BREAKING: Video Games Killed The Rockstar Author

I side-eye leftist or marxists in general but I like Freddie De Boer. He’s so smart and he’s cute when he’s posting about his kid. I don’t yet know if I should tag him in this given his Note inspired my piece or if he will mind it so for now I will leave him untagged. I don’t follow him because it’s a bit exhausting, but I sometimes get his stuff in my feed out of sheer force of his personality (and the algorithm of course lol.) If you read the note below he is accusing someone of being a performative ally to the women in book publishing who are being mean bitches and excluding men for ideological reasons.

To be fair to Freddie, he also spoke about the falling male readership. But he is essentially speaking of the whole thing as a self-fulfilling circular prophecy. Women are leading the book publishing world, because of which men are not reading, because of which women are commissioning more women and on and on.

He is not the first person to blame an “ideologically compromised” industry for depriving certain authors of readership. And he won’t be the last. I do wonder though if he is truly only mourning the end of male readers and the book publishing world’s feminist bent.

Or is the greatest loss that of a specific aura for male authors? Male authors especially in the 20th century had a sort of rapscallion, “what is he going to do next” vibe to them. They were the Anthony Bourdain-path for a certain intellectual man to get masculinity aura points. And I wonder if the end of that kind of man and his reflected glory is what Freddie is actually mourning. Because his tone here, while caustic as usual, is a bit too puritanical in it’s shaming.

I have a theory: Video Games Killed The Rockstar Author.

Men don’t read because they play video games. If you have men in your life you can see how they invest their time. Thankfully, I have a large enough group of varied men in my life and most of them go home and play video games. The thing is, people have finite time to invest outside of work. I myself noticed, that my reading time fell abysmally when I started writing on Substack. I must now work harder to read than I ever did, because I have my full-time job, my substack writing. I also travel, watch movies, meet friends and go out to dinners. And reading requires more “work” from me than any of these other items of instant gratification. Men on average play more video games, which take a long time to complete and sometimes are played every night. Women are being allowed to “occupy the publishing industry” cause women still read (even if it’s smut). You’re reversing cause and effect, when you blame the industry for the customers choices.

You think a soap manufacturer has ideological reasons to sell soap — he is a cleaninist! he likes people to be clean!! — rather than serving a market of people who like to stay clean?