Do Literature and Sex Have A Lot in Common?
Posted by: Avinash in Biology, Books, Educational, Observational, People, Romance, tags: Books, brain, characters, evolution, evolutionary psychology, gender, literature, plotline, psychology, sex, storiesRead this post by Razib this weekend, and it got me thinking, which is always a bad sign. It usually means something stupid’s about to come out of my mouth, so bear with me.
One thing that Razib points out is the fundamental difference between gender and genre. Males enjoy plot-driven stories, escapist fiction. We don’t want to focus on characters and their development, we want storyline and plot. Get to the point, get to the next point, etc. Women enjoy more of the character development stuff, the writing prose, etc. etc.
So I was wondering–is our interest in certain books wired into our own primitive desires? Do we like certain books because they fire up a part of our own evolutionary structure?
Think about it. Men enjoy plot-based books, with an aura of mystery but also of adventure and exploration. Books have the power to take us away. It takes us away from the burden of work and responsibility, provides us refuge from the toil we endure. We have traditionally been the ones to carry the load for our families, and while the gender gap has made dramatic shifts in the past 200 years, our brains don’t evolve nearly as fast.
Just like the supposed theory that our bodies have supposedly not caught up to agricultural products toxifying our body, our brains have not yet fully caught up to the idea that women can now bear equal responsibility, so it takes our own growth and development in life to adjust to this. Because of the growing amount of entertainment options in the Internet age and the relegation of books to a niche activity among the XYs, many of us never do.
Women, on the other hand, have traditionally been groomed to find mates. Unlike male, whose work, intelligence, wealth, and physical stature defined him, a female was traditionally defined by the strength of her partner. So it became important for her to find that character, and that required deep examination of human psychology to attract suitable mates. So isn’t it natural that females would enjoy books that involved deep character study and soothing words of comfort and seduction?
(Another possibility is that if females were not happy with the mates they got, they could dream up their ideal Cassanova to escape the doom and gloom of their situation. Hence the continuing popularity of harlequin novels for women in completely unsatisfying marriages.)
I’m not sure how far I’ve gotten, but the last work of fiction I read was Kafka on the Shore, and it touched me so profoundly because of how mystical and otherworldly it was. I felt like I was being transferred away from this world and into a dream. It was…liberating. I certainly felt like I was in another world, and didn’t have to worry about the one I was in now.
Sound familiar?
There’s my crock theory. Someone please tear it apart.
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June 6th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I like how you add a disclaimer at the beginning that “something stupid” is about to follow, which you bookend neatly with the insistence that this is a “crock theory” you wish someone to tear apart. I’m down for desconstruction, so I’ll give it a shot.
One of the commenters (Conradg) on Razib’s post brought up the point that, even before women in general were literate enough that they could constitute a formidable audience and consumer base for fiction, male authors were already leaning towards a more introspective form of literature. “Look at Shakespeare. Yes, plenty of action, but a marked preference for the beautifully crafted phrase, the introspective monologue, and endless romantic dialog.” Shakespeare’s an excellent example of a classic male author who, despite incorporating a lot of military and political settings for his plays, wrote quite a lot about romance, marriage, and relationships. Not a guy you’d read for plot: his plays featured many psychological explorations, his poems focused on romantic longings. Male critics and scholars were reading and analyzing Shakespeare for centuries before women started doing so. People may read Shakespeare as a means of escape, but his storytelling is kind of rubbish, really, (although “exit - pursued by a bear” is one of the best stage directions ever). Men who read Shakespeare are not reading him for the “what happens next?!” aspect. And Dickens’ Great Expectations? That was a book originally written in serial form. In order to maintain an audience, Dickens had to advance the plot of the book at least every installment (two chapters), but he also incorporated a lot of introspection and romantic longing in there as well. I read Great Expectations for the first time this past semester and I was not expecting there to be so much pining. Pip’s quite the romantic.
Now, for your post:
Let’s leave evolution out of this cultural (or perhaps sociological) theorizing, since you focus more on social roles rather than biological roles. You refer to escapism from everyday burdens as a reason for male interest in primarily plot-driven works, since men “have traditionally been the ones to carry the load for our families.” Financially, perhaps, but if you think about labor, women haven’t had it easy for the past few thousand years either. They’ve had their share of gathering, participating in farm work (for those who live(d) on farms ior in agricultural societies), and in more industrial nations, doing housework such as cooking, cleaning, raising children, and in general, bearing children. So you might want to reconsider the idea that men read plot-driven literature to escape from their burdensome lives.
However, the idea that people read fiction to escape from their burdensome lives- or, more broadly, lives that are less than ideal - is quite valid (as valid as hypothesizing about the preferences of an entire gender can be, I guess). The distinction you present between males as being more interested in plot/action and women as being more interested in characterization/prose (did you mean writing style or content? “soothing words of comfort and seduction” seems to focus more on content) can blend together quite easily. Examine the James Bond novels, for instance - Bond himself presents a pretty nice ego-ideal for heterosexual men: a secret agent who kicks ass, takes names, and beds beautiful women, all the while conveying an image of cool confidence. If you retained the plots but replaced Bond’s badass secret agent with someone like Steve Urkel, you’d probably get a very funny set of action thrillers, but I doubt they’d be as popular as similar stories featuring a more debonair “manly” man. I get the impression from the few chick-lit novels I’ve read that romance fiction is rarely about the ideal Casanova as much as it is about the female protagonist who can attain the ideal Casanova. There’s also some kind of plot, melodramatic as it is, about the eventual successful relationship between Female Protagonist and Male Love Interest. Just pages of character description wouldn’t be enough to sustain an entire novel, even if it is a badly written one - there has to be a plot to move things along. You can consider chick-lit as a very escapist kind of literary genre, capitalizing on the fantasies of desperate housewives or single women (or women in unsatisfying relationships). Basically, both the typically-male genre of thrillers and the typically-female genre of romantic chick-lit are forms of escapism that rely on an integration of plot and characterization to construct a fictional world within the text. Get away from these extremes towards the middle ground of literature that isn’t preferred by a typically male or typically female audience, and you’ll find even less support for your theory.
I’m not sure how far I’ve gotten, but the last work of fiction I read was Kafka on the Shore, and it touched me so profoundly because of how mystical and otherworldly it was. I felt like I was being transferred away from this world and into a dream. It was…liberating. I certainly felt like I was in another world, and didn’t have to worry about the one I was in now.
This is interesting. Murakami writes in the genre of magical realism (although you could argue that his works defy genre, but people cannot resist labels and “magical realism” it is), so yeah, his works have a tendency towards the mystical and otherworldly. You seem to offer your post-reading feelings as a personal example of how you fit your claim that men read fiction to escape. I see it as an example of someone who enjoys reading, someone who can be affected by words enough to feel better than they did before reading those words. When it comes to reading for entertainment, all entertainment provides a possible alleviation from the worries of reality, but there’s also some entertainment found in analyzing and questioning why we are entertained. It adds variety to life, and I think that variety - not so much a subconscious biological imperative - is the reason people are so interested in reading things written by others.
Anyway, I think I’ve torn enough of your post by now, so I’ll end here. =)
June 27th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
“You refer to escapism from everyday burdens as a reason for male interest in primarily plot-driven works, since men “have traditionally been the ones to carry the load for our families.” Financially, perhaps, but if you think about labor, women haven’t had it easy for the past few thousand years either. They’ve had their share of gathering, participating in farm work (for those who live(d) on farms ior in agricultural societies), and in more industrial nations, doing housework such as cooking, cleaning, raising children, and in general, bearing children. So you might want to reconsider the idea that men read plot-driven literature to escape from their burdensome lives.”
This is very true. In olden times the male was the explorer, the venturer, while the female was typically stuck in traditionalist roles that did not allow her to break her confines. So the male’s role might have changed from the past, although I think fiscal roles still have issues.
I do believe most fiction is construed as escapist simply to enrich our boring lives with something more substantive. I just think males and females think about it differently (at least right now; perhaps as times change this will change). For males it’s more about the images that these novels generate; for females it’s more about what the words say to them and how they’re crafted into a storyline, whether for romance or for any genre.
To borrow from another realm of pop consumption, you could use the Simpsons (appeals to both sexes) and Family Guy (mostly for the guys). Why is one a cult hit and the other a long-standing sensation? The writing is good for both, but the storytelling takes one to another level.