Sexes Be Battlin'!

Two days ago the author Jennifer Weiner (more like Jennifer WHINER am I right JUST KIDDING she has a valid point maybe hang on there) published a blog post in which she alleged that The New York Times is SEXIST. In that they review more books by men than women. GASP wait I mean, yeah, that's probably true. Well, it's probably reflective of systematic sexism in the publishing industry (nay, the world!), which sees dude authors as like, either Intellectual Titans or Fuck Champions or both and which sees female authors as the lady from Sex and The City or Stephenie Meyer or Jodi Picoult or all three (HOLY SHIT let's write a book about VAMPIRES WITH CANCER) but ANYWAY. You can read her post here (on her blog which, like, is there a such thing as Asperger's Syndrome for web design? If so, her blog has that) but she's got some hard data, which is where I sort of took issue with her argument.

Because she alleges that only 41 percent of the books reviewed by the NYT were written by women. Only 41 percent! Well, is 41 percent really a percentage to which we should assign "only"? And then there's the fact that she's talking about an N size of 254 books. That's not many books!

And yesterday, Salon's Teddy Wayne (he sounds like a Pan Am character) published a rebuttal to Weiner, which sadly did not take issue with her N size but instead mounted one of those ugly defenses of the poor white male in American Culture. Well, actually, he mostly just seems to agree with her and then, in the last paragraph, makes the aforementioned ugly defense. And what he does there, more than anything, is compare male authors to male porn stars. I mean, why should Jonathan Franzen shave his balls and then cum all over Jennifer Egan if SHE'S going to get the Pulitzer Prize, right? Huh? Okay, maybe I need to read the article again. Salon really throws me off, man. They always throw in that twist in the last paragraph, like M. Night Shyamalan is their publisher or something. FRANZEN WAS DEAD THE WHOLE TIME.

(And the comments on Teddy Wayne's post (I can't find the comments, if they exist, on Weiner's sub-Drudge Report monstrosity of a site) all read like they were written by the ghosts of Norman Mailer and Charles Bukowski. "I am a middle-aged man writing working-class fiction," one of them says, "and that is an even harder gig." I can't tell if we are joking or not, guys. Are we joking? What is happening here?)