Imagine you started a nationwide book club about thirty years ago and you marketed it almost exclusively to girls and women. You release all kinds of books, but for some reason or another you decided to brand reading as a hobby for women.

Despite this, boys and men join the club because they also enjoy reading. Maybe they’re quiet at first because they don’t assume it’s a big deal, or maybe they just feel kinda weird liking a “girl’s thing” because of how our society is about gender roles.

Now imagine years go by aaaand…the internet happens. Suddenly there is a huge forum for people with shared interests to gather and communicate, to find conventions and to discuss their favorite books. This book club, now a huge industry with an enormous and active community, is seemingly dominated by women. Reading is still “theirs”, it’s a feminine hobby. But men are starting to show up more and more.

The women are largely attracted to the idea of being with a man who reads, because it’s something they enjoy very much and up to this point they assumed no dudes were interested in it for some reason (marketing by your industry)

Now men see that women like this, and they are confused by the fact that they think men don’t read. So they announce that yes, they enjoy reading and they are dudes. Some women are excited to find guys that share their most cherished hobby, and some are doubtful that these men are REALLY interested in reading.

The excited women place the “boy reader” concept on a pedestal, which in turn causes more boys and men to speak up and state that they too like reading. Most everyone likes attention and everyone likes to be praised. It is not a negative thing, it is entirely natural.

The women who are doubtful take it upon themselves to test the men. In what year did Tolstoy write Anna Karenina? What was the name for the religion in Cat’s Cradle and what was it about? What was the name of the book O’Brien gave Winston in 1984?

The questions get more and more specific as the men answer them correctly, and if they miss any they are immediately written off as “fake boy readers”. This is because for some reason deep down the women doing the quizzing don’t believe men have the capacity to enjoy reading as much as ladies do.

To add to this, other men also begin to judge the reading habits of boy readers to assert that THEY are the only guys who REALLY like books. “So the last series you finished was Harry Potter???? Casual.” They do this because they have bought into the idea that reading is for women, that they are very unique for enjoying a woman’s hobby, and they also think maybe if they attack other men they will see their own status elevated to ”real boy reader”

So these men feel compelled to prove their worth to other people who share their hobby. They feel compelled to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are indeed men and they read.

Suddenly they’re everywhere and they’re mad at being treated like shit and they are vocal about the bullshit hoops they’ve had to jump through just to be taken seriously, to have simple discussions about the books they love.

Now

Imagine someone asking these men

"What does your gender have to do with reading?"