Good article with a great deal of information I did not know about the current state of the literary world. But I find your recommendation of The Bell Jar incongruous. There is nothing uplifting in that work whatsoever. Suggesting women seeking titillation should try digesting a depressing piece such as this will never win any converts.
Why not to just think that the author is a wet blanket?
When trying to improve someone's reading, taste and delicacy are always required. Radical shifts in genre are unwise, and only create distrust of you as a recommender.
As C.S. Lewis observed in *An Experiment in Criticism*, even staying within their favorite genre may not work. Trying to give boys who are reading the lowest sort of adventure stories better adventure stories, with more vivid settings, actual characters, and plots that hold together may still have them put off by them. But giving them novels of everyday life will only put them off literary works and convince them that literary and popular works are different cases.
But when they find out that the author ended up killing herself, that may lead them to despair and depression, not to feeling they can build a good, joyful life for themselves.
I would never recommend The Bell Jar to any woman.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it. They won't be just as thrilled by Anna Karenina or the Bell Jar. If people don't read serious literature today, it is because todays "serious literature," its so called "literary fiction," is so turgid and bizarre, a kind of intellectual masturbation that is in its way as pornographic as Fifty Shades of Grey.
And yes, the classics are wonderful, but age and cultural change has made them less and less accessible than when they were written. It would take a revival of genuine serious literature today to build a bridge to the classics for most readers.
Left to choose between the grimly esoteric and the vacantly erotic, the latter choice, though lamentable, is hardly surprising. Perhaps then, we could use fewer novels delving into deviant psychology and more that take the reader on a good old adventure.
Some how the Aeneid, the Ulises and Divine Comedy withstood the age and cultural change for centuries of the the previous generations.
The cultural change that makes great literatury works inaccesible should not be taken lightly. It needs to be addressed so that the current generation learns how to relate to masterpieces like Anna Katerina. Not the other way around.
But it's not just about literary culture, it is about the whole way people lived and thought. We can't go back to living and thinking like Elizabethan English people for the sake of appreciating Shakespeare better, or like renaissance Italians to have an easier time with the Divine Comedy. I'll take refrigeration and antibiotics over an easier appreciation of Anna Karenina any day of the week.
The question is why we cannot today produce works of equal merit that stand in relation to the culture of our times as those works stood in relation to the culture of their times.
This was interesting and matches real life observation. Both men and women are spending a lot of time being told what opinions to hold, far less time being encouraged to think and form considered opinions of their own. That’s pretty much where we’re at: only the causes are a matter for real debate.
FWIW, I find few things more attractive in a person than the holding of considered and original opinions which they’re confident and happy to discuss. Disagreement can be even more interesting and enjoyable than concord between two grown adults (I think). People like that have always been a rare and lucky find and seem to me to be getting rarer. Sadly.
As an aside, my one small disagreement with your thesis would be that publishing is “…an industry that believes the female brain can handle nothing more than orcs and orgasms (or orc orgasms).“ I don’t really think most publishing houses consider their customers’ consumption in terms of intelligence: it’s all about the money. They sell what they know people will buy. If we want them to do better, then we need to stop buying the trex they’re putting out. They’re in business to do business, not to be a public good.
Thanks for a thought provoking article (as always) and happy Christmas.
They sell what they THINK the customer will buy. Consider that when they found that adult women were reading a lot of YA, they decided that they would make it more appealing to them.
The genre imploded, because those women were reading it to ESCAPE "more appealing to them."
True, sales must always involve a large amount of “best guess” marketing.
However, in this case, if sales figure are to be believed, either the marketing was ur effective or they called it correctly and there was an appetite for this sort of fiction. It would appear to be a money spinner in any case; whether interest was pre-existing or manufactured can only be a matter of speculation I suppose.
It’s going to be interesting to see how all this plays out, I think, not that I have any real skin in the game. For myself, I’m somewhat underwhelmed by the current literary scene but there’s a back catalogue of fascinating books sufficient to last me several lifetimes, so I’m not too downcast!
I came here for a line like “infantilized by an industry that believes the female brain can handle nothing more than orcs and orgasms (or orc orgasms)”. I did not leave disappointed!
I remember that my grandmother had those 80s novellas, in German so thankfully I could not read them. The covers were hilarious. You can escape the Holocaust, but you can’t escape pirates abducting damsels and seducing them in German.
It's sad young women are not having boyfriends or sex and that they have to read to not feel lonely, but at least they're getting some outlet somewhere. It's great they're reading what is to some the female version of porn. I wish men would watch less porn and women would read less erotica and they'd get together and do it for real. But to say women should trade no sex life and erotica for no sex life and "great literature" is to deny their sexuality and is just anti-woman, in my view. Until they get the real deal, leave them be with their erotica. Yeah, go out and meet a mate. Read whatever you want. Read deep stuff. Read what turns you on. Do what turns you on.
It's sad that young women are not having husbands and children. They would be less lonely if they did. Say what you like about the travails of family life, but if servicing the erotic impulse becomes an end in itself, it will inevitably seek it satisfaction by the path of least resistance, which sooner or later will inevitable be smut, for one sex as much as the other.
I think the whole question is way too binary. I just saw this post with a hook from CS Lewis' puritanical views on masturbation being always and definitionally narcissistic and bad. Long before the internet. Frankly: that's inhuman and repressive, and let's not go there (again.)
A little smut and a little non-gross porn (especially pre-internet) was probably never that bad.
It's not clear how much porn and smut are symptomatic of other things and how much they are a driving agentic force in the overall issues our society has.
People talk about this stuff far more confidently than they should, Liza included.
Heck, Jonathan Haidt as been caught overstating his case for the addictive and destructive potential of social media.
That doesn't mean cell phones should be allowed in schools, btw, that's crazy in the opposite direction.
Like I said: the whole discourse is way too binary on this stuff.
There are few novels as serious about intellectual issues as Atlas Shrugged, and there are scenes depicting the sexual conquest of Dagny Taggart, the female protagonist by several strong male characters that struck me as rape. This was one of the reasons I turned away from Rand, very ambiguous moral center in her work. So sex, divorced from marriage and family building is an unsatisfying pursuit.
I need to dispel a fundamental misconception here: women read smut because they're horny, not out of loneliness or some bizarre brainwashing scam by hack porn writers. And the smut comes packaged with romance, unless it's erotica, so we like the love story too. Many of us read Anna Karenina AND smut - though not usually at the same time because smut takes a lot of concentration. Women's libidos actually predate romance novels - nay, the printing press even. Yet from Plato's Republic to the 18th century conduct manuals to the feminist sex wars of the 80s, this flavor of censorship advocacy persists like herpes. What's truly infantilizing is the "what about the children" fallacy repackaged for adult women. Quality varies in romance novels, as with anything, but to blame our current state of societal deterioration on romance novels is quite a stretch.
My 'teenage book' (I am 80) was Doctor Zhivago which I read several times. How privileged I was, to live before the smartphone had been invented. Pasternal wrote poetically about serious moral issues: the anguish of loving your wife as well as falling for another woman. Real relationships in which sex is present, but implicit, never salacious. The broader context of the Russian Revolution gives the novel wider bearings. It was literature.
How sad that women today prefer trivia and pornography. Naturally it is addictive as we are all, women as well as men, a fallen species.
I think Romance has always been the cash cow and paperback Romance was always the supermarket bestsellers, but yes, whatever is supposed to pass for modern popular literacy fiction, I haven't seen.
Yeah, smut has long been dressed up and renamed 'erotica.' I've always been chagrined by writers who come into groups and proudly state that they write 'erotica.' Yeah, sure. And what they write should come with a free tube of lubricant.
I think Western culture is now predominantly about women and their sacred orgasms. All about keeping them coming, the orgasms. Everything else is secondary, genuine relationships with men, having babies.
Yeah, men are now, a lot of them, consumed by porn as well. Also pathetic.
For the record. I don't know how and if ever all of this will change. And I'm not calling for any new kinds of censorship. If women want to limit their existence to having unlimited orgasm, let them wallow in it. But I am calling for an even playing field in the Publishing biz.
Reopen publishing for men, and women, who write about things, other than the vagina, namely the heart, the mind and the soul.
I'd rather keep the ladies' erotica and bring back the Gor novels, but then again I'm in the minority here.
I think the elevated stuff has always been in the minority. The difference from what I've heard is that with electronic readers nobody can see what you're reading so you can read Fifty Shades or whatever. Also literary fiction has gone in political directions Ms. Libes (and I) don't like, which is a problem because they insist on talking about politics a lot more and more explicitly (not that it wasn't always there).
Yeah, they have their rightful place. Like a lot of Westerns, Louis L'Amour, and others. Good writing, but they seem to be too forgettable. Just my opinion. Hope I don't bust anybody's bubble.
I do think the current fad for kink has at least something to do with the attack on gender roles. The only way to get any polarity and allow the guy to be assertive is to negotiate it out ahead of time as a 'scene'. It conflates a bunch of things that don't go together, though, and it's a problem for the gal who wants to be seduced but not tied up.
I think you can find a slightly easier entry point for literature than Anna Karenina. (Haven't read the Bell Jar). How about Girl of the Limberlost? Anne of Green Gables? Or if they need a transition to other literature how about Lady Chatterley's Lover?
But it's the 900th article or Youtube podcast discussion on this topic. This is not new, anymore.
So what have you learned, that can add something clarifying to "what's going on"?
I'd like to see a Part 2.
Also, what do you think of: The Marque De Sade's work, and Fanny Price? Both are clearly obscene. But one was written for men (the former), and one was written for women (the latter), as smut. I'm not encouraging you to scald your eyeballs on them. But if you DO have an opinion on it, since both were written in the 18th century?
Something else to consider. There is a serious body of medical work from the 1800s about English (British) "gentlemen" who were sexually dysfunctional with their wives and mistresses, while also being hooked on pornography (in the form of books and pamphlets - and some of it was particularly kinky in terms of mixing beating and sex). Some of the doctors connected the frequent canings and beatings from British boarding school at a young age, to their later eroticization when the boys became men. This was also a time when a variety of sexual violations and sexual humiliations was approved as "scientific child development" by materialist philosophers and en vogue "Experts" in the industrial age. It was applied in nurseries by nurses and other staff "Managing" the children for wealthy couples.
PS: If anyone reading this is now googling for 1800s written porn, this was NOT a go-ahead. NOT a green light to do it. You ask me how I know about these things? Take a guess.
Good article with a great deal of information I did not know about the current state of the literary world. But I find your recommendation of The Bell Jar incongruous. There is nothing uplifting in that work whatsoever. Suggesting women seeking titillation should try digesting a depressing piece such as this will never win any converts.
It will cause them to come face to face with their loneliness and think critically about their own lives :)
Why?
Why not to just think that the author is a wet blanket?
When trying to improve someone's reading, taste and delicacy are always required. Radical shifts in genre are unwise, and only create distrust of you as a recommender.
As C.S. Lewis observed in *An Experiment in Criticism*, even staying within their favorite genre may not work. Trying to give boys who are reading the lowest sort of adventure stories better adventure stories, with more vivid settings, actual characters, and plots that hold together may still have them put off by them. But giving them novels of everyday life will only put them off literary works and convince them that literary and popular works are different cases.
But when they find out that the author ended up killing herself, that may lead them to despair and depression, not to feeling they can build a good, joyful life for themselves.
I would never recommend The Bell Jar to any woman.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it. They won't be just as thrilled by Anna Karenina or the Bell Jar. If people don't read serious literature today, it is because todays "serious literature," its so called "literary fiction," is so turgid and bizarre, a kind of intellectual masturbation that is in its way as pornographic as Fifty Shades of Grey.
And yes, the classics are wonderful, but age and cultural change has made them less and less accessible than when they were written. It would take a revival of genuine serious literature today to build a bridge to the classics for most readers.
Left to choose between the grimly esoteric and the vacantly erotic, the latter choice, though lamentable, is hardly surprising. Perhaps then, we could use fewer novels delving into deviant psychology and more that take the reader on a good old adventure.
Some of us are trying to write stuff that's neither.
Some how the Aeneid, the Ulises and Divine Comedy withstood the age and cultural change for centuries of the the previous generations.
The cultural change that makes great literatury works inaccesible should not be taken lightly. It needs to be addressed so that the current generation learns how to relate to masterpieces like Anna Katerina. Not the other way around.
But it's not just about literary culture, it is about the whole way people lived and thought. We can't go back to living and thinking like Elizabethan English people for the sake of appreciating Shakespeare better, or like renaissance Italians to have an easier time with the Divine Comedy. I'll take refrigeration and antibiotics over an easier appreciation of Anna Karenina any day of the week.
The question is why we cannot today produce works of equal merit that stand in relation to the culture of our times as those works stood in relation to the culture of their times.
Shakespeare could read much older works despite not living and thinking like those who wrote them.
We probably can, but we won't know who the next Shakespeare is for 400 years.
Hear, hear!
This was interesting and matches real life observation. Both men and women are spending a lot of time being told what opinions to hold, far less time being encouraged to think and form considered opinions of their own. That’s pretty much where we’re at: only the causes are a matter for real debate.
FWIW, I find few things more attractive in a person than the holding of considered and original opinions which they’re confident and happy to discuss. Disagreement can be even more interesting and enjoyable than concord between two grown adults (I think). People like that have always been a rare and lucky find and seem to me to be getting rarer. Sadly.
As an aside, my one small disagreement with your thesis would be that publishing is “…an industry that believes the female brain can handle nothing more than orcs and orgasms (or orc orgasms).“ I don’t really think most publishing houses consider their customers’ consumption in terms of intelligence: it’s all about the money. They sell what they know people will buy. If we want them to do better, then we need to stop buying the trex they’re putting out. They’re in business to do business, not to be a public good.
Thanks for a thought provoking article (as always) and happy Christmas.
They sell what they THINK the customer will buy. Consider that when they found that adult women were reading a lot of YA, they decided that they would make it more appealing to them.
The genre imploded, because those women were reading it to ESCAPE "more appealing to them."
True, sales must always involve a large amount of “best guess” marketing.
However, in this case, if sales figure are to be believed, either the marketing was ur effective or they called it correctly and there was an appetite for this sort of fiction. It would appear to be a money spinner in any case; whether interest was pre-existing or manufactured can only be a matter of speculation I suppose.
It’s going to be interesting to see how all this plays out, I think, not that I have any real skin in the game. For myself, I’m somewhat underwhelmed by the current literary scene but there’s a back catalogue of fascinating books sufficient to last me several lifetimes, so I’m not too downcast!
Except that they complain about sales.
They had a wonderful opportunity to sell to two different markets with the YA thing, and they blew it.
100%. Still, marketing departments do rather whinge about sales. Justifies their continued existence!
I came here for a line like “infantilized by an industry that believes the female brain can handle nothing more than orcs and orgasms (or orc orgasms)”. I did not leave disappointed!
I remember that my grandmother had those 80s novellas, in German so thankfully I could not read them. The covers were hilarious. You can escape the Holocaust, but you can’t escape pirates abducting damsels and seducing them in German.
All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder
For filth (I'm glad to say) is in
The mind of the beholder
When correctly viewed
Everything is lewd
(I could tell you things about Peter Pan
And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)
Tom Lehrer, Smut, 1965.
It's sad young women are not having boyfriends or sex and that they have to read to not feel lonely, but at least they're getting some outlet somewhere. It's great they're reading what is to some the female version of porn. I wish men would watch less porn and women would read less erotica and they'd get together and do it for real. But to say women should trade no sex life and erotica for no sex life and "great literature" is to deny their sexuality and is just anti-woman, in my view. Until they get the real deal, leave them be with their erotica. Yeah, go out and meet a mate. Read whatever you want. Read deep stuff. Read what turns you on. Do what turns you on.
It's sad that young women are not having husbands and children. They would be less lonely if they did. Say what you like about the travails of family life, but if servicing the erotic impulse becomes an end in itself, it will inevitably seek it satisfaction by the path of least resistance, which sooner or later will inevitable be smut, for one sex as much as the other.
The "just do what you want" stance is dead. Advocating for people to be better, to want to be better, is in.
What's anti-woman is to infantilize her. To permit every whim until they get the "real deal" will only destroy her.
We gotta challenge men and women alike to do the hard work now of fixing their dopamine addictions.
I think the whole question is way too binary. I just saw this post with a hook from CS Lewis' puritanical views on masturbation being always and definitionally narcissistic and bad. Long before the internet. Frankly: that's inhuman and repressive, and let's not go there (again.)
A little smut and a little non-gross porn (especially pre-internet) was probably never that bad.
It's not clear how much porn and smut are symptomatic of other things and how much they are a driving agentic force in the overall issues our society has.
People talk about this stuff far more confidently than they should, Liza included.
Heck, Jonathan Haidt as been caught overstating his case for the addictive and destructive potential of social media.
That doesn't mean cell phones should be allowed in schools, btw, that's crazy in the opposite direction.
Like I said: the whole discourse is way too binary on this stuff.
Two words: orc orgasms.
Clearly, that should be ONE word, don't you think?
There are few novels as serious about intellectual issues as Atlas Shrugged, and there are scenes depicting the sexual conquest of Dagny Taggart, the female protagonist by several strong male characters that struck me as rape. This was one of the reasons I turned away from Rand, very ambiguous moral center in her work. So sex, divorced from marriage and family building is an unsatisfying pursuit.
Rand was sui generis, but it's a fairly common fantasy.
I need to dispel a fundamental misconception here: women read smut because they're horny, not out of loneliness or some bizarre brainwashing scam by hack porn writers. And the smut comes packaged with romance, unless it's erotica, so we like the love story too. Many of us read Anna Karenina AND smut - though not usually at the same time because smut takes a lot of concentration. Women's libidos actually predate romance novels - nay, the printing press even. Yet from Plato's Republic to the 18th century conduct manuals to the feminist sex wars of the 80s, this flavor of censorship advocacy persists like herpes. What's truly infantilizing is the "what about the children" fallacy repackaged for adult women. Quality varies in romance novels, as with anything, but to blame our current state of societal deterioration on romance novels is quite a stretch.
My 'teenage book' (I am 80) was Doctor Zhivago which I read several times. How privileged I was, to live before the smartphone had been invented. Pasternal wrote poetically about serious moral issues: the anguish of loving your wife as well as falling for another woman. Real relationships in which sex is present, but implicit, never salacious. The broader context of the Russian Revolution gives the novel wider bearings. It was literature.
How sad that women today prefer trivia and pornography. Naturally it is addictive as we are all, women as well as men, a fallen species.
I think Romance has always been the cash cow and paperback Romance was always the supermarket bestsellers, but yes, whatever is supposed to pass for modern popular literacy fiction, I haven't seen.
It was, yes. Romance was always the biggest genre and some of them, according to my female friends, were pretty spicy.
Yeah, smut has long been dressed up and renamed 'erotica.' I've always been chagrined by writers who come into groups and proudly state that they write 'erotica.' Yeah, sure. And what they write should come with a free tube of lubricant.
I think Western culture is now predominantly about women and their sacred orgasms. All about keeping them coming, the orgasms. Everything else is secondary, genuine relationships with men, having babies.
Yeah, men are now, a lot of them, consumed by porn as well. Also pathetic.
For the record. I don't know how and if ever all of this will change. And I'm not calling for any new kinds of censorship. If women want to limit their existence to having unlimited orgasm, let them wallow in it. But I am calling for an even playing field in the Publishing biz.
Reopen publishing for men, and women, who write about things, other than the vagina, namely the heart, the mind and the soul.
Good on you, Liza, for saying what must be said.
I'd rather keep the ladies' erotica and bring back the Gor novels, but then again I'm in the minority here.
I think the elevated stuff has always been in the minority. The difference from what I've heard is that with electronic readers nobody can see what you're reading so you can read Fifty Shades or whatever. Also literary fiction has gone in political directions Ms. Libes (and I) don't like, which is a problem because they insist on talking about politics a lot more and more explicitly (not that it wasn't always there).
What are 'Gor novels?' Do you mean gory novels?
A series by John Norman.
Thank you.
Swords & Sorcery novels--seemed to have a Conan vibe. Used to see them everywhere. Haven't read.
Yeah, they have their rightful place. Like a lot of Westerns, Louis L'Amour, and others. Good writing, but they seem to be too forgettable. Just my opinion. Hope I don't bust anybody's bubble.
Women's contemporary literature is entirely boring. Basically, it can be summarized into a single genre, which I call "whoshuldafuck"
Its themes run like those
- There's a war: whoshuldafuck?
- There's a famine: whoshuldafuck?
- There's a natural disaster: whoshouldafuck?
- I'm a professional career woman: whoshouldafuck?
- I'm dealing with disability: whoshouldafuck?
- I'm dealing with bereavement: whoshouldafuck?
- I'm a happily married mother: whoshouldafuck?
- I'm divorced: whoshouldafuck?
- I'm sent back in time for adventure: whoshouldafuck?
- I'm an oppressed feminist: whoshouldafuck...
And so on, so forth...
😂
Insightful! Maybe it’s got to do with the sheer lack of romance and fantasy and great sex in women’s life.
I do think the current fad for kink has at least something to do with the attack on gender roles. The only way to get any polarity and allow the guy to be assertive is to negotiate it out ahead of time as a 'scene'. It conflates a bunch of things that don't go together, though, and it's a problem for the gal who wants to be seduced but not tied up.
I think you can find a slightly easier entry point for literature than Anna Karenina. (Haven't read the Bell Jar). How about Girl of the Limberlost? Anne of Green Gables? Or if they need a transition to other literature how about Lady Chatterley's Lover?
It's a good article, Liza.
But it's the 900th article or Youtube podcast discussion on this topic. This is not new, anymore.
So what have you learned, that can add something clarifying to "what's going on"?
I'd like to see a Part 2.
Also, what do you think of: The Marque De Sade's work, and Fanny Price? Both are clearly obscene. But one was written for men (the former), and one was written for women (the latter), as smut. I'm not encouraging you to scald your eyeballs on them. But if you DO have an opinion on it, since both were written in the 18th century?
Something else to consider. There is a serious body of medical work from the 1800s about English (British) "gentlemen" who were sexually dysfunctional with their wives and mistresses, while also being hooked on pornography (in the form of books and pamphlets - and some of it was particularly kinky in terms of mixing beating and sex). Some of the doctors connected the frequent canings and beatings from British boarding school at a young age, to their later eroticization when the boys became men. This was also a time when a variety of sexual violations and sexual humiliations was approved as "scientific child development" by materialist philosophers and en vogue "Experts" in the industrial age. It was applied in nurseries by nurses and other staff "Managing" the children for wealthy couples.
PS: If anyone reading this is now googling for 1800s written porn, this was NOT a go-ahead. NOT a green light to do it. You ask me how I know about these things? Take a guess.
utm_source=chatgpt in your links is crazy work