Men hardly read anything nowadays, and if they do, it's reading intended for utilitarian purposes: self-help books to learn to motivate and discipline themselves, business books to learn how to make money, programming resources to get a job (and then make money), that type of stuff. By and large though, most men don't even read those, and are too busy being addicted to video games, pornography, drugs, or spend their time obsessing about lifting weights, or 'looksmaxxing' as it's called.
This means that only women read, especially the types that consider themselves to be women of letters, the ones who work in academia and who must preface all of their messages with 'as a PhD in history/english literature/psychology', or the zany artsy women who look for a rich man who will provide for all of their financial needs and hardly seem to do any art.
As a result, literature becomes a thing that is written by women, and for women. This is part of a larger trend in the modern world where the incentive structures are such that everything becomes a bubble, because short-term success, which mainly comes from pandering to the personality of the audience (as opposed to its conscious character) compounds to a career, in a way that striving for artistic greatness simply doesn't, because it is tremendously more difficult to express, and hardly anyone in our times care, because we live in an unconscious world, spending most of our time on the digital screen, or the screen of our personality, which makes us filter Reality based on likes and dislikes, instead of perceiving the unique qualities in the situations we find ourselves.
When something becomes an echo chamber, it starts off by being reassuring and relatable, never giving the audience something that is difficult to experience, never presenting an idea that is difficult to understand, never writing a 'bad' ending where the main character doesn't get what he or she wants, and on the other hand, writing about the type of things that equally unconscious people would feel or think, such as their daily worries, their fears, their surprising sense of boredom at everything, their terrifying lack of interest in other people, or making tons of references, to other bits of pop culture, or to other works in the same echo chamber.
Over time, these reassuring and relatable aspects end up dominating the entire creative process, to the point where there might only be references, only tropes, only copies of copies of copies, with nothing really behind them, which is by and large the state of our modern 'culture', particularly movies and TV shows as people hardly read, but which also applies to books to some extent.
Returning to literature, this dynamic where everything is now written by women, for other women, also includes the commentary on literature, with one of the most tragic consequences that the great writers of the past, the overwhelming majority of which where men, have been pushed away based on political ideology.
The fact that many of the greats in literature were men is mainly a combination of two factors: firstly, that women were hardly allowed to write to begin with, too busy taking care of domestic concerns and raising a family, which is why feminist writers are correct to point out that women were hardly given a fair chance to begin with. But the second one, much more inconvenient for feminists to consider, much less admit, is that women simply don't feel as much of a need to reach immortal greatness than men do.
Don't get me wrong, they certainly can be good, very good, and I have no doubt that the best women writers of the past are worth reading—Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson—but greatness is something else entirely.
As Darren Allen argues, women in general do not strive for greatness because they simply aren't interested in worldly achievements as much, or even the transcendence that being a great artist who is remembered for centuries afterwards could offer them. They are not lazy or unambitious, they are simply more embodied, more present, and as a result, prioritize other things. Their rewards come from participating in a community, delighting in the beauty around them, and of course, the love that they receive from others, and the love that they themselves feel for people. Women are complete and present in their love, while men are born incomplete, and find their way back to wholeness through mastery, courage and struggle.
Modern society has no need for any of those feminine qualities however, which is why it has to push women towards surrogates of those. Instead of community, women are made to work in a career, where they serve the interests of wealthy people whom they hardly know, or the interests of rigid institutions which serve no one but themselves, and we call that equality, because you see when men and women alike get equally cucked by the office environment, that's clearly social progress.
Instead of love, what women receive is either attention from men who fawn over them, the fawning of nice cowardly men who ultimately just want to sleep with them, or the much more direct approaches of self-interested bastards who also just want to sleep with them. Neither 'nice' guys nor bastards love them however, because only a man with a spine and a heart could love a woman, but such men are rare, indeed very rare.
This is why women in the modern world are so routinely depressed, plagued with all sorts of afflictions that doctors don't understand, from chronic illnesses, to eating disorders, to menstrual issues, because they are innately very loving (and loveable) people, but they are met with a world where love is distorted into a romantic fantasy at best, and totally useless at worst, and where they are only valued for being human fuck-toys. Who would want to live in that hellscape?
This then prompts women to look for one another, to share about their struggles, to make sense of the world they live in, and support one another in doing so, which makes complete sense. Modern feminimism might be a frequent subject of critique from my end, but I hope it is clear that the seed from which it sprouts, the fact that civilization (which started with agriculture) has been, up to this point, entirely patriarchal, and that the modern world has no need whatsoever of feminine qualities (nor of masculine qualities either, though the system can certainly use male minds), with all of the inequalities and outrageous treatment of women that those entail, are completely on point.
My point is not that women are bad writers, or that feminism is totally unreasonable and we should go back to putting wifey in the kitchen, it's that women are great at certain things, namely being embodied, spontaneous, empathic, loving people, and not so great at other things, such as striving, abstraction, and disagreeableness. A sane culture would rejoice in both sides, the presence and love of femininity, and the courage and mastery of masculinity, and of course the mysterious union between the two, but insane civilizations manifest in two opposite poles which are essentially the same, in that they both miss the conscious qualities of women: the domineering patriarchy which subjugates women, and the modern genderless machine which is 'equal' in the sense that everyone can be a slave to wealthy people and the system at large.
The latter then leads to all sorts of trends in the ideological machine of the system which must emphasize 'equality', namely through removing men from companies and institutions, hence the trend in which the dreaded white men in literature are now systematically seen as bigots by contemporaries, and thus implicitly pushed aside from modern culture: the racism of Dickens, the bigotry of Schopenhauer, the misogyny of D. H. Lawrence. Not that those accusations are baseless, indeed Schopenhauer seemed to genuinely hate women, and Dickens didn't seem very keen on minorities—although when it comes to D. H. Lawrence, the claim that he was a misogynist comes from the modern lens that women should be independent rather than being loving, in other words it's loveless women writers who seemed most keen on critiquing the priest of love.
The problem with relinquishing to the void all of the great writers of the past based on modern sensibilities around bigotry is that it also prevents contemporaries from accessing their greatness. Thus we miss Schopenhauer's great insights in not just philosophy, but also people, art, physiognomy, and much more, or we miss Dickens' panoramic observations, his ability to capture not just a massive amount of details about people and their settings, but also paint beautifully coherent landscapes from them, as well as his deep sensitivity to the struggles of people, particularly children—arguably the most oppressed people in every society—and the poors 1, or we miss Lawrence's portrayal of love which brings much-needed fire and directness to modern, cold and insensitive hearts.
If anything, discriminating writers based on such ideological grounds is esssentially guaranteed to exclude the greats. Because to be great means to necessarily be an outlier, and have the ability to stand tall as one. It's impossible for instance for someone to have the insights that Nietzsche had about the masses, and about people at large, while remaining in the safe confines of mass-society, as only an outsider could make great observations about the people around them.
The ideological filter that hones on bigotry and discrimination is not without its merit, indeed we should acknowledge the prejudices of the people in the past, and such knowledge should inform our reading of them, but if the only things that can reach us are merely nice, then nothing of genuine greatness can arise, because love is not likeable, and mass ideologies, which includes the modern form of feminism, are all about mass appeal, i.e. being as nice as possible to their target audience.
Can you imagine what it would take to write something that offends no one in our times? You'd basically be forced to say nothing at all. But in fact, even that is offensive to the modern mind, which is so restless that it cannot tolerate silence, which is why we live in a world filled with gossip, reportage, which distract us from whatever troubles us, and which are seen from such crude, undiscerning eyes that only the mere facts remain, the things which are undeniable but also lacking in any conscious quality, and thus of any value.
High vantage points are not popular because it takes real effort to reach the tops, as well as an ability to sit alone and in silence, but only from there can we appreciate the view, the stunning beauty of the present that silences the mind, and the fire of the past which, like the sun, seems to fade in and out of view, but which ultimately is always there, available for anyone with the heart to feel and the eyes to discern to access it.
1 It's truly ironic how Dickens, the closest thing there is in history to a man of the people when it comes to writers, having personally lived through much of the social horror that he writes, is now furiously disparaged for his racism, wheras one of the most highly praised female writers, Jane Austen, in her most acclaimed title, Pride and Prejudice, is essentially writing about how to navigate the bourgeois world, and how to identify a good man who will provide for your needs. Truly an inspiring figure for the human experience!
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Literature Feminism Echochamber Gender Modernity
2026-06-17