In the famous comic-strip Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin forms a club called “Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS” (G.R.O.S.S.), sole members Calvin and Hobbes, whose entire purpose is excluding his neighbour Susie Derkins from the treehouse.
Calvin is a fictional comic-strip character, and Hobbes is a stuffed tiger. But G.R.O.S.S. captures a dynamic that’s frustrated feminists forever: men like excluding women from the (figurative) treehouse, and when forced to let us in they’ll move the treehouse. Once women are allowed into a previously all-male “treehouse” of some kind, whether a profession, meeting-space, or sport, the treehouse loses desirability. Eventually the men will reconstitute their club elsewhere, leaving the field to women. Male-dominated professions are always higher-status and better-paid, for example; then, when women move in and take over a sector it will begin to lose status, and the wages will fall.
On the face of it, the sole exception to this would seem to be fiction publishing. Here, the treehouse is full of girls. Women make up 80% of fiction sales across much of the English-speaking world, and most of the publishing workforce, too. A 2024 Publishers’ Association report showed over two thirds of the UK publishing workforce is female, with the proportion of women in US even higher at almost 80%.
Does this mean men are locked out of the literary treehouse? Novelist Joyce Carol Oates thinks so, at least if the man is white. In 2022, she quoted a literary agent friend, who lamented that publishers simply don’t want to hear from white men, no matter how talented. A well-known (male) British novelist of my acquaintance concurs, adding that, in his view, this has amounted to a two-decade ideological campaign to publish, platform, and target books at women.
But apparently it’s rude to say any of this. Oates was dogpiled by the progressive press for her tweet, and my novelist friend refused to speak on the record about sex discrimination in publishing, saying he’s been warned by colleagues to leave well alone. Even the creative writing professor worrying in the New York Times about the “disappearance of literary men” was obliged to add a disclaimer, about how “I welcome the end of male dominance in literature”. In other words: you can only point at the locked treehouse as long as you say it’s not a treehouse, and anyway it’s good that it’s a treehouse.
But while publishing sector workforce statistics, new fiction titles, bookshop displays and the broader cultural sensibility all point to female dominance in fiction-writing, this wasn’t always so. In fact, the real flash in the pan was the brief status of literary fiction as a boys’ club. For while it’s true overall that the Republic of Letters has historically been male-dominated, fiction is only a small and recent subset of that Republic, and one that was always more female. In a sense, the supposed “feminisation” of fiction is really more a reclamation by women of a genre that was always theirs, from the boys that briefly annexed it as their treehouse.
Prior to the printing press, and into the early history of print publishing, the most important all-male cultural treehouse was, as literary historian Walter Ong observes, Latin: a language more read than spoken, and taught almost exclusively to men. “For well over a thousand years,” Ong writes, Latin was “sex-linked, a language written and spoken only by males, learned outside the home in a tribal setting which was in effect a male puberty rite setting, complete with physical punishment and other kinds of deliberately imposed hardships.”
This survived for some time even after the arrival of print. But print occasioned a rapid fall in the cost of making new books, a trend that drove literacy as well as demand for works written in the vernacular. With this shift, both literary sensibilities and prose styles once constrained by classical precedent began to diversify too. The inflection point in this opening-up of the classical treehouse is arguably Alexander Pope’s verse translations of the Homeric epics, produced between 1715 and 1726. Pope benefited from a cluster of factors, including a boom in printing but also the 1709 Statute of Anne protecting publishers’ rights; a spreading public appetite for classics in translation; and a vigorous public literary culture, centred around 18th-century London’s coffee houses and England’s expansionary, entrepreneurial sensibility. He funded the translations by subscription; they made him the equivalent of a modern-day millionaire.
“In a sense, the supposed ‘feminisation’ of fiction is really more a reclamation by women of a genre that was always theirs”
So if the literary “treehouse” was once occupied chiefly by monks and aristocrats, the appetite for translated classics that made Pope rich shows how far beyond its habitual occupants this had now expanded. Women, too, soon moved into this new cultural space. As vernacular literature expanded, so more women began to write, bringing with them a less formal writing style. As Ong points out, while women were often intensively educated from the 1600s on, they were not routinely taught Latin and rhetoric. Thus they “normally expressed themselves in a different, far less oratorical voice, which had a great deal to do with the rise of the novel”.
The most famous early pioneer of this new style is Jane Austen, who set the template for an intimate style of literature combining moral clarity with psychological insight and — crucially — absorbing fictional settings, intended to represent their contemporary readers’ familiar worlds. Women were soon avid consumers of such work, prompting moral panic about women being led astray by their consumption of overstimulating romantic fiction.
Meanwhile, men moved the treehouse. Women and the broader (implicitly lower-class) “reading public” were welcome to their “penny dreadfuls”, but “serious” literature was often understood to exclude fiction. Historian Jonathan Rose reports this attitude reaching the working class, with one engineer in 1910 castigating his grandson for reading the “trash” novel Anna Karenina, telling him instead to read “proper books”. “Proper” literature was understood to range across fields such as science, poetry, philosophy, and political and religious debates: for example it’s difficult to imagine a theological autobiography selling more than a few hundred copies today, and yet John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, documenting his founding of the Oxford Movement and eventual departure for Catholicism, was a bestseller on its publication in 1864.
By the end of the two 20th century world wars, though, this solemn Victorian sensibility was widely viewed as obsolete and even morally suspect. Over the same period cinema, radio, and latterly TV diversified the media environment, and the United States seized the baton of cultural leadership. This, in turn, created the specific cultural moment in which literary fiction became, for a few decades, a male-dominated treehouse. The American cultural historian Ronnie Grinberg has recently argued that this was shaped, even more specifically, by the distinctive, argumentative literary sensibility of 20th-century New York Jewish men, who set out to reclaim literary fiction from its girly 19th-century origins.
In Grinberg’s words, this post-war milieu believed the intellectual life could be “virile in the way that athletes were in American culture”, even as they viewed second-wave feminism as suspicious, whiny, and shrill. It was, then, in the context of the parameters set forth by this newly-masculinised literary treehouse that the “Bro Lit” school of 20th-century literary fiction flourished, including such American luminaries as Philip Roth, John Updike, and Cormac McCarthy.
But it wasn’t long before Susie Derkins was hammering on the treehouse door again: the feminist movement decried by America’s postwar New York lit-bros in turn produced a new wave of women’s writing, which has only grown in volume and confidence since. The same era also saw the rise of Hollywood and TV as competitor outlets for storytellers, offering if not the same “high culture” cachet, at least better pay than literary fiction.
Fast-forward to today, and more books are published than ever. But fiction has escaped the post-war macho treehouse and reverted to its feminine 19th-century connotations. Even fantasy fiction, the last hiding-place of the heroic epic, has latterly been colonised by “romantasy”, or — as some very online treehouse-dwellers rudely call them — “femcel gooner books”. Existing studies suggest that men still read, but prefer genre or nonfiction to new literary fiction; an unscientific poll of my X followers returned broadly the same result, with a number echoing the sense that new fiction is not aimed at them. One man of my acquaintance dismissed contemporary fiction as wholly uninteresting on the basis that it’s all “New York neurotics, daddy issues, and multiculturalism”.
So where has the treehouse gone? In all the NYT and Guardian type think-pieces on this topic, there’s a vague background sense that men ought to be more interested in New York neurotics, daddy issues, and multiculturalism than they are. The creative writing professor lamenting this in the NYT blames Trumpism on this recalcitrance, lamenting: “These young men need better stories — and they need to see themselves as belonging to the world of storytelling.”
“Fiction has escaped the post-war macho treehouse and reverted to its feminine 19th-century connotations.”
But perhaps this has it backwards, at least according to the treehouse logic that has governed cultural history since time immemorial. This logic tells us men don’t want to be included in someone else’s treehouse. They want to make their own, and then keep Susie Derkins out. So if Susie has claimed the contemporary-fiction treehouse, chances are the men are elsewhere. And, if treehouse logic holds, they’ve taken the status and money with them.
Lo and behold: total US fiction sales in 2024 totalled just under $2 billion; modern publishing is, notoriously, “champagne lifestyle and lemonade wages”. Hollywood grossed four times that sum in 2024: around $8.5 billion. And both of these were dwarfed by video gaming, so much of which is story-driven it should surprise none of us that it’s eclipsed both cinema and novels as a source of narrative enjoyment, grossing around $100 billion in the US alone over the same period. And video gaming is only one aspect of the now all-enveloping digital realm, in which a thousand treehouses have taken root and flourished. You only have to look at the impact of debates over sexism in gaming to see this dynamic, and its far-reaching political consequences: the 2014 Gamergate controversy is widely credited with kick-starting the anti-progressive internet backlash that would eventually gift Trump not one but two terms in the White House.
In this sense, the NYT is directionally correct to link battles over storytelling with the rise of Trump. It’s just that the casus belli was never stories as such; it was access to the treehouse. And in this sense, too, we can feel sympathy for those literary men who don’t love gaming, who long for the old bro-lit club, and who resent its occupation by Susie Derkinses and their books about vibrant urban communities or horny werewolves.
But notwithstanding the protests of creative writing professors and the New York Times, I doubt men will be returning to literary fiction any time soon. And yet for all that men can justly complain of having lost this particular treehouse, we might also temper our empathy a little. For whenever Susie Derkins makes it into Calvin’s treehouse, this elusive, exclusive space invariably moves; and wherever it re-forms, it somehow always seems to end up writing the cultural agenda.
