Recently, Esquire magazine published a list of “75 Books Men Should Read,” earning the wrath of Atlantic writer Ujala Seghal for its failure to include more than one book written by a female author (Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find).
Seghal writes:
One. One! The only book written by a female on the list was A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor. No doubt, lists such as this are always imperfect. And based on the list’s above-description, it appears a casually constructed bit of fun, rather than a definitive ranking for posterity. But while there is no reason to take offense to every slanted statistic one comes across, out of the 75 “greatest” books, just one by a woman? Not even Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird?
Although I doubt these book lists motivate too many young men to pick up one of the titles on the list, it strikes me as rather mean-spirited of females in the publishing industry to denounce even ineffectual efforts to introduce men to literature. By all accounts, publishing has come to be dominated by women, and men are reading far fewer books than women these days. Given this state of affairs, you’d think that the women in the industry might be a bit gracious and let the boys pick and choose which titles interest them.
But of course that won’t do, because feminists must find fault with any and everything men are involved in. Even as female professors assign and recommend books written by women – going so far as to teach classes dedicated to promoting solely female-authored literature – women in media outlets, publishing organizations and, of course, nonprofits, are denouncing one innocent little reading list cooked up at Esquire.
Joyland Publishers writes on their blog:
This really does imply that men don’t/can’t/shouldn’t read women and we were pretty sure that wasn’t the case among readers. We were also sure that part of the editorial reason for making such a list this way was to generate a response, so here it is. Over Memorial Day weekend we asked Joyland readers, editors, and contributors to come up with a list of 75 Books By Women All Men Should Read. We received over 250 suggestions in two hours.
The implication is that men should be forced by political pressure to read female writers (sometimes these feminists come off as whiny, annoying girlfriends complaining that “he just won’t listen to me!”).
Now let’s turn the tables and ask why, if college kids are so often forced to read terrible literature written by women (yes, assigned literature is overwhelmingly awful), there’s anything wrong with suggesting that young men (Esquire’s prime demographic), should read books written by men? You’d think it would be a good thing if got young men away from the HALO long enough to crack a book and gain some appreciation for the written word. However, it seems that complaining about men is a lot more important in the feminist universe than actually doing anything useful to help them.
Finally, is it even normal for young men to read female literature? How many women have written anything that appeals to a large proportion of post-adolescent boys? I’m trying to think, but all I can come up with off the top of my head is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, neither of which is ideal. James Fenimore Cooper, Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, among others, capture the youthful masculine spirit in a far more compelling manner than any female author yet to reveal herself. And this isn’t sexism, but rather the wisdom of experience. Transsexuals’ claims notwithstanding, women just don’t know what it is to be a man.
