My Thoughts on Conduit Books and Writing as a Man
A new publishing company aims to focus on male writers. Naturally, controversy has ensued.
I spotted a post on Reddit this morning about a new publishing company that is going to temporarily focus on books by male writers. Naturally, this caused a great outpouring of anger in the comment sections of various subreddits and on social media platforms like Bluesky. In fact, I could not find a single comment on Bluesky that was not filled with outrage at the idea.
There were various stories in a number of media outlets, including the Guardian, but the td;lr is that a man named Jude Cook has founded a publishing company called Conduit Books and says he will begin reading submissions by male writers before later—possibly—opening to female ones. He says this is because the book world is now increasingly dominated by female writers and men’s voices need to be heard.
Jude Cook is undeniably right. When I say “undeniably,” I mean “if you are not so utterly indoctrinated by political rhetoric that you cannot engage with reality,” which sadly excludes a great many people nowadays. The fact is that even though men are seen as dominating the publishing industry, the opposite is in fact true. Just as in education, men used to outnumber and outrank women, but massive efforts have been made not to create balance but to shift the pendulum far in the other direction.
No! you say. It can’t be true! The publishing world is super sexist and women are an oppressed minority! Everyone knows that men are big mean stupidheads that rule everything and suppress women’s voices!
Well, you are entitled to your opinion, but take a look at the New York Times bestseller list for 2024. For hardback fiction, nine of the top ten books were written by women. For paperback fiction, all fifteen of the top fifteen were female. That is what we call an inconvenient truth. It is like a great many factual truths nowadays and it’s why we have the term “politically correct,” which generally means something you want to be true but which is factually incorrect. The literary canon may well be skewed towards white men because of historical sexism, but today the industry is very much female-dominated. It is not so bad in the world of non-fiction, which is merit-based, but in fiction, where quality is more subjectively assessed, agents and editors are keen to play into popular narratives and in the liberal world of the arts, there is no message more prevalent than the one that says, “We’re sick of hearing from white men.”
Although my writing is overwhelmingly in the non-fiction category, a few years ago I wrote a novel. Naturally, I sought a publisher and for a while I even sought an agent. I spent almost two years looking at potential publishers and even literary agents and these places were indeed staffed mostly by women. That is not a problem of course but for the publishing companies there was a big issue. For almost every one that was open to submissions, there was a sentence or paragraph saying something like this:
We are looking for books by women, people of color, the LGBT community, the differently abled, and other marginalised communities.
That is a polite way of saying, “No white men.”
I can actually understand why they want to exclude white men. Coming from an extremely liberal background with a very liberal education and possessing liberal politics and inhabiting a liberal social circle, I am familiar with the idea that white men are responsible for all the evils of the world. I am quite accustomed to the fact that all of our experiences are immediately denied by the use of phrases such as “male privilege.” It doesn’t matter how many of us die by suicide, end up in prison or on the streets, or suffer through addiction. We are viewed as the bad guy and somehow personally responsible for everyone who looked a little bit like us decades or even centuries ago.
The world of 2025 is very different from that of 1925. In education, it used to be that 60% of university students were male. We eventually reached parity but that was not enough and now the percentages have changed places. Men are very much a minority in higher education and we are a rapidly shrinking minority. The strange thing is that the people who claim to want equality have no problem with this. They are eager to prise men from their positions of power and replace them with women, not to achieve any sort of equality but simply to achieve change. If a new form of discrimination supplants the old, so be it.
Similarly, in literature, it is female writers who grab the headlines now and fill up the bestseller lists. More than half of authors are female and more than half of editors are female, too. For children’s books, this soars to 80%. I read many articles about this and almost all of them oddly agreed on one thing: It’s wrong for men to dominate a field but it’s perfectly fine for women to do it. Most of those articles instead called for greater female representation in other creative industries. To be honest, almost all of my favourite living writers are women. Yes, the man writing an article in defence of men enjoys reading feminist authors like Sayaka Murata and Meiko Kawakami. What a shock! But for all I think it’s a great thing that we see more fiction by women writers, I regret that we have to marginalise men at their expense. Why not aim for equality rather than exclusion?
You might well say, “But women’s problems are more serious! Therefore, it is reasonable that their voices should be heard and men—who are overrepresented historically—should be punished and silenced!” There is a certain logic to that and indeed we need more books by women writers and those ought to be widely read, especially by young men who are too often ignorant of female experiences and perspectives. But that does not mean we should exclude male voices. We should not look down so readily on male experiences. Look at the problems in our world and how many of them stem from disaffected men whose lives lack meaning because of recent societal changes. Where is their literature? Why are they demonised and marginalised and mocked even as their suffering increases?
It is true that the great writers of the past were mostly men and that young males today can go and read Hemingway if they want. We have not entirely cancelled these figures. But what of modern problems? I believe Hemingway and other great male writers of the past remain relevant but what about voices addressing contemporary issues in a direct sense? What about books that deal with life in the 2020s for young men? Life is bleak for these so-called privileged people. They struggle to find a place in a changing world and those classics no longer reflect their current circumstances. The old ways no longer apply and yet they are denied their expression. The best I can think of is Michel Houellebecq, who let’s face it would have no chance whatsoever of being published today if he were an aspiring young writer working in the English language. He would be rejected outright by any publisher in the U.K. or U.S.
There is a crisis of masculinity today and many men struggle to find a place in society. Whilst most change brings opportunities for women, it simultaneously robs men of their roles and tells them that all their traditional values no longer apply. I don’t mean to complain too much because a lot of this change is for the best, but again that means we cannot rely entirely on the literature of the past. Young males look for role models and see… what? From the left, there are few options. It is only really on the right that there are people offering solutions and these people are pretty dismal, to say the least. Think Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. Yeah… I vomited a little just typing that second name.
The left demonises men and denies there is a problem and only the right offers up solutions. These solutions of course tend to create more problems, and as young men move towards conservatism, the left demonises them even more. If liberals would stop treating all men as toxic and stop denying our experiences and problems, then perhaps we would have a chance of inhabiting a more peaceful world. Perhaps we could find some sense of balance. But instead, we pull boys’ books from school and so boys stop reading. We try to stop boys from being boys and pretend that the very notion is a green light for the most toxic behaviour. We rob men of the right to expression and education and now, when a man decides to start a publishing company that will hopefully print books that redress this situation, he is widely mocked for his efforts.
I was delighted to hear that Conduit Press will exist and I was depressed but not surprised to see all the mocking comments on social media. These were the voices of profoundly indoctrinated people. But to hell with them. You cannot easily change the minds of cult members. There were a few people, though, who bravely spoke up and said that just maybe this might not be such a bad idea. Maybe male voices ought to be heard. Maybe there are some problems that need addressed and maybe—just maybe—not all men are totally evil. Let’s hope that Conduit succeeds and let’s hope for social and cultural changes. I for one will be submitting my novel to them when their submission window opens. No doubt it will be lost under a mountain of other manuscripts, but at least I know it will not be dismissed outright based on my gender.