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The ‘Lit Bro’ Debate And The Fight Over Masculinity
This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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The “lit bro” is a man, usually white and straight, who almost exclusively reads male authors deemed pretentious by polite society. He dismisses female authors as trite, and trite authors as womanly.
Every couple of years, we start talking about the lit bro, specifically, why he’s bad. At various points, the discourse has centered on the lit bro’s maleness, his whiteness, his straightness, or his privilege. But recently, criticisms of the lit bro have centered on one thing: performativity.
Brady Brickner-Wood perfectly summed up this phenomenon in the New Yorker last year, writing that “to the severely online,” a man who reads books such as “Infinite Jest” in public “treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others … begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-‘B’ book.”
It’s tempting to dismiss this as so much virtue signaling, the literary equivalent of looking down at people who listen to the Eagles or frequent chain restaurants. But we can’t simply ignore the scolds, for one simple, striking fact: men aren’t reading fiction anymore.
In 2022, nearly half of American women read novels, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, while just 28% of men could say the same. As fewer and fewer Americans read across the board, that percentage is likely to continue dropping. And with men making up an ever smaller share of America’s fiction readers, it’s no wonder that, as Kyle Smith noted in the Wall Street Journal last month, publishers are no longer interested in printing fiction that may appeal to men.
This isn’t exactly a new problem. Men have historically been drawn more to nonfiction, history in particular. Everyone jokes about giving their dads World War II books for Christmas. In “30 Rock,” Jack Donaghy lists reading fiction alongside wearing jeans as a terrible result of letting his wife run the show.
Still, things have gotten worse in recent years, and cultural critics are very concerned. “Why did the novel-reading man disappear?” the New York Times wondered over the summer, six months after Vox asked, “Are men’s reading habits truly a national crisis?”
But the literati’s proposed solutions are as unhelpful as they are unsurprising. GQ suggests men who want to learn about history simply pick up a novel and hope it makes them a better person. And that Vox article denies the premise entirely and scolds us for worrying about something as meaningless as men and their reading habits.
Oh, boohoo. Can’t they just read female authors? Sally Rooney writes a new book every year; just get one of those. Not so fast! Men with copies of “Normal People” in their backpacks? Believe it or not, also performative males!
Whether they’re reading Faulkner or Ferrante, guys can’t catch a break. So American men are becoming duller while the fiction market, loosed from any kind of masculine counterbalance, is driven more and more by the tastes of female consumers — a distaff drift that explains things such as AI-generated romance novels, BookTok, and “Heated Rivalry.”
That might seem like a crazy thing to say. But is it? “Women make up half the country” is a political truism, and politicians from both parties who ignore it are written off as dolts. Sure, publishing companies have less of a responsibility to their country than elected officials, but the logic holds.
All of these are ancillary problems. BookTok is probably bad, and AI-generated fiction certainly is. But we’re not going to solve those problems with Hemingway reprints. And while I’m sure Philip Roth has a good argument about why society needs more “manly” books, my concern isn’t for society. My concern is for the bros.
I’ve never really scrutinized how my reading habits make me seem, but I don’t need to. There’s a Vampire Weekend poster on my wall and a copy of “Ulysses” on my bookshelf: I am a lit bro. Until recently, though, I hadn’t been acting like one.
A few years ago, I simply stopped reading fiction. This had nothing to do with snobbishness, nor a dearth of male novelists. (In fact, most of the fiction I read over the past five years came from Ann Patchett.) No, I simply gravitated away from fiction in favor of what I thought I should be reading, buzzy nonfiction and “important” political texts. And then I had kids, and the prospect of reading “Abundance” in the 40 minutes before I fell asleep was laughable.
So I went back to fiction, and I eventually found myself at the base of Lit Bro Mountain: Jonathan Franzen. If the lit bro discourse ever discouraged me from reading anything, it was Franzen. By the time I finished “Freedom,” I was back on novels. I paid more attention to fiction reviews and bestseller lists. When friends recommended novels, I actually bought them instead of adding them to Goodreads and promptly forgetting them.
The results couldn’t be clearer. I’m reading more and picking up my phone less. And most importantly, I’m reminded of just how good good fiction is. It’s exciting and inspiring, enjoyable and informative.
Which brings us back to the bros.
Bros know how to live the good life, and they never let the fear of embarrassment stop them from doing so. Whether they’re lounging at a Dave Matthews Band concert or sitting around quoting “Entourage,” bros do what makes them happy, no matter how cringe it may seem to others.
If nothing else, that’s why all bros should be lit bros. Sure, reading literature will make men more well-rounded, and getting men back into novels will do wonders for the state of American fiction. But ultimately, choosing not to read a great book because you’re afraid to seem, alternatively, too manly, too womanly, too performative, or too unsophisticated is incredibly un-bro-like.
So come on, bros. Put down the beer and pick up some Franzen.
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The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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