Men don't have hairy penises.
BarcelonaWith an already immense and Basque weariness towards the subject, I read that these days Mr. Juanma Bajo Ulloa –a film director who, some time ago, mesmerized me (when I was fourteen, I went to the Fantasio cinema three times to see Butterfly wings) but which I later abandoned completely – goes around the world whining and saying that if you're not a woman or don't follow certain rules woke You're in a very difficult position in the film industry. I haven't seen the interview, nor will I: I'm speaking from hearsay. Some have come forward to refute Ulloa's claims with data, especially Javier Zurro: in short, we could say that, in terms of subsidies, there are a few extra points (very few) if some of the main positions are held by a woman. This is a measure that exists to correct the historical and ominous bias that films made by women have suffered. However, Zurro tells us that, despite the very small amount of support women receive, in 2023 only 36.5% of the projects that received funding had exclusively female directors, and in 2022, 37.8%; the same is true for the films in which RTVE invests: between 2020 and 2023, 63.7% had male directors. In other words, we continually hear the annoying refrain about poor men being left out, while the data confirms that men are still the majority in the industry.
But this article should be about books. The thing is, I'd say the same thing is happening with literature in our country. I've heard several authors—I won't name names, because I don't want to stir up trouble, but I assure you they're not second-rate authors, but published and recognized ones; four come to mind right now—complaining along the same lines: now, if you're not a woman (or LGBTQ+: for them, the supposed threat comes from anything that isn't a traditional male), you're not interesting, you're ignored, you're not wanted. It's not just male authors who are feeling this way; even some female authors somewhat agree, and agents confirm that now is the time for women and, therefore, they're easier to sell.
Women are translated more than men
Frankly, I'm fed up with all these theories. I'm even tempted to dedicate another public forum to discussing them, but I feel we need to stop perpetuating this idea like an unquestionable mantra, and the only way to do that is to talk about facts and data. We can, for example, consult the Ministry's statistics on books published in Spain (please excuse me, but I don't have gender-disaggregated data for Catalonia), which tell us that, in books by a single author, between 2020 and 2024, men consistently represent more than 60% (specifically, 2020: 39% women; 2021: 62% men and 38% women; 2022: 62% men). In other words, there's no sign of a trend toward publishing more women. There's a small percentage (less than 0.5% every year) that appears below "Unclassified", which I imagine perhaps corresponds to authors Non-binary people; please excuse the crudeness of distinguishing only between men and women, but these are the data I have. Nor is there a particular preference for women in the grants awarded by the ILC to established writers (if I haven't miscalculated, I'd say 54% have gone to male writers). I've also taken the time to count whether women are translated more than men into other languages, and on this point, yes, in both 2025 and 2024, around 65% of translated works are by women. According to data from the Institut Ramon Llull, 80% of the ten most translated authors between 2022 and 2025 are women. (and the vast majority are from the undervalued children's and young adult literature, of course); but if we take the list of the ten most translated Catalan works of all time, 60% are by female authors.
From all this, I suppose two conclusions can be drawn. The first is that men, accustomed throughout their lives (or rather, throughout history) to dominating the scene, suddenly feel threatened when they see their presence drop from 70% or 80%, even though they remain the majority. It's what we might call a delusion of loss of influence. The second is that, looking at the translation figures (and also, intuiting from the bestseller lists that women are more prevalent), perhaps we can conclude that, in part, what women write is indeed of slightly more interest (although the percentages aren't scandalous to me), but it's not that the executives and editors that Juanma Bajo Ulloa can't stand are interested in feeling that what he does isn't as popular as it used to be. When you're a man, it's not that you have hairy penises. What you have hairy are your testicles, and you'll get a stiff neck from staring at them so much.
