For Electric Literature, Sigal Samuel suggests that reading sexist male writes is “compulsory for women writers,” as sexist works can “give insight into the history and logic of sexism”: 

If reading sexist male writers is recommended for women readers, it’s downright compulsory for women writers. We need to be intimately aware of that language, need to speak it backward and forward, so that we can make our own books relevant and, ideally, cleverly subversive to boot.