Can men read women's lit?

I really don't like thinking in terms of men's writers and women's writers, in that I believe one of the great pleasures of reading (and writing) fiction is that novels and stories allow us to experience "the consciousness of the consciousness of another," and I know that this form of mediated experience expands our view of the world and of humanity and makes us more complete and true as humans and as residents of a complicated, global society. Having said all that, some writers do by choice seem to write primarily for one gender or the other - or, more accurately I guess, they write of one gender not the other (and I'm not even getting into the nuances of gender-definition and identity here - just talking in the broadest terms). Kate Walbert, with current story in the New Yorker, has emerged as one of he preeminent contemporary "women's writers," in the best sense of the term - I don't mean this as a delimiting term at all, but just to say that she has been using fiction to explore various aspects of women's consciousness, history, and sensibility. Can men read and learn from her fiction? Yes, I guess so, but I do feel like a bit of an interloper when I do so. I appreciated her novel A Short History of Women but was annoyed by the jumping back and forth in time and the difficult of assembling the pieces into a coherent narrative. Her NYer story also uses this mosaic technique but here with just two narrative strands and she jumps back and forth between current - mom and daughters spend a day in Manhattan - and past, woman breaks up with husband and ponders how to tell the kids. Works reasonably well, but the present is much more fully articulated and dramatically interesting. The dad is a cipher and probably meant to be. Story left me a little cold - but I will tip my hat to the NYer for - for a few weeks in a row now - publishing true short stories rather that snippets from about-to-be published novels. Let the publishers do their own publicity!