Earlier this year, the British writer and illustrator Joanna Walsh made bookmarks featuring 250 of her favorite women writers — from Angela Carter to Zadie Smith — and the Twitter hashtag #ReadWomen2014. She had been inspired by two male journalists who had decided to read more women this year to correct for their own biases. Walsh’s hashtag became a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers, consistently published and reviewed less often in major publications, according to VIDA, a literary organization that tallies gender disparity in bylines.

The proposal to read only (or mostly) women for a year to even the playing field is a good one, I think. But when I did it many years ago, I undertook it as a cure.

In 1988, at the age of 20, I stopped reading men and read only women for a period that lasted almost three years. At the time, I was a student at Wesleyan, taking a course on modernity, and how the mechanization of war changes the roles of men and women. We were reading Paul Fussell, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Marguerite Duras, Simone Weil and Christa Wolf.

This course was also something of an education in male privilege. The evidence, once it was pointed out to me, appeared everywhere — I felt like a character in a science fiction novel who discovers he’s living in a dystopia.