Why We Need Real Critics, Ctd

Michelle Dean, commenting on the recent debate over "niceness" in online literary criticism, says that harshness is a moving target, and something that means very different things to different people. And one of the diving lines is gender:

In retrospect, that a call for being "less nice" would begin with a male critic isn't so surprising: There's a certain male tint to the perspective that life happens on a level playing field, where reason is always triumphant and a hint of bias is a slag on a good man's word, so why can’t we go mano-a-mano and all just have at it? Women, for better or worse, don't have that luxury. They know that the unconscious bias is always there.

Earlier in the thread here.