Your bag is empty.
John Waters once famously said, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em.” It’s a quote so iconic and repeated that you can’t even quite find the original context for it—all we know is, he said it. In 2020, however, he delivered an update to the advice for W Magazine: “If they’re cute enough and they don’t have books, eh. I guess I’m a hypocrite,” he conceded.
Perhaps John’s change in attitude is a reaction to the times. This summer, The Atlantic declared that “the end of reading is here.” Substantially fewer Americans are reading for pleasure these days (in fact, they’re more likely to have gambled in the last year than they are to have finished a single book). And in 2025, average reading scores for high school seniors fell to the lowest point since 1992.
We’re also in the midst of a sex recession (perhaps you’ve heard?). I won’t go so far as to say the decline in reading and the decline in sex are connected, but they are both part of a larger trend: as we retreat into our digital world, we’re less and less likely to be doing tangible things that make us feel good. So, let me make a humble suggestion. If you want to get laid, try picking up a book.
For men, reading a book is the easiest possible way to become sexier. That’s true for a few reasons. First: it makes you a rarity. Women today are leaving men in the dust in several respects. We are filling the majority of new jobs, earning more degrees, and we’re beginning to out-earn men, too. We’re also out-reading you—particularly when it comes to fiction. While a good chunk of people are still reading in some capacity, only 38 percent of Americans have read a novel in the last year. Meanwhile, only 25 percent of men have finished a fiction book in that timespan, less than half the rate of women.
If the majority of men today lack the interest or attention span to consider the internal life of others in the way only a book allows, the reading male becomes a niche. And a niche is attractive.
The second reason is related to the first: we now know that you have interest in someone or something outside yourself. Research has found that reading can increase empathy and boost your ability to understand other people in general. In other words, reading shows women that you have the ability and, perhaps, the desire to care about and understand them—and that’s unfortunately not always a given in our current dating landscape.
Now, some may say the reading male is a performative one. He’s doing it because he knows he looks interesting and that women might like it. Well, so what? What’s really so wrong with being someone who wants to appeal to women and actively pursues hobbies that might contribute to said appeal? I’d rather a man crack open some Joan Didion or bell hooks to get some pussy than scroll through manosphere reels to mentally justify why he’s not.
At the end of the day, reading just about any type of book can be sexy. Maybe the sci-fi of Adrian Tchaikovsky or Andy Weir is more your speed, or you find narrative history non-fiction more compelling. Whatever the genre, the point is that reading demonstrates that you’re cultivating some kind of interest, particularly one that doesn’t exist in the confines of your phone. It shows that you’re engaged with the world around you, and probably are interested in being more knowledgeable—you’re bettering yourself. And perhaps more important in the context of dating, it shows that you can listen to the thoughts and ideas of someone other than yourself. And by extension, well, it might just suggest that you are the sort of partner who is attentive to the desires of others. And yes, I mean in the bedroom.
