Sometimes men’s treatment of women professionally is like a slow-motion hanging. Women fail, but so slowly. And men make it look mundane.

Take this sequence: A man buys a book. He reads it. Civilized man, right?

No. Let’s lean over and look at what he’s reading.

At least British men have the gall to admit this one. In Canada, men don’t even give it a thought.

A survey just taken on the 10th anniversary of the Orange Prize, the £30,000 literary prize restricted to female authors, reveals that men read books written by men, end of story. Women read books written by both men and women. True, more women buy books, but what matters to me is not dollars, but understanding between the sexes.

The survey revealed that men know the titles of prominent books by female authors and read the reviews, but they just will not/shall not/can’t make me/don’t care if you take away my PlayStation read the damn books.

When pressed (pressed? I would have roped and branded them), the men could not bring themselves to “like” or “admire” a book written by a woman, The Guardian reported. But a male book often was termed “great.” According to them, only men (Jane Austen aside) could write “great” books.

The Guardian suggested that this is why the Orange Prize is damned each year by critics who are astonished that such a mainstream, pedestrian book has won, as opposed to a “great” one, the kind that wins the Man Booker or the testicular Nobel. To them, the Orange winner by definition cannot be great. It was written by a woman.

This was rather the painful point of Carol Shields’s last novel, Unless, a novel that the men said they had heard was good but had not read.

This, by the way, was also the reason for the invention of the Orange Prize, so women could get their oar in.

And Tuesday night, I and many other Canadian women rejoiced. For Lionel Shriver, the American author of the ferocious, utterly original and fearless novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, won the prize.

Kevin‘s popularity was word of mouth. Women at the New York Observer noticed it. I raved about it. Anne Kingston of the National Post threw Ms. Shriver a party at which I gave Lionel a Canadian kitsch gift festival, including a purple plastic hockey stick, which Homeland Security confiscated.

American publishers balked at We Need to Talk About Kevin, a novel about a woman who, against her wiser instincts, gives birth. Meet Kevin, the kind of inventive boy who gives de-eyeballing your little sister a bad name. There’s school shootings and there’s Kevin’s school shootings. Gosh, honey, it’s just his “boy” qualities, her affable husband has always said. He’ll learn.

It was published, just barely, in America and in Britain, the ostensible objection being its violence. “You’d never write Crime and Punishment, lest arrogant young men take axes to miserly crones,” Ms. Shriver told an interviewer. The subtext, though, was that violence is a male subject.

And the problem with Kevin was that it was a shiveringly truthful book with no prettifying. “There are a lot of people out there who hate this book,” Ms. Shriver told the world on prize night.

But she had expected to win, she told the BBC. “I have a narrator who says stuff you’re not supposed to say. People find that a tremendous relief when you say out loud what other people are thinking.”

People are “very hungry” for that kind of truthfulness, she says.

Female truthfulness has until now been seen as Chicklit, with idiot columnists shrieking, “The truth is, we’re really silly.” That isn’t the kind of “truth” I mean.

Because I Said So, the second volume of Mothers Who Think, edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses, has just come out, telling you more truths about motherhood. Take one essay: Blue states parade their moral superiority, but read about the black woman with a white husband who had to leave New York City because she couldn’t survive the visceral open hatred on the street, especially with their gorgeous coffee-coloured baby. I have never read before about the Mississippi-ness of “liberal” New York.

Better yet, buy The Friend Who Got Away, 20 true stories of women’s friendships that exploded, burned or faded out. Women can forget every man they ever slept with and erase a marriage, but they remember their broken female friendships unto the grave. It is an agonizing read, but so revelatory, so instructive. Why was this collection not published until 2005?

The truth is acidic. Those endless Chicken Soup for the Soul messes sell like carpet tiles. Why? Because books like The Friend Who Got Away are only now being published. Writing is a separate world from editing, publishing and marketing.

It does seem that publishers, thanks to Lionel Shriver’s seven-novel trek to a fresh kind of triumph for literature, will see that fiction and memoirs containing glass shards will indeed sell.

Partridges eat gravel. It helps them digest the food already in their stomach. Think of the Female Truth Revolution as something like that. Eat dirt? Are you mad? But it helps your digestion of the unpleasant facts of life.

As for men, I cannot help you if you balk at reading women’s literature, which is growing ever more adventurous. Seeking male truths, I find Donald Rumsfeld press conferences, David Foster Wallace doorstops and Roth after Roth. And the prize goes to . . . them.