OPINION - Men don't read any more — what happened?

Why don’t men read? Oh, I know dear male Standard readers do, those urbane, literary, poised and secretly perverted doyens of good taste. But those other men, they are not reading fiction. Oh sure, they read Sir Alex Ferguson’s book, Lewis Hamilton’s book, books about cage fighters and career criminals, but nice books that win literary prizes? Nope. The book buying public in the UK, US and Canada is 80 per cent women.

Is this why no-one wants my woe? Why my breathtaking work of utterly miserable fiction has been rejected by every literary agent in London, including a few I didn’t even send it to. Despite pouring my little spiteful heart and ugly soul into 350 pages of unrelenting male despair, everyone is chipping in with how much they hate it, how little it would sell, how much of my life I wasted on it. And those are just the gentle let-downs.

I could get all thicko anti-woke conspiracist about it — “I clearly wasn’t successful because I’m a man!” — but instead I’ll go thicko anti-male conspiracist: other men have let me down!

No-one wants to read my crushingly depressing glimpse into the masculine mind because no one is interested in what men think. Least of all men!

I refuse to accept my book stinks. That’s impossible. Instead, I demand to know: what happened to men?

I refuse to accept my book stinks. That’s impossible. Instead, I demand to know: what happened to men?

I recently read an interview with a fashion person in Vogue. I’m not proud of it, but it’s pertinent here. It was an interview with Argentinian film-maker Laura Citarella, who made a short film for Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales project, which I’m sure is a very worthy project, but she said: “Women tend to handle the ambiguity and mysteries of life better than men.”

This sense of men lacking the sophistication to understand the nuances of existence has been at the centre of the analysis about why the modern man’s preferred reading choice is the captions on Rio Ferdinand’s podcast videos.

LitHub quoted an Irish novelist saying women are better novelists than men because they have a better grasp of human complexity, and the piece explored men’s reluctance to buy books written by, or about, women as indicative of a stunted view of literature.

Dazed put it down to the patriarchal late capitalist system, quoting one professor who said: “Our culture makes a fetish of practical outcomes, and perhaps because the outcomes of fiction-reading don’t patently lead to higher wages, it seems less worthy.”

All of which provides excellent food for thought when your thought revolves around: why is the book industry spaffing millions on Matt Haig’s global book promotion, while I can’t even get a non-automated reply?

Didn’t men used to be more engaged in the internal struggles of existence? I’m not going to reel off a load of male writers highly attuned to mysteries and complexities, but y’know, Shelley was hardly Andrew Tate was he?

Things have changed. Men have changed. Or the perception of men has changed. One which seems to be increasingly reductive. It becomes a self-fulfilling doom loop where men are considered by the literary world to be half-dog, half-machine, while men themselves take the excuse to act like robo-hounds because it’s easier and there are apps demanding their attention instead. They’re right, men are not buying women’s books, but they’re not buying men’s books either. They’re just not reading, OK?

And so you see. The abject failure of my rotten novel is not my fault, it’s the world’s…

Terrible films (and their stars) do not deserve our worship

Whose idea was it to start timing standing ovations at film festival screenings? At Venice, we heard that Beetlejuice 2 had a three-minute standing ovation. Ah, but then George Clooney and Brad Pitt scored a four-minute standing ovation for Wolfs — and they danced with excitement. Aha, but then Pedro Almodóvar put them to embarrassing shame with a whopping 17-minute standing ovation for The Room Next Door.

Is this what film criticism is reduced to? What would Truffaut think? “C’est merde!” is what he’d say. I wouldn’t mind, but you know these films are all terrible. Besides, I just hate how sycophantic it is to film stars. They don’t need the ego boosts of a live audience rising to their feet to pay worship to them.

If there really must be standing ovations then let there also be the opportunity for an opposite reaction: when the film is deeply flawed, every individual audience member has the chance to approach and slap the A-list lead in the face. I actually think this could vastly improve the quality of cinema today.

Make the spoilt clothes horses try a little harder.