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.
In the imagined space of the story here, perhaps the more interesting novel (for the purposes of “exploring masculinity”) would be about how their relationship changes as he enters middle age, how he can never make enough money for them to truly be equal, how her writing is always received a couple circles of social prestige above his, his fear that she’ll mature into someone who can see just how timid he really was — not that she would decide he was a monster, but (worse? for him?) that he wasn’t and isn’t the literary genius she was youthfully enamored of, his awareness of this possibility, the strange suspicion he has at times that (endowed with the confidence to act enabled both by wealth and precocity) she indeed groomed *him* after a fashion.
I think it’s the existence of such power dynamics in flux over time that A) your fictional editors have no feel for/are afraid of, and B) that the novel of manners of the 19th century was so good at (under conditions, it should be said, of much less gender egalitarianism!).
Love this comment. That would be a great and even more unpublishable book! Kind of like Marguerite Duras's the Lover, where her race always puts her at an advantage over her richer and older lover
yeah exactly this. It's the other side of committing to a naive younger person who can't really fully judge your actual status and talent when they are falling for you. They will age out of that phase, and will the love last? If she's more talented perhaps he could keep her if he switched from being the admired more talented figure to a truly supportive partner -- more of the "wife" -- but could he? Might he even be tempted to sabotage her?
It's hard to tell from this story because the man is written as a cipher. We're told he wants this girl but in such a matter of fact way that you can't tell the degree to which he is unusually lustful, aggressive, narcissistic, selfish or selfless, what have you. I guess that's part of the point in that you seem to be trying to make, that every man is (surprise!) attracted to young beautiful admiring girls, so he's written as an everyman.
I used to be a young, male, good looking art teacher, so I understand where this is coming from but I have to say it's exceptionally creepy. I had to deal with similar things but I dealt with them by shutting them down at the first gate. There are a lot of small compromises that lead to something like this. I would never be alone with young girls, that's just dumb. I was lucky though, I had a very strong religious tradition informing my choices.
But this guy is 100% correct that society has lost it's collective mind allowing these types of relationships to develop. The practice of chaperones, severe taboos on intimacy between men and young, unrelated girls to the point where you would never be put in the positions outlined in the piece are 100% warranted.
The guy was jerking off to his students. Basically everything has gone wrong at that point. He should have already been married and raising his own kids and had some kind of tradition that stopped this situation from even developing. It was only the basic fact that he had some vestigial moral restraint that stopped the situation degenerating any further, everything hinged on him being a good guy.
You can say it's his little bit of evil, but this is basically like leaving a pallet of PS5's in the street in the middle of the hood. The big difference being that no-one is getting in trouble when all the PS5's disappear.
The title of the guy's novel shouldn't be 'groomer'. It should be 'how I was slowly sexually tortured for a decade by liberal society and narrowly avoided going to prison for it'.
What the hell does "he should have been married" mean? I think that sentence right there shows you have absolutely no idea what it's like to be a guy like him.
One of the central troubles of male inner life is how resistant mediocrity is to romanticization. It's fair to call what lives inside men a "darkness," but it's also a deeply heroic impulse—one that finds no easy expression these days for about a million different reasons. So, it becomes a burden. And men forget how to live, wrestling with this thing inside them. You call it pathetic. I call it necessary.
She's trans. Does that make a difference? If it does, if you can't find a similar thing written by a cis woman, does that make her thoughts on "masculinity" a consequence of her socialization as a child, or her innate biology as an infant? The answer to this question in relevant to a whole host of "trans debate" policy questions.
This was super intriguing, and there’s a lot to unpack here about masculinity, what women expect of it, what men expect of it. I applaud the courage to broach the discomfort of pondering an inherent “badness” to masculinity. It’s something I think about a lot! Thanks for writing, I’m glad I found this.
There are many standout quotes but I’d like to spotlight this one in particular:
“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.”
Men also desperately need to believe in that myth. They are, on the whole, pretty bad at understanding their own evil and even worse at doing anything about it on a structural level. Hence why they keep falling for the same grifters.
It’s hard to grapple with the banality of it and still justify getting laid or existing in public. And as much as everyone gripes about the culture wars and the rise of women’s dominance, the scandals and abuse stories remain as common and predictable as ever.
Even if men’s POV is missing from contemporary literature at the moment, it still manifests in other sectors of life. The military, the police force, most of religion, the annals of YouTube, most of hip-hop, the tech world.
Startup and venture capital culture, especially, seem to reflect masculinity: they are self-important, erase their own history, extract all they can. Can only be as big as it is if everyone ignores some very obvious questions.
Even if the gender ratios in publishing flipped overnight, I doubt we’d get more interesting work. The intellectual rigor isn’t there. We’d trade bland, listless ‘lyrical’ womanhood (which I cannot stand) for the two flavors of masculinity: childishly loud and optimistic or fake, hyper-inflated ‘tortured genius’. The options are bleak on all sides.
It is a little sad, to me, that your protagonist partially became fixated on the girl simply because she showed him attention. She made him feel important when few other people did.
And he was so unwilling to deal with that loneliness that he could only wait a handful of years before retreating to her.
He chose to stunt himself instead of continuing forward into adulthood. Or, hell, even looking for new experiences that would allow him to explore the masculinity he wanted to be the voice of. I can’t help but wonder how seriously he actually took his writing or personal code of ethics, given how quickly he gave up.
It is understandable, but pathetic, as many men are.
Do you know what real loneliness feels like? Spending no time with friends, going home to no one waiting for you, going to bed alone and going to work with people who aren't very fun to talk to, then going home and doing it all over again? For years on end?
Not the years on end part of it, no. But there does come a point where that loneliness is a choice.
That does not mean it is easy to work your way out of. It is often unbearably hard. But there *are* choices to be made on whether you can go on existing as you are.
And this protagonist wasn’t abnormally lonely to begin with - he just didn’t push himself very far.
Lots of good comments here! I have a lot of sympathy for lonely, desperate people, personally, and I have much more sympathy for this character than you do, Zeja--I'm more on Skull's side. It's true the character is pathetic, but most people are pathetic, and at least he's a married and relatively happy pathetic person!
As to whether there'd be more good work if men felt less inhibited--I dunno. To be honest, I think the struggle to speak honestly about the male experience is what will, in the end, produce good work! It's hard on individual men, but not necessarily bad for the culture.
I wrote an SF/magical-realist story recently about an unhappily married man, grieving over being legally cut off from a toddler son he fathered while philandering, and who has a very brief (under 20 seconds) and absolutely non-sexual relationship with a late-teens girl who doesn't even know he's there. It just that, through the magic in the fiction, she is able to directly feel the sadness he has pushed down in his heart. An offer of male friendship interrupts his suicide attempt when he realizes how cut off he is from his own sadness, from his own ability to feel much of anything directly anymore.
After I wrote it, I sat back and thought about audience. A lot of people would read something misogynistic into the near-future world I sketch out. Some of them would be misogynists and read me wrong. Some of them would be women who'd also read me wrong. If anything, I see it as sort of metaphysically trans, and I only wanted to make the point that power corrupts even when the present ruling class may be inherently somewhat less corruptible than the one it supplanted--oppression is still oppression. The ending holds out the beginning of a path toward better. I thought it was an ambiguous happy ending, but the only reaction I've gotten so far is "sad."
When male privilege is stripped away leaving room to grow, there'd still be flowers of evil blooming up, but maybe not as much. If male privilege is stripped away with no room to grow, what happens then? That's the question I was asking, and trying to answer. Now, the question for me: is anybody interested in my answer? Probably not many, these days. I'd like to be wrong about that, but I'm OK with being my own audience sometimes. I'll keep writing anyway.
Is the "tortured genius" really a "masculine" archetype at this point? I feel like I've read way too much "sad girl lit" about self-destructive millenial females to buy that.
As someone who has also read too much sad girl lit (not of my own volition) - I don’t think the characters are claiming to be geniuses, they’re listless Millennials with no real responsibilities.
They don’t even indulge in actually torturing themselves or others. They’re just bored, and assume that boredom is a woman’s natural state under capitalism, and they still desire men too much to actually be a threat to *handwaves* the world at large.
I found this hard to relate to. I teach Highschool and I have hated every single student I have ever had. The best I just grudgingly respect and accept could hold a job for more than a month, which aren't many. Boys or girls, all are awful. I wouldn't pay a one of them to pick up dog shit in my backyard.
I could see this story maybe being realistic in the early 2000s but not since cell phones became ubiquitous and when such things as standards had cultural purchase. Maybe kids at the fancy schools instead of my exurban dumping ground are just more mature. Or maybe the guy was an actual pedo since today's 17-year-old has the socio-emotional depth of a 12-year-old.
"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."
Great point. I believe you. But I can see an exception to this rule. Set your story a few decades back, and it seems that the culture is much more receptive to a realistic portrayal of masculinity. Mad Men sprung to mind first. It's easier to dissect the past.
I'm not sure that's true. Don Draper didn't become pathetic until several seasons in, when he fucked up his second marriage. The writers set him up as better and worse than the vast majority of men until they needed him to fall so he could confront his past and grow.
But the other male characters were more common. Maybe they just felt they needed the unrealistic male protagonist to provide literary cover for realistic male characters.
I would absolutely buy, read and devour a book about a male teacher who has pursued a female student for a (sexual) relationship. If they get together at the end, this is a bonus.
This is like a subgenre in manga - adults dating teenagers - but it freaks out women so bad in the US, there are almost no books about something that quite honestly happens all the time.
So yes. I am more interested on books about men and masculinity. I have zero interest in the sort of sad white girl thing that's happening right now. Or *any* sad girl thing.
I think the problem is the simplistic moralism that reigns in commercial literary circles. For example, if a kid has a tantrum and yells, “I hate you and I wish you were dead,” everybody realizes that’s not a moral flaw. But as soon as you get into the adult world, nothing can be just characterological – it has to be moral. Would “American psycho”
be published now? I doubt it.
The darkness in the human psyche — and not just the male psyche — is problematic in the world, but interesting on the page. But we can’t have it.
Beyond that, you’ll like my novel if it ever gets published.
Manga and anime do love that particular tension, and in most of the ones I see here in the US mine it for comedy as much as anything. Posting this a day early because of this conversation.
I have no literary cred to judge anything, but I definitely enjoyed reading! Your comment: "I can imagine a reader asking me whether I condemn the character in this story, and the answer is…I’m not sure." brought to mind Etgar Keret's teaching that "a good story, by definition, has to be smarter than the person who wrote it. Because if it’s less smart, that means the writer wasn’t writing a story but assembling a piece of Ikea furniture."
While I think you're correct, I don't know if I'd want to see a renaissance of these kind of protagonists. It's like putting down 'Catcher in the Rye' and going "oh yeah more of this, please!" I was immensely entertained by this story, and I would read more of it, but the character sucked, I wish him the worst. In less talented hands, the perspective would be unbearable, and while its a voice unheard in literature the cry of the incel rings loud enough for me. Not to say that people shouldn't write about it, but its understandable why there's no real impetus behind it.
Matt, just wondering, can you really explain why this character ‘sucks?’ Do you just mean he’s unlikeable? Could you give an example of flawed (male) characters who don’t ‘suck?’
I have lots of thoughts on the piece, but none formed well enough to share yet. Except to say: I love this quote:
"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."
I'm glad I read this story as an essay and not a novel. It certainly convinced me that the hypothetical editor was correct. There wouldn't be a willing audience. Maybe if I was paid to read it. I value my romantic illusions quite highly so it would be a high price.
In the imagined space of the story here, perhaps the more interesting novel (for the purposes of “exploring masculinity”) would be about how their relationship changes as he enters middle age, how he can never make enough money for them to truly be equal, how her writing is always received a couple circles of social prestige above his, his fear that she’ll mature into someone who can see just how timid he really was — not that she would decide he was a monster, but (worse? for him?) that he wasn’t and isn’t the literary genius she was youthfully enamored of, his awareness of this possibility, the strange suspicion he has at times that (endowed with the confidence to act enabled both by wealth and precocity) she indeed groomed *him* after a fashion.
I think it’s the existence of such power dynamics in flux over time that A) your fictional editors have no feel for/are afraid of, and B) that the novel of manners of the 19th century was so good at (under conditions, it should be said, of much less gender egalitarianism!).
Love this comment. That would be a great and even more unpublishable book! Kind of like Marguerite Duras's the Lover, where her race always puts her at an advantage over her richer and older lover
I love Duras.
yeah exactly this. It's the other side of committing to a naive younger person who can't really fully judge your actual status and talent when they are falling for you. They will age out of that phase, and will the love last? If she's more talented perhaps he could keep her if he switched from being the admired more talented figure to a truly supportive partner -- more of the "wife" -- but could he? Might he even be tempted to sabotage her?
It's hard to tell from this story because the man is written as a cipher. We're told he wants this girl but in such a matter of fact way that you can't tell the degree to which he is unusually lustful, aggressive, narcissistic, selfish or selfless, what have you. I guess that's part of the point in that you seem to be trying to make, that every man is (surprise!) attracted to young beautiful admiring girls, so he's written as an everyman.
Maybe they don't age out of respect for your ordinariness, but INTO respect for it.
A culture can't be ALL outliers, or it isn't a culture...and there's a message for late American culture.
Interesting piece. Not what I was expecting. Not sure if I even liked it. But it definitely made me think, so maybe that's better
I used to be a young, male, good looking art teacher, so I understand where this is coming from but I have to say it's exceptionally creepy. I had to deal with similar things but I dealt with them by shutting them down at the first gate. There are a lot of small compromises that lead to something like this. I would never be alone with young girls, that's just dumb. I was lucky though, I had a very strong religious tradition informing my choices.
But this guy is 100% correct that society has lost it's collective mind allowing these types of relationships to develop. The practice of chaperones, severe taboos on intimacy between men and young, unrelated girls to the point where you would never be put in the positions outlined in the piece are 100% warranted.
The guy was jerking off to his students. Basically everything has gone wrong at that point. He should have already been married and raising his own kids and had some kind of tradition that stopped this situation from even developing. It was only the basic fact that he had some vestigial moral restraint that stopped the situation degenerating any further, everything hinged on him being a good guy.
You can say it's his little bit of evil, but this is basically like leaving a pallet of PS5's in the street in the middle of the hood. The big difference being that no-one is getting in trouble when all the PS5's disappear.
The title of the guy's novel shouldn't be 'groomer'. It should be 'how I was slowly sexually tortured for a decade by liberal society and narrowly avoided going to prison for it'.
What the hell does "he should have been married" mean? I think that sentence right there shows you have absolutely no idea what it's like to be a guy like him.
You haven't understood what I was trying to convey, I'm curious as to what you think I was saying there.
One of the central troubles of male inner life is how resistant mediocrity is to romanticization. It's fair to call what lives inside men a "darkness," but it's also a deeply heroic impulse—one that finds no easy expression these days for about a million different reasons. So, it becomes a burden. And men forget how to live, wrestling with this thing inside them. You call it pathetic. I call it necessary.
A damn Good story. With a very believable and relatable male protagonist. I can hardly believe a woman wrote it.
She's trans. Does that make a difference? If it does, if you can't find a similar thing written by a cis woman, does that make her thoughts on "masculinity" a consequence of her socialization as a child, or her innate biology as an infant? The answer to this question in relevant to a whole host of "trans debate" policy questions.
Makes sense. Most women have no idea how men think. It's mostly guess work, fantasy and some projection.
This was super intriguing, and there’s a lot to unpack here about masculinity, what women expect of it, what men expect of it. I applaud the courage to broach the discomfort of pondering an inherent “badness” to masculinity. It’s something I think about a lot! Thanks for writing, I’m glad I found this.
This story is very funny and very thoughtful.
There are many standout quotes but I’d like to spotlight this one in particular:
“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.”
Men also desperately need to believe in that myth. They are, on the whole, pretty bad at understanding their own evil and even worse at doing anything about it on a structural level. Hence why they keep falling for the same grifters.
It’s hard to grapple with the banality of it and still justify getting laid or existing in public. And as much as everyone gripes about the culture wars and the rise of women’s dominance, the scandals and abuse stories remain as common and predictable as ever.
Even if men’s POV is missing from contemporary literature at the moment, it still manifests in other sectors of life. The military, the police force, most of religion, the annals of YouTube, most of hip-hop, the tech world.
Startup and venture capital culture, especially, seem to reflect masculinity: they are self-important, erase their own history, extract all they can. Can only be as big as it is if everyone ignores some very obvious questions.
Even if the gender ratios in publishing flipped overnight, I doubt we’d get more interesting work. The intellectual rigor isn’t there. We’d trade bland, listless ‘lyrical’ womanhood (which I cannot stand) for the two flavors of masculinity: childishly loud and optimistic or fake, hyper-inflated ‘tortured genius’. The options are bleak on all sides.
It is a little sad, to me, that your protagonist partially became fixated on the girl simply because she showed him attention. She made him feel important when few other people did.
And he was so unwilling to deal with that loneliness that he could only wait a handful of years before retreating to her.
He chose to stunt himself instead of continuing forward into adulthood. Or, hell, even looking for new experiences that would allow him to explore the masculinity he wanted to be the voice of. I can’t help but wonder how seriously he actually took his writing or personal code of ethics, given how quickly he gave up.
It is understandable, but pathetic, as many men are.
Do you know what real loneliness feels like? Spending no time with friends, going home to no one waiting for you, going to bed alone and going to work with people who aren't very fun to talk to, then going home and doing it all over again? For years on end?
Not the years on end part of it, no. But there does come a point where that loneliness is a choice.
That does not mean it is easy to work your way out of. It is often unbearably hard. But there *are* choices to be made on whether you can go on existing as you are.
And this protagonist wasn’t abnormally lonely to begin with - he just didn’t push himself very far.
Lots of good comments here! I have a lot of sympathy for lonely, desperate people, personally, and I have much more sympathy for this character than you do, Zeja--I'm more on Skull's side. It's true the character is pathetic, but most people are pathetic, and at least he's a married and relatively happy pathetic person!
As to whether there'd be more good work if men felt less inhibited--I dunno. To be honest, I think the struggle to speak honestly about the male experience is what will, in the end, produce good work! It's hard on individual men, but not necessarily bad for the culture.
I wrote an SF/magical-realist story recently about an unhappily married man, grieving over being legally cut off from a toddler son he fathered while philandering, and who has a very brief (under 20 seconds) and absolutely non-sexual relationship with a late-teens girl who doesn't even know he's there. It just that, through the magic in the fiction, she is able to directly feel the sadness he has pushed down in his heart. An offer of male friendship interrupts his suicide attempt when he realizes how cut off he is from his own sadness, from his own ability to feel much of anything directly anymore.
After I wrote it, I sat back and thought about audience. A lot of people would read something misogynistic into the near-future world I sketch out. Some of them would be misogynists and read me wrong. Some of them would be women who'd also read me wrong. If anything, I see it as sort of metaphysically trans, and I only wanted to make the point that power corrupts even when the present ruling class may be inherently somewhat less corruptible than the one it supplanted--oppression is still oppression. The ending holds out the beginning of a path toward better. I thought it was an ambiguous happy ending, but the only reaction I've gotten so far is "sad."
When male privilege is stripped away leaving room to grow, there'd still be flowers of evil blooming up, but maybe not as much. If male privilege is stripped away with no room to grow, what happens then? That's the question I was asking, and trying to answer. Now, the question for me: is anybody interested in my answer? Probably not many, these days. I'd like to be wrong about that, but I'm OK with being my own audience sometimes. I'll keep writing anyway.
Is the "tortured genius" really a "masculine" archetype at this point? I feel like I've read way too much "sad girl lit" about self-destructive millenial females to buy that.
As someone who has also read too much sad girl lit (not of my own volition) - I don’t think the characters are claiming to be geniuses, they’re listless Millennials with no real responsibilities.
They don’t even indulge in actually torturing themselves or others. They’re just bored, and assume that boredom is a woman’s natural state under capitalism, and they still desire men too much to actually be a threat to *handwaves* the world at large.
I found this hard to relate to. I teach Highschool and I have hated every single student I have ever had. The best I just grudgingly respect and accept could hold a job for more than a month, which aren't many. Boys or girls, all are awful. I wouldn't pay a one of them to pick up dog shit in my backyard.
I could see this story maybe being realistic in the early 2000s but not since cell phones became ubiquitous and when such things as standards had cultural purchase. Maybe kids at the fancy schools instead of my exurban dumping ground are just more mature. Or maybe the guy was an actual pedo since today's 17-year-old has the socio-emotional depth of a 12-year-old.
Maybe the difference is the quality of the school? By which I mean the filtering effect on the students.
"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."
Great point. I believe you. But I can see an exception to this rule. Set your story a few decades back, and it seems that the culture is much more receptive to a realistic portrayal of masculinity. Mad Men sprung to mind first. It's easier to dissect the past.
I'm not sure that's true. Don Draper didn't become pathetic until several seasons in, when he fucked up his second marriage. The writers set him up as better and worse than the vast majority of men until they needed him to fall so he could confront his past and grow.
But the other male characters were more common. Maybe they just felt they needed the unrealistic male protagonist to provide literary cover for realistic male characters.
I would absolutely buy, read and devour a book about a male teacher who has pursued a female student for a (sexual) relationship. If they get together at the end, this is a bonus.
This is like a subgenre in manga - adults dating teenagers - but it freaks out women so bad in the US, there are almost no books about something that quite honestly happens all the time.
So yes. I am more interested on books about men and masculinity. I have zero interest in the sort of sad white girl thing that's happening right now. Or *any* sad girl thing.
I think the problem is the simplistic moralism that reigns in commercial literary circles. For example, if a kid has a tantrum and yells, “I hate you and I wish you were dead,” everybody realizes that’s not a moral flaw. But as soon as you get into the adult world, nothing can be just characterological – it has to be moral. Would “American psycho”
be published now? I doubt it.
The darkness in the human psyche — and not just the male psyche — is problematic in the world, but interesting on the page. But we can’t have it.
Beyond that, you’ll like my novel if it ever gets published.
The book you may be looking for is “Disgrace” by J.M Coetzee. It’s a masterpiece.
Manga and anime do love that particular tension, and in most of the ones I see here in the US mine it for comedy as much as anything. Posting this a day early because of this conversation.
https://open.substack.com/pub/randallhayes/p/cap-and-co-part-6
I would read it too. :)
loved this story!
I have no literary cred to judge anything, but I definitely enjoyed reading! Your comment: "I can imagine a reader asking me whether I condemn the character in this story, and the answer is…I’m not sure." brought to mind Etgar Keret's teaching that "a good story, by definition, has to be smarter than the person who wrote it. Because if it’s less smart, that means the writer wasn’t writing a story but assembling a piece of Ikea furniture."
You can read, you can judge things. You might be wrong, but that’s much better than pretending you aren’t real
While I think you're correct, I don't know if I'd want to see a renaissance of these kind of protagonists. It's like putting down 'Catcher in the Rye' and going "oh yeah more of this, please!" I was immensely entertained by this story, and I would read more of it, but the character sucked, I wish him the worst. In less talented hands, the perspective would be unbearable, and while its a voice unheard in literature the cry of the incel rings loud enough for me. Not to say that people shouldn't write about it, but its understandable why there's no real impetus behind it.
Matt, just wondering, can you really explain why this character ‘sucks?’ Do you just mean he’s unlikeable? Could you give an example of flawed (male) characters who don’t ‘suck?’
I have lots of thoughts on the piece, but none formed well enough to share yet. Except to say: I love this quote:
"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."
Best shit I’ve read on Substack in a long while. This type of narrative would find success as a show or film, no question.
We men know the literary world is entirely gate kept by liberal white women, so it punctuates the significance of this piece more so.
I'm glad I read this story as an essay and not a novel. It certainly convinced me that the hypothetical editor was correct. There wouldn't be a willing audience. Maybe if I was paid to read it. I value my romantic illusions quite highly so it would be a high price.