I& #39;ve been thinking about this a lot recently

Can a writer(or book)truly be considered "great" if its portrayal of women is lazy and incompetent at best, or misogynistic at worse?

Surely if you can& #39;t portray 51% of the population as human beings, you can& #39;t be a "great" writer

And no, "it was a different time" doesn& #39;t hold up as an argument here. Tolstoy& #39;s views about the role of women were definitely informed by the time, but he still wrote women as multi-dimensional people.

And obviously, books written from the point of view of a misogynist are exempt from this discussion as it is a conscious artistic choice. But one does wonder why so many books are written from this perspective.