Was it sexist to publish a "top ten books" list that had no women authors? Or was it simply honest?

FreddyDeus · 2009-11-13T16:00:57+00:00

Doesn't that depend on the motives of the person choosing the books? If women authors were excluded from the list simply because they are women, then yes, it is sexist. If the list compiler chose the books that they genuinely favoured, then no, it isn't sexist.

What's so difficult about that? Unless of course, you are one of those people who is convinced that creating statistical parity is more of a virtue than judging on merit.

Kuonji · 2009-11-13T16:46:54+00:00

In the end, unable to find books by women that we liked better than those five novels, we opted for honesty, which we consider the critic's first responsibility.

gasp....how do they make it through this world?

kragshot · 2009-11-14T01:41:29+00:00

Do they want equality or not?

If they want equality, then they need to stop looking for "hidden sexism" under every rock. Was there a "secret memo" circulated around the P.W. offices saying "...an' make shur ta leave off eny books by teh wimmenz dis yer!"

Give me a frackin' break....

2009-11-13T21:10:50+00:00

Was it sexist to assume that this article was written by a woman before reading it?

Zalenka · 2009-11-13T18:07:02+00:00

Top 10 books should not take into account anything but the quality and content of the writing.

Bananaz · 2009-11-13T16:05:53+00:00

It is a fucking opinion. What kind of silly ass question is that?

masterofshadows · 2009-11-13T19:35:19+00:00

Seeing it in one way, we could say that this has everything to do with personal taste and nothing to do with sexism.

Then another question pops up though. Where does personal taste come from? In libraries I've seen signs with the library rules. Two of the rules are: Girls will read anything boys read and boys will not read anything girls read. So there is in fact some sort of conditioning going on in the literary world as well. With this we could argue that the world-view where boys are cool but girls aren't follow us into adulthood and therefore books by men are more likely to be chosen than books by women.

One would need the number of yearly top ten lists through the ages, number of male to female author ratio on these and actual number of works to chose from and whatnot to be able to get an approximately accurate answer.

Sarcasticus · 2009-11-13T17:49:59+00:00

Call this a generalization if you will, but women do not write good books. With the one exception of "To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.

Title	Was it sexist to publish a "top ten books" list that had no women authors? Or was it simply honest?
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	24
Comments	25
Date	November 13, 2009 3:42 PM UTC (16 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/a41xx/was_it_sexist_to_publish_a_top_ten_books_list/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/was-it-sexist-to-publish-a-top-ten-books-list-that.1052036 https://theredarchive.com/post/1052036

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