_{Image courtesy of the New York Times}

I don't like to write about sexual politics, honestly.  First of all, I'm a white guy, by default one of the most priviledged people in the country, if not the world.  Yes,  I've worked my behind off to do well, yes I work very hard, yes I've overcome obstacles, blah blah blah.  But the fact of the matter is, being a white guy has opened doors that, by default, would be closed to probably most anyone else.

But some things do bug me when it comes to sexual politics.  In both directions.

Like abortion.  This one seems simple to me:  if men were the ones who got pregnant, this wouldn't even be an issue.   Hell, abortion probably would have been enshrined as the 11th Amendment to the Constitution.  To my mind, there is no way that  abortion would be limited at all if there were a chance that some rich right-wing jerk-weed might get knocked up.  Not a chance.  So to me, every right-wing male rich jerk-weed (every male Republican member of Congress, basically) is a flaming hypocrite on this topic.  And you can bet any amount of money you want that, should one of these rich right-wing jerk-weeds have a pregnant daughter, they're sure as heck going to at least want the choice of having an abortion.  Hell, even Sarah Palin has said that she "chose" to have her Downs Syndrome baby.  Why get amniocentisis if you're not at least considering ending the pregnancy?

Bunch of hypocrites, in my opinion. 

On the flip side, a lot of liberal/progressive folks have said some stuff, and have strained credulity, trying to make their points.  My favorite is Gloria Steinem, who said that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."  And of course later, she got married.  I understand her point, and what she was trying to point out, but when you use language like that, you come across as, well, a hypocrite.  Or a polemicist using language simply to inflame rather than inform.

Similarly, I have to say I was shocked when I found out that, contrary to what I had been taught as a kid, women didn't make 54 cents (or whatever it was; less than 60, anyway) for every dollar compared to a man who worked the same job.  Women made 54 cents for work in a comparable job.  Now, that may be, but to the logical, mathematical statistician in me, that seemed like cheating.  Hey, maybe working in a textile plant is comparable to working in, I dunno, an auto assembly line, so those two wages should be compared, but it certainly feels like cheating.  Cheating to make a point.  Now there's no doubt in my mind--none--that women don't make the same as men for doing the same job, but by arguing comparable jobs rather than the same jobs, you undermine your essential point.

(Yes, I'm sure when they first knocked those stats together there was so much sexism in hiring that you simply couldn't compare what a female vs. male doctor or lawyer made, because there were so few female doctors and lawyers.  But it still feels sneaky and underhanded.) 

And that's the kind of thing I felt when I read a tweet by Laura Miller today.  Here's what Laura tweeted:

Goodreads data confirms women are twice as likely as men to read a book by an author of the opposite gender http://tinyurl.com/4anelxg

I had trouble with this tweet right off the bat.   First of all, it was a follow-up to something Miller wrote about just the other day, which is that there are more men published than women.  "But hey," I thought, "If more men then women are published, then that means women almost have no choice; they'd have to read more male than female authors."  Right?

And then I wondered what books, exactly, this was talking about?  Are we just talking about literary fiction?  Or all fiction?  Or genre fiction?  Or all books in general?  Or what are we talking about, exactly?  And this is important, because it may be true in literary fiction, but not in genre fiction.  Or it may vary widely from genre to genre--for example, I've read that the largest-selling genre is romance novels.  If more women read romance novels than men, and there are more male romance novel authors than women romance novel authors, well, that would skew the numbers quite a bit, I'm sure.

(I think it's a bad idea to limit yourself to "literary" fiction.  No offense to people who want to read "The Corrections" or whatnot, but that leaves out Steven King and Dan Brown and, let's face it, millions of books.  I don't know the percentage of overall book sales are made in "literary" fiction, but I would be pretty surprised if it exceeded, say, 25%.  And talking about only that 25%, while perhaps important, gives you a fairly skewed view of the publishing business overall, in my opinion.) 

So I went ahead and surfed to the article that Miller was pointing at, on goodreads.com.  And I found out that it was a lot like the 54 cents example above:

 In 2010, of all the reviews posted by male users on Goodreads, only 18.3% of them were of books written by women. In contrast, 38.6% of the reviews posted by women were of books written by men. 

I was surprised.  And disappointed, honestly.  Statistics like this--generated from a self-selecting statistical universe, skewed towards a particular audience (readers who both know about Goodreads and decide to post a review)--are essentially worthless.  It's an uncontrolled sample.  It's not all the books that were read; it's all the books that were had a review posted on Goodreads.  I mean, c'mon!

(I'm not even going to get into how big a sample needs to be to draw such large conclusions, partly because the Goodreads writer didn't say.  I'm guessing it's decently-large, but have no way of knowing.) 

Now, I know Laura Miller was constrained by Twitter's 140 character limit, and I know I'm  making an awful lot out of one lonely tweet.  But this is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about above, and yes, it's definitely one of my buttons.  C'mon now; we know there's a big problem here, but let's not distort things or imply things to make them appear differently than they are.  That's the method the Bad Guys use.  Try to be more honest and straightforward, that's all I ask.  Because otherwise, I think you undermine yourself, and that really sucks.  Especially when folks like me agree with your basic point.

(N.B.: I acknowledge the possibility that I completely mis-read Laura Miller's tweet, and that she was not trying to imply that "women are twice as likely as men to read a book by an author of the opposite gender."  And if that's the case, I apologize sincerely, and will apologize to Laura Miller directly [and publicly, if she so desires].)