>>24853396
>>24856316
While also degrading & slowly choking out the more vulnerable literary market that was the bread & butter of that "literary middle class", used both as a way to invest a love of literature in the young, but also to abstract & tackle more complex & unique emotional, philosophical, and otherwise immaterial themes more cleanly and clearly, as such clarity & certainty of intent & purpose is eminently hostile & counter-functional with modern & especially post-modern thought, derived as they are from the particularly poisonous fruit of the Enlightenment that "All Art is Subjective", & thus inherently denying any kind of objective measure, such as purpose, intent, technical quality, or desired accomplishment relating to the context of its creation, that can be used to measure such things.
This is an important factor with men & fiction in particular. While there is variation, of course, most men are at least partially objective-focused. This is the source of the psychological factors that sees a man confused by a woman complaining about something, only to lash out at him when he asks how to help or if he takes action to address the problem. Thus, more fantastical fiction appeals to most intellectually honest & average men. Because it can abstract things while still having clear meaning via the use of fantastical or impossible imagery or setting, divorced from some of the grunge-realities of the realist world, it helps to stimulate & develop a greater abstract awareness & maturity in men who historically have long grappled with "uncertain" immaterial things. This is the root of the masculine fascination with concepts such as honor, nobility, love, & spiritual purpose. These are immaterial, uncertain things, but they also objectively exist from the perspective of a human being engaging with them, and this compels both fascination & frustration as humans in general struggle with this contradictory and slippery kind of concept. Women, wired to largely disregard fine, objective details in favor of broad spectrums of emotional & physical wellbeing as a kind of social mechanism for their ingroup, more easily disregard & accept such things based on how they feel about them. Men however, in seeking concrete realities, struggle, & thus deeply benefit from fiction which helps them develop a better grasp on the immaterial by contextualizing it in abstract as something material & representative with which they can more easily come to terms with & thus create a collection of objective points from which to base things on.
As that brand of fiction has almost entirely been destroyed, having its death throes through the cold war just as the intelligentsia have most heavily been subsumed by the schools of thought & political ideology that killed said brand and cemented their control over much of the educational system on a foundational, material level, it's only natural to find men increasingly alienated as a collective from literature.
