In 2015, a black blogger and author implored her readers to stop reading "white, straight, cis, male authors" altogether for one year. "I stopped reading white male authors last year," reads The Week's headline from 2016, "Here's what I learned." The subhead for that think piece was "Should I have banned white women too?" This was the year Yale English students demanded an end to the focus on white male writers in the curriculum. The Guardian weighed in to bitch about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize, saying "he's just another white male writer."
2017 saw the justification for abandoning nearly the entire history and tradition of western letters with "Why I Don't Read Straight White Male Authors" along with Boston's NPR affiliate publishing a column by a "progressive, anti-racist, feminist, pro-equal rights" writer who claimed that "Giving Up White Male Authors" was the best way to "understand what it's like not being part of the dominant culture." Literary Hub expounded on "The Year I Stopped Reading White People" in 2018. In 2019, Book Riot came up with the "Why I'm No Longer Reading Books by White Men." Shortly thereafter, HuffPost asked "The End of the Great White Male Writer?" As far back as 2010, authors such as Jodi Picoult complained about The New York Times giving positive book reviews to books written by white men.
By 2022, when Joyce Carol Oates claimed that publishers were eschewing works by white male writers, she was slammed for it, with people saying that this was not happening. But it was happening, obviously, and by the time Oates mentioned it, it had been happening for years. Nonetheless, James Patterson, The New York Times writer, apologized for agreeing with Oates' assessment. David Foster Wallace, John Steinbeck, Brett Easton Ellis, William Shakespeare, and so many other men, straight and undoubtedly white, were tossed on the pyre of racist hate against whites, sex bigotry against men. The flames were fanned with the determination of petulant critics, reviewers, and authors who desperately wanted to be up-and-coming and would sacrifice anyone and anything to do it, even if it meant destroying history, literature, their colleagues, and worst of all, subjecting good work to bullsh*t diversity standards instead of y'know, standards of merit, talent, storytelling and good work.
While much of the hate and outright racism against white, male writers, or white, straight, male writers, or white, straight, cis, male writers, or heteronormative white male writers, was grown in the petri dishes of culture—in blogs, social media missives, and arts communities, whether online or IRL, it was propped up by the leading outlets. While the cultural left (read: the entire culture) advocated for the removal of white men as cultural creators and the erasure of white men from literary history, they also began removing white male authors from their current careers, ambitions, positions, and social lives. Professors, novelists, poets, playwrights and film directors were summarily cancelled for random acts of micro-aggressions, random unprovable sex stuff, saying the wrong thing, thinking something even worse, or simply for just being white and male.
Take for example the 2020 Jubilee, the little known plan of the wokesters in the New York City theater scene. Theater is an art form that is perhaps woker than most. Always the purview of gay men, the question of LGBTQ+ inclusion was never in doubt. The revelation that the great, white way was in need of diversity received no pushback but only welcome by producers, directors, and theater makers. By the time 2020 was approaching, the desire to cleanse American stages of white men had reached a fever pitch and a project was launched, called the 2020 Jubilee. The idea was that for just one year, white male playwrights would take a step back, would not put their plays up for production, would not submit their plays for awards, grants, or opportunities, would keep away from the big festivals, and would simply, silently, support their non-white, non-male brethren. Producers and theater companies were enlisted to join in, to block productions that were led by white male creators.
White male writers spoke privately about the absurdity of the ask—how were they supposed to pursue their careers for that year? How were they supposed to earn an income if they were supposed to voluntary commit to a year of not only unemployment but unemployability? To take a step back was to give up your career, your work, your dreams, your creative drive. To stand up against the Jubilee year was to submit to cancellation. No matter which way the white men went in the face of this madness, they would have to resign themselves to abandoning the theater. In a massively ironic twist, 2020 was the year the Covid pandemic inspired the shut down of in-person entertainments. Theater practitioners, woker than most, masked up, locked down, and closed up theater spaces to avoid creating mass-spreader events. Even after restrictions began to lift, the Covidians of the theater world kept the stage doors closed almost to protest against the plebes who believed that life should return to normal.
The New York Times was not the only publication mobbing men out of their literary careers, but they were certainly one of the more prominent ones. The Times hasn't just taken aim at male authors, but males in the arts in general. In 2015, they took aim at William Styron for not knowing enough about black writers. 2016 saw The Times take issue with American novelist Lionel Shriver, a woman, for not being on board with the concept of cultural appropriation. In so doing, they quoted other authors who complained that white male writers were writing. In 2018, they slammed the television industry for not creating a "pipeline" of "diverse" (read: non white male) writers. They complained in 2019 about The Atlantic's white male editor giving story assignments to white male reporters—I mean really, how dare he.
Now, they've run a column claiming that it's somehow worrying that there has been a "disappearance of literary men."
In 2020, The Times wrote about "female directors" who "reject the male gaze." They even wrote about female pythons who don't need men to create new pythons. They took aim at the male creators of films, books, television, they repeated anonymous claims of sexual whatever against men, such as the so-called Sh*tty Men in Media List. They said "the future is female," touted "girl power," and rejected "male entitlement." Oscar nominations that were too male, BAFTA announcements to be more "diverse," which is code for rejecting white males, critiques of the "male-dominated" art world. In publishing, politics, teaching, film, television, and theater, men, mostly white men, have been derided, cast aside, looked upon with disdain. Men were told across progressive media outlets that their contributions were not needed, were not wanted, and would not even be considered.
The Times aided the MeToo movement in hounding men out of their careers over anonymous allegations of varying shades of sexual misconduct, from the odd glance to off-color jokes to bad dates. They minimized cancel culture, saying that the canceled just made new lives and hey, isn't that just great, no big deal. And now they wonder where all the men have gone and claim to want them back. "Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women," they write. Women are taking up all the spots in creative writing grad programs, women readers are taking over, too, and men aren't submitting their manuscripts to literary agents and publishers. They quote a VP at Simon & Schuster who said "the young male novelist is a rare species."
The thing is, The Times notes in their column on the decline of men after a decade of calling for the decline of men, that no one in the book world is concerned about it, and even the author doesn't really seem to care, writing "To be clear, I welcome the end of male dominance in literature." Author David Morris, who obviously is a white man himself, judging by his level of self-flagellation, and a professor of creative writing, makes sure that all readers know that he's not advocating for the return of the male dominated literary scene. He goes on a bit longer than necessary, saying men should read women, that men are definitely not "suffer[ing] from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured." But in his view, in his very, progressive, Trump-hating view, he stated that "the decline and fall of literary men should worry you." In education, Morris, writes, white men have declined, white men have been "marginalized," a marginalization that he feels led those men to—gasp—vote Trump.
Literally what the hell, NYT. Your recent lamentations are weak.
Now you want the white men back. Just like you want Rogan back and Elon Musk back and all the rest of the people the left shunned because they didn't conform, comply, and regurgitate the fashionable progressive ideologies? They're not coming back. They don't belong to the left anymore. White male authors are not Democrats anymore—the good ones anyway. The ones with any brains and sense have abandoned the progressive nonsense of The New York Times and all the rest of those foolish opportunists because it turned out that the lies leveled against the white man, that they are racist, hateful, and willing to destroy people on the basis of their race, sex, and sexual orientation, were simply the truth about the progressive left and their storied media and cultural outlets.
American men, Morris writes, "need better stories." What Morris doesn't realize, before he launches into more assurances that he is not calling for a return to male dominance, is that American men have found better stories. They found the story of a man who survived not one but two assassination attempts and still rises to "Fight! Fight! Fight!" They found the story of a self-made billionaire who bucks the system and advocates for freedom, the good stuff, and tells everyone who doesn't like it to f*ck off in the process. They found the story of a family who sticks together, despite persistent slings and arrows. And most of all, they found the story of a nation that will not slink peevishly into the darkness but will rise again, with liberty and justice for all, whether the woke scolds keep bitching about it or not.
