Nehaveigur

“Women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales,” writes David Morris in the New York Times. Why is that? Most new books being written by women may have something to do with it but can’t completely explain it. After all, there are millions of books by male authors that appeal to male readers, so why don’t they read those instead? Other distractions being available to men doesn’t explain it either because they’re equally available to women. Men’s tendency to be more conservative isn’t a satisfying explanation either, because why would a conservative worldview be associated with reading less? And even if this were the case, for this to have explanatory power we’d need to show causality or at least that conservative men read less than liberal men, and I haven’t seen data supporting that either. Morris cries fire, and indeed there is a fire, but who or what caused it we don’t know.