Over the past few years, I’ve gradually gotten back into reading as a hobby. I, like many others, loved reading as a kid but fell off in high school and early college when life got busy and I got bogged down with textbook readings for class. But it’s no coincidence that I began my journey back to books at the same time that BookTok was a trending hashtag on TikTok.
My friends and I all got back into reading around the same time, sharing our books and our thoughts. I quickly fell back in love with a hobby I feared I lost. But over time, I began to realize that it was only my female friends that had resumed reading — most of the guys I know still hadn’t read a book in years.
There are several possible reasons for this, some that can be seen through statistics and some where the data is more qualitative.
For one, a Pew Research study found that 26% of men hadn’t read a book in the past year, compared to 21% of women. A Gallup Poll had similar findings — on average, women read 15.7 books last year compared to 9 books read per year by men. So we know that women are reading more than men — do we know what they’re reading?
One survey found that men make up only 20% of the market for fiction books. If fiction helps us to make sense of the human condition and explore life experiences vastly different from our own, shouldn’t we be concerned that men aren’t interested in these stories? The gap in fiction is so pronounced that many female authors go by their initials so as to not put off potential male readers.
Women and men don’t have proportional readership within their own respective genders. While men seldom read works by women, women read men and women authors about evenly. Once again, women are doing the heavy lifting for equality (no surprise). This shows us that the male perspective is still seen as universal, while the female perspective continues to be seen as niche.
Still, despite the fiction gap, fiction books are wildly popular and women are very successful in the genre. In fact, Goodreads’ 30 most popular fiction books of 2022 are all by women. Similarly, the list of Best-Selling Books of 2022 is dominated by female authors.
Female readers online have been instrumental in popularizing countless books for the masses. Booktok influencers have been key drivers in this, most of whom are young women. Their TikToks get millions of views and these accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers. Their content is so widely viewed and profitable that you can walk into any Barnes & Noble in the country, and they’ll have a table of books designated, “#Booktok.” These accounts popularize books and authors and allow readers to bond over their love of the characters.
#Booktok is one of the ways women have embraced the community aspect of reading. Women have also organized groups through the internet to form virtual book clubs, create Bookstagram accounts, and share their thoughts with each other. Similarly, women have aestheticized the act of reading to the extent that the exhibition of reading on social media has become its own hobby done in conjunction with the reading itself.
As for me? I think that men largely don’t want to participate in hobbies that are perceived as feminine, whether they realize it or not. The increased social media visibility of women reading makes men associate the hobby as being feminine. I hear men say that they want to read more, but people are more public about what they’re reading than ever before — yet they still have yet to pick up a book. I can’t help but speculate that if men saw each other posting about their favorite books on the internet as much as they posted about their favorite sports teams, men would report higher rates of reading.
There’s so much for one to learn about his or herself through reading that men will overlook if they reject the hobby as feminine. They’ll miss out on exhilarating murder mysteries, gut wrenching romances, and deranged family dramas. They won’t experience camaraderie with someone who’s reading the same book as them. Most importantly, men will miss out on the opportunity to self-reflect and empathize with other people, particularly women.
As much as women enter areas that have historically been dominated by men, it seems impossible to change the fact that men are still the ones who get to determine what hobbies are cool and whose voices are heard and respected.
