"If you want to be a great writer, be a man."

I'm a sucker for op-eds that tackle gender issues and writing.

Like this one from Julianna Baggott in the Washington Post, in which she talks about the ways we idolize male writers (yes, even in today's equal-rights world) and leave the women in a pile of chick lit and romance novels.

To quote: "In my grad school thesis, written at 23, you'll find young men coming of age, old men haunted by war, Oedipus complexes galore. If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

No one told me this outright. But I was told to worship Chekhov, Cheever, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Carver, Marquez, O'Brien. . . . This was the dawn of political correctness. Women were listed as concessions. In the middle of my master's, a female writer took center stage with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award -- E. Annie Proulx. Ah, there was a catch. She was writing about men and therefore like a man."

Salon's Broadsheet column has more on this.