Extra, extra. You’ve seen the headlines. Men—particularly straight men—have stopped reading fiction. This year saw the rise and fall of the performative lit-bro. And though history, crime, and self-help books still persuade a certain type, the most recent NEA survey found that a mere quarter of men picked up a book of fiction in 2025.
Theories about the origins of this “crisis” span a gamut, with many pinning blame on the supply. Multiple New York Times opinion columnists have argued that straight men aren’t reading for lack of relatable protagonists.
Others, like Robert Rubsam in Vulture, have noted plenty of books that spotlight straight men, but in a less-than-flattering light. Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, for instance, depicts “the male psyche as a pulsing wound of self-conscious neurosis.” Though a seismic best-seller, publishers have struggled to replicate that cultural event.
As Sophie Lee reported in an essay for Cultured yesterday, the literary world is still puzzling over what the next generation of [straight…] men want from a novel in 2026. Especially if it’s no longer recognition—wounding as that can be.
Lee posits practicalities. Is it “adrenaline” men seek? Or “direction, new pickup lines?”
There’s a new case to be made that the boys desire all three.
*
In an exposé last week, The Guardian’s Amandas Ongs considered the secret lives of straight men who read romance novels. An apparently growing cadre, these readers may have found their way to the ripped bodice via other genre fiction, or love of a tight formula. Others, fresh off Bridgerton binges, cite the same attraction that the wider fanbase does: they love love.
While romance is basically keeping the whole publishing industry afloat at this point, the genre has historically been pitched to women and queer readers. Accordingly, some straight men feel shame about their interest.
Many people Ongs spoke to are not quite out with their addiction. They congregate not in public, but on a Discord channel called Romance for Men. Most confessed to fandom on condition of anonymity, because they “worried about being misunderstood or mocked.”
This gets at one problem, re: What We Talk About When We Talk About the Male Literacy Crisis—readers are clearly feeling too much pressure to signify with their stacks. Perhaps because the objectification of books has us conflating TBR piles with personal values. Or sillier still, the interesting protagonist with the relatable one.
Curiously, the romance reader often flocks to a title despite—and not because of—relatability. Straight women queuing for Heated Rivalry and Heartstopper have a rhyme with any human queuing for the Court of Thorns and Roses series, simply given all those werewolves. For many of today’s most successful romance franchises, escapism is part of the appeal.
Ongs suggests that this distancing is key to the genre’s radical potential. Romance, she writes, is lending a new “kind of liberation” to the straight man by “allowing [him] to feel deeply, imagine being desired, and accept parts of [himself] that conventional masculinity has little room for.”
Matt Starr, co-founder of the ultra-hip Dream Baby Press, might cosign this mission. Or at least, he also sees literary fiction as in the liberation business. Of the missing male readership, he told Cultured, “I really want to make the world more romantic. There’s not a lot of sensuality left.”
*
What do straight men want to feel, reading? I’d wager, just what everyone else wants to feel: free, energized, titillated, and sensual, sure. In this age of incels, gooners, and fascist overlords, the mirror fiction for that demographic may not actually provide those feelings. So, a little genre play could be in order.
Anyway, unless you’re Bret Doofus Stephens, you’ll understand that a truly good book should transcend one-to-one expectations around identity and affiliation. Because escapism and relatability are not at cross-purposes.
This is weirdly easy for some men to forget. In his nervous 2024 op-ed on the men’s literacy crisis, creative writing professor David J. Morris argued for a “more inclusive” literary culture even as he admitted that the fault wasn’t in the supply.
“Young men should be reading Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante,” he wrote. Not for nothing, name-checking two of the more romantic writers we have.
Some of the trick to more reading men, then as now, must be in taking judgment out of the equation. For there is a romantic literary world. It’s the one where no reader is ashamed to desire.
Leave a Reply