New York Magazine Asks Bunch of Dudes How Big Their Boner Is For Philip Roth

In honor of Philip Roth’s upcoming 80th birthday, New York asked a panel of “30 literati” (including five women, fyi) how much they loved the esteemed novelist. Do they loooooove him? Or do they reeeallllly loooooove him?

I appreciate Roth as much as the next Jewish lit major. But this is insane. Sample questions include: “Does Philip Roth deserve to win the Nobel Prize?” (Everyone said yes, except for Brian Evenson, who gave an obnoxious long-winded variation on “yes”) and “Is Roth a misogynist?” Here’s part of Keith Gessen’s response:

“Does Roth hate women? What does that mean? If you hated women, why would you spend all your time thinking about fucking them? I do think he sometimes thought, as many men have also sometimes thought, that women were a foreign country.”