This week, Australian Story profiled former NRL player, BookTok creator and fantasy author Luke Bateman. The episode explored his recovery from addiction, his struggles with mental illness and his love of reading, which led to a three-book publishing contract after his BookTok account went viral.

“It was not something that men did,” he said, describing how he hid his childhood love of reading. To address this reading gap, he said, we “want to be writing more stories that boys want to read”. (Though, he reads books by women, and a week ago, posted a BookTok video of himself weeping over a romance novel.)

Bateman’s efforts to encourage boys and men to read is worthy of recognition. However, his online aesthetics, which include hypermasculine Australian tropes such as tractors and blue singlets, suggest he appeals to an audience of women rather than men looking for role models.

Calls like his for more “boy books” are common, and often suggest we need more books on a narrow range of topics “boys love”, like sport, zombies and science. But boys actually read more widely before they reach high school, and have been told over and over what they’re presumed to like. And decades of research shows that boys (and boy protagonists) have long been overrepresented in children’s literature.

Calls for “boys’ books” misdiagnose both the problem and its solutions.

The real problem with boys and reading

International testing is consistently interpreted to show that girls outperform boys in reading tests in almost every participating country, including Australia. This has created widespread, overly simplistic concerns about a........

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