Hi Dan—

Another reason women are better at these essays: we fucking write one every time we send a work email, only to get a one-liner back or just an “ok.” So many manfeels to navigate!

Same for “serious” “hard-hitting” journalism. I write about the US-Mexico border and refugees, but my pitches about cartels and violence don’t get picked up; they send in men to do stories about how dangerous it is, how violent, how very masculine. Unless I’m writing about sex trafficking or femicides, and then I can…

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.