Naturally, I feared the worst from the headline: ‘Men need liberation too’: do we need more male novelists?, but apart from the guy who is the editor of this new imprint which is to encourage poor wittle male authors (Son of Mybug, well, I guess, Grandson? Great-Grandson? Distant Descendant discovered through sending his DNA to be tested?) they are all actually WTF, FFS, what are you talking about?

He moans on that the vast majority of commissioning editors in publishing are women, which I fancy is a situation that has historically pertained for Quite Some Time and did not happen just yesterday, and there have been Fabled Agents and Editors of Ye Fayre Sexxe who were the champions of Bloke Writers, some of whom were fairly toxic specimens (e.g. look at some of the authors with whom Diana Athill worked closely).

Come on down Anne Enright:

The majority female readership is generous to male writers, while male readers continue to be reluctant about reading and praising women.... More books are being published today than ever before, and this includes more books by men. I have seen publishers eat up novels by younger men (especially Irish men, I am glad to say). I have seen them fall on such books with relief that they exist and that they are good. I don’t see any problem with men getting published, when those men are not misogynistic, because it is actually misogyny that has gone out of fashion, not male writers. I worry about men who miss all that, and who miss the inflated, undeserved feeling of importance of the good old days.

Yay Leo Robson:

Anyone who knows anything about anything, or at least about the English novel, knows that it can never be “too female”.... There have been periods when male novelists consumed most of the attention: notably in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it was deemed necessary to found a women’s prize for fiction. But everyone knew that the leading English novelists were Penelope Fitzgerald and Iris Murdoch, who wrote often and brilliantly about men.... Of course I am exaggerating, slightly. There have been some decent male novelists. If this were not the case, it would have been somewhat presumptuous or arrogant to have attempted writing a novel myself.

Sarah Moss suggests maybe the problem is men as readers:

I suspect that if there is a problem with men’s literary fiction, it’s as much to do with reading as writing. The gender (im)balance of audiences at book events suggests that men much prefer to read nonfiction.... If patriarchy means that some men miss out on the joys of literature, that’s quite low on the list of its harms and also unlikely to be fixed by setting up a men’s publishing house. I wonder also how much this is a British problem, because I can immediately think of dozens of Irish men, established and emerging writers, publishing very well-received novels.... Many men, it seems, experience no curiosity about the female gaze, or women’s experiences. Maybe women, who always used to read men and buy their books, are beginning to return the compliment.