I like this a lot. The term androgenic literature should catch on! I think you can still publish it today, so long as it's written by a woman :) (a la the novel I am reading now https://www.amazon.com/Darryl-Jackie-Ess/dp/1944866841). I write YA lit, amongst other sidelines, and the boy of YA are utterly comical. They're so sexless, so gentle and docile. If you write even the best actual boy, he seems like a hopeless monster. I mean even Gandhi found his sexual urges to be an all devouring terror, against which he did perpetual combat (and arguably sublimated into psychological humiliation of his wife). And yet he was literally one of the best men who has ever lived
> "the boy[s] of YA are utterly comical. They're so sexless, so gentle and docile. If you write even the best actual boy, he seems like a hopeless monster."
I think the immense irony of our current age is that it sort of feels impossible to write about men without coming off as Elliot Rodger. There are of course myriad reasons for this but the fear of that categorization is so intensive that it makes the representation of actual male psychology incredibly difficult. PS thanks for the book recc!
The other truth is that publishers won’t touch anything with a young male protagonist because their readers/main demographic are mainly middle aged women. Bret Easton Ellis was re-iterating this on his podcast. Charles Bukowski was a best seller during his time, imagine his books being published by a mainstream publisher nowadays, it’s unfathomable. Yet there is still a silent reader demographic that’s crying out for raw honesty and raw characters in fiction and non-fiction pieces which is why I think substack has gotten so popular.
This is incredibly well written around a subject that most people fear to even get near the keyboard to confront. Also hats off to the execution and word choice, this piece could of easily came off the wrong way. They way that stirs the mob. Careful, original, yet blunt. Reality is filled with male thoughts and actions that are often hyper sexualized or violent, so those very ideas being absent from literature is what gives much of modern literature a flat taste. Bad things happen in life and art is part of life that reflects life. I sense that something is missing. Other ideas are so fixated in most modern literature I feel as though I am reading a Disney script that has been sanitized and bleached a little too hard. What's left feels like it may fall apart when subject to any amount of scrutiny. So many people comment on this, but they do it in a nasty provocative way that gets everyone nowhere fast. "I'll be back"
Androgenic sounds slick and catchy. Not to be confused with Androgynous. Also, how does Androgenic implicate masculinity (particularly more than androgyny)?
"Androgenic literature may possess a sense of overt political morality—it can critique, ignore, or celebrate reactionary moral sentiments—but as a categorical whole, it is pre-ideological, and cannot be subsumed or defined by it."
I think you really hit the nail on the head with this point. From my experience reading these kinds of books they fall to pieces if a stump speech comes up, and can really sing when it comes across as raw experience.
I am a bit concerned that as a genre they tend to be over sexualized and may run dry. The raw masculine sexual discourse you describe can attract people but I also find it juvenile in large doses, which was actually the kiss of death for the "fratire" genre as a whole as I recall - a lot of people just aged out and lost interest. I guess I'm just a bit concerned about a lot of people I relate to will end up writing too much about sex and reducing masculinity to just intercourse rather than the joys and miseries of being an older man, father, etc. while still through that same exuberant lens.
> "From my experience reading these kinds of books they fall to pieces if a stump speech comes up, and can really sing when it comes across as raw experience."
1000% agree. This is a tightrope I tried very hard to walk with my own book, and I think it's very difficult to do. The paradox is that young men are indeed gripped by ideology, they frame their own experiences through it, but anything written in an overly ideological manner almost invariably fails because it almost automatically lapses into didactic preaching (the one exception I can think of: Houellebecq, and I'm not sure why he is able to pull it off). One possible solution is to steelman both the thesis and antithesis of whatever the protagonist's ideology is within the scope of the entire narrative, but that's still hard to pull off also. In my view this issue ultimately regresses to the broader issue of -> how does one interweave ideas/themes into plot in general? i.e. without over-reliance on exposition?
> "I am a bit concerned that as a genre they tend to be over sexualized and may run dry. The raw masculine sexual discourse you describe can attract people but I also find it juvenile in large doses, which was actually the kiss of death for the "fratire" genre as a whole as I recall..."
Another thing where you hit the nail on the head. It absolutely IS repetitive and juvenile over time and once you've read 1-2 of these books you've read them all. Houellebecq's staying power is because he also writes about the inexorable *decline* of the male's "potency" over time, with age, and ruminates on it - it's far from triumphalist. But at a certain point, the crass millennial hypersexed male's oversexualization invariably runs dry because it's as narrow a life experience as it is a literary experience.
Henry Miller is an instructive case here. When he was young he wrote a lot about fucking in Paris, in his old age he wrote about the wilderness where he lived at Big Sur, now that I am 58 I actually think his Big Sur non fiction material starting with "The Air Conditioned Nightmare," and ending with "Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch," is more profound than his flashier more well known sex stuff.
Any healthy male author will follow a similar trajectory IMO.
Since I really like reading or writing books about sheer willpower or ambition, I gravitate to literature that carries men of great gravitas. I wouldn't want to write a male character like a boy from YA, as Naomi writes. The heights of man's spirit are simply too interesting to allow for docility.
Thanks! I've read some McCarthy (intend to read his entire ouvre) but gave up halfway into Portnoy's Complaint. I will definitely be taking another look. I'll be the first to admit that I need to read (much) more lol
Can male homosexuals write androgenic literature? If so, how? (Honest answers only. No need to be inclusive for inclusivity's sake. I'm not trying to make this about me.)
I'm thinking about this and hope to respond more meaningfully. Right now I would like to respond to your example of the novel Stoner--a novel I found so painful (good) I had to put down for a few days--I certainly remember the tortuous marriage. I don't even remember the attempted marital rape, maybe because (if) it did not succeed. In a moral assessment of the novel it is fine to cite it as example, but let us please remember all the ways the wife destroyed bigger and bigger bits of the protaganist's life, forms of domestic torture to make him suffer. This includes conspiratorial sabotage of the closeness between him and his daughter, which harmed the daughter too. While I was reading it I recalled the disturbing flower animation (battle of the sexes) from the Pink Floyd movie The Wall. May life really not be that horrible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a86QgZVgbyQ Aside from the main point, as you know, Stoner is remarkable as including an early academic "cancellation."
I'm not sure what the canonical reading of that scene is or if Williams ever mentioned the canonical reading in an interview, but perhaps the ambiguity of how it's written is what makes it relevant to us morally - there's also her compassion toward him at the end of his life, even in spite of her previous antagonism.
Agree that it's one of the most powerful novels I've ever read!
I like this a lot. The term androgenic literature should catch on! I think you can still publish it today, so long as it's written by a woman :) (a la the novel I am reading now https://www.amazon.com/Darryl-Jackie-Ess/dp/1944866841). I write YA lit, amongst other sidelines, and the boy of YA are utterly comical. They're so sexless, so gentle and docile. If you write even the best actual boy, he seems like a hopeless monster. I mean even Gandhi found his sexual urges to be an all devouring terror, against which he did perpetual combat (and arguably sublimated into psychological humiliation of his wife). And yet he was literally one of the best men who has ever lived
> "the boy[s] of YA are utterly comical. They're so sexless, so gentle and docile. If you write even the best actual boy, he seems like a hopeless monster."
I think the immense irony of our current age is that it sort of feels impossible to write about men without coming off as Elliot Rodger. There are of course myriad reasons for this but the fear of that categorization is so intensive that it makes the representation of actual male psychology incredibly difficult. PS thanks for the book recc!
The other truth is that publishers won’t touch anything with a young male protagonist because their readers/main demographic are mainly middle aged women. Bret Easton Ellis was re-iterating this on his podcast. Charles Bukowski was a best seller during his time, imagine his books being published by a mainstream publisher nowadays, it’s unfathomable. Yet there is still a silent reader demographic that’s crying out for raw honesty and raw characters in fiction and non-fiction pieces which is why I think substack has gotten so popular.
Then come off as Eliot Roger, fuck all this pussified bullshit! Henry Miller novels had multiple rapes in them, and guess what they are great.
This is incredibly well written around a subject that most people fear to even get near the keyboard to confront. Also hats off to the execution and word choice, this piece could of easily came off the wrong way. They way that stirs the mob. Careful, original, yet blunt. Reality is filled with male thoughts and actions that are often hyper sexualized or violent, so those very ideas being absent from literature is what gives much of modern literature a flat taste. Bad things happen in life and art is part of life that reflects life. I sense that something is missing. Other ideas are so fixated in most modern literature I feel as though I am reading a Disney script that has been sanitized and bleached a little too hard. What's left feels like it may fall apart when subject to any amount of scrutiny. So many people comment on this, but they do it in a nasty provocative way that gets everyone nowhere fast. "I'll be back"
For more.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Keep Cranking it outtttt!
Androgenic sounds slick and catchy. Not to be confused with Androgynous. Also, how does Androgenic implicate masculinity (particularly more than androgyny)?
Thanks!
I'm not sure that it "implicates" it - it's just meant to be descriptive, in the neutral sense.
"Androgenic literature may possess a sense of overt political morality—it can critique, ignore, or celebrate reactionary moral sentiments—but as a categorical whole, it is pre-ideological, and cannot be subsumed or defined by it."
I think you really hit the nail on the head with this point. From my experience reading these kinds of books they fall to pieces if a stump speech comes up, and can really sing when it comes across as raw experience.
I am a bit concerned that as a genre they tend to be over sexualized and may run dry. The raw masculine sexual discourse you describe can attract people but I also find it juvenile in large doses, which was actually the kiss of death for the "fratire" genre as a whole as I recall - a lot of people just aged out and lost interest. I guess I'm just a bit concerned about a lot of people I relate to will end up writing too much about sex and reducing masculinity to just intercourse rather than the joys and miseries of being an older man, father, etc. while still through that same exuberant lens.
> "From my experience reading these kinds of books they fall to pieces if a stump speech comes up, and can really sing when it comes across as raw experience."
1000% agree. This is a tightrope I tried very hard to walk with my own book, and I think it's very difficult to do. The paradox is that young men are indeed gripped by ideology, they frame their own experiences through it, but anything written in an overly ideological manner almost invariably fails because it almost automatically lapses into didactic preaching (the one exception I can think of: Houellebecq, and I'm not sure why he is able to pull it off). One possible solution is to steelman both the thesis and antithesis of whatever the protagonist's ideology is within the scope of the entire narrative, but that's still hard to pull off also. In my view this issue ultimately regresses to the broader issue of -> how does one interweave ideas/themes into plot in general? i.e. without over-reliance on exposition?
> "I am a bit concerned that as a genre they tend to be over sexualized and may run dry. The raw masculine sexual discourse you describe can attract people but I also find it juvenile in large doses, which was actually the kiss of death for the "fratire" genre as a whole as I recall..."
Another thing where you hit the nail on the head. It absolutely IS repetitive and juvenile over time and once you've read 1-2 of these books you've read them all. Houellebecq's staying power is because he also writes about the inexorable *decline* of the male's "potency" over time, with age, and ruminates on it - it's far from triumphalist. But at a certain point, the crass millennial hypersexed male's oversexualization invariably runs dry because it's as narrow a life experience as it is a literary experience.
Henry Miller is an instructive case here. When he was young he wrote a lot about fucking in Paris, in his old age he wrote about the wilderness where he lived at Big Sur, now that I am 58 I actually think his Big Sur non fiction material starting with "The Air Conditioned Nightmare," and ending with "Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch," is more profound than his flashier more well known sex stuff.
Any healthy male author will follow a similar trajectory IMO.
Since I really like reading or writing books about sheer willpower or ambition, I gravitate to literature that carries men of great gravitas. I wouldn't want to write a male character like a boy from YA, as Naomi writes. The heights of man's spirit are simply too interesting to allow for docility.
chuck philip roth in there too?
good point, yeah, this list isn't even close to exhaustive
Thanks! I've read some McCarthy (intend to read his entire ouvre) but gave up halfway into Portnoy's Complaint. I will definitely be taking another look. I'll be the first to admit that I need to read (much) more lol
Can male homosexuals write androgenic literature? If so, how? (Honest answers only. No need to be inclusive for inclusivity's sake. I'm not trying to make this about me.)
I'm thinking about this and hope to respond more meaningfully. Right now I would like to respond to your example of the novel Stoner--a novel I found so painful (good) I had to put down for a few days--I certainly remember the tortuous marriage. I don't even remember the attempted marital rape, maybe because (if) it did not succeed. In a moral assessment of the novel it is fine to cite it as example, but let us please remember all the ways the wife destroyed bigger and bigger bits of the protaganist's life, forms of domestic torture to make him suffer. This includes conspiratorial sabotage of the closeness between him and his daughter, which harmed the daughter too. While I was reading it I recalled the disturbing flower animation (battle of the sexes) from the Pink Floyd movie The Wall. May life really not be that horrible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a86QgZVgbyQ Aside from the main point, as you know, Stoner is remarkable as including an early academic "cancellation."
I'm not sure what the canonical reading of that scene is or if Williams ever mentioned the canonical reading in an interview, but perhaps the ambiguity of how it's written is what makes it relevant to us morally - there's also her compassion toward him at the end of his life, even in spite of her previous antagonism.
Agree that it's one of the most powerful novels I've ever read!