Okay a couple of things:

Hi, my name’s Jonathan Franzen and I really don’t see what the uproar is all about.

It was. Also, there were supposed to be other people there. Surprise: it was just the two of us!

I once took a class on humor writing, and the male professor taught a unit on “why women aren’t funny” and how women like Tina Fey overcame that. I brought up that Irma Bombeck was the most read newspaper columnist in this country for years, and the most clipped and pasted on refrigerators. He basically told me that…

Yep. Too many people (including everybody under age 30) confuse brilliance with charisma.

Most of those same men see the woman’s education and creations as ornaments with which they can adorn themselves. It’s easy, as a young woman, to be flattered when a man seems to take an interest in your writing. But trust me, his interest is fueled by the subconscious thought: “I think I deserve an educated…

In fact, the more of an abrasive asshole he is, the more he treats people with contempt and insults and all that shit... the more of a genius he is, the less people even question his brilliance. I mean, if he wasn’t a genius, he wouldn’t dare, right? (He would.)

Same standard also applies to politicians.

Jia, not possessing a MFA, or for that matter a MA - I have to defer to your knowledge to guide me. Halfway through reading this article, I decided to go find out more about this gent, Ellis. I know little of poetry in English, apart from a a few of the classics (dead Englishmen).

Similarly: Male professor is an abrasive bully in class—he’s called “brilliant but tempestuous” or “gruff” or “rough around the edges” but always brilliant. Those same things would be character flaws in evaluations of female teachers (“mean” “bitchy”) and would be cause for discounting her brilliance. But the male…

Bravo. There’s a classic “It’s a trap” situation. If you have emotions - are emotional - then you are a girl and girly and that is fundementally not equal to “us boys” and only girls who reject girliness can be in with us. From the playground onward, you must have masculine taste (I would never read a romance novel or…

What was most annoying was that the male students, who thought of themselves as sensitive men (and probably feminists), were blind to this. When I started to apply for MFA programs, the undergrad prof who was writing my recommendation told me that one potential MFA professor would like me because he “liked pretty…

I was once in an MFA workshop where the male students outnumbered the female, and one unit every single male student wrote a short story with a stripper or prostitute as the only female character, usually a secondary character. Because these writers were deep, man and lived outside the boundaries of respectability,…

Me too. Same. As a young woman I thought of myself as “cool,” because I could “hang” with the dudes. I didn’t think of sex in a needy emotional way! So I fucked all of them and let them treat me like shit, while talking to me about their One True Loves (invariably someone not “cool” who didn’t “hang,” who invariably…

An important literary man expresses his feelings: he’s a genius. A woman does it: she’s a hack, put that lady in a pink cover and call it chick lit.

I haven’t read this entire thing because I’m at work, but let me tell you: the best accidental decision I have ever made in my entire life was to study creative writing at an all women’s college. I can’t say enough good things about my MFA program. I really can’t.

The thought of one of my college professors inviting me over to cook lunch and discuss the local food scene sounds like an abysmal time.

I completed a PhD program in literature in which about half of the students were also published writers or novelists. Because it wasn’t an MFA program, there were no creative writing classes. Instead professors held “salons”. They were all male even though half of the students in the program are female. When women…

I’d be inclined to agree with you but Pounded in the Butt by my own Butt is light years better than 50 shades of Twilight.

Women suck at things, there is no way a woman could write a book series as good as JK Rowling and his Harry Potter series or write music as good as that dude PJ Harvey. They def can’t sing as well…

I went to one of the top MFA fiction programs in the United States. Sexism infected the culture and colored both how the professors treated male vs female students and also how we discussed the work.