CULTURE SHOCK:HAVING A womb is an even bigger predictor of an interest in the arts than having a university degree, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Last Saturday afternoon, I spoke at the Book Club Festival in Ennis. The ballroom of the Old Ground hotel was packed. Aside from its obvious good taste, however, the audience had one outstanding peculiarity. Here and there among the serried ranks of readers were dotted a few most curious creatures.
They had evidence of facial hair, if not necessarily of the same substance on their heads. Though it was hard to be certain while they were sitting down, all of them wore trousers. When any of them spoke, their voices seemed a little deeper than the norm. They were, I am almost sure, men. Even if you had to look hard to find them, it was worth the effort because such sightings are increasingly rare at arts events these days.
Today being International Women's Day, it is worth noting one of the most obvious but perhaps least remarked aspect of contemporary arts and literature in Ireland - that they are, overwhelmingly, consumed by women. Michael Colgan, who runs the Gate Theatre, has long remarked that "Women go to the theatre; men are brought." But this anecdotal evidence is now buttressed by stark statistical support.
Last week, the National Economic and Social Forum (NESF) and the ESRI published a report by Peter Lunn and Eilish Kelly, In the Frame or Out of the Picture?, on attendance at arts events. It analyses the data collected for the Arts Council's The Public and the Arts survey conducted in 2006. It confirms and deepens our knowledge that audiences for the arts are drawn most heavily from the well-off, well-educated parts of society. But its most startling revelation is the sheer extent of the gender gap.
Leaving aside popular music and cinema, which women and men attend equally, having a womb is an even bigger predictor of an interest in the arts than having a university degree. "There is," says the report, "no category of arts activity or literature in which men are significantly more likely to attend or read." Women are significantly more likely both to participate in the arts and to attend events.
Women are almost three times as likely to go to a musical, and more than twice as likely to go to a play, an art exhibition, a classical concert, or an opera. They are one and a half times more likely to go to the circus, the panto or a variety show, and to look at a piece of public art. They are over twice as likely to read a novel, a short story or a poem. Even the assumption cherished by publishers that while women read more fiction, men read more non-fiction, turns out to be wrong. Women are one and a half times more likely to read a non-fiction book as men are.
Conversely, and taking all the other variables into account, "the odds that a man read no kind of literature in the previous 12 months are more than double those that a woman did."
This pattern of reading, incidentally, is being passed on to the next generation. The NESF report The Arts, Cultural Inclusion and Social Cohesion, published last year, noted that while almost 70 per cent of girls read every day or most days, only 45 per cent of boys do so.
The fact that this finding mirrors the situation among older age groups cautions against simple explanations such as boys spending more time on their X-boxes. To account for the reality that art and literature in Ireland are now essentially female interests, something much more general has to be going on. The problem is saying what it is.
Some of the obvious explanations don't seem to hold up. The gap doesn't exist, for example, just because women are more likely to bring their children to events - it is actually less pronounced in relation to, say, the circus or the panto than to plays or classical concerts. Nor does the marketing of "chick-lit" elucidate the underlying differences - women don't just read more romantic fiction, they read more of everything.
Nor does the fact that women have more leisure time than men - other evidence suggests that, in general, they have less. The report itself goes no farther by way of explanation than the suggestion that women "appear simply to be more interested".
Maybe asking why women are so much more interested in the arts is the wrong question. The right one might be to ask why men are so much less interested. In a healthy culture, after all, female patterns of participation in the arts could be taken as the norm, and the male pattern as the problem to be discussed.
That, of course, raises a whole other set of questions. Have Sky Sports and Setanta filled the hole in men's lives where Beethoven and Shakespeare used to be?
Has male socialisation become paranoid, so that straight women going to the theatre together are assumed to be friends, while straight men are terrified that if they do likewise, they'll be seen as gay?
Is something in the education (or more likely the exam) system steering boys away from music, art and literature?
I don't know, but it might be worth finding out before the last arty man utters his epitaph: "Feck it, the Champions' League is on the TV, I'll stay in."