Didn't Brando Sando release another book recently?
I don't think it's a chicken/egg question. Once publishing hit 50/50 for male/female authors, and especially once YA got the triple hit of HP/Twilight/Hunger Games (all written by women), reading started becoming fem-coded and so men and boys stopped reading. So the market went to the readers who stuck around.
It's just sexism.
i'm not sure if i agree about reading novels being fem-coded being a recent phenomenon. it's frankly been a thing since practically the very inception of the novel as a form of literature (especially with all the 19th century moral panics about women reading (in particular reading ~gothic~ novels)
obviously this is all rooted in sexism but women (particularly middle and upper middle class bourgeois women who actually have the time and the means to read) have always been the primary consumers of fiction, despite what most people would like to think.
Yeah this is literally a big part of the novel Northanger Abbey, written 222 years ago in 1803. Men look down on girls and women for enjoying novels and think they should read "better" books. Here is the dick character in the book (emphasis mine):
âHave you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?â âUdolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.â Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented her by saying, âNovels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that tâother day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation.â
And by contrast, here is the hero character in the book:
"...But you never read novels, I dare say?â [said Catherine] âWhy not?â âBecause they are not clever enough for youâgentlemen read better books.â âThe person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. ...â ... âI am very glad to hear it indeed, and now I shall never be ashamed of liking Udolpho myself. But I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly.â âIt is amazingly; it may well suggest amazement if they doâfor they read nearly as many as women. I myself have read hundreds and hundreds. ...â
So yeah, men being pretentious dicks about what women like to read, and often secretly hypocritical about it, is not new.
The fact of the matter is that publishing is a business. They simply care about money. So if men are going to mock and refuse to read entire genres of books, as they've been doing for centuries, then publishers are going to target books to the people who actually want to read them: women. Because money.
