Are Women Preventing Men From Publishing Novels?

Yes and No: A Nuanced Case Study

Several months ago, I published a piece titled The Strange Death of Literary Men that took Substack by storm. Today,

Michael Mohr

expands on the conversation by offering his own take on men in the publishing industry—and whether they are being kept out.

~ Liza Libes

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A shorter, edited version of this essay was first published in The Republic of Letters. CLICK HERE for that version. I wanted to present the following original version because it adds nuance and context to such a complex and controversial topic.

~ Michael Mohr

The Controversy

Much has been made over the past eight months about the “vanishing” male writer, or, more juicily and perhaps pointedly, the vanishing white male writer. The New York Times had a piece out December 7^th, 2024 entitled, The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone. Jan 3, 2025 Vox did a hit piece called Are Men’s Reading Habits Truly a National Crisis?: The Questionable Statistic at The Heart of the ‘Men Don’t Read Fiction’ Discourse. March 21, 2025 Compact Magazine titled its essay, The Vanishing White Male Writer. April 3, 2025 Current Affairs did a piece called, The White Male Writer is Fine, I Promise.

Writers on Substack weighed in. On December 15^th, 2024, Daniel Greenfield, who writes a Substack called Trajectories, published a piece titled, The Disappearance of Male Authors: Gen Z Doesn’t Have a ‘Book’ Problem, It Has a ‘Man’ Problem.

Perhaps the most important, most read and most commented piece on this hot topic on Substack was Liza Libes’ piece titled The Strange Death of Literary Men: Men Have Abandoned Reading. The Publishing Industry Has Abandoned Them on her popular stack, Pens and Poison, where she makes bold, controversial statements such as this: “Unfortunately, with Rooney’s intersectional feminist coalition dominating the publishing space, men are no longer writing books for men—or for anyone else, for that matter.”

I also can’t help thinking of Alex Perez’s September 29, 2022 interview in Hobart Magazine, where he pulled no punches, shocking readers by saying the unsayable: That book publishing had gone too far to the progressive left and there was no more place for serious male authors (especially white ones) attempting to pen genuine stories.

From Perez: “I think every guy who writes from a heterosexual male point of view feels the pressure to apologize for his manhood. First, let’s define masculine writing, since we’ve mentioned it a handful of times. Masculine writing=writing about heterosexual male concerns from a non-feminist point of view. It doesn’t mean that the masculine writer can’t be a feminist or write about feminism or whatever, but he can’t care about not being seen as a feminist or an ally, which is the main concern of most male writers now...If a man is worried about what feminists will think of him, he’s not a masculine writer because he’ll never be able to write honestly about the male condition. He will be the worst of all creatures: the mushy male feminist.”

Ultimately, there is no solid “answer” to the question: Are men no longer able to get genuine, authentic “male” books published? (By “authentic male” books I mean books about the straight male experience in America which necessarily means discussing uncomfortable topics like sexism towards women, violence of various forms, anger and rage, the struggle to be vulnerable, politics not solely of a progressive variety, etc.)

*(Nota bene: I am not saying that gay men are not “authentic men” or anything absurd like that, I’m simply talking about the majority of American men, who happen to be straight and, most often due to population demographics, white.)

What We Actually Know

Based on data, it’s now universally agreed that, overall, women read more books than men. Also, women tend to specifically read more fiction (novels) than men. A hundred years ago this was not the case. But, in the 20^th century, really beginning to uptick during the Women’s Movement in the 1970s, this paradigm began to shift.

Now, in 2025, women pretty much dominate the book publishing world. Some will argue that men still make up the top bestsellers, and most CEOs of book publishing companies are men and so, really, nothing has changed. But the reality is more complex as you get more granular.

Literary agents—which are the crucial bridge between writing a book and getting it published with a major publisher—are The Gatekeepers. As of now, 58.5% of agents are women, with only 41.5% being men. NPR, a bastion of leftist politics, admitted this fact openly in an article published in Planet Money on April 4, 2023, titled, Women Now Dominate the Book Business: Why There and Not Other Creative Industries? Lee and Low Books did a study of 34 major book publishers way back in 2016 which showed that a mind-blowing 78% of the staff were female. (Seventy-nine percent were white, 88% were straight.)

In 2012, roughly 54.6% of women read fiction, compared to 35.1% of men. By 2022 women readers of fiction had dropped to 46.9%. Men had dropped to 27.7%. So there’s a clear gap of almost 20 percentage points, but it’s pretty consistent since roughly 2012.

At the same time over the past 100, 150 years we’ve seen the publishing industry itself shift from being majority male authors to majority female, women going from being just 30% of authors in 1970 to over half now. In addition to all this, even though only 6% of America’s population identifies as “progressive,” it seems to be more and more clear that literary agencies and publishing companies as a whole are predominantly led by young, white progressive feminists, desiring certain types of stories, which often preclude or at least deprioritize men, especially WSM (White Straight Men), from the inchoate contemporary cannon. (I couldn’t find any direct polling on this specific question but having interned for a literary agent for nine months myself, having submitted to hundreds of agents and interacted with them for a decade, and looking over their “manuscript wish lists,” it seems obvious that progressive ideology is vastly overrepresented in American book publishing.)

So over the past 15 years it has become more and more a case in publishing of young progressive white women seeking more books for, by and about women like them. Since more women than men read books, and particularly novels, this makes sense. So to a fair degree I think this is just “capitalism,” aka, the free market doing its thing.

But I don’t fully buy this. Here’s where it gets interesting and where we don’t have the specific data. At this juncture all of us are theorizing.

My Theory

On one hand, yes, in modern times (since roughly the 1990s) women just caught up to men as far as reading and writing, and have now surpassed them. Many herald this as a very good thing. Women are behind men still in most other creative industries, so having one major win is an overwhelmingly positive thing. There are more complex sociological factors here, too, for why women might be dominating. More women are now attending college than men. There are still more stay-at-home moms than dads which allows some women time here and there to work on their book. Some articles even make the argument that women are “more agreeable” and less hostile as men and therefore may thrive more in lone, solitary, at-home environments. Or that women in general are more open to getting paid less in an industry which pays very little, and on average have more “flexible” schedules if the husband is working fulltime. (Though almost no one makes a living as a writer, of either gender.)

It's also true, generally, that fewer men are going to college. Fewer men read books in general. More men read nonfiction versus fiction. Men tend generally to be more taken in by podcasts, YouTube, Reddit, and nefarious figures like Andrew Tate or the comedian (who likes to cosplay with conspiracy theorists in the mode of “just asking questions”) Joe Rogan, or else a personal favorite of mine, Sam Harris. (Who is brilliant, nuanced, center-left but critical of identity politics.)

Around the year 1950, roughly 72% of bestselling books were written by men, versus only 28% by women. By 2016 that gap had shrunk to 52% to 48%; almost even. Since 2015, over the past decade, that dynamic has finally shifted in favor of women. Up until the turbulent cultural earthquakes of the 1960s and the Women’s Movement in the 1970s, most authors were men and most American readers were men.

Reading novels—once the top form of entertainment before the advent of radio and film in the 1920s—had, since the earliest times, going back to Thomas Malory, William Baldwin and perhaps Cervantez’ 1615 Don Quixote—and if you wanted to really twist hairs here you could argue that Homer’s The Iliad, technically an epic poem likely pieced together over centuries, and spoken/read around 630 B.C. was even an early form of “novel”—was, for a very long time, the luxury almost exclusively, with some important exceptions of course, of men. (Broadly speaking.)

Again, this began to change in the 20^th century, surely due to the 1960s civil rights and women’s movements, birth control, more women entering the workforce during and after World War II, and many more factors.

So the big question for 2025 seems to be: Is this all just natural based on the reality of modernity doing its normal thing? Or, conversely, is there perhaps something more sinister and provocative going on?

I might disappoint some people by saying: 1. We don’t know for sure and probably won’t for a long time; 2. I think it’s basically a mix of both.

Clearly, over the past half-century, as women have gained more sexual and social freedom and have dominated college and specifically MFA programs and have had higher rates of literacy and met more demand in the workplace, they have also begun to dominate the book industry leading to more women reading novels, writing novels and working in publishing. That makes sense and seems more or less irrefutable.

But.

It also seems clear to many people—myself very much included—that the playing field is no longer catering to men, especially WSM. Some view this is a good thing; reverse discrimination one might call it, or equity, equality, men getting their right due, their societal “comeuppance.” Aka: Men dominated for centuries, just like with almost everything else, so why should the playing field be equal? Shouldn’t women have their time? Do men need to read novels about social topics today? Does it matter anymore? Since men still, even today, dominate almost every industry, creative or not, why can’t women dominate this one?

Another way of putting the question might be this: Are men, especially WSM, seeing themselves “reflected” in contemporary literature? Further: Should they? I would say, overall, 100% no; most men are not seeing themselves reflected in contemporary literature but that yes, they absolutely should be. Most novels today are by women, about women, written with a female audience in mind. Some do in fact write from the male POV, but they rarely pull off what feels like a genuine, authentic male POV.

(Click here for my essays on Sally Rooney, Miranda July and Dolly Alderton.)

As of 2023, the largest age group of literary agents is between 30-40. Also, in the same year 83.1% were white. As of 2020, there’s a 23-point gap between men and women when it comes to political progressivism; women are on average far more progressive than men. In other words: Young white women who are progressive (aka, the vast amount of literary agents) are the gatekeepers, and young or middle-aged men (white and non) who are trying to get their gritty, honest work out there are facing some serious hurdles. For one, they seem to have the market generally working against them as a result of more or less natural social change. But on the other hand, you’ve got what amounts to very young, very white, very progressive female gatekeepers who surely as a group have some kind of agenda/bias which must be necessarily preventing the Honest and Real Male Novels from making the cut.

This isn’t a stretch. Wasn’t it the same thing happening up until the 1960s and 70s but with male dominance? Most authors and readers back then were men. So the market up until 1970, roughly, worked against women, and agents (regardless of race, in a pre-Woke era) would surely cater to the market, which, back then, were male books for male readers by male authors. (Generally.)

But if we see the flaw in the structure pre-1970s, why can’t we see the same thing now? This seems to open up a bigger, deeper can of sociological worms. Men are behind, as we have already discussed, in college attendance, MFA degrees, and also real wages, etc. Shouldn’t we discuss how to rectify this problem? Instead what we generally seem to most often get is an eyeroll, a mocking laugh, and sarcasm which amounts to, Fuck you. Men had it all forever. It’s our turn. Men control everything and have all the power. Time for the Patriarchy to suffer.

But is this fair? If we’re going to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion—a favorite weaponized term of the left—shouldn’t that include men, and even, god forbid, WSM?

I’ve witnessed the transmogrification in the book world over the past 12, 15 years. It was when I came into my own as an author myself. In 2012 I had my first short story published in a little magazine. I was thrilled. I wrote here about my debut novel, The Crew, and my journey to self-publication after 15 years on and off of rewriting, editing (including with a freelance former Random House editor) and the subsequent close calls with many agents (after sending all told to probably 250-300 agents over that span of time) including one agent who read the novel all the way through three times, claimed to love it, and then suddenly disappeared, and another agent who praised it but criticized that it would be hard to market the book because the protagonist was a middle-class WSM.

Now, look. I’m not claiming necessarily that my novel was rejected “because” I’m a man. Plenty of women get their novels rejected all the time. Most writers, in fact, get rejected by agents most of the time. An agent is incredibly hard to get. But when you take the next step and look at the novels actually being published, and you see that the majority of these books are by, for and about and catered to women, it starts to make you think twice.

Glancing at the websites of some of the top NYC literary agents one finds requests such as the following quite frequently:

1. “She welcomes the surreal and is excited by fiction that explores gender, language, identity, built and natural environments, and/or systems of power in creative and compelling ways.”

2. “She writes about identity and youth through her experiences as a young Black woman, particularly focusing on genre fiction as a means to explore tropes otherwise dominated by white voices. _____ would particularly like to read stories by, for, and about marginalized creators who deserve the space to be messy, complicated, stubborn, in love, and celebrating joy.”

3. “She loves novels that subvert dominant cultural narratives and explore questions of identity, belonging, community, inheritance, and diaspora.”

Ok, I know what many of you are thinking here, and fair enough: I’m cherry-picking. While it’s true that there are plenty of agents out there who do not ask for these specific guidelines, there are enough of them that it stands out. Further, it’s hard to ignore the overall broad cultural feeling that most agencies (which are overwhelmingly represented in coastal elite cities, mainly NYC, SF, Boston, etc) have this progressive sort of anti-man/anti-WSM ideology “baked in.” This isn’t pure speculation. As I said: I have experienced this personally with my own novel. Walk into any bookstore in Manhattan or Brooklyn and novels by men—especially white men—are not what’s staring back at you. (I have experienced this in real time often and it always feels a little shocking in its disproportion.)

Gen Z women and new fourth-wave feminism has made it pretty clear over the past 5-10 years that women are angry, resentful and are happy to see men struggle. Why not, they say, men were on top forever. Now that the shoe is on the other foot men are going to cry male tears and claim they’re victims?

No. At least I’m not doing that. I don’t see myself or WSM or male authors in general as “victims.” But neither do I see women as victims. Nor non-white authors, who have been given a massive push from behind from major publishing over the past 20 years.

My bigger point is this: What happens when men stop reading altogether? Shouldn’t we try offering men something appetizing that they actually want to read? If we’re largely excluding men from the cultural discourse as far as getting novels published, is that still following the mission of diversity, equity and inclusion? If so: How, exactly? What are the possible side effects of a society with very few or even no genuine male authors or readers of literature?

Broadly, men broke more for Trump. Don’t you think there’s a connection here between the “feminization” of the culture, Woke ideology, women dominating publishing and often news media (in terms of the writers of articles; 58% of social issues news reporting comes from women writers) and men shifting tragically towards Andrew Tate, Trump and Rogan? Nature abhors a vacuum, right? So if men feel more and more rejected by the woman-dominated left, they’re going to move to the other side, because what other option do they have?

The solution might be, therefore, allowing some men (of any race) to write more honestly about their experience. That experience is almost certainly going to be not as progressive or not progressive at all, gritty, and filled with violent thoughts and ideas, inner and outer pain, the struggle to understand one’s own complex masculinity, and other topics that agents seem purposefully not to be looking for. Because there just might be a market for this kind of book. If more young men are breaking for Trump and Tate, etc, then wouldn’t it follow that a more honest, authentic male novel might do well? Publishing has always been left of center. I’m not suggesting it suddenly become conservative. (Nor am I myself conservative. Nor did I vote for Trump. Nor do I like Tate in any way.) What I’m saying is that it might be time for a more open-minded, honest approach to book publishing.

Most new books “fail” commercially and sell very few copies, especially novels, regardless of gender, so it’s always a risk. Book publishing is in fact an industry of chance and risk. You’re betting on readers you can’t fully rely on, particularly with a new author. This being the case, why not open the field more and let more men writing honest accounts of life from their perspective get their books out there? I suspect that much of the resistance here has more to do with gender animus, political ideology and Woke DEI than just the market. And therein lies the problem.

Some authors have gotten through in recent years, such as Andrew Borgya’s novel, Victim, which is a brilliant, nuanced satire on identity which I reviewed here. But most of us sit on the sidelines, either changing our writing to meet the New Left standards of political appropriateness, sticking to safer nonfiction, or else just continually circling through the agent rejection mill because we’re non-female, non-Woke, and don’t want to use our pronouns. Because maybe, just maybe we want to write about most men’s actual contemporary lived experience. We’re mostly not aloud to even say the obvious in major outlets of cultural repute. How on Earth would we expect to get our books published?

The culture wars have been bad for everyone. It flattens peoples’ ideas, shatters critical thinking, and shape-shifts interesting concepts into pulpy syrup. It makes people unnecessarily tribal. It pushes groups to deny the suffering of others based on the “other’s” immutable characteristics, whether that be race, gender, or anything else. It prevents free and open expression and speech. It cancels people. (Including women and Black men if they don’t have the “right” opinions according to the young white Woke-Feminist elite.)

Some claim that maybe male writers—and particularly WSM—just simply aren’t writing “good enough” novels. I just don’t buy this argument. Move through time from the muscular writers of Norman Mailer, John Updike, Philip Roth, Charles Bukowski in the 1950s up through Bret Easton Ellis, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy and Jay McInerney in the 1980s to David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Denis Johnson in the 1990s to Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon in the early 2000s to Akhil Sharma, Neil Gaiman, Andy Weir, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Coleson Whitehead in the 2010s, all the way to Gabriel Tallent’s searing My Absolute Darling, which came out, miraculously, in 2017. Tallent’s potent, hyper-sexualized, taboo, muscular and brilliant novel came out a mere eight years ago, with all this literary lineage behind him.

It doesn’t make sense to me that, suddenly, over the past eight years, male writers have just lost interest because they don’t have anything to say or they aren’t as talented or they don’t like feminism or they’re more drawn to Rogan and Trump, Jordan Peterson and YouTube than writing fiction. Yes, there’s some truth to all of this. But: You have to ask the obvious question: What has shifted in the culture over the past decade? Well, as we’ve already discussed: Women and extreme identity-saturated progressivism have dominated the past 10-12 years. Everything shifting from print to online, including the culture wars, hasn’t helped the problem. Novels have become increasingly less about quality and High Art and more and more about progressive loyalty and ideology, identity, and having the “right views.” Hence the noxious idea of the “literary citizen.” Inherent in this concept is the idea that one can have one’s citizenship revoked for Wrong Think. (It’s also interesting to me that Orwell has been turned on his head, now seen as a sort of Right-Wing Bro Bible. The irony just keeps coming!)

But I think it’s bigger than that. I think now that women have finally dominated a creative industry, the younger generation of identity-minded feminists have consciously chosen, on some level, to exclude genuine male writers from the inchoate 21^st century cannon. Because these women seem to like men less and less, and care less and less about their true experience. Of course rejecting a whole population always leads to revolution. It did so with the Black Civil Rights Movement, with the gay community in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and with women in the 1970s.

This is now happening with men of all races. Wildly high numbers of men drifted to Trump in 2024, from not just white but also Black and Hispanic communities. Men are feeling the pressure everywhere. The revolution has already started, with Andrew Tate, Rogan, Peterson and two Trump terms.

Creative industries—MFA programs, academia more broadly, book publishing, etc—seem in my experience to generally push harder on the culture war issues when their side (the left) is not in power, because they feel more desperate to make even small change in any way they can. As they sense a loss of control federally, they double-down on more control locally and internally. We’ve been seeing that in the book publishing world for roughly the past decade now: As agents and publishers have seemed less and less interested in the genuine American Male experience, so too have men in general been pushed to corners most of them wouldn’t have considered back in, say, 2010, 2011, 2012.

This has opened the floodgates for alternative platforms like Medium and Substack, and of course self-publishing. Clearly, these represent the future of books. And in this regard I am hopeful, because there are no gendered and ideological gatekeepers in these forums. There are only readers, and an author’s direct relationship with them. This, slowly, is what seems to already be changing things. Some writers are gaining bigger audiences and making more money on Substack than they ever realistically could have from a traditionally published book. (Very close to zero people make an actual living through publishing books, traditionally or not.)

What we’re seeing in places like Substack are large, loyal followings for writers who question the status quo and who write about the “genuine American Male experience,” writers such as Sherman Alexie, George Saunders, Chuck Palaniuk, Jimmy Doom, Andrew Borgya and many more.

In 2022 famous female author Joyce Carol Oates tweeted this: “A friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’”

In his NYT piece, The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone, David J. Morris wrote, “As Eamon Dolan, a vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, told me recently, “the young male novelist is a rare species.”

Also in 2022 the famous male author James Patterson tweeted: “Can you get a job? Yes. Is it harder? Yes. It’s even harder for older writers,” he told the Sunday Times. “You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males.’” He immediately backtracked and apologized, adding, “I absolutely do not believe that racism is practiced against white writers,” he wrote. “Please know that I strongly support a diversity of voices being heard – in literature, in Hollywood, everywhere.”

My purpose in writing about all this is to point out that it seems abundantly clear that there is a problem…or at least a serious perception of a problem which, really, is more or less the same thing. It’s like in politics: If people perceive weakness, whether it’s there or not for real, the candidate (Kamala) will suffer. So regardless, whether it’s real, imagined, or somewhere in-between, it seems like, at a minimum, book publishing could try to open the gates a little more and see what happens.

But maybe none of this matters now anyway. Like I said: Substack and self-publishing (and other avenues like them) are the future.