“I’ve known this for a very long time, that men just aren't interested in reading our literature.”

— Booker prize-winning author Bernadine Evaristo 

Sometimes a quote gets stuck inside my brain, and it's hard to get it to exit — no matter how hard I bang my head.

After pondering whether it’s true that men just aren't interested in reading women’s literature, I did a little scientific experiment (some might call it detective work) at my boyfriend’s place while he was golfing. Four whole hours to snoop! (Kidding. Relax.)

But I did study his bookshelves to see if My Guy, an avid reader, was interested in women’s literature.

Allow me to digress…

This quote has been swirling in my head for a couple of weeks now, all because of this fascinating article: Why Men Don't Read Books by Women. 

Some key takeaways:

• For the top 10 bestselling female authors (including Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Danielle Steel and Jojo Moyes), only 19% of their readers are men.  But for the top 10 bestselling male authors (including Charles Dickens, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lee Child and Stephen King), 45% of their readers are women.

• Margaret Atwood has a readership that is only 21% male. Fellow male Booker prize winners Julian Barnes and Yann Martel have nearly twice as many male readers (39% and 40%).

• Women are 37% more likely to read fiction and 65% more likely to read non-fiction by the opposite sex than men are.

Many female authors feel compelled to use pseudonyms  — and I'm assuming nowadays are nudged or encouraged by publishers, especially in genres like thriller — to disguise their gender in hopes of tricking getting more men to read their books, a tactic used by contemporary authors like J.K. Rowling and E.L. James.

“Is it really still necessary?” Mary Ann Sieghart, the author of the article asks. “Yes!”

In her latest book, The Authority Gap: Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men and What We Can Do About It, Sieghart commissioned Nielsen Book Research to do some digging.

"I wanted to know whether females were not just deemed less authoritative than men, but whether they were being read by men in the first place,” she writes.

The results confirmed her intuition: men were "disproportionately unlikely even to open a book by a woman.” (Can I bang my head again?)

It really is disappointing that so few men read books written by women. Wouldn’t life and relationships be SO much easier if men read some of the books their partners were reading? 

If a man read even a handful of chick-lit beach or romantic reads, they’d not only learn very quickly about the woman they’re married to, in a relationship with, or dating, but they’d see things differently. Like, universally differently.

Like, a woman wearing nothing but a t-shirt? Super cute and sexy! A man wearing nothing but a t-shirt? Pretty much the unsexiest thing in the history of unsexy things. Or, maybe they’d learn, “Oh, so it’s not only my wife who spends $250 on a specially formulated moisturizer for her right eyebrow.” They would also learn that women know shit and are great at writing about it.

All of this reminded me of Canadian author David Gilmour. In 2013, while teaching modern short fiction to U of T students, he said in an interview: “I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virgina Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories…. Usually at the beginning of a semester, a hand shoots up and some ask why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them…”

I kid you not. It doesn’t even end there.

“What I teach is guys. Seriously heterosexual guys,” he also said, and “none of those happen to be Chinese or women,” which obviously is sexist AF and racist AF. It’s also one of the most ridiculous, non-sensical, and idiotic sentences ever uttered by a man.

I mean, this shouldn’t have happened back then. It was still fairly recent! But could you imagine the fallout if he uttered THAT today?

The only apology non-apology from the university following that quote was a written statement that claimed “neither the college nor the University of Toronto endorses Gilmour’s views,” but maddeningly continued, “Mr. Gilmour is a noted Canadian author and journalist, teaches elective seminars on his area of expertise, leaving other areas of literature to be taught by colleagues who can do so most effectively based on their areas of specialization.” (Can I bang my head on the wall yet again?)

Gilmour didn’t back down, saying, “I'm simply not passionately enough engaged in female writers, that's all.”

That's ALL? I guess Gilmour, like many men, missed the memo that a female experience is not a niche experience; it’s a universal, common interest, as author Dolly Alderton, whose memoir Everything I know about Love, describes it.

(I have no idea if Gilmour, now 71, is married or single. When I ran into him many years ago, he had a girlfriend. Plus, I think even he'd admit that, back in the day, he was somewhat of a “player,” and so he did, in fact, find women “engaging” — under bed covers but not between book covers, I guess?)

Yet, I have enjoyed his books. All of them in fact. I have never once thought, “Hey, David Gilmour is male. Should I read one of his books? I mean, he has a penis!”  or “Hey, Jonathan Frazen has a new book out — should I read it? I mean, he's a guy, so I don’t think I'll get it at all.”

I've read Bret Easton, David Sedaris, The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde, and the list goes on.

(And, um, also Nicholas Sparks? Need I say more?)

Gilmour, who had his book Extraordinary coming out that same year, admitted his editor was concerned his comments may affect his book sales. “And that's one of the reasons that I'm apologizing. Normally, I actually wouldn’t,” Gilmour said at the time. (Oh, why do men have such a hard time just saying, “I'm sorry. That was a dumb thing to say!”)

Bestselling author Jodi Picoult chimed in over the controversy, saying, “Oh, how I wish this were a joke. But by all means, keep pretending there's no discrimination against female authors."

Unfortunately, we don’t have to pretend. In this 2015 Jezebel article, Homme de Plume: What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name, writer Catherine Nichols shares how she created an email account using a male name to send her manuscripts to agents to get representation. (What a brilliant experiment and a brilliant read!)

“I sent the six queries I had planned to send that day. Within 24 hours, ‘George’ had five responses — three manuscript requests and two warm rejections praising his exciting project. For contrast, under my own name, the same letter and pages sent 50 times had netted me a total of two manuscript requests. The responses gave me a little frisson of delight at being called “Mr.” and then I got mad… The judgments about my work that had seemed as solid as the walls of my house had turned out to be meaningless. My novel wasn’t the problem, it was me — Catherine.”

She decided to continue: “Total data: ‘George’ sent out 50 queries, and had his manuscript requested 17 times. He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book,” she writes. “Fully a third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25.”

Sigh. Just because a book is written by a woman, or is about women, doesn’t mean it has nothing to offer men. I’d go as far as arguing to (heterosexual) newlyweds that to ensure a happy marriage, women should ask for their own washroom and men should ask for a required reading list — saving years of arguments and a whole lot of "I told you so’s” in my opinion.

If men read Knocked Up, where I write the truth about being pregnant —how uncomfortable it is, why we cry if you glance at us, and why you better find us a can of Orange Crush, like, this instant, or we’ll kill you  — they’d at least have more than a clue what pregnant women go through. (No, the pain of giving birth is nothing like a fucking headache!)

If more men read Blissfully Blended Bullshit, they'll get a much better appreciation of what us females feel or suffer through while blending (yes, it hurts that I always feel like the least of your priorities. Yes, it hurts that you treat your children differently), leading to better odds of making blended splendid.

If men read How to Raise a Boyfriend, they’d learn how to, and how NOT to, treat a woman they’re dating or in a relationship with. (No, it’s not okay to tell me you’re 40 minutes late because you took a nap and forgot to set your alarm!). And maybe they might actually have a clue as to why we react the way we do.

Back to my unscientific scientific experiment. There I was, looking at My Guy's bookshelf, really dissecting what he reads.

Bernadine wasn't wrong. Based on My Guy's bookshelf — home to at least 70 books — there are but only a few books authored by women.

Aside from pretty much all of my books (such a supportive boyfriend!) and Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, Atlas Shrugged, and The Secret, the rest of the books were written by men, including I Will Teach You to Be Rich, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, Tax Policy in Canada, Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect, We Learn Nothing, Inherit the Wind, Lie Down with Lions, The Drifters, The Alchemist, The Game, Leo: A Life, and Man’s Search for Meaning. 

I wonder, though, why that was? If I asked him, like most men, he would try to disprove the thesis — that men just aren't interested in reading women's literature. But the pattern holds equally for My Guy’s bookshelf, so there is nothing to debate. Is it because some book covers of female reads repel men? Would My Guy have picked up Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich if the cover were bright pink featuring a purse overstuffed with money?

Times are changing slowly. I recently received such a nice message from a male reader: “I really do enjoy your articles and your casual style of writing. Very refreshing and easy to read and to relate to.”

Maybe we should all just give our men a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary or On Beauty by Zaide Smith so they can recognize the unique pressures us women face. (“First read Bridget Jones, then maybe you'll get a ‘B.J.’ I’m kidding! Or am I?”)

These books, I think, would help men grasp what it’s really like to see the world through the eyes of women. If you could only walk a block in my stilettos, in the rain, on gravel, carrying a three-ton purse…

Us women? Not only do we read books by both men and women, we also already know what men want. (To be fair, the list is very short!)

“For we have known for even a longer time that men are simple.  All they care about is a happy ending!” — re:books

So, if some male instructors insist on only teaching “seriously heterosexual guys,” doesn’t it follow that men would prefer a happy ending from a female author? 😉