At The Stake, we write a lot about women and popular culture. A lot. Particularly issues around equity of representation, access to stories about female characters, how females are portrayed in popular culture, etc. It matters to us here. And to me personally, it has become even more important since the birth of my son a few months back. The language we speak, the cultural air that we breathe, our behavior and attitudes and preferences, are all influenced by what we consume in popular culture. And exposing ourselves only to the male experiences in the world contributes to a culture of rejection, or worse.

Which is not a surprise. If my son grows up never encountering stories about female superheroes, for example, why would he think of men and women as equals? He will learn that men are heroes and women are not.

If my son grows up never encountering stories told by women, why would he think of women as artists of value? He will learn that men make art that matters and women do not.

Some think this issue is behind us. Just this week I was asked why we write so much about women (“you must get a lot of girl readers,” I was told). That’s an easy question to answer: this is a real problem.

David Gilmour, popular novelist and Literary Studies professor at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, reminds us that this is so. Gilmour said in an interview this week that he doesn’t teach female writers. Because he doesn’t like female writers. Here’s Gilmour:

“I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women… Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them… What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.”

I studied literature in undergrad and graduate school. I’ve read and loved the work of all the authors Gilmour names, and I still love reading the biggest names in the canon of 20th century literature (which are mostly white and male). When I hear something like this from a professor, it’s not a surprise. A familiar sentiment, I would imagine, to many of us humanities students. Not in the specifics-no professor I’ve encountered said anything like this-but in attitude. The idea that serious literature worthy of consideration is mostly written by “serious heterosexual guys,” and that the rest is, by omission, unserious and unworthy of study, is not hard to find in academia.

But it’s total bullshit, and we need to call it such.

Gilmour, of course, can read whatever he wants. But he’s a teacher. Teaching from a philosophy predicated on a broad and sweeping rejection of female and homosexual authors deprives Gilmour’s students of interacting with the full human experience. Young men in his classes will embrace this worldview, and will ignore the contribution of 50% of the human species because they are not men. They will ignore all those men who do not merit Gilmour’s absurd qualification of “real guy-guys.”

That will be a real loss, and Gilmour will, at least in part, be responsible for that loss.

In a follow-up interview, Gilmour expressed surprise that his comments were found offensive, and provided a host of excuses for why that was. Some of which are valid, I suppose. When he says “There isn’t a racist or a sexist bone in my body,” I can’t argue. I don’t know him.

But I do know that his classroom is making things worse.

What Gilmour is expressing represents a larger cultural problem than his syllabus. This is a problem not just in our classrooms, but on our televisions and in our movie theaters and in our video games, and it leads to unwelcome, dangerous places. When we reduce literature to “male authors,” then to “serious heterosexual men,” and then to “real guy-guys,” we have closed a necessary, and beautiful and inspiring and educational, window to the world. And we must work actively to open that window for everyone.

Which is why this issue matters so much to The Stake. This same attitude is prevalent in all our popular culture.

We cannot expect our sons, expect Gilmour’s students, to become compassionate adult men who consider the fully actualized reality of women, or gays and lesbians, or any other group unlike ourselves, if we do not expose their minds, imaginations, emotions, and intellects, to stories of and by those individuals.