Irvine Welsh's Empathy Claim Opens a Fracture Line in Literary Culture

Scottish author Irvine Welsh has published a sequel to Trainspotting — and deployed the launch to make a claim that has predictably reverberated across media. Young men, he said on 16 May 2026, have "lost empathy because they no longer read novels." Women, he added, are "the only ones who read fiction."

The statement landed in the culture-war crossfire before any serious parsing of its empirical basis could occur. Welsh — author of a novel that placed opioid dependency and Edinburgh's underclass at the centre of literary consciousness — is not a neutral observer of masculine behaviour. His work has spent three decades chronicling men who fail, deflect, and destroy. That he has now diagnosed a generation's emotional deficit as a reading problem is worth examining on its own terms, rather than simply as another contribution to the culture wars.

The Claim and Its Context

Welsh made the remarks in the context of publishing Men in Love, a follow-up to Trainspotting that revisits the original's characters in midlife. The El País report that carried the quote gave the statement space without context or contradiction — wire framing that lets the claim sit as received wisdom.

Several claims are bundled together. That young men have "lost empathy" is a moral diagnosis. That fiction-reading drives empathy development is a contested but longstanding hypothesis in literary theory. That women constitute the entirety of fiction's remaining readership is, by any available survey data, an exaggeration that deserves direct examination rather than nodding acceptance.

The OECD's Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies has tracked reading behaviour across member nations for years. Its findings show a consistent gender gap in regular fiction reading — women read more literary fiction than men across virtually every country surveyed — but the gap is not a chasm. Men read. Men read fiction. They read differently, often preferring thrillers, science fiction, and crime to the literary novel, but they read.

Welsh's statement, taken at face value, erases a large portion of male readership to make a rhetorical point. The device is familiar from cultural commentary: universalise a partial observation to make it strike harder. It may generate engagement. It does not survive scrutiny.

What the Data Actually Shows

Reading rates in developed economies have declined over two decades. The Pew Research Center's surveys of American adults show that the share of adults who read any book in a given year dropped from 79 percent in 2002 to 69 percent in 2023. Among 18-to-29-year-olds specifically, the decline is sharper. Screen time has displaced print.

Gender differences in reading are real but narrowing in some cohorts. A 2023 UK Arts Council report found that 53 percent of women reported reading books regularly, compared with 39 percent of men — a significant gap, not a monopoly. Among younger age groups, the gap narrows further when digital reading formats are included.

The empathy question is where Welsh's argument strains most. The hypothesis that fiction-reading produces empathy — sometimes called the "reading fiction makes you a better person" thesis — has been tested and the results are mixed. Studies by psychologist Emanuele Castano and others found that reading literary fiction correlated with improved theory-of-mind performance in experimental settings. But critics, including philosopher Brian Keizer, have noted that these results are modest in effect size and that experimental conditions bear little resemblance to actual leisure reading habits.

Welsh is not citing these studies. He is making an assertion. The mechanisms he implies — that fiction builds the capacity to imagine another person's inner life — are plausible enough to be worth taking seriously. The claim that this capacity has been uniquely lost among young men, and that its loss is traceable to non-reading, is a much larger leap that the available evidence does not support as a general proposition.

The Gendered Framing Problem

"Women are the only ones who read fiction" is the sentence in Welsh's remarks that most requires pushback. It is factually incorrect by any reasonable survey measure. It also performs a cultural exclusion that should concern people who care about fiction's future.

If the argument is that literary fiction has become a gendered genre — that its gatekeepers, reviewers, and marketing apparatus have implicitly coded it as a feminine interest — then Welsh has landed on something genuinely worth discussing. The publishing industry's long-documented bias toward women as assumed literary fiction buyers has shaped acquisitions, covers, and placement in ways that have made some male readers feel fiction is not for them. That is a structural problem, not an inherent quality of the form.

But Welsh's framing does not diagnose a structural problem. It praises women for reading and diagnoses men as deficient. It locates the failure in an absent reader rather than in an industry that made decisions about audience over decades. That framing flatters neither the audience it addresses nor the literature it invokes.

Men who do not read literary fiction are not a monolith. Some read widely in other genres. Some were never taught to engage with literary prose in school. Some found the industry's marketing and retail environments unwelcoming. Some are reading, but reading web fiction, audiobooks, or genre work that does not appear in the surveys that track "fiction reading." The diagnostic precision Welsh implies does not exist.

Stakes and Forward View

The real stake in Welsh's remarks is not whether he is right about reading rates. It is what his framing forecloses.

If fiction-reading is positioned as a feminine activity that men have abandoned, the path to expanding readership runs through masculinity-reclamation projects — "books for blokes," gruff-hero reading lists, marketing campaigns built around the aesthetics of toughness. That approach has a track record in the commercial end of publishing. It sells copies of certain kinds of books.

But it reinforces the gendered sorting that created the problem. It positions literary fiction as the exception rather than the norm, something men must be coaxed into rather than something they naturally inhabit. It treats the absence of male literary fiction readers as a cultural fact rather than a curatorial choice.

An alternative framing — that fiction of all kinds builds the capacity to inhabit perspectives other than one's own, and that this capacity is under pressure from an attention economy designed to keep users in loops of their own preferences — would be broader, more accurate, and more useful. It would not let any gender off the hook. It would locate the problem in the infrastructure of culture rather than in the moral failing of a generation.

Welsh has a sequel to sell. Provocations serve that purpose. The conversation his remarks have generated is worth having. But it deserves better foundations than the claim that women are fiction's sole surviving readers — a claim that flatters one audience, dismisses another, and misreads the data that is actually available.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/elpais/7382