In what ways do men and women in general differ in their literary preferences?
>>7735269
This assumes that men and women have any more than a vague sense of commonality across cultures in their interests.
Could you be more specific?
>>7735269
VS Naipaul, Norman Mailer, and Marlon James have all criticized the female taste in literature and writing abilities...banal is a word thrown about.
James: While she recognizes how much she was pandering to the white man, we writers of colour spend way too much time pandering to the white woman … astringent, observed, clipped, wallowing in its own middle-style prose and private ennui, porn for certain publications.
>>7735293
Of course, women of color do nothing but read about gender and race broke. Down from a woman's usually simplistic and typically Marxist view.
>>7735299
*broken down to a
Autocorrected
A girl I'm talking to recommended The Bell Jar, so I read it. It sucks. But I told her I loved it cause I wanna get laid.
>>7735307
It was mediocre, which is good in the world of female lit. I can't say it was any better or worse than Catcher in the Rye, and knowing she ended herself made it far more interesting.
>>7735269
Very little now. 99% of the people posting on this board and in the world in general like absolute shit and wouldn't know any sort of quality if it raped them.
>>7735323
i hope you get cancer
>>7735307
same but with "The Mill on the Floss"
>>7735329
I'll do you one better and hope I die in my sleep.
>>7735323
This.
The problem with the typical /r9k/ misogyny with /lit/ is that most men don't read at all, but watch garbage sports and drink beer and become fat shits, or they play video games all day. A minority read genre fiction. An extreme minority read literary fiction.
>>7735339
i hope you get raped in the eye with a knife
I worked in an independent bookstore for a few years, and thanks to all the empirical data I've gathered, I can say that there are definitely differences in literary preferences based on gender.
For example, a lot of women enjoy erotic fiction. They also tend to ask straight away for novels with a very light subject matter "to relax or read on the beach". Women generally have a preference for novels written in diary form. Obviously, most men are not interested in any of this.
What is common to both sexes is a keen interest in historical fiction and crime novels (especially of the Scandinavian variety).
What is also common to both sexes is a near complete disinterest in serious literature. That is unfortunate but inevitable.
>>7735269
Reading for fun/escape/easy pleasure: They like different subjects. Neither is better than the other.
What they consider serious literature: Women seem to find way more significance in sentimentality, family drama and relatively banal atmospheres for some reason, which is annoying when this preference elevates boring shit to "serious literature" status.
>>7735269
If you want to talk about cross-cultural truths, romantic novels come to mind. It's a genre whose patrons are almost exclusively women. There are also patterns to these novels, e.g. the main protagonist male is often a tall, brave, wealthy, magnanimous philanderer whose heart just can't be captured until he finds the right woman. It is the females fantasy to capture the heart of a high status male whether we're talking about tribeswomen in Papua New Guinea or any woman belonging to a complex Western society -- but to boil it down to a maxim -- high status male becomes infatuated with young woman. Subsequent instant seller. You can't escape the truth of hypergamy and sexual dimorphism.
Males are often more information driven and into nonfiction. In recent years, and to the ire of many Marxist feminists, some school districts have noticed young males falling markedly behind in their reading scores. Positing that this was caused by a disinterest in reading from young men, they adjusted their summer reading lists to titles that might attract young males more, i.e. books inundated with sports facts or historical war novels; they made sure to provide more nonfiction choices in the classrooms, and they offered a greater variety of nonfiction at the next book fair. Within two years boys reading scores were matching the girl's. This trend continues throughout adulthood, in fact, men account for a mere 20% of the fiction market.
Another thing to account for -- cross culturally -- is the predominance of men in philosophy. This really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has seen the IQ distributions of men and women and the cerebral nature of philosophy. It's the same reason why every other technical field is dominated by men, i.e. cognitive barriers of entry.
That's all I can think of.
>>7735496
>IQ distributions of men and women
I don't buy this argument. I accept that men are more represented at the extremes of both ends of the scale, but most people who achieve success only have an IQ which is about one standard deviation above the mean.
>>7735839
Well, let's be careful about how we define success, because this all depends on what you mean by success. If you think that folks who're ~115 (aka one standard deviation above the norm) are generally successful by virtue of their intelligence then you'd be mostly right. A liberal arts degree and a little discipline can get you comfortably into a satisfactory life.
But if you're positing that after 115 IQ doesn't matter, then no. 115 simply doesn't grant an individual the ability to do high level physics or philosophical abstractions.
Even if someone in a field like physics has low verbal ability and high fluid intelligence (think problem solving, backwards number recall on the WAIS, spatial ability), their IQ would still represent itself as a high number because their fluid intelligence must be high enough to comport with the mental taxation of physics.
Richard Feynman is a good example of this, scoring 125 on a college IQ test, and we can only guess on which questions he did good, but we have a good idea (although some, including me, think this test was not taken seriously). Nonetheless people who score high on one thing, e.g. verbal ability, will typically score around that range or a little lower on all other measures.
