Today’s guest blogger is Gwendolyn Ravenmoore-Thatch (they/them). They are the author of “Unraveling the Unraveling: A Memoir of Almost Finishing Several Important Books,” and the founder of the Wisteria Collective. They hold a Master’s degree in Narrative Justice from an institution they are currently in a dispute with. They can be reached via the contact form on this website, though they cannot guarantee a timely response as they are very busy being exhausted by everything.
I want you to know that I am writing this from my fainting chaise, draped in my protest quilt — the one I sewed together from deconstructed neckties I confiscated from men at airport security — because I have just had the most harrowing experience of my literary life. More harrowing, even, than the time I accidentally read a Tom Clancy synopsis and had to spend three days in a sensory deprivation tank to recover.
I found a display at my local bookstore.
It was called, and I need you to brace yourselves, “Father’s Day Books for Him.”
I will pause while you recover.
The display was right there, between the “New Arrivals” section and the café counter, brazen as anything, just flaunting itself in the fluorescent light. My purple hair — freshly redyed in a shade I call “Institutional Rage” — practically vibrated with indignation. My emotional support tote bag, which reads “SMASH THE CANON,” swung from my elbow like a pendulum of justice. I stood there in my orthopedic protest sandals, which are very chic actually, and I simply could not move. I was rooted to the spot the way the patriarchy is rooted in everything, which is to say: deeply, infuriatingly, and with absolutely no invitation from me.
What was on this display, you ask? I will tell you. Adventure stories. War novels. Thrillers about lone men doing lone-man things in the wilderness while an eagle probably cries a single patriotic tear nearby. There was something called “Iron Resolve: A Man’s Guide to Surviving Everything.” There was a historical epic about a Viking with, I assume, excellent pectoral muscles and zero interest in processing his emotions. There was a spy novel — a spy novel, in this economy — featuring a man with a gun on the cover who looked like he had never once asked for directions.
I picked up the Viking book. I should not have picked up the Viking book.
The back cover described the hero as “uncompromising, fierce, and forged by battle.” He had, according to the blurb, “conquered nations and bent the arc of history to his iron will.” He did not, as far as I could tell from the back copy, ever sit quietly with a cup of chamomile tea and examine his role in upholding systemic power structures, and I think that tells you everything you need to know.
I placed it back on the display with the careful, controlled energy of a woman who has been to twelve and a half therapy sessions.
The thing is — and here is where I really want you to follow me, because this is the intellectual crux of the issue — books like these do not just entertain. They normalize. They normalize the idea that men can simply go around having adventures, solving problems with their fists or their wits or, God help us all, their iron resolve, without first completing a comprehensive self-assessment survey on their privilege. Where is the chapter where the Viking sits down with a trusted village elder and unpacks why he felt the need to conquer things? Where is the moment of reckoning? Where is the growth arc that doesn’t involve him lifting something heavy?
I raised these concerns, very calmly and at a normal volume, to the bookseller on duty. His name tag said “Phillip.” I have thoughts about Phillip, but they are not for this post.
Phillip told me that the display was intended to offer “gift ideas for Father’s Day.” I told Phillip that Father’s Day is itself a complicated institution with fraught cultural implications. Phillip offered me a complimentary bookmark. I declined the bookmark. The bookmark had a picture of a compass on it. I took the bookmark home, and I am currently using it to mark my place in a 900-page academic text called “Dismantling the Heroic Archetype: A Feminist Phenomenology of the Action Narrative,” which I am only 47 pages into but which I already feel very passionately about.
Look, I am not saying men should not read. Reading is wonderful. I am a huge proponent of men reading, specifically books that explain, at great length, why so many of history’s problems are their fault. What I am saying is that there is a very particular kind of book — the kind where a square-jawed protagonist overcomes physical and moral obstacles through a combination of courage, strategy, and sheer stubborn competence — that I find deeply suspicious. It is too clean. It is too satisfying. It presents a world where problems have solutions and solutions involve doing things, and frankly that kind of narrative optimism is something I simply cannot endorse without further peer review.
My book club, the Wisteria Collective, meets on the third Thursday of every month, and we have a rule: no male protagonists who don’t cry at least twice per hundred pages. It keeps the selection manageable. Last month we read a novel narrated by a sentient bog, and honestly it was one of the more emotionally nuanced perspectives we’ve encountered. The bog, at least, had ambivalence. The bog did not have iron resolve. The bog simply existed in a state of murky uncertainty and occasionally absorbed things, which is the most relatable characterization I have encountered in contemporary fiction.
But I digress. Back to the bookstore display and the ongoing cultural catastrophe it represents.
After my conversation with Phillip, I wrote a strongly worded letter to the store manager, a three-page handwritten manifesto to the publisher whose logo I spotted on three of the offending volumes, and a very long comment on the bookstore’s Instagram page, which as of this writing has received fourteen crying-laughing emoji reactions and one person named DavidTruePatriot99 who told me to “touch grass,” which I found ironic given that the Viking on the cover of that book was literally standing in a fjord.
Here is my ultimate thesis, and I will be asking you to cite it in future arguments: masculine adventure narratives do not just reflect culture, they shape it, and a culture shaped by stories of men solving problems through competence and determination is a culture that is simply not taking seriously enough the idea that maybe the problem cannot be solved, maybe the problem should be sat with, maybe the problem deserves a podcast and a panel discussion and at minimum a six-week community workshop series before anyone goes around resolving anything.
I am now going to finish my lavender oat milk latte, reread the first forty-seven pages of my phenomenology book because I think I may have missed something important on page thirty-one, and petition my local library to relocate the adventure fiction section to somewhere less visible, perhaps behind the large-print romance novels, where it can do less damage.
The revolution will not be shelved in the Featured Display area. It will be very loudly reshuffled.
