i don’t think i’ve ever read a single post that i’ve agreed with so totally and so immediately and here’s why:
i love books, right? and from the ages of about 11-15 i was insanely invested in teenage/ya fantasy and sci-fi. harry potter, percy jackson, all of the books op listed above- and one of the things that made those books so great was that you could have a conversation about them with anyone! a lot of the guys in my class also loved this type of genre and i’d often talk about books with them (even my own brother has read all of the books listed above) we’d have long, interesting conversations about these books and it was great.
but then i’d mention something about the hunger games, or the divergent series, or uglies, the raven cycle, mara dyer, the mortal instruments, the selection, etc. and the response would always be the same: either ‘i haven’t read it’ or ‘i couldn’t get into it’ or ‘it doesn’t seem like my type of thing’
even outside of the ya genre, looking at something like contemporary fiction or whatever- do you know how many guys will talk endlessly about the great gatsby or catcher in the rye or any other male-centric novel? but when you bring up something as influential as pride and prejudice or jane eyre or practically /anything/ written by/focused around a woman- you get the same responses as before
society has made it so that women have no choice whether to engage with male-centric stories or not: from children, a big portion of the media we consume focuses on the male perspective and like,,, that’s not necessarily a bad thing /in itself/- the bad thing is that it doesn’t work both ways and it’s not an even split. whereas young girls are surrounded by and expected to empathise with films/books/media concerning men, it’s not the same for young boys: they have narratives that either focus entirely or largely around them.
women have no trouble consuming media that focuses on a male narrative because it’s been labelled as the default, the ‘normal’- whereas men struggle to watch/read anything that doesn’t focus around them because they’ve never /had/ to.
