Having experienced this demoralising treatment while discussing the women-only Orange Prize for fiction with a female novelist, the author Tim Lott took his grievance to the comment pages of the Telegraph.

Lott points out that women dominate publishing and literary agencies, and sell most of the books in a female-dominated market. They are favoured by the most important publishing prize (the Richard and Judy list) and comprise most of the reading groups that drive sales.

In this climate, Lott concludes, "the Orange Prize is sexist and discriminatory, and it should be shunned."

Those who think this issue is irrelevant to anyone outside the ivory towers of literary London should bear in mind that boys perform worse than girls at literacy in schools.

Let's imagine what message exclusively female literary prizes send to working-class boys, who might already think that books are for girls, even without the literary establishment making the point for them.

To stand up to male exclusion, it takes a certain willingness to be labelled as what Lott calls a BUM (Bitter Unhappy Misogynist). When a man complains of sexism, he will inevitably be reminded of the centuries of repression endured by women at the hands of his ancestors.

But this is the intellectual equivalent of being hit on the head. And Lott is right to complain.

The exclusive nature of the Orange prize is not only anti-male, but also, in a way, anti-literature.

Books are one way in which men and women can understand each other better.

Tim Lott may or may not be a BUM, but he's written great novels about the male experience – books you press upon your girlfriend in the hope that she'll understand you better.

This process isn't always easy. A female reader of Philip Roth, for example, won't always like the way she finds her gender represented.

Just as the male reader will need a strong stomach to confront the piercing insights of Rachel Cusk. But when readers take the trouble to reach across the gender divide they come away a little wiser.

Better a cross-gender conversation than a cosy closed circle of books by girls for girls being judged by girls.

Think about your favourite novels. Some of them will be comforting, but others will have also shocked you, given you nightmares, introduced you to a frightening truth.

One series of books that did all that for me was written by a woman – Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, about shell-shocked soldiers in the First World War.

Barker saw men clearly – often at our worst – and yet wrote about us with sympathy and compassion.

That's how literature should be. To treat it like an all-girl's club is not only an insult to men, it also inhibits the scope of the art form itself.