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I think there might be a confusion from the start, between what we think we do and what we end up doing in reality. Your poll questions, Ea, refers to what we think we do and why we think we do it, so it's only natural that most of us replied there was no bias in their choices. No voluntary or conscious bias, that is.
The truth, of course, is harder to pinpoint. Let's take romance for instance. Women like romance, and romance books are written by women for women. That is the accepted truth, and of course if everybody believes it, it becomes a factual truth, which reinforces the subjective truth. And being written by and for women, it is, naturally, not serious literature, maybe even not literature at all. (Which is true of many of those books, I'm sad to say, having myself a taste for romance, though I hate to see some of the horrible products that are sold as such). And on the other hand, it's perfectly all right for a woman to write romance books on her kitchen table while dinner is cooking, but a woman who takes herself seriously as an author and aspires to write "real" literature is quite another thing. Conditioning from birth will make sure that very few women will even consider that kind of ambition, and then they will have to struggle to be accepted in the literary world.
It doesn't matter much why we think we end up choosing a book. Many of the choices we do are conditioned by collective decisions that are biased (starting with what books are made available and how they are presented to us), and even our personal decisions are probably much more biased than we realize.
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