Here’s a statistic which sounds made up, but isn’t: not one white male born since 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in the New Yorker. Here’s another: by 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the New York Times “Notable Fiction” list. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (out of 25 total nominations) for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction.
The disappearance of the white male writer is just the pointy end of the erasure of men completely from the traditional publishing industry. Of the Big Five publishers, 70 per cent of staffers are women. Even interns are 70 per cent female. Women take up the majority of executive positions.
Men are not just disappearing from publishing and authorship: they’re disappearing from fiction altogether.
Then they complain that ‘men don’t read any more’.
Sophia Nguyen points to a 2026 analysis by elementary-school book guide curator Afoma Umesi, which found that female protagonists outnumber male ones two to one in middle-grade fiction for ages eight to 12, and three to one in realistic and mystery titles. Nguyen then exposes the actual driver without quite meaning to: the feminism that runs the industry, her own included.
Parents had been telling Umesi that her guides offered almost nothing for boys. Her first reaction was irritation.
“What do you think this is, the 15th century?” Umesi remembers thinking.
A woman whose job is to get children reading dismissed a clear and damaging imbalance as some mediaeval relic. The imbalance did not arise by accident. It was produced by the same ideology that now controls the lists, the prizes and the acquisitions desks. The cultural left has long treated strong, ordinary men as the principal obstacle to its project. Sixty years of deliberate effeminisation of boys, the systematic removal of masculine figures from stories and the invention of fantasy women who outrank men in every domain have done the work.
Nguyen’s own framing gives the game away. She treats Umesi’s century-specific sneer as unremarkable. It is not. The 16th century gave boys Robin Hood. The 17th gave them Don Quixote. The 18th gave them Robinson Crusoe. The 19th gave them the Three Musketeers, Edmond Dantès, Captain Nemo, Phileas Fogg and Sherlock Holmes. The 20th gave them Tarzan, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Conan, John Carter and James Bond, along with an entire Western genre that celebrated competence, restraint and courage. None of that was an accident of the calendar. It was the product of a culture that still believed boys needed models of masculine excellence.
In the present century those models have been almost entirely cleared from both page and screen. The Western, the genre that most consistently offered the archetype, has been banished. The same publishers who emptied the adult lists of white male novelists are now doing the same to the books aimed at boys before they reach secondary school. Their denials are transparent. Liesa Abrams, chief editor at Labyrinth Road, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, notes that while the great majority of new middle-grade releases have female protagonists, the titles with male leads outsell them. Cue feminist fishwife screeching.
Those male leads are Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and the Wimpy Kid. Yet, they were all created in the 1990s. If male-centred stories still outsell the rest, the commercial case for more of them is obvious. But, as in Hollywood, this is an industry which would rather haemorrhage money than give up THE MESSAGE.
“The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde,” she wrote. “Even to the boys themselves.”
Did she even bother asking any actual boys? At least, aside from the middle-class ‘progressive’s obligatory trans child?
The same editors who created the gap now propose to close it by smuggling girl protagonists past the reader. One new fantasy series, Dragonborn, withholds the main character’s pronouns for as long as possible. The cover shows a child and a dragon and is carefully gender-neutral, as is the character’s name. The trick is presented as clever marketing. It is simply another refusal to give boys what the sales figures already show they want.
The people who run the Big Five have decided that the historical pattern of male readers preferring male protagonists is a problem to be engineered out of existence rather than a fact to be served. They have done the same to the adult literary market.
The result is a publishing industry staffed overwhelmingly by women, publishing books overwhelmingly about women and then expressing bafflement that men have stopped buying them.
Boys will keep reading when they are given something worth reading.
