My kids read Harry Potter and Percy Jackson growing up in the US (both with male protagonists), and they were both huge fan of the LOTR movie series (with its nine members of the fellowship of the ring, all male).<p>It's really hard for me to believe American kids suddenly can't get enough books with male protagonists. If that's the case, the fault must lie with whoever's choosing books for those kids.
I think this is pandering to quietly misogynist people; books don't disappear after they're written. All of the hundreds of books with a male protagonist that I read as a kid are still around, so if the industry has over-corrected it doesn't meaningfully affect anyone.
My problem with books recommended by schools and parents are that they are the insipid kind of books.
Yes I'm a fan of Jane Austen's works but I needed to read some action fantasy books.
Boys love super hero oriented themes who are standing between the innocent ppl and the villain. And also video game mechanics in their stories.
We need to introduce the kids to those books.
Royal Road, webnovel have lots of such stories.
Maybe parents and the school authorities are not looking there.
I just read Phil Tucker's "Dawn of the Void vol 1" and it is so nice for any boy to read.<p>What the English faculty in colleges and schools need is to work with the authors of the "Levelling genre" or "Isekai genre" and modify those books with the reading abilities of those boys according to their grades while keeping the credits with the original authors.
The last thing we want people to get hooked on is the isekai genre. It's just insipid low-effort wish-fulfillment.
> Boys love super hero oriented themes<p>Where does this nonsense come from? I didn't nor did anyone I know. I snorted any kind of adventure books but superpowers? Nuh uh, boring and cheapest of plot devices, and yes, I thought so at 7.<p>My parents brought me to the library every two weeks and let me read whatever I wanted, I think that's most important. Also, show you read yourself, and if you don't, wonder why.
There's not exactly a shortage of action fantasy books aimed at children with female protagonists.<p>Second of all, claiming that boys only like action heroes is frankly offensive and stupid. Boys are not intrinsically less capable than girls.<p>Edit: i said what i said. I am not just replying to the above text but decades around parents who think less of boys.
Somehow you've shoehorned the word "only" in there when the parent said nothing of the sort. Ironic in a thread about reading.
Curious how an equals sign got drawn in your thinking between "likes action heroes" and "less capable."
"Harder to get boys into books" means "scholastic sales are down" - it's hard for me to believe that with 50,000 + novels that we can't find <i>any</i> that are appealing - but they're not scholastic "new" and they don't move the money the way they need.<p>A boy (or girl! They're allowed to read, too now, like Belle) buying a copy of <i>The Hobbit</i> doesn't help much, they need consumption of the new mass-produced stuff to keep the machine running.
I can't imagine how hard it is to try to make it as an author in 2026. Between the sheer number of people writing, the suspicions of AI use, trying to be discovered, it must be completely demoralizing.
I was at my typical bookstore lately and I walked right out again. All the recommendations by staff and bestsellers all anchored around "I'm a woman and I see the world like so and so". I wanted inspiration on life in general (think The Alchemist or whatever). Not how it is to be a woman. Not hating, but I'm a dude in my mid thirties and an avid reader. The whole bookstore was remade to cater to young women, tiktok viewers (has selfie walls and shit), and table top games. I get that there's market pressure, but it was already hard to buy books already (like english books taking 3 weeks to be ordered and such). I don't want to order on amazon ...<p>Really a pity. Another big store opened 100m from them. Hope they get their ass whooped.
Marvel is still putting out plenty of them.
<p><pre><code> > Out of curiosity, she compiled a database of 2026 releases and combed through them, analyzing their protagonists. Umesi found[1] a surprising disparity: Girl protagonists outnumbered boys by a ratio of 2 to 1. Some categories, such as realistic fiction and mystery, were especially lopsided, she told me, with ratios of more than 3 to 1. “Girls are taking over!” she said, with a laugh.
> Umesi’s survey offers just one snapshot of the publishing landscape. But others I spoke with in the children’s-book business shared the perception that today’s protagonists are predominantly female. The dearth of male protagonists, some told me, has made it harder to get boys in this age bracket interested in reading.
> The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde, even to the boys themselves. Kids rarely state such preferences outright, Melissa LaSalle, the children’s-book buyer at Old Town Books, in Alexandria, Virginia, told me. Their parents sometimes will, albeit “in a slightly embarrassed way.” Of course, individuals might not connect to a book for any number of reasons: sense of humor, narrative stakes, cover art. “But the unifying theme that I hear resoundingly from parents of boy readers,” LaSalle said, “is, at the end of the day, there are not enough boy protagonists.”
</code></pre>
[1]:<a href="https://readingmiddlegrade.substack.com/p/we-need-more-boy-books" rel="nofollow">https://readingmiddlegrade.substack.com/p/we-need-more-boy-b...</a>
It is more or less inevitable that successful representation pushes will overcorrect and you get a situation like this. It doesn’t have to be badly intentioned, and it’ll work itself out as the market corrects itself. But my boys have plenty of books to read with male protagonists if they want them. Percy Jackson alone has carried one of my kids through a long stretch of recreational reading. There is, you know, centuries of literature for children available during which male protagonists were over represented.
> successful representation pushes<p>Certainly this is one possible hypothesis.<p>There are plenty of other cultural pressures for boys to read less than girls, though. For example, the prominence of male-dominated sports could be drawing their attention.<p>I’m wondering if the causal arrow goes the other way: fewer male readers leading to fewer male protagonists.<p>If that’s the case, we are already looking at the market correction, we just don’t like it.
We just spent the last several years hearing how representation matters, and when the numbers flip sufficiently that a new group is now under represented they get told "that's too bad".<p>When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.
>When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.<p>I'm not clear on what exactly you mean. My best guess is: "media is produced to satisfy an audience's desires" but I'm not even confident that's what you mean.
Media is <i>not</i> produced to satisfy an audience's desires; that's only indirectly and coincidental; more and more.<p>Media is produced to satisfy an <i>executive's</i> desire, which is often based on what they think the audience wants, but sometimes is based on what they think the audience <i>should want</i>.
Media is rarely passive and never just follows where consumers point to, is it. Eveeybody with some power has some agenda to push on others.<p>I dont even mean cia/military-backed ultra patriotic movies from hollywood of the past, eveeybody simply has their opninion and even journalism is rarely objective.
Representation never mattered, what mattered was to get a different group on top. It's not just men vs women, you see it everywhere. It's like how a poster of black and Asian people is "diverse".
> when the numbers flip sufficiently that a new group is now under represented they get told "that's too bad"<p>according to whom? do you have any examples?
This sounds like a pretty dumb explanation due to the obvious fact that you're not forced to only read books which came out in the current year...
Somehow, one single year of female protagonist majority is more powerful than 3000 years of male protagonist majority.
Did someone steal all the old books? This is absurd on its face.
> The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde<p>Jeez, how far from common sense are some people nowadays.
Sounds like the Critical Drinkers “modern audiences”.
Maybe the publishers could start a campaign to recruit more male writers, and put greater effort around promoting and publishing their books. Then we could take those books and market them to boys and say look, you can be a writer too.
Now lets see the atlantic write endless articles advocating for greater representation of women, racial minorities, lgbt people, and disabled people in media where they are underrepresented.
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