Editors don't want male novelists

Once upon a time, a young man read on Substack that writers like him were, if not discriminated against by the world of letters, then at least severely underrepresented. To the young man, this discussion was a turning point: he had to finish writing his novel. In fact, the world needed his novel.

Within a few weeks of the online discussion (or "discourse") dying down, he'd already forgotten the exact arguments. He couldn't remember whether the problem was that publishing was dominated by white women who hated and feared the hard honesty of young men, or if there was some general crisis of confidence in young men themselves that made them not want to write about their own lives—either because of shame or simply because they'd lost faith in literary self-expression and cared only now for video games and podcasts. In other words, was this a demand problem (publishers / critics / readers didn't want men's books)? Or a supply problem (men weren't writing the books)? Many online seemed to believe it was a supply problem, so their solution was hortatory—get out, read some Hemingway, and believe in words again, young man. This also had the convenient side-effect of exculpating the industry itself and making it a lot easier for everyone to get along.

The young man's novel was a work of autofiction about (what else?) a young man in his late twenties, the graduate of an MFA program, living in New York City, and his struggle to connect with other people and live an authentic life. The book was a Hunger, a Crime and Punishment, a Bright Lights, an American Psycho. The book was composed of short episodes, each perhaps a thousand words long. Most episodes were amplified versions of things that'd happened to him. Conversations and encounters, in other words, but ones where everyone was more articulate, more understanding, and more emotionally invested than they'd been in real life. Each of the episodes had something or other to do with sex. Men really want it; women want it too, sometimes, but not as intensely, or at least in a way that's not quite so destructive to others.

At the time, the young man was living in New York and working as a teacher at a private school—he taught high school creative writing (this was a very fancy school). The young man wasn't a sterling example of masculinity: he liked that at this school you had to wear a blazer and tie ever day, but in his real life he still wore mostly rumpled jeans and t-shirts. He'd never played sports as a kid, he'd only ever had one girlfriend. He'd done the thing shy young men do when they're worried about their masculinity, where they date that one girl in college who just absolutely idolizes them, the girl who practically knocks them over and pushes them into bed. But of course he hadn't particularly connected with the girl on a personal level, and he'd only narrowly managed to avoid marrying her (she'd gotten a fellowship abroad, and during their year of long-distance the cord between them frayed and snapped).

Anyway, the young man's issue was, in short, that he was very attracted to several of his students. The kids who took his classes were mostly girls. They wore plaid skirts and purple polos, and their bodies burst with youthful vitality. Two in particular hung out in his office during lunch, daring each other to show him their fantasy novel—he'd found it surprisingly good (better than himself at that age!), and had felt no compunctions in encouraging them. The rich dad of one of the girls hired him to tutor his daughter in writing and advise her how to get published. They lived not too far apart and once ran into each other at a street corner—she was with some friends from a different school and they all burst into laughter when he appeared, but she ran after him, took his sleeve, pulled him back, and told him to tell them, tell them about her book.

About seven years earlier, during a very formative period in the young man's personal development, there'd been a outpouring of confessions by young women about all the ways that men had harassed, raped, and mistreated them. The young man was horrified, but he couldn't help thinking, Oh, so it's really common then? And, moreover, it's very hard to get caught? In recent years, some of the worst offenders of that time had rehabilitated themselves, returning to prominence. One man, who'd drugged and raped fifty women, was released from prison after just two years. Reputations suffered, yes, but material consequences were few. Moreover, in many of the tales of ambiguous encounters, the young man had seen how susceptible women were to certain kinds of pressure, while in tales of the legal reaction, he saw how it was utterly impossible to prove the pressure had existed in the first place. The man had the persistent feeling that this online condemnation of sexual harassment and rape had, in fact, the opposite message: this behavior is common, expected, and easy.

The man of course was attracted to the girl he tutored. She had dark hair, sloe eyes, was lanky and gamine, and he could've deployed a dozen other adjectives invented precisely for the purpose of describing the appeal of teenage girls. He masturbated to her and only to her—he kept imagining her lying lazily in his bed, body bursting with joy and anticipation, her aliveness so intense that the emotion super-saturated the room, imparting even his plain curtains and the brick wall next door with a sense of shimmering expectation.

The man was shocked at how little he was distrusted. Nobody spoke to him about the amount of time he spent alone with this girl, both in his office and outside! He mentioned it to a female friend of his, and she said, "We don't expect men to be Mike Pence—you can't just never be alone with a girl—that's unrealistic.'

"But it's just crazy," he said. "The rhetoric is that men are predators and women need to be wary at all times, but then you get handed the keys to the chicken coop. Some girl's dad is literally like, ‘Do whatever this man says. He's got your hopes and dreams in a vise grip, and your only chance of future happiness depends on pleasing him sexually.’"

"John!" said his friend. "That is so inappropriate."

"What?" he said. "That's kind of the subtext! He's supposed to protect her from guys like me."

“You’re being so patriarchal."

"But she's…I mean any guy in my position…"

Unlike the protagonist in the corresponding scene of his novel, he didn't try to continue the conversation. He'd learned that his female friends fell into two categories, conservative and cynical or liberal and innocent. His one good conservative friend would've readily agreed with him that this was ridiculous, and that of course any man would lust after this girl. But his far-more-numerous liberal friends seemed positively affronted by the idea. Once, a (male) teacher friend had alluded, in a very oblique way, to the idea that a teacher could be attracted to their students, and a table of women had erupted in shouts of "Gross!"

Can you imagine, they'd said? That is so disgusting! The man had phrased it as a hypothetical, so he was not personally implicated, but this gave the women leave to say, "Wow, but that's really how some people think! They think all men are pedophiles."

And yes, whenever he probed his liberal woman friends on the topic, they did indeed seem to believe that a man who was attracted to a sixteen year old girl was a pedophile.

This belief troubled the young man, but not because of any sense of personal shame. He was one hundred percent certain that he was not a pedophile and was not abnormal. If these women truly believed the average man was so sexless, then they were simply incorrect. It would be fine to think it was wrong to be attracted to a teenager (in which case most heterosexual men were moral monsters), but to think it was abnormal was simply factually incorrect.

No, the problem this posed to the man was in terms of his fiction: the women who'd shouted "Gross!" and "Pedophile!" were the main audience for his work. How could he connect with readers whose view of reality was so different from his own? If he wrote down his current conundrum in a book, they would read his protagonist as a monster.

The man knew instinctively that he could either write the book or seduce the girl—he couldn’t get away with doing both. He was one hundred percent positive he could've slept with the girl and left her unharmed. Frankly, he was so attracted to her that he would've happily married her. From what he could tell, the harm in these relationships often came when a student felt used or exploited. Since he would've spent the rest of his life with the girl, he thought that risk was minimal. However, the lure of art was stronger than the lure of life, so he rewrote his novel to make it a thinly-fictionalized version of his relationship with his student.

He wrote down his issue, precisely as it is stated here, writing a version of himself that was not heightened or witty. He thought that he did a great job of describing the temptation to err, and how he'd ultimately laid down his sword, not through an overt rejection, but through an accumulation of slight acts of boundary-setting that slowly put their relationship back on a student-teacher footing.

The girl herself was talented, insightful, and courageous, and late in the drafting of his book she provided him with a climax. She came to his office shortly after her eighteenth birthday and silently handed him a short story about a student who's lusting after her teacher—the girl’s story closes with the student locking the door of the office. And when he was done reading, the real life girl put out a hand, put her finger on the doorknob, and tried to push in the little knob—only to say, "Wait, this lock doesn't work."

"Yeah," he said. "I disabled it, sorry. Mostly because situations like this. But don't get me wrong—you are unbelievably, just—just really—"

Except by this time her face had collapsed. She stood up, her arms and shoulders bowed inward, and staggered out—they never had another meeting.

---

His novel was of course rejected by every literary agent to whom he sent it. Their comments were all in the same vein: a chilling portrait of a sociopath, but as a reader I want my sociopaths to be powerful. I don't want to read about a wimp who expects to be patted on the back for not following through with his fantasies of hurting women.

The man wrote an essay where he tried to summarize this reaction, and then to give his response: my character was not a predator; he was an ordinary man in contemporary America; you, the agents rejecting this book, are only safe (your daughters are only safe!) because of the act of will undertaken by men like this. And yet that self-control reads to you as cowardice! (The essay was rejected by the three or four outlets to which it was pitched).

In meditating on this reaction, the man was struck by two things. First, the girl in question had shown immeasurably more courage than he'd ever shown in his own life; and, second, the dearth of men in fiction was neither a supply problem nor a demand problem, it was a problem with masculinity itself.

So far as he understood it, the problem you faced as a man was that, due to either sociology or biology, you had a relentless desire to aggress and dominate. In the young man's case, he'd known, even as a young teacher, how to avoid leading on the girl in question—he could’ve praised her a little less effusively, and she would’ve gotten the picture. Instead he’d decided, slowly, carefully, persistently, to tempt fate and to court transgression. And even now, he couldn't quite regret it: in capturing the girl’s affection, he'd proven some kind of dominance and added meaning to his life.

He didn't know if women were driven to tempt fate, but he was positive that most young men felt an almost-irresistible desire to blow up their lives, to pursue sex, adventure, fame, fortune, etc, in ways that read as aggressive and dangerous.

Now, either you regarded this desire as good and productive (i.e. you celebrated masculinity in itself), or you regarded it as dangerous and potentially-harmful. Those with the former orientation had absolutely no problem achieving success in society—they turned into hucksters and self-help artists who appealed to desperate young men. But if you didn't know whether masculinity was good (which is the same as suspecting it might not be good), then any artistic production meant, necessarily, writing about both the darkness and the allure of masculinity. If you portrayed this darkness as exceptional or abnormal, then you could have an audience, but this was a lie—no man could honestly believe that most male human beings didn't have a little murderer and rapist in them. The agents’ objection was not that his character was a wimp, but that he, as an author, hadn't allowed them to believe that his character was an aberration. They had objected to him puncturing, or attempting to puncture, the myth they needed in order to live peacefully with their fathers, husbands, and sons.

Nobody wanted an artist who merely aired masculinity's dirty laundry. They wanted an artist who solved the seemingly-insoluble problem of masculinity. They would be happy with an artist who unambiguously condemned or celebrated masculinity, but it was impossible to honestly do either.

The man thought for a long time—he realized that once he solved the masculinity problem for himself, then it would cease to matter as an artistic problem. He'd write his book or not, and its publication would be of no concern.

The man was drawn back relentlessly to that moment in his office—to the girl's face going cold, and to the horror he'd felt, to the fact that this person, who he knew and respected, who'd put his soul in her hands, had left his office feeling so shattered and unwanted.

Well…he still had her number, so he asked if she'd like to discuss that last meeting sometime. With most girls, the answer would've been embarrassed silence, but he knew her, and he wasn't surprised when she said, "Sure, I'd like that."

She came in a dark blue dress—wool or linen? He didn't know fabrics, but it didn't seem like cotton. Her hair was bobbed, had light-colored highlights, and she wore white sneakers. Her hug was one-armed, and their talk was superficial, awkward. He asked about her college classes. She was majoring in creative writing, she said. Then she added: “oh god, by the way, you don't have that story I wrote still do you?”

“I mean, yeah,” he said. “I do. You printed it out, I remember.”

“Thank god, I had such a fear of it getting passed around at school somehow. Will you burn it?”

“Sure, if that's what you want. I sometimes think about deleting my own book, to be honest.”

At this hint of self-doubt, the girl leapt forward, "Oh but what happened? You can't do that! I tell everyone at school that the professors at Dartmouth aren't nearly as good as my high school teacher was, and it's so true—you know that, right?"

"I sent it out. Nobody was interested. I think...it's just not what people want. Actually, I was wondering—I meant to ask—is there any chance you could read it? And really, truly give me your honest opinion?"

This was a line he'd handcrafted at home, and he'd practiced saying it to himself, looking down a bit at the table, just so he could deliver it exactly right. The trick was to hit the word ‘honest’ very hard on the first syllable, then trail off for the second.

"Of course! Oh my god, I'd love that!"

"Be brutal," he said.

At 2 AM that night he got a gushing email where she compared him to Updike, to Philip Roth—nay, more honest than either, because he really made himself vulnerable and didn’t do any macho posturing, and if people didn't like this book then fuck them, they were the problem.

He was surprised by how affecting it was to be reassured of your genius by a young, well-read, beautiful, sophisticated woman—so that is why they do it, he thought. For once in his life, the juice was worth the squeeze—the pleasure fully in line with expectation.

He invited her over the next night, and they were up until dawn, drinking and talking. He asked if he could kiss her, and she nodded. After they’d made out for a few minutes, he said, “We shouldn’t…we shouldn’t be doing this.” He knew that sex could only disappoint her, so he held off for a month, allowing her to persuade him that this was something she wanted.

They went through the usual travails—her dad got angry with her, left her terrible voicemails, even though he was polite whenever he met the young man. She got crushes on other men, more her own age, and tearfully confessed them to the young man—sometimes he almost hoped she would leave him, freeing him from the complications of this relationship. But he loved her, of course, and enjoyed spending time with her. She was everything a person could want in a partner. There was quite literally nothing more to ask for. For every disadvantage (he hated going to house parties), there was a corresponding advantage (it would be a literal decade, if ever, before she wanted children).

They dated. They wed. It wasn't even a scandal, particularly. He kept his job and nobody at the school talked (at least to him) about it.

His friends got quite angry with him when he mentioned that there was little difference between him and, say, Elvis Presley stealing away Priscilla.

“What’re you talking about? Priscilla was just a kid. Selene is educated. She’s a writer. It’s completely different.”

“Is it?”

The thing is, he was very aware of the ways in which he had manipulated Selene when she was too young to have erected any defenses. It'd been almost comically easy to build her up, to flatter her, to hold back, play her hot and cold, and to refuse to douse her attraction. He'd felt very in control at all times, and the fact that he'd married her, and she appeared happy with the relationship, and even believed herself to have been the aggressor—this didn't obviate the truth that his whole relationship had been a giving-in to his inner darkness, and that it all could've turned out quite differently, if she'd at some point changed her mind about his actions.

That was the oddest thing. His one flirtation with darkness—his one attempt to "be a man"—had been whitewashed by Selene's receptiveness. And yet, he'd also created that receptiveness. He'd had this powerful impulse to sleep with one of his students, and with his intellect and cunning he'd looked around for a likely candidate and, well, he'd successfully "groomed" her.

Having succeeded in this one adventure, he was never again particularly tempted to stray. Selene was loving, supportive, and well-off. He was getting older and feeling less libido. His book finally sold to a small publisher: he'd wanted to title it Grooming, in a reference to Norman Rush's Mating, but his editor said she would under no circumstances put it out under that title, so he'd acceded, and it'd come out as The Genius.

The book didn't sell well, and it wasn't received that well—readers echoed the sociopathic wimp comment that agents had once given him. In the same year, Selene sold her own novel for much more money, to a much better publisher. But she wasn't the least bit embarrassed by her husband’s book—far from it, she told all her fancy literary friends about it, not even noticing how uncomfortable it made them.

Strangely enough, the young man developed a particular sort of female fan—college-aged, precocious, eager to be a muse and to believe in his genius. He learned quite quickly not to be alone with such women, not to meet for coffee, get their number, message them at night, etc. In short, he almost immediately set up boundaries to prevent him from manipulating them into bed again—it was no more than self-interest on his part, as his wife currently paid most of their bills (and also he loved her!)

But the elusive and much-sought-after male reader never materialized. All these pathetic, stifled men, who secretly believed themselves to have the souls of great heroes or great villains, were not interested in the young man's rather underwhelming answer to the problems of masculinity, which is that most men are simultaneously quite evil, and yet not quite as evil as they imagine themselves to be.

The young man had discovered that, although he possessed the same kind of darkness as a Hitler or Ted Bundy, the quantity of that darkness was in his case so small that a relatively tiny (and, in the end, very socially-acceptable) level of evil was enough to suffice for a lifetime.

---

Afterword

There’ve been a few different discourse cycles in the past six months about how it's hard to be a male writer. I’m fairly sure

Chris Jesu Lee

,

Ross Barkan

,

John Pistelli

,

Andrew Boryga

,

ARX-Han

and

Alex Perez

have all written about it, and Esquire recently published a piece (that I haven’t read) asking where the sad boy books are. I’m broadly in sympathy with these comments. I and my work have been called misogynistic a few times. When my YA editor canceled the book deal for We Are Totally Normal, she told me the YA audience doesn’t want to read about a “misogynistic Nice Guy”. In my last workshop experience, at the Lambda Literary conference in 2015, my story was also the occasion for the women (who made up 2/3rds of the class) to decry the men’s offerings as misogynistic.

It’s bummed me out on occasion, but I haven’t particularly taken it to heart, because it springs from these intuitions that left-of-center women have about masculinity that are just…profoundly incorrect. If my work is misogynistic, then it’s hard to imagine any novel about a boy or man that wouldn’t be called misogynistic.

For a while I reconsidered whether I ought to post this story, particularly given the recent news about Alice Munro and Neil Gaiman. I thought it might be in poor taste—but you know what? Those authors didn’t write bad things—they did bad things. I might write bad things, but I don’t do them.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on my particular strengths as a critic and a writer, and I think one of them is that I’m fairly clear. To the extent that I have a point, I think the reader can generally understand it. In this case, I can imagine a reader asking me whether I condemn the character in this story, and the answer is…I’m not sure. I definitely think he shouldn’t have begun this romance, and he’s lucky it turned out well. But the truth is I know men in real life who’ve done things very similar to what he’s done, and I can’t say that I cross the street to avoid talking to them.

I’ll admit that the title of this post is a bit of trolling. Editors desperately want to publish male writers, but they really don’t want to publish any male protagonists who’re the least bit realistic. It’s kinda like how the Supreme Court has ruled you can’t discriminate against homeless people, but you can arrest them for sleeping outside.