Jennifer Weiner is on a mission. The author of Good in Bed and In Her Shoes is currently on a very public crusade to persuade the New York Times Book Review to give “commercial fiction”—particularly commercial women’s fiction—some respect in the form of reviews.

The issues that Weiner is working at are a complex tangle of literary, gender, and genre topics, and as is often the case with complex topics discussed on the Internet between parties with different priorities and agendas, things often get a little confused in the resulting back-and-forth.

Consider this my attempt to untangle the mess—if only to get it straight in my own head. Here we go:

So, the first thing you need to know if you want to make sense of this ongoing literary dustup is that the problem Jennifer Weiner’s working isn’t really about genre, per se. To be sure, the Times Book Review may have a genre issue, which we’ve talked about elsewhere. When a freelance contributor* for the TBR implies that the only thing at stake in genre fiction is whether or not it “conform[s] to the expectations of its genre or subgenre,” you know that something’s off. Shakespeare wrote some pretty good plays while conforming to the expectations of Elizabethan five-act comedy and tragedy, but nobody claims that his work isn’t worth discussing. TBR‘s position with regard to genre is especially precarious given how porous the borders of genre have become as of late, resulting in absurdities like Marisha Pessl’s Night Film—which hews pretty closely to the conventions of the mystery genre—getting reviewed not once but twice in the pages of the Times, while nearly identical books don’t receive the same treatment due to the accident of their being rather arbitrarily labelled “mystery” rather than “literary thriller.”

That’s a problem—but it’s not (I think) the one that Weiner’s working at. From what I can tell, Weiner’s upset more specifically about the marginalization of women’s fiction and chick lit, the genres that she happens to be most frequently identified with. She has good reason to be upset. As she herself has observed, crime fiction does often get reviewed by the TBR, as do books by male genre writers like Stephen King, John Grisham, and Dan Brown. The TBR‘s preference for “literary” over “genre” fiction may be an issue, but its special disdain for women’s fiction and chick lit signals a gendered response to those specific genres.

The second thing you need to know is that Jennifer Weiner’s struggle is not (just) with the Times Book Review. I’m not sure if Weiner herself would see things this way, though I suspect based on some of her other writing that her feud with the TBR is in fact a beachhead for a broader struggle to gain some respect for commercial women’s fiction in the literary establishment at large.

Let me explain. The TBR‘s ignoring of women’s commercial fiction may be (read: probably is) a bad thing, but it is also the logical outcome of a literary system that’s rigged from top to bottom. The TBR, for good or ill, doesn’t review books because their writers have big audiences, or because they think you might like them, or even, as Weiner has suggested, as charity for literary writers. It reviews books because it thinks that they’re important in some way—because they try to accomplish something interesting thematically, or speak to broader cultural currents, or move the literary conversation forward in some significant way.

And here’s the rub: the TBR doesn’t just decide what books are important, what books are worth reviewing. It looks at what the rest of the literary establishment tells them is going to be important, and makes a guess. And the publishing industry has evolved very standard ways of signaling to the TBR (and book reviews like it) that something is serious, important, and worthy of committing precious inches for a review.

These signals begin with genre categorization—and already here, women’s fiction and chick lit are at a disadvantage. These two categorizations may help female readers find books that they like, but all too often they are used as genre ghettos where books by and for women are isolated and marginalized. How many of these books, if the genders of their authors and characters were flipped, would be categorized as “literary fiction” or simply “fiction”? I suspect quite a few.

Cover art is another big one. Here again, female writers get the worse end of the deal. YA author Maureen Johnson pointed this out in a really awesome way when she put her “Coverflip” challenge before her Tumblr readers. The idea was to take famous books and imagine what the cover would look like if the author’s gender were flipped. The results were amazing: titles by male authors punched up with flowers and dewey meadows, while titles by female authors were given the aura of respectability that they deserved all along.

I could go on, but you get the point. The TBR is at the end of this whole chain—considering what to review by glancing at how the publisher categorizes it, looking at the cover and marketing copy, and then making a guess: is this book important enough, serious enough for the pages of the Times? Over the years, they’ve been trained: this type of genre, of cover, of writer, is worth your time; this type is not.

To change that, we can’t stop at just changing the Times. Though it’s a good place to start.

*Correction: An earlier version of this article suggested that Christopher Beha was a TBR editor. He is in fact a freelance contributor to TBR and other publications.