Bring on the dirty stories: We need more literature for young men!

These days, anyone who takes the subway rarely sees people reading, and especially few men. Recently, I walked down an entire subway train and counted: Only one man was standing in the crowded train reading a book. It was a self-help book called "The Three Minute Rule." It describes how to pitch a good idea to your employer. The other men were engrossed in their phones or staring out the window.

Men read less than women. This is nothing new. What's striking is that there are hardly any books aimed at a male audience these days. Things used to be different. Novels like James Bond appealed to a decidedly male audience with violence, martinis, and beautiful women. Today, there's hardly any such literature left—and characters like Bond are already considered toxic.

At the end of March, journalist Nils Schniederjann complained on Deutschlandfunk that there are currently hardly any literary offerings for young men. In the past, novels by authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Philip Roth, and Wolfgang Herrndorf appealed to young men and explicitly addressed masculinity as a topic. Today, such literature is rare. Instead, men mainly listen to shady podcasts or waste their time following streamers and influencers.

This also has political explosiveness. Schniederjann explained on Deutschlandfunk that the lack of literary offerings is also reflected in the election results: While young women tend to vote left-wing, young men tend to vote for the AfD . Because as a young man, an alternative way of interpreting the world is no longer available in the form of literature, but primarily in social media. And this offering is clearly right-wing.

Women have “Dark Romance”, men have nothing

Since then, the debate has raged in the publishing industry and on social media: Do we need more literature for young men? Some say there are hardly any literary offerings for young men and regret this. Others blame men themselves: the selection for men in bookstores is so limited because they neither buy nor read books. Supply and demand. The debate is heated, and the fronts are hardened.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung also recently weighed in. Cultural journalist Felix Stephan demanded: "Please, no men's books!" While he agrees that women outnumber women in the literary world, he argues this is mainly because, for men, the act of reading has historically been a means of gaining power and influence. "Today, it's perfectly possible to become highly successful in your career without ever having read a single line of fiction," Stephan says. And anyway, literature doesn't make its readers better people, and books written for specific target groups have nothing to do with art anyway.

In doing so, the author overlooks the fact that literature doesn't always have to be about great art to have social relevance. It's enough to create an entertaining offering for specific target groups. Literature can create radical alternative worlds to social realities, but it can also simply reflect the zeitgeist. Take, for example, the "dark romance" genre. It is aimed primarily at young women and addresses sexual fantasies of male dominance and humiliation. One could call this literature, which filled entire halls at this year's book fair, reactionary, and yet these books have a socially compelling power that men no longer find in literature today.

Yet there used to be good popular literature aimed at a decidedly male audience. One immediately thinks of Robert E. Howard's warlike macho Conan the Cimmerian, the novels of Karl May , or the science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. It wasn't always great art, but it was enjoyed by many young men. And some popular literature also cleverly addressed the zeitgeist. Nowhere was the East-West conflict perhaps more strongly addressed in literature than in the adventures of James Bond and his fight against Soviet villains. Cowboys, adventurers, and secret agents like Bond were once the heroes of young men. Today, it's Krah, Höcke, and the like.

We must start telling the stories of young men again

The image of masculinity has changed dramatically in recent years. Until recently, men were primarily expected to be sensitive and self-critical, but recently they are once again being asked to heroically defend the blood and soil of the West with weapons. But where are the new novels that deal with this present? Well, they are lacking. Writing them wouldn't require the literary caliber of a Thomas Mann. Perhaps it is enough to portray the current plight of young men in a clever and exciting way. Bring on the war novels about young European men who must defend our freedom in the Baltics ! Bring on the coming-of-age stories about growing up in the pandemic! Bring on the smutty stories that understand masculinity not only as something destructive, but also as something idiosyncratic and mysterious! We need literature that offers more than the recurring female perspective on male toxicity.

The fact that young men no longer read is not an individual weakness. It is a cultural vacuum that is to blame. Literature has withdrawn from their lives because it no longer tells them anything that speaks to them. Yet, right now, there is room for stories about men who don't know what to do with their masculinity. In a time when men are expected to be both highly sensitive and heroic, the present of young men, with all their longings, is a narrative no-man's-land. Those who want to bring them back into literature don't have to flatter them, but they do have to start telling their stories again. Otherwise, the right-wingers will soon be the only ones doing so.

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