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Young men, like 18-24 year old males on Hexbear: Is the culture for your age group completely fucked, or am I out of touch?

Basically a repost pf things I said in the mega, but anecdotally I'm hearing that sales of fiction read by men are dropping precipitously, and English and literature classes in colleges are now dominated by women. It seems like young men are not being exposed to literature in the same way that they used to. Like, when I was in high school and college, you could be a "bro" kind of guy and read Chuck Palahniuk, or Hunter S. Thompson, or David Foster Wallace. For decades, authors like Hemmingway and Bukowski found receptive audiences in young men, not to mention all the crime fiction, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy that men have traditionally consumed. The "guy in your English class who loves David Foster Wallace" was a stereotype for a reason. I read in another thread that music is less culturally important to young men than it used to be. It seems like younger men just straight up see no value in reading literature or fiction, or exposing themselves or critically engaging with art and music, because the algorithms just railroad them into Alpha Gridset world.

Am I wrong about this? Am I being condescending and out of touch, or is this a real thing that's happening, where the whole "male" culture is turning into grindset podcasts and streamers?

Edit: Okay, so the impression I'm getting is that everything is worse but also kind of the same as it ever was, which sounds right.

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  • I don't know if anyone has said this, cause there's a lot to read here, but I think you're just seeing all this online. Nobody posts on their social media that they just enjoyed X, Y, or Z literature or art. I won't say for sure that this is because the people who take the time to genuinely enjoy these things don't really give a fuck to tell everybody else about it, but that's what I think is happening.

    I'm pretty sure there's a term for this phenomenon that I can't think of right now, but yeah you're just getting exposed to drivel that is not representative of actual people.

    I'm older than this range, but still a "Zillenial" for context.

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