i donāt think iāve ever read a single post that iāve agreed with so totally and so immediately and hereās 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 iād often talk about books with them (even my own brother has read all of the books listed above) weād have long, interesting conversations about these books and it was great.
but then iād 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: eitherĀ āi havenāt read itā orĀ āi couldnāt get into itā orĀ āit doesnāt seem like my type of thingā
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,,, thatās not necessarily a bad thing /in itself/- the bad thing is that it doesnāt work both ways and itās not an even split. whereas young girls are surrounded by and expected to empathise with films/books/media concerning men, itās not the same for young boys: they have narratives that either focus entirely or largely around them.Ā
women have no trouble consuming media that focuses on a male narrative because itās been labelled as the default, the ānormalā- whereas men struggle to watch/read anything that doesnāt focus around them because theyāve never /had/ to.