Every so often somebody discovers that men aren't reading romance novels, or aren't showing up for some new romantic movie or television series, and reacts as if scientists have just discovered that the male of the species is incapable of love.
MEN DON'T LIKE ROMANCE!
Jesus Christ. Men like romance.
Men have always liked romance. Men have written romance, sung romance, painted romance, fought duels over romance, crossed oceans for romance, started wars over romance, ended wars over romance, and occasionally made such spectacular jackasses of themselves over women that entire civilizations have preserved the story for three thousand years.
The problem may not be that men don't like romance. The problem may be that men don't like your romance.
There are reasons for this. The first is the giant elephant squatting radioactive elephant shit in the middle of the publishing industry that everybody has been carefully trained not to notice: A lot of people writing stories today don't seem to like men very much.
Men are the problem.
Men are the obstacle.
Men are something to be conquered, corrected, domesticated, lectured, mocked, improved, apologized for, or (if they're particularly fortunate) educated by a woman who has arrived from the heavens to explain why everything they believe is stupid.
Then everybody gathers around the sales figures six months later.
"Where are all the male readers?"
THEY LEFT, YOU MANIACS.
You spent the last 300 pages kicking them in the nuts. This shouldn't require an advanced degree in literary criticism. People generally don't enjoy entertainment that despises them.
But there's another problem here, and this one requires us to venture into intellectual territory so dangerous that I should probably notify my next of kin before proceeding:
Men and women are different.
There. I said it. Call the authorities.
Obviously I'm generalizing. There are women who love exactly the stories I'm about to describe as masculine, and men who will happily inhale 400 pages of tortured relationship drama. Human beings are messy creatures and averages don't issue marching orders to individuals. But averages exist. And I think men and women often want something different from romantic stories.
A lot of romance written primarily for women makes the relationship itself the conflict.
Will they?
Won't they?
He said this.
She misunderstood that.
He didn't call when he said he would.
She saw him with another woman, who was just a coworker.
He has trouble communicating.
She doesn't trust him because of what happened three boyfriends ago.
They get together.
They break apart.
They get together again.
Someone storms out into the rain.
Somebody cries in a bathroom. A friend delivers a 20-minute lecture. Eventually one of them races to the airport.
And millions of women eat this stuff up. Great! You have found your audience.
The thing is, if you've ever actually dated a man and observed him in his natural habitat, you may have noticed that most men regard relationship drama the way a cat regards being lowered into a bathtub.
Their first thought is not: *At last! Emotional complexity!
Their first thought is: How the hell do I get out of here?*
The romantic fantasy for a lot of men isn't a relationship constantly being tested from within. It's a relationship strong enough to withstand everything testing it from outside.
He meets her.
He likes her.
She likes him.
They slowly discover each other. He learns the weird little things she does. She discovers the things about him nobody else sees. Friendship becomes affection. Affection becomes love.
And then?
Release the fucking dragon. Now the world comes after them.
The king wants him dead.
The empire is collapsing.
The farm is burning.
His enemies from the war have an old score to settle.
The zombies are coming over the hill.
Some bastard wizard has kidnapped her and hasn't studied what happened to the previous seventeen bastard wizards who tried this.
And through all of it, she is his home. She's his ride-or-die. The world can beat him bloody all day, and when he crawls through the door at night, she's the one place where he doesn't have to fight.
That's romance, too. In fact, I think that's one of the most powerful male romantic fantasies there is: I have found one person in this insane, hostile world who is unequivocally on my side.
This also helps explain something I've never personally understood the appeal of: harem stories. They're enormously popular with some men.
I don't particularly like them, but here's the important part: I'm not a man. So there. I don't have to personally enjoy something to spend five minutes wondering why somebody else does. Once you stop sneering at the audience, the appeal isn't exactly buried under the Dead Sea Scrolls. The hero is surrounded by affection, loyalty, admiration, and belonging. He has multiple people who value him, need him, support him, and give him something emotionally stable to protect and return to.
It's a grotesquely exaggerated version of the same fantasy: "Somewhere, I belong. Somewhere, I'm wanted. Somewhere, somebody is glad I came home."
Male romantic fantasy tends to express love through action. The man may not spend six pages describing the delicate architecture of his feelings. He'll just go kill the dragon.
He'll work three jobs.
He'll build the house.
He'll walk into Hell carrying a shotgun because Hell made the catastrophic administrative error of taking his wife.
This is why you can have stories that men adore in which the protagonist says only eleven emotionally articulate words, but will nevertheless cross a continent, overthrow a government, and personally fistfight Satan because somebody hurt the woman he loves.
The deed is the declaration.
Meanwhile, a more stereotypically female romantic fantasy might revolve around him remembering her birthday, noticing she's upset before she says anything, remembering the obscure thing she told him six months ago, or knowing that she hated that sushi restaurant even though she insisted at the time that everything was fine.
Neither one is better. They're just different ways of asking the same question: Does this person actually see me?
And this is where we arrive at the part that makes me want to bang my head against a desk, because you don't actually have to understand any of this.
You don't have to agree with my theory about male romantic fantasy.
You don't have to write dragons.
You don't have to write loyal girlfriends.
You don't have to write harems.
You don't have to study evolutionary psychology, conduct focus groups, read 900 Reddit posts from lonely men, or travel into the wilderness carrying a clipboard and tranquilizer darts to study the elusive North American Male in his natural environment.
There is one rule that will get you surprisingly far:
MEN ARE PEOPLE, TOO.
Holy shit! What a breakthrough! Men have feelings! Stop the presses!
Men get lonely.
Men want to be loved.
Men want to be wanted.
Men want somebody to admire them.
Men want somebody who makes them feel safe.
Men want somebody who thinks they're worth fighting for.
Men sometimes want to be vulnerable without having that vulnerability immediately turned into evidence for the prosecution.
And yes, men often have trouble explaining these feelings. Sometimes they don't understand them themselves. Sometimes they express them in ways women don't immediately recognize.
So ask them.
Talk to them.
Listen to them.
And here's the really revolutionary part: Believe them occasionally.
If a man tells you that something hurts him, perhaps your first response shouldn't be a 40-minute seminar explaining why his pain is actually evidence of toxic masculinity. If a man tells you they don't like being portrayed as stupid, violent, horny, emotionally defective gorillas requiring female rehabilitation, perhaps you don't need a peer-reviewed sociology paper before considering the possibility that they mean it.
Nobody likes being lectured to. Men OR women.
Nobody likes being condescended to.
Nobody likes being the designated asshole.
Nobody wants to spend their precious few hours of leisure consuming entertainment whose fundamental attitude toward them is: You're defective, but don't worry. We can fix you.
And there is far too much fiction that participates in this casual disrespect of men. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes because the writer has been swimming in it so long they don't even realize the water is there.
Then somebody looks around and asks: Why aren't men reading?
For FUCKS SAKE. Maybe start there.
You don't have to understand men perfectly.
You don't have to write specifically for them.
You don't have to abandon female readers or change the stories you love.
If you want men in your audience, you might try extending them the same basic courtesy every writer owes any group of human beings they're trying to reach:
Be curious about them.
Listen to them.
Take their feelings seriously.
And above all: Respect them.
If you've been paying attention to X for the past week, a ton of men have gone absolutely apeshit for the "Malfoid" trend of Harry Potter fan fiction. I've even joined in, and I'm not even the target audience.
I've had some success with it, and I don't think it's because I possess some mystical understanding of the male psyche. I'm a 53 year old woman trying to write teenage boys. I'm standing outside the enclosure with binoculars thinking, "Well, I guess Harry would probably do this." Most importantly, I followed that last rule. Respect gets you a long fucking way.
I respected the men who enjoyed the premise instead of treating their enjoyment as something embarrassing that needed to be diagnosed.
I respected Dracena Malfoy. I didn't make her a drooling idiot who exists solely so Harry can rescue her. I didn't make her a flawless Girlboss who exists to humiliate Harry and explain his deficiencies to him, either.
I tried to make her someone a man could understand and empathize with. Someone with strengths and weaknesses and loyalties and fears and a family she loves even when they're wrong. Someone who can need Harry without being helpless, and whom Harry can need without being emasculated.
And Harry? Hell, I don't know how to write a teenage boy. So I guessed. But I tried to write him as somebody I could respect. That turns out to be a surprisingly useful literary technique.
I even tried to respect the old pure-blood families that Rowling's original books regarded with suspicion. They're arrogant. They are classist. They are "racist." Some of them are outright monsters. The thing is, they're still people. They love their children. They worry about their families. They have traditions and obligations and loyalties that mean something to them. I Don't have to like them, or agree with them, but I think it's a lot more fun if you can understand them. Understanding requires at least a smidgeon of respect.
Rowling was a poor single mother when she created this world. I can certainly understand why inherited wealth and aristocratic pretension weren't going to get the sympathetic camera angle. Maybe she'd write them differently today. Maybe not. I don't know.
But I decided to ask the more interesting question: What if these people aren't cartoons? Hell, I even snuck a little feminist power fantasy into Epilogue. Apparently I needed to prove to myself that you can write powerful women with feminist ideals without making the men around them pathetic.
It can be done! Take THAT, Gloria Steinem. (Who, eventually, married a man.)
And I think that's the lesson I've accidentally learned from this whole silly (but fun) "Malfoid" experiment.
You don't have to perfectly understand your audience.
You don't have to become them.
You don't even have to like all the same things they like.
You just have to grant them (and the characters through whom they're experiencing your story) the dignity of being human.
Respect gets you remarkably far.
Because men don't hate romance.
They hate being invited to a love story only to discover that they're the thing the story doesn't love.
