We live in a time of deepening division—not just between political parties or social classes, but between the sexes as well. Of course, men and women have always been different, but those differences have grown increasingly stark in recent years, even as it becomes more politically incorrect to say so.
Across the Western world, men are drifting one way, women another. In politics, men are turning more conservative, while women—especially young, unmarried women—are growing more liberal. We can see this gap not only in US voting patterns, but in voting patterns across the world. In matters of faith, men are turning toward traditional, even ancient forms of religious expression: high liturgy, orthodoxy, duty, and structure. Meanwhile, women are leaving organized religion altogether in record numbers. Some are embracing a kind of therapeutic spirituality—mindfulness, astrology, crystals—but many are simply checking out.
It’s not hard to see this growing rift playing out in other areas of life: marriage, dating, education, employment. But it’s also playing out in fantasy literature, not just among readers, but also among writers and publishers.
Instead of sharing a common ground, men and women are building parallel worlds. Many male readers are flocking to grimdark, with its blood-soaked realism and morally gray protagonists, or to litRPG, which merges game mechanics with fantasy worldbuilding in a system-focused power fantasy. Meanwhile, women are turning increasingly to romantasy, a subgenre that often verges on outright pornography and has virtually no appeal to men.
A lot of this is downstream from the gender divide in publishing. Traditional publishing—especially in the U.S.—has become overwhelmingly female, especially in the editorial departments. Some of that is demographic; some of it is cultural. But the result is that the gatekeepers of traditional fantasy publishing are mostly women. Their tastes, sensibilities, and values shape what gets acquired, marketed, and celebrated.
This divide wouldn’t be so troubling if it were merely about preferences or taste. But it runs deeper than that. Increasingly it seems that men and women no longer understand each other—or worse, no longer even try to. And when even our fiction reflects that fracture, it becomes that much harder to bridge the growing divide.
That’s what makes the current state of fantasy so toxic. Not because romantasy or grimdark are inherently bad—every subgenre has its place—but because they have become echo chambers that silo the sexes off from each other.
Men and women were not made to live in separate worlds. We need each other—not just to perpetuate the species, but to challenge, balance, and refine one another. I know this from personal experience. Without my wife, I’d be a lesser man. She often drives me crazy (to be fair, I return the favor), but we have each grown so much since marrying each other that I think I would hardly recognize the man I once was. Together, we are far more than the sum of our two parts.
Our stories should reflect that truth. We don’t need more genre ghettos. We need shared myths. Stories where masculine and feminine virtues don’t clash with each other, but come together in harmony.
That’s what I’m hoping to accomplish with my epic fantasy series, The Soulbound King. When building out the fantasy world, I deliberately designed the magic system so that latent magical powers can only be unlocked through marriage—the “soulbond”—between a man and a woman. I did that largely in response to the growing gender divide, because I wanted to write a story that shows how men and women can overcome it. Hopefully it works.
Fantasy, perhaps more than any other genre, gives us the space to reimagine what’s possible. It allows us to explore not just what the world is, but what it could be. And right now, what the world needs is for the young men and women of the rising generation to come together and reinvent the world.
