Will straight guys read a book with gay characters

Boys are less likely to have male reading role models and are generally nudged by parents, teachers, and product marketers in the direction of other pastimes, particularly sports. Meanwhile, masculinity continues to be in crisis. If men read, it helps society at large.

Reading fiction opens your eyes to uncomfortable truths and unexpected perspectives that you may otherwise not have sought out. They were right: in , women made up 80 per cent of the book-buying market in the UK, US, and Canada, and accounted for 65 per cent of all fiction purchases in the UK according to Nielson BookData.

Similarly, straight people can read a book featuring a gay relationship and identify with the love between the couple even if they wouldn't personally have a relationship that looks exactly like it. Straight women seem to feel entitled to write gay characters because they think homosexuality is simply an inherent desire to attract and please a man.

You must feel it to believe it. In , Deloitte predicted boys and men would continue to spend less time reading books and read them less frequently than women and girls. Find your creative community. This is, as ever, an intersectional issue: boys on free school meals read less than anyone else.

Could reading stories offer an alternative route through the masculinity crisis? In our increasingly time-poor, grind-obsessed hellscape — gym, work, and side hustle — coming up for air from being a cog and curling up with a novel just because you want to is a borderline sensual pleasure.

Books are a total waste of time. However, I do not think a straight person can write about a gay or (GLBT) person. Generally speaking, reading is an indulgence that women permit themselves more than men. The bookish man is a rare species. This article focuses particularly on Chinese BL, while most BL fans in the West are more.

Alex, 24, thinks reading for pleasure is a waste of time. Boylove (BL) as queer fiction or hetero-romances in disguise? Young adult fiction is the near-total domain of the teenage girl — including what is made, marketed, sold, and read. So instead of retreating further into the hollow temple of productivity, might we suggest a prescribed course of Fourth Wing for all?

Case in point: 1. Instead, he reads to learn about current affairs, maths, and Black history. Reading fiction ultimately leaves you feeling full up, a stark contrast to self-improvement imperatives that demand you be more than you already are. By the time their tween years swings around, a line is firmly drawn.

So, naturally, girls spend more time reading and reading fiction than boys. It is a form of immersion therapy that demands you be present and forget yourself to a meditative end. I've read some of the most stereotypical, flat and absurd characterizations. She may think, “He’s just like me because he likes penetration and getting his hair done.”.

Their imagination is not that good, and their sense of privelege is misplaced. Education for cowards. Reading books is for losers who are afraid to learn from life. It is a cultural hangover that persists. In the 19th century, reading novels developed a reputation as a frivolous and feminised activity as bourgeois women, imprisoned in the private sphere, took up reading bodice-ripping paperbacks as a pastime.

Men are not inert vessels for potential economic capital that needs to be squeezed out. ‘Straight’ Ideals in Queer Titles.