Occasionally it’s disappointing when my favorite authors act like they just can’t conceive that some women are like them. James Joyce and Neal Stephenson (yeah, yeah, odd juxtaposition) have both irritated me on occasion. I’m Stephen Dedalus, not Molly Bloom. I’m more like the Rogue Hacker of fiction than his cardboard love interest. But, you know, I still love those books, because I’d rather read about characters who share my nature if not my gender.
I like Kerouac (even though he’s shitty to women) and Vollman and Thoreau and Hemingway (even though they’re also shitty to women) because they’re the American individualist tradition, and I’m an American individualist. Albeit one with boobs.

The obligation to have solidarity with other women is something I don’t like… because I’m a person first and then a woman. I know a couple gay guys and Native Americans who have the same attitude about their respective “groups.” In a past generation quite a few black people had that attitude. I just think that you can associate with, or identify with, whomever you prefer.

I agree entirely. I mean, you’re a dude, who writes dude characters, largely for the enjoyment of other dudes. You know that there’s a glut of this out there already, and that it’s often shoved down our throats as the real kind of “good writing”. But how unfair, that women might be tired of it! Just because men tend to write swaths of shitty books about the same thing, over and over, target these books to each other, laud each other for the great “art” they’ve produced, all while writing women in the worst possible ways if at all and refusing to read or acknowledge women’s own writing as anything but trash… that doesn’t mean women can just *stop reading*! I mean, what sort of person, upon realizing that reading certain kinds of books by certain kinds of people are quite likely to make them feel like shit, would then choose to stop reading those books entirely? How sad! What if as many as 1% of those books, like yours, might not be quite as insulting, though still about the same old things and not including women characters or actually making an effort to appeal to women? They’d be missing out on a so-so book that doesn’t have too much overt misogyny in it — but written by a DUDE! My word! How could anyone limit themselves to reading only women and trusted men authors, knowing they could be creating such a hole in their lives?

I wonder, as a writer, is there something you could maybe possibly do to help build a culture that has more books with good female characters, and more books that appeal to women in an intelligent way? Hmm… I thought I had an idea there but I’ve forgotten what it was. Probably wasn’t important, anyway. We should just be happy that a real live man agrees with us. At least in pretense! Enjoy your cookie.