How to Manufacture a Man Who Doesn’t Read

Or: it isn’t the phones.

Pick up almost any of the interminable think-pieces on why men have stopped reading and a typical rogue’s gallery of reasons will assemble itself. TikTok. Video games. The attention economy. Men just aren’t built for sustained focus.

Round up the usual suspects, etc, etc.

What pretty much everyone agrees on is that the problem is the boy in the dock. Sure, he can grind a Path of Exile build to thirty-seven decimal places, recite every infield of the 1986 Mets, and sit through a three-hour Joe Rogan podcast at 1.5x without once checking the time, but yeah.

His attention span is the issue.

Oh, and tonight he’s nine hundred chapters into a web serial translated from Korean that he found at eleven o’clock and has mentioned to literally nobody.

Trust me on this. The issue here isn’t the boy. It’s a literary culture that’s cut him off from a reason to read.

I’ve spent the last week examining this, and the true picture of boys’ reading isn’t close to the one the New York Times is pitching out there. In fact, it’s older, weirder, and acutely embarrassing to schools and teachers.

Let’s, for example, start at the turn of the twentieth century, when the men building the American school system just flat out let their hatred for reading run free. It was solitary, they argued, and antisocial. And bad for boys. Henry James - we know him, right? - was packed off to a science school explicitly because his parents had decided that he “read too many novels, or at least read them too attentively.”

That was James’s key vice. He was reading, and his new school’s job was to cure him of it.

Now, this isn’t going to be a rant about Common Core. We have something similar here in the UK. Bad times. But the broader point is that we should probably have some concerns about the institution we hand our boys to, as it has spent much of the last century flagging reading as the inferior opposite of “real experience.” After a whole bunch of years of that, we shouldn’t act surprised when, at fourteen, a boy with an iPhone and an Xbox miraculously declines to treat a novel as a serious thing a serious person does.

So the schools were never going to be on the side of the male reader. Fine. But that was a hundred years ago. What about what’s happening now?

It’s actually a bit worse. Because now they hold a stereotype. In 2015 a team of researchers walked into German classrooms and asked teachers to rate how good boys and girls are at reading. Girls, naturally, were held up as the exemplar. But then they followed the children for two years and, who would’ve thought it, the boys whose teachers held the firmest stereotype saw their reading self-concept fall, while their actual achievement held constant.

The teachers weren’t making those boys worse readers. They were making them believe they were worse readers. And then the boys, being boys, did the most obvious thing and read less.

It gets funnier. Or worse. Definitely one of them. In 2016, a French team handed eighty third-graders the same reading task twice. When it was called “a reading test,” the boys flopped it hard. However, when the activity was framed as a game, but was still the identical task, the boys outperformed the girls. But here’s the part worth shouting from the rafters: the boys most damaged by the “test” version of the experiment were the ones who cared the most about reading! The boys who’d, despite everything the school was throwing at them, actually felt that reading mattered were the boys whose performance collapsed the instant it was called a Test.

Francesca Borgonovi looked at something similar on a worldwide scale. She acknowledged that PISA, the well-known assessment of literacy, is sat in school, and is where some of the best evidence for the yawning gender gap lives. However, she found that PIAAC, which tests the same competence but is measured at home over a cup of coffee and a biscuit, highlighted almost no gap at all. The clear suggestion here is that boys have all the literacy. What they won’t do is perform it on the school’s dime.

This brings us to the playground, where the truly serious work of killing boys’ reading takes place. In Laura Scholes’s Australian interviews, young men are clear about why they stop reading. “The other boys in the class think it’s gay.” “People that read too much must have to get a life I reckon.” A boy who reads inside a peer culture that views reading as feminine will pay a social tax every single day. Sadly, most boys will pay that tax for about as long as you’d imagine a thirteen-year-old would pay for anything.

So, let’s add this all up and see where it leaves the male bookworm. We have a century of institutional contempt. Then teachers who assume he’s the weaker reader. Then an assessment system that hammers home the stereotype the second he dares to sit down. And a playground atmosphere that calls him gay if he dares to enjoy the thing anyway.

Sand the edges off all of that and the product we’re left with isn’t a population of boys who can’t read, but a system engineered, across decades, to manufacture men who don’t dare try.

There’s one more finding, though, and this is the one that should be keeping traditional publishers awake. Jerrim and Moss took 297,000 fifteen-year-olds across 35 countries and asked which kind of reading actually builds reading skill. And the standout answer to that was fiction.

Only fiction.

And the current gender gap in fiction runs wider than the gap in any other kind of text. So it isn’t that boys are failing to read. They’re failing to read the one thing that has the best chance of making them better at it.

All of which makes the self-improvement industry’s pitch to men, Goggins barking, Jocko barking back, Naval lobbing algorithmic koans from a sun-lounger, a cure for a disease we don’t have. But that’s another post.

In conclusion, though, here’s the point the trade keeps walking straight past. In secret and undercover, boys have already found the fiction they want to read. They just didn’t ask permission. And, importantly, they’re not doing it anywhere that the fancy measures are counting.

Open Royal Road, a website most of publishing certainly never has, and there are more than sixty thousand serialised novels. The books on this site mostly are LitRPGs, which is a subgenre of fantasy whereby the hero levels up on the page in numbers. One of them, Mother of Learning, has been read more than twenty-two million times and Dungeon Crawler Carl, went up free in 2020, became a Penguin Random House deal, and later this year arrives as a Peacock series.

These sixty thousand books are being devoured, right now, by the boys that elsewhere are described as non-readers. The boys aren’t missing. It’s the counting that’s broken.

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Sources

• Morgan Day Frank, ‘Don’t Read.’, New Literary History, 51.1 (2020), 45–66 — Henry James and the school built to cure reading.

• John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education (New York: Oxford Village Press, 2001) — schooling’s long hostility to voluntary reading.

• Jan Retelsdorf, Katja Schwartz and Frank Asbrock, ‘”Michael Can’t Read!” Teachers’ Gender Stereotypes and Boys’ Reading Self-Concept’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 107.1 (2015), 186–94 — the German classroom study.

• Pascal Pansu and others, ‘A Burden for the Boys: Evidence of Stereotype Threat in Boys’ Reading Performance’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 65 (2016), 26–30 — the “test” vs “game” experiment.

• Francesca Borgonovi, ‘Is the Literacy Achievement of Teenage Boys Poorer Than That of Teenage Girls, or Do Estimates of Gender Gaps Depend on the Test? A Comparison of PISA and PIAAC’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 114.2 (2022), 239–56 — the PISA/PIAAC gap.

• Laura Scholes, ‘Working-Class Boys’ Relationships with Reading’, Gender and Education, 31.3 (2019), 344–61 — the peer-culture interviews.

• John Jerrim and Gemma Moss, ‘The Link between Fiction and Teenagers’ Reading Skills: International Evidence from the OECD PISA Study’, British Educational Research Journal, 45.1 (2019), 181–200 — fiction as the text type that builds skill.

• Vel Woven, ‘You Are Not Alone (Just Niche)’, Royal Road Forums (2025) — Royal Road scale and Mother of Learning‘s readership.

• Alexandra Alter, “’Dungeon Crawler’ Soars Thanks to Gonzo Fans”, Orlando Sentinel (4 January 2026); Joe Otterson and Jennifer Maas, ‘”Dungeon Crawler Carl” TV Series Lands at Peacock’, Variety (2 April 2026) — the Dungeon Crawler Carl pipeline.