Strictly for Men (and the Women Who Read It)

Or: what five words did to a genre that’s already proving them wrong.

Full disclosure before you read another word of this. I know Jez Cajiao and he’s awesome. He runs Legion and they’re the people who first made me feel welcome in the LitRPG genre when I knew less than nothing. In fact, Legion are the whole reason I’m now able to do this writing thing full-time. So, you know, I’m nowhere close to a neutral observer on this kerfuffle.

For those who have no idea what that paragraph above was about, I should explain. Two weeks ago the Telegraph did something of which I approve, sending one of its journalists to talk, at length, to an excellent LitRPG author about one of the most interesting things happening in male reading right now. Which, if you’re new here, is kind of my thing...

And, by and large, the article itself is quite good. Ed Power interviewed Jez about his career and a readership he describes as “predominantly military and ex-military and truck drivers.” Its scope covered the free web-serial world of Royal Road where the genre grew up, the Dungeon Crawler Carl books that dragged it into the mainstream (and into a TV deal with Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door), and it hits a conclusion that’s, basically, Chapter 2 of my PhD: “After years of being told they must read because it’s good for them, male readers have simply decided they’d rather curl up with something they actually enjoy.”

Awesome. No notes. Well done everyone involved.

But then we get to the headline and things get a bit... spicy. Because the Telegraph initially ran with: “Forget romantasy, the hottest new literary trend is strictly for men.”

Now, I think we can all recognise what’s going on there. Johanna Thomas-Corr would call that bit of sub-editing the “push-button culture war headline” which does a cracking job as clickbait because “everyone loves generalising about other people [and] no one likes being generalised about themselves.” This particular headline is a textbook specimen of a nice bit of ragebait. “Forget romantasy” manages to dismiss a mostly female readership in the very act of misdescribing a supposedly male one. Two birds. One stone of bait. Nice one.

And, obviously, LitRPG is majority-male, and nobody pretends otherwise. However, there’s something more nuanced going on there than saying it’s ‘strictly male’.

Here’s Jez’s own correction to the furore that broke out. “What I actually said to him, and I quote was; ‘When the genre started, it’s was very heavily male/female, close on 95-97% from some of the quotes we saw, BUT, over the last 6 years it’s moved more to a 70/30 split and climbing’... To be very clear, I was applauding the balancing of the genre, but you know journalists.”

Interestingly, The Telegraph has since changed the headline to “LitRPG is making reading fun again - so why have publishers ignored it?”, which is a touch nearer the mark, but the internet keeps its receipts forever, and the piece detonated eleven days after publication, when it got shared with the old preview card still wearing the original headline.

Most of the readers who became annoyed were on Facebook and over on TikTok. “Strictly for men?! The audacity of this article writer.“ “Dude I’ve been reading LitRPG for over 6 years. ‘Just for men’??? What?” “I read LitRPG and ‘Men’s’ HaremLit too. Introduced my husband to both genres as well... Am I not allowed to read them anymore then?” “Love how they ignore all the women who love the genre - but they also still think girls don’t play video games I’m sure. sigh” And my favourite of the lot: “Yall saw the trend where men cant read? So is the genre picture books?”

So what happened here?

Sarah McDonald calls all of this “doxic discourse.” The crisis narrative about gender and reading has now been accepted as ‘common sense’ and that means nobody bothers questioning whether it is true any more. The story that men-don’t-read is now doxa, so when a genre comes along where men conspicuously do read it can only be articulated as a fortress. A clubhouse.

Strictly being for men.

And, sadly, maintaining the doxa pays hard currency. Holohan and Stahl have observed that crisis talk “fuel[s] the rise of a cottage industry of pseudo-experts” to supply them. And once we see that, I think we can recognise that the Telegraph’s headline stops looking like an accident of pure ignorance. Because gender-war framings of books and reading produce an awful lot of clicks...

And the most annoying thing about this whole thing is that making women’s existence in the LitRPG genre invisible is exactly the way we know happened in video games. Vilasís-Pamos and Pires found that “certain male game practices are explicit, while female game practices are silenced.” The women of LitRPG are there - both reading, and increasingly writing, from Erin Ampersand’s Apocalypse Parenting to K.T. Hanna - but the headline writers of The Telegraph doxa simply couldn’t see them.

But, at the end of the day, though, does any of this actually matter beyond hurt feelings and an interrupted holiday?

Well, yes!

The best-evidenced harm in reading is what gendered labels do to those on the wrong side of them. Muntoni, Wagner and Retelsdorf found that boys in classrooms where reading was stereotyped as feminine “were less motivated to read, held lower competence beliefs, and performed poorer in the reading test.” Nobody has run that study on newspaper headlines and grown women, but sticking a neon sign on a genre and saying not for you is obviously not the gold-standard of smart.

As a final note, I think Sarah J. Sover, a fantasy author who came to LitRPG from outside, puts it best. She highlights that the community is “quick to absorb anyone interested in their genre into their ranks, even gasp icky girls. I’ve never been treated as anything less than a peer by any of them.”

Sources

Ed Power, ‘LitRPG is making reading fun again - so why have publishers ignored it?’ (published 14 August 2026 under the headline ‘Forget romantasy, the hottest new literary trend is strictly for men’), The Telegraph; syndicated via Yahoo and AOL. The LitRPG Books group thread, 25-27 August 2026; Jez Cajiao’s comment and video response, 26 August 2026; Sarah J. Sover, public post, 27 August 2026; @runhesaid (TikTok), 26 August 2026.

Johanna Thomas-Corr, ‘What the “men don’t read novels” debate gets wrong about fiction’, New Statesman, 15 June 2022.

Sarah McDonald, ‘Constructing the (il)literate boy: Crisis Talk, Literacy Promotion Websites and the Simplification of Boyhood Literacies’, International Journal of Educational Research, 122 (2023).

Lisa Holohan and Garth Stahl, ‘Boys, Academic Achievement and “Crisis” Talk’, Gender and Education, 38.1 (2026), 73-90.

Julia Vilasis-Pamos and Fernanda Pires, ‘How Do Teens Define What It Means to Be a Gamer?’, Information, Communication & Society, 25.12 (2022), 1735-51.

Francesca Muntoni, Jenny Wagner and Jan Retelsdorf, ‘Beware of Stereotypes: Are Classmates’ Stereotypes Associated With Students’ Reading Outcomes?’, Child Development, 92.1 (2021), 189-204.

Oh, and one thing the article does get wrong is not understanding the genre’s Russian origins. It’s worth reading this: Francis Butterworth-Parr, ‘Machphrasis: Video Games as Metaphor in Contemporary Literary Culture’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 2024), and Sergei Shickarev, ‘High Waves, Quiet Backwaters’, trans. by Kenneth Cargill, Russian Social Science Review, 59.6 (2018), 536-558.