"Fiction should not be comfortable" - acceptable degrees of discomfort?

"Fiction should not be comfortable" one of the judges of this year's Man Booker Prize has been quoted as saying.  The comments were made about the winning book, The Sellout, by Paul Beatty.

But I suspect there are differing degrees of discomfort which are acceptable to editors.  And I strongly suspect that discomforts around feminist issues are far less acceptable.

in my story The Defence of the Wombs I'm writing about attacks on Womb Banks where every human being is now grown.  The story explores the changes that being freed from breeding would create in our society.

And they would be fundamental.  Women would have to look elsewhere than the persona of 'mother' to define their identities.  Most likely the change would trigger a move away from nuclear families and back to "taking a village to raise a child" as the African proverb goes.  But I'm guessing that the changes might be more profound than that, bringing the end of our current "sex is good" culture.  We might well see a whole swathe of society that saw no value in sex whatsoever.

So far, I've not sold that story, despite one editor of a major magazine telling me it was an intriguing concept.  And I have a suspicion that uncomfortable feminist fiction might still be harder to sell than fiction exploring other discomforts.  I can't prove that, but it's a gut feel, and a strong one.

That's why I'd love to see a massive extension of the VIDA concept.  Publishing stats on the number of male and female writers published is a start, but the content of what is being published also needs analysis.  I'm wanting to see a breakdown of the types of stories published, and how many of these feature issues of concern to women.

That would be difficult to do, and involve a massive amount of work.  It isn't just a number-crunching exercise, it requires in-depth analysis.  But until someone does that, there's no way of knowing whether feminist issues are too "uncomfortable" for the magazines to handle.

We need to know if there are some topics that are just too "uncomfortable" for magazines to publish, or whether they are living up to the grand claims of inclusivity spouted in their submission requirements.