Reading Needs a New Pitch for Men

The last few years have witnessed a glut of writing about men and their reading habits. Among the takes on offer are that men are being stolen away from reading by pornography and video games, that the decline of male reading is driving them toward the political right, and that if men read more, they would learn empathy and better ingratiate themselves toward women.

Notwithstanding that the disparity between male and female readers has likely been overstated, I think there is something to this discussion. If nothing else, it is accurately tracking that the paradigm reader in most Americans’ (and publishers’) minds is now a woman, who is reading a book marketed toward women.

It is also tracking how, in a surprising turn of cultural history, men are now treated by much of the commentariat as a troubled or dysfunctional demographic class, one whose ills are represented back to them in articles they frequently neither author nor read.

One recent entry in this genre (that received a lot of online flack) is Catherine Pearson’s “Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping,’” which explores women’s frustrations at having to manage the social and emotional needs of their male partners—what Stanford postdoc Angelica Ferrara has termed “mankeeping.” Judging by their recent interests, many in the world of letters are as yet unwearied by their own project of collective mankeeping, their attempt to use books to guide the fallen gender toward heightened taste and emotional wellness.

Some men probably find this trend condescending. My complaint is a different one: I think many of these writers are, to borrow a recent coinage, bad ‘mankeepers’ and are in desperate need of a refresher course. Most of what’s out there claiming to pitch men on reading is painfully unconvincing—and probably because it was never meant to do that in the first place.

Take “The Real Reason Men Should Read Fiction,” published this past June in the Atlantic. The essay by author and senior Atlantic editor Jeremy Gordon positions itself against the overdone argument that reading (and reading fiction in particular) has the power to teach men empathy, with Gordon proudly advertising that “empathy is a bit too touchy-feely as a consistent motivation—at least for me.” So what motivates him instead? Not much, in my view, that stands to actually convince prospective male readers to pick up a book. This is the sum total of Gordon’s case:

“Literature … allows me to occupy a place that is totally for myself, and unaccountable to other people’s expectations … It is seductive … to keep things to yourself. To incubate your own thoughts and ideas without having to express and justify them in real time as you might when talking with other people.”

“… reading skips backward and forward, allowing me to consider the world from a removed vantage point. Instead of feeling squeezed by my earthly existence and my own bodily limits, I leap into other minds and perspectives … and consider those expectations … fiction can remind you that you exist along a continuum of human experiences, and that your own everyday ennui is less of a dead end and more of a data point.”

Everything else in the essay is either ground-laying, autobiographical color, or elaboration on these two core arguments, the first being that reading gives you private time to reflect insulated from others’ expectations—something you can just as well achieve with less effort by taking a walk; and the second being that reading encourages the consideration of others’ perspectives—which sounds suspiciously similar to the classic ‘empathy defense.’

I don’t mean to single out Gordon. I’m sure he has much more say on this topic, and I ultimately do agree with what he has said. But his essay has the unfortunate property, given its topic, of transparently not being meant to convince more men to read. It is instead meant to rehearse the virtues of reading for those who already do.

That is why its core arguments will be accepted at face value by avid readers, but will come off as schmaltzy and elusive to almost everyone else. Reading’s public defenders love to gesture in circuitous terms to the activity’s joy and/or power, while spurning more direct appeals to concrete incentives. They might consider emphasizing, for instance, that reading literature is a challenging intellectual undertaking that will make you smarter and more capable if you do it.

This, I offer, is the sort of appeal more likely to be heard by men. I know what you’re thinking: it violates that common dictum, ‘thou shalt not instrumentalize reading.’ But that, I also offer, is too bad. In a fast-paced world making temporal misers of us all, it is imperative to tell people why time-consuming things are worth doing, and to make such appeals in straightforward terms they will understand. There is not always something wrong with stripping away layers of figurative language, and just telling people what they stand to gain.

That all said, here is an honest attempt by a man who loves to read to pitch men on reading, one that I hope avoids the major pitfalls of its forerunners. I want to be clear that this is not an exhaustive description of why I read, nor of why everyone should read. It is very specific to the goal of pitching men—in particular those skeptical of or uninterested in reading—on why they should read. Feel free to share with any men you may be ‘keeping’ at the moment.

Forget what you know about reading. Forget whatever boring stuff you were forced to read in school. Forget whatever ‘vibe’ you think reading has. Reading is not about being a certain type of person. Reading is not about signaling that you are smart or worldly. All reading is about, all it will ever be about, is processing linguistic information, information delivered to you in language, in words, in sentences. You’re probably pretty good at this already, or else you couldn’t read what I’m saying now. But you could be better, way better.

Long ago, the physically strong held more sway over human affairs. But in the modern world, it is your ability to internalize, organize, and extrapolate from information that makes all the difference. It is your mental, more than your physical strength that determines your lot in life. In a world like ours, you need a mental training regimen, just as much, if not more than you need a physical one.

So what should you do? You could learn a narrow technical skill like coding. You could play an intellectually challenging game like chess. But these fields are defined by their strict, exceptionless rules. The real world is much more uncertain. The real world is much more colossal and diverse. The real world is not a game, and it doesn’t have a rulebook.

To prepare for it, you need something that shares these same properties. You need to test your ability to reason absent hard-and-fast rules, to organize disordered, uncertain, and incomplete information. You need to throw yourself at something that won’t hold your hand, the same way the world throws itself at you. That thing is a book.

Books collect massive amounts of complex information into a unified whole. To read them—and especially to read them well—means expending sustained effort to retain and interpret the information they contain. There is no way to do that without learning something, without becoming a smarter, more capable person than before. And the more you read, and the more challenging what you read, the more those gains compound.

Take it from someone who used to read very little. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I saw how each book shaped the person that I was. I saw how each book represented a new challenge that required focus, discipline, and ingenuity to surmount. I felt better about myself. Things got a little bit, and sometimes a lot easier in other parts of my life.

A book is like a little world. More specifically, it is like a model of a world, or a simulation of one, that is made out of words. It is a linguistic model in the same way that models of, say, the solar system are mathematical models. Moby Dick is a model of a tireless whaling-boat captain’s journey to take revenge on the titular ‘great white whale’ that tore off his leg. Das Kapital is a model of the 19th century European manufacturing economy, and how it shaped the political and distributional conflicts of its time. The more you practice engaging with these ‘linguistic worlds,’ and the more of them you familiarize yourself with, the more prepared you will be to take on the real thing.

You probably already exercise. Maybe you lift weights, maybe you run, maybe you play a sport. But you don’t live in a world ruled by strong or fast people. You live in a world ruled by owners, architects, and manipulators of information. In a world like that, those who don’t read are at the mercy of those who do. So if for no other reason than self-protection, do yourself a favor and go pick up a book.