will reflect this, and it’s irregular for it to happen in the other direction.

Yes, you’ll find women who read heavy space opera and men who read cozy romance mysteries. These are exceptions. Exceptions fortify rules.

It's not harder than that. You can quote Game of Thrones all you like, trying to reduce our combat drive to something purely sexual, but that's so narrow that it misses the mark. Sex is only one component of love. Men won’t go to war for sex; they’ll steal it, or pay for it if they must. They fight for hearth and home. They find heroism in the expenditure of blood, sweat, and tears for their wives, their children, their homes, and their gods.

Men will establish what is theirs and then work like hell to defend it. Ideally the woman we love is a key component of that equation. That's why we acquire strength and resources. We are builders. And what we build, we defend.

Stories that aren't about this at their core (strong man good punch bad man get woman) will never appeal to us broadly. This is what we’re after in fiction, and when we delve into non-fiction, it’s to fortify that same sensibility.

The Hoe Quivers Before Truth

So what of this “hoe-scaring extremism?” Setting aside that this take is from Reddit and Old Twitter, it’s pretty simple: men live in a world of stubborn facts and hard truth. We see statistics. We embrace engineering. We click the male end of the seatbelt into the female end. These things simply are, and what they are not is “up for discussion.”

In the highly advanced and industrialized times in which we live, it is easier to mask a hard fact behind smoke and mirrors, bluster and bluff, bots and bulls***. The world has never dealt with global cyberspace in all of its history, even if things like media manipulation and the spread of “fake news” have happened in pockets. You can say that two and two make five and even get a lot of dumb people to believe it, but as time goes on you will need more and more compounding lies to maintain the desired result. Those lies break under their weight, and they take down anything built on top of them.

When you’re years or decades downstream of a falsehood, and you start to think reality might be a little different than is commonly perceived, and you find some old books that lay out how the world was, and how it got to be the way it is now, and that a lot of people either don’t know or don’t care, well…suddenly you’re the one saying something extreme. Something like “Ehhhh…maybe we shouldn’t have teamed up with the commies in the 1940s…” or “Uhhh…we’ve sent two trillion dollars of foreign aid abroad in the last century and it’s not working…could we stop?”

If you’re comfortable in The Matrix, it’ll upset you when someone breaks through a wall of green code and tells you it’s wrong. “The commies infiltrated our learning institutions, now look at academia, we shouldn’t have let them in…” and “Our currency is so deflated because we keep printing money to give away to people that hate us, now it’s hard to buy a house and feed a family…” are ideas that progress from an analysis of the past. We look for things in literature that fortify the truth.

These things “scare the hoes” because they point out that the underpinnings of their day-to-day reality are wrong and untenable. That’s not a pleasant thought for anyone, but what the hoes fail to realize is that it’s even more unpleasant for the ones whose purpose it is to secure a home for their family. Historically this responsibility falls on the men, and where it hasn’t, you’ll largely find reasons why it should. That’s a subject for another post, and beyond the scope of this literary analysis.

The point is that men read nonfiction to understand the world and perhaps right the ship if they can. They read fiction that scratches a deep itch for action, heroism, combat, and victory. And for the ideological leviathan that has largely seized control of the publishing industry in the west, and its bookselling outlets, and its academic magazines, and its freaking podcasts with fall get-togethers at cabins in the mountains, that is frightening.

Because they know they can take the man out of the institutions.

But they can’t take the essence out of the man.

We’re still out here, those of us who read, finding action-packed novels and gritty genre pieces and delving into epic classics and parsing through detailed history books. We are what we are. And there’s good news in that.

We need each other.

This whole literary “conflict” is an appendage of a larger problem: a cultural push for people to live permanently single, isolated, disposable lives, as if doing so is some sort of victory over the institutions of the past. It’s not. It’s hollow and unfulfilling, and we’re lesser for it. We’re less without each other, and we’re less without raising the next generation.

In this cultural window where we argue over what’s a man and what’s a woman, and what’s wrong with the world and who’s to blame, we’ve come to accept a poison pill of thought, telling us that we can be happiest by avoiding marriage, avoiding parenthood, and just living alone, drifting through casual relationships, using each other up emotionally and physically, until there’s little left of ourselves. You see celebrities do it and you think you can do it too.

They’re miserable. Don’t fall for it. Men can’t force women to read nonfic about submarines and women can’t force men to care about…ugh, whatever you’re reading these days. I’m a dude, I don’t know. I guess “romantasy” where a dude is shredded and jacked without having to exercise, and he’s also rich, and he thinks the Bella Swan female lead (who is a plain 5 with no distinguishing features) is the most desirable woman to ever exist.

There are maybe three of these guys in existence, okay? Henry Cavill, who’s got a kid with an Italian supermodel, and Matthew McConaghey, who married a much younger Brazilian model. The third is Ryan Gosling, who’s got kids with Eva Mendes. Ladies, you’re special, but you’re not that special, any more than every guy you’ve ever met is Superman.

We’re regular people. We’re real. And since this article started out as a literary thinkpiece before veering hard into relationship commentary, let me drift back onto the highway and close with this quote from fiction poet William Ashbless (Tim Powers)—

“The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.”

Ladies, don’t be frightened. Guys, don’t scare the girls. The overlap between my annual reading list and my wife’s is pretty narrow, but we can still tell each other what we liked about a book. I tease her, she rolls her eyes at my stuff, and it works because we like what we like. Keep reading.

And for crying out loud ladies, when he asks you out, let him take you to dinner. I’ve got too many single bros, y’all need to get things moving.