But there's another issue at play here, gender considerations aside, and that's the nature of the question itself. Should we be looking to fiction for friendship material to begin with? Imagine for a moment that someone wrote an impassioned critique of Crime and Punishment on the basis of Raskolnikov's unworthiness, or denounced Macbeth because Lady Macbeth would likely turn out to be one of those frenemies who invites you for a sleepover and takes the opportunity to poison you and ruin your reputation on the chance your survive, or railed at The Inferno because, out of all of its major players, hardly a one would pass muster as friendship material. You'd dismiss any of those arguments as absurd from the get-go. Judge literature on the merits of its characters-as-my-best-friend material and you lop off the vast majority of the literary canon—and much of modern fiction along with it (goodbye, Jonathan Franzen; farewell, Raymond Carver, J. M. Coetzee, and Orhan Pamuk). Such a reading misses the point entirely.

Conduct that exercise, and you see how inane the question is to begin with. Why in the world would you possibly ask it? The goals of literature are multifold, but creating nice, positive protagonists that you'd want to grab drinks with or invite home to mom can hardly be considered one of them.

But here's the thing. I've never met McCleave, but I would guess that she is far from inane or unperceptive. I'd venture to guess that she simply didn't think twice about her question or its relative merit (or lack thereof) because, well, she was a woman talking to a woman about a woman. As David Daley pointed out in Salon, the question "might not be posed to a male author in quite this way." Nor, I would add, would it be posed the same way by a male interviewer (who would be all too aware of its potential bias) or about a male protagonist (who would be evaluated differently to begin with). McCleave thought herself on safe ground—and ran afoul of the gender biases that tend to permeate our perceptions on a fundamental level, female or no.

I hate writing about gender in literature. Not because I don't think it matters, but because there are others who do it better, on the one hand, and on the other hand, I find that you often have far more productive discussions—and address many of the same issues in a deeper way—when you stop letting gender be a necessary focal point.

Three years ago, Emily St. John Mandel wrote an essay in praise of unlikable characters. There was no gender frame to set her off, no conflict or media flurry to prompt her writing. It is a measured, insightful, engaging piece that deals evenly with men and women, with no other agenda than to talk about the nuance and intrigue that accompany protagonists you wouldn't let within arm's—make that city block's—length of you in real life. In fact, were they to bother you with overtures of friendship, you'd be apt to get a restraining order.