Eli Cugini

It's mostly to do with, again, economic factors.

Publishing has become less lucrative.

Men have often gone elsewhere to places that are more lucrative and women have filled their jobs and reading has like gone in and out of being feminized in general.

And it seems like we're in a more feminized zone right now.

Yeah, women read and buy a lot more fiction.

Fandom is very female-dominated.

I think a lot of the kinds of, like, desire and sexuality that are gotten at through fandom appeal to all genders, but men are probably more scared of it.

They're more scared of engaging with it openly.

It feels embarrassing for them.

And so a lot of the men who engage with it are already gay, trans, for instance, like have already bypassed a few layers of shame about your internal desires.

Books that are associated with being not very good and being smutty and being aimed at women who like romance and who

supposedly all want an escape from their boring domestic lives and husbands.

Obviously, that's a caricature, but a caricature that is redeployed a lot in the romance space.

Men are absolutely very inclined to go, well, this is the decline of culture.

And we need to make entire literary houses that only publish fiction by men, things like this, as if men are somehow being persecuted by the fact that women buy a lot of these books.

It's like, well, you could also buy books and you don't.

So this is what you end up with.

Fanfiction is very closely engaged with what people want.

Like I think to an extent when you're writing, you're always in some way getting at like

What do I want to see?