I can't tell you the number of times I've heard from the Left that my beloved IPs — "Star Wars," "Star Trek," "Harry Potter," "The Lord of the Rings" — are problematic and need to be retooled to appeal to the Modern Audience. What they mean is, they think these works cater too strongly to men (an assertion easily debunked by the numerous female fans, including me), and must be feminized, injected with diversity, and destroyed to appease the woke mobs.
Their argument is Modern Audiences won't watch these stories unless they're reworked to meet the current political zeitgeist, and it doesn't matter how poorly they're written, directed, or produced or if they lose tons of money for a studio. The political message is what's important here; money and profit and good storytelling must take a backseat to that.
It's why, for example, the trainwreck of a trans musical, "Emilia Perez," was nominated for the Best Picture and Karla Sofia Gascón was nominated for Best Actress, despite being a man. "Emilia Perez" was a joke with a cringe song featuring the line "from penis to vagina," sung in an off-key baritone, and the only reason Gascón didn't take home the Best Actress award was because some problematic tweets resurfaced.
Anyway, the point is this: modern "entertainment" has to be inclusive of everyone and anyone except white men and boys. That's evidence not just in movies and television, but in books as well. And over the weekend I learned that not a single white male author born after 1984 has had a work of literary fiction published in "The New Yorker" because the publication simply refuses to publish them.
A statistic that sounds fake but isn't: Not one single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.
— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) November 7, 2026
It's not because they stopped writing. It's because The New Yorker has refused to publish them. The publishing industry has… https://t.co/S0x1MbS21O
And then we wonder why boys don't read much anymore. We have told them they're not welcome in the literary space, and they responded by ... leaving the literary space.
Young boys are being discouraged from getting into reading—and it’s because more books are missing one key element, @sophiah_n reports: https://t.co/oYF70dmWn8
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) November 5, 2026
Here's a more from a rare win for The Atlantic:
At first, Afoma Umesi brushed off the comments. At her review website, Reading Middle Grade, a core part of her work was curating literary guides for elementary and middle schoolers. The commenters were, of course, adults—mostly parents and educators, keen on finding books that would delight the children in their life. The “middle grade” period, spanning ages 8 to 12, is thought to be the crucial moment when kids do—or don’t—become lifelong readers. And whenever Umesi posted a new roundup—say, “7 Tween Books Like Little Women” or “Middle Grade Books to Make You Cry”—at least one person would ask, Do you have anything for boys?
Her initial response was annoyance. “What do you think this is, the 15th century?” Umesi remembers thinking. Yet when she deliberately sought out such titles, they were unexpectedly scarce. “It was kind of like I was running into a wall,” she told me.
Out of curiosity, she compiled a database of 2026 releases and combed through them, analyzing their protagonists. Umesi found a surprising disparity: Girl protagonists outnumbered boys by a ratio of 2 to 1. Some categories, such as realistic fiction and mystery, were especially lopsided, she told me, with ratios of more than 3 to 1. “Girls are taking over!” she said, with a laugh.
Remember: we need more women in STEM and politics and every other office. But in female-dominated spaces, we definitely do not need more men (unless they're trans, that is). Women never clamor to work road construction or logging — fields disproportionately dominated by men — and we never hear about the gender gap when it comes to suicide, which takes the lives of more men than women.
Women and girls read books with male protagonists all the time. Maybe boys need to suck it up https://t.co/ByrbiGQ57Q
— maria 🦋 (@_mariaslibrary_) November 8, 2026
No one would ever tell a woman to "suck it up" if we were intentionally and explicitly excluded from entertainment, of course. We'd hear cries of "sexism" and "misogyny" from every corner of the media. Then again, gals like Maria tell women like me to "suck it up" when we object to men in our safe spaces, so maybe she's not the best arbiter of, well, anything.
We are going to have a fundamental difference of opinion if you think the answer to boys not reading is to write about “boy stuff” and not rethink how we engage with boys in general let alone as readers. No specific interest or taste should be placed on a gender binary!!!
— Katie Campione (@katie_campione) November 7, 2026
Despite the Left's best efforts to deny biological reality, the gender binary is real. People have done studies on this, and boys gravitate towards toys like guns and cars and tanks while girls go for dolls and tea sets and teddy bears. It's innate and while, yes, there are outliers that doesn't mean the entire theory is garbage.
Like I’m not even mad if you like Hatchet. Read whatever you want!!! Enjoy whatever you want!!! But women are not rolling their eyes at you liking a book. They are rolling their eyes at the continued sociological conditioning of boys and men to be violent and destructive.
— Katie Campione (@katie_campione) November 7, 2026
Katie has never read "Hatchet" and it shows. It's not about violence and destruction, it's about survival in the wilderness.
You can't have a discussion with people who are so fundamentally, intentionally misinformed and ignorant. They do this so discussion is made all but impossible. There is nothing wrong with making literature that caters to boys, even if it hurts the feelings of feminists who hate boys, anyway. They don't have their best interests at heart and should be summarily dismissed and ignored.
I suppose that's the one silver lining if the Islamists take over: the feminists will be permanently shut up and put in their place.
Anyway, as the mom of boys who wants them to read, I know this: reading informs everything you do. It's not just for pleasure: you have to read to do word-based math problems, understand science, learn history. The ability to read and comprehend what you read is vital. Reading also informs your ability to write. I was a voracious reader from an early age and I absolutely contribute that to my ability to write stories like this, and to write things quickly.
We are robbing a generation of that because some people have deep-seated daddy issues and it has to change.
