(This is part two of a two-part summary of informal research I conducted on men and genre fiction. For part one, please click here.)

One of the factors raised by the online survey that I tried to examine closer in my paper was the apparent contradiction between the stereotype that “men don’t read” (an opinion with which many of the survey respondents agreed) and the finding that only 2.3 percent of the male respondents said they never read for pleasure. There are several potential reasons for this: One is that the male respondents to the survey could see themselves as “exceptions to the rule” that men do not read fiction for pleasure; i.e., that while they read fiction occasionally or frequently, they think that other men do not. Another is that the male respondents to the survey actually are “exceptions to the rule,” in that the informal survey distribution method was more likely to attract male respondents who do read fiction for pleasure than an average range of male readers and nonreaders. A third potential answer is that the question was poorly phrased; just because a respondent thinks a woman is more likely to read fiction for pleasure than a man doesn’t mean they think a man never reads fiction for pleasure (although again,  some respondents did leave comments indicating that they don’t know any men who read fiction for fun). A fourth potential answer is that the respondents have incorrect perceptions and assumptions about the rate of fiction pleasure reading among males, and that men are actually reading fiction for fun at a much higher rate than people (even men) think they are. 

I also conducted additional literature research to try and answer the question of what makes a fiction genre a “masculine” genre (i.e., one that is typically perceived as masculine). I focused on science fiction in particular, because it was the genre with the strongest masculine perception rating in the survey. I found that some factors that can contribute to this perception are an early negative moral reputation that could reflect poorly on women readers and authors, often leading to internal tropes making the genre unlikely to appeal to women readers and authors (such as an emphasis on violence and male sexual fantasies and a lack of strong female characters). In addition, these fiction genres often contained factual elements, making them more acceptable to men who perceive reading fiction as a feminine activity and nonfiction as more masculine (i.e., the elements of hard science in science fiction). Based on these points, a “masculine genre” is one that comes from a historical or cultural context that was traditionally not conducive to female writers or readers, allowing it to develop themes that attracted male readers while possibly keeping female readers away, and often has an instructive element that makes it more palatable to male readers who are typically more likely to read nonfiction than fiction.

These factors certainly apply to Westerns, the genre with the second-highest masculinity rating in my informal poll. Western fiction came from a similar pulp fiction background to science fiction, meaning it was also considered too vulgar for the female writers and readers of the time. As a result, Westerns typically were written from a male perspective with strong male leads and helpless female characters in need of rescuing. Finally, the strong historical aspects of Western novels provides the instructive element, the idea that the reader is learning something useful while also enjoying a story.

So how can there be “male genres” if men, traditionally, do not read fiction for pleasure? I found that although there are men who read fiction for pleasure, it may be that there are not enough of them to support a fiction genre that is written and read almost entirely by men. Science fiction, while still perceived as masculine due to the genre’s history, appears to have attracted enough female readers and authors to be commercially viable. Meanwhile, Westerns appear to have dropped almost completely off the radar, possibly because it never attracted a strong feminist movement like science fiction did in the 1960s and 1970s.

It was difficult to find any recent academic research on male genre reading or perceived masculinity of various genres, and I feel the subject of literacy would benefit from a more academically rigorous survey than the one that I conducted for my paper. In addition, it would be interesting to examine the perceptions of men who read masculine fiction genres for pleasure. For example, since science fiction is a male genre, is it considered masculine to read sci-fi books, or does it still fall under the rubric that reading for pleasure is not a masculine activity? My gut reaction is that male sci-fi readers are not perceived as being particularly masculine (stereotypes of sci-fi nerds spring to mind) despite their involvement with a masculine genre, but this bears further study.