Ein langjähriger Glaube in der Verlagswelt legt nahe, dass Männer es vermeiden, Belletristik zu lesen, in der es um das Leben von Frauen geht. Neue Forschungsergebnisse deuten jedoch darauf hin, dass das Geschlecht eines Protagonisten fast keinen Einfluss darauf hat, ob ein Mann eine Geschichte weiterlesen möchte.
New findings challenge assumptions about men’s reading habits
12 Kommentare
The Empyrean series is awesome.
The Hunger Games were also great books, barely done justice by the movies.
Maybe readers just respond to stories they feel engage with their interests, their experiences, and how the perceive the world. Maybe there is more to reading a novel than just the gender of its primary protagonist.
Publishers know exactly who buys which of their books. They know the demos. Women authors know that to publish in certain genres, it’s recommended to use a man’s name as their pen name, or to go by their initials so male readers will not realize they’re reading a woman author. This study does not provide remotely enough evidence to overturn or challenge the objective statistics.
This study is also poorly designed. They made a character, then changed nothing but the gender descriptor for the character. They also made the two stories different, and found that men simply chose the hiking story at a 75% clip regardless of the protagonist’s gender. Women chose the hiking story at a nearly identical rate, indicating that the competing story may have been of lesser quality/less engaging than the hiking story.
Finally, the only question that matters in real life is „will men choose to read stories that they know have a woman protagonist?“ This study was „if we force men to choose between reading two passages, will the protagonist’s gender affect that decision (holding literally everything constant other than the designated gender)?“
Interesting study. Study have some flaws – perhaps protagonist gender only matters when reading for fun and in marketing, rather than when forced to read one of two short stories of clearly defined genres in a psuedo-academic context. I struggle to believe publishers are completely wrong given they have vast commercial data.
I think this study has a (correct?) and novel discovery that if all else is equal, gender of protags will matter very little to the reader.
However, I think gender has a strong influence on determining people’s perceptions of a genre of a work in marketing. Since stories that star men or women tend to be written in certain ways, this genre expectation is self-reinforcing.
Additionally, the stories the scientists tested (coffee/hiking stories) had little to no romance components. Testing romance would be much more commercially relevant, since romantic tension is a key marketing and story component of nearly every kind of work.
Definitely read the article – the headline skips over the results for female readers. It could also explain why representation is important to some groups but not others.
>Women […] displayed a modest preference for stories featuring women.
TLDR:
“””
The data suggests that while women leaned toward characters of their own gender, men remained indifferent. The gender of the character did not appear to be a deciding factor for male readers.
The authors acknowledged certain limitations in their experimental design. The study relied on just two specific short stories. It is possible that the genre of the story influences reader preferences in ways this experiment did not capture.
“””
I would think the primary factor driving the belief is not that men don’t want to continue reading female-led stories once they have begun reading them, but that they are less likely to begin reading them in the first place.
Terrible title, terrible article. It implies that „men are willing you *continue* reading books with women protagonists“ counters „men avoid reading fiction that center the lives of women“, but plausibly the filtering process happens at the „choosing what to read“ stage rather han the „choosing what to *continue* reading stage.“ The article even gives backhanded support to that anti-hypothesis by talking about how men have been reading less literacy fiction as the genre has become dominated by women.
The study itself remains an interesting result. It’s valuable to know that men won’t *put down* a piece of writing just because of the main character or author’s gender. But it also proves a very clear indictment of the publishing industry, as it reveals a systemic incompetence at publishing and advertising books that men want to *pick up*.
This basically confirms what a lot of readers already know but the industry keeps ignoring
story quality matters more than protagonist gender.
Men didn’t “stop reading because women showed up in books” publishers assumed they would, marketed accordinglye and created a self-fulfilling loop
Same logic shows up in games and films too creators underestimate male audiences, then blame audiences for the result.
This is a sub for science not pop gender studies and pop psychology.
Protagonist gender doesn’t matter as long as the world building is interesting and the writing is good. I don’t even need the story to be good as long as I like the setting and the writing.