Those excerpts from James Woods' review were basically from the bottom up. From the top down here are the rest:

McCarthy is a colossally gifted writer, certainly one of the greatest observers of landscape.
...
There is intense disagreement about McCarthy’s literary status [I didn't know that, I thought he was near-universally well-regarded]...Some readers are alienated by his novels’ punctual appointments with blood-soaked violence. (“No Country for Old Men” opens with a prisoner strangling a sheriff’s deputy with the chain of his handcuffs.) Others think his work bombastic, pretentious, or claustrophobically male-locked: McCarthy has a tendency to omit half the human race from serious scrutiny.

He's right! There are virtually NO women EVEN MENTIONED in Blood Meridian. Thus, perhaps, why there is no sex. OR Because the male sex is the only sex McCarthy cares anything about...Wait a minute. That is beyond odd. NO WOMEN AT ALL! Dickens: didn't write women too good, BUT THERE ARE TONS OF WOMEN IN ALL DICKENS' BOOKS. Hemingway: Hemingway to Martha Gellhorn: "Why aren't you in my bed like a wife should be?!" THAT is misogyny. McCarthy is not misogynistic...Wait...How would we know? He "omits" women. To "omit half the human race" does speak quite a bit to how he views women, as if they don't exist, to how "seriously" he takes them. BUT IT IS NOT IDENTICAL TO "SCRUTINIZING" THEM AND FINDING THEM WANTING. How would we know unless he' a 'Mo?

Seriously, has anybody ever taken a look at McCarthy's work from a sexual preference perspective. It is surpassingly weird that McCarthy entirely "omits" women. Would it not be equally weird for a gay writer to omit all women? It would. Proust was bi- or gay, yet 99% of Remembrance of Things Past is about Proust's crushes on girls. 

But, see, Proust...I see a distinction there. How can I put this?...Proust engaged in affirmative misdirection about his sexual preference. He wrote relentlessly about loving women so that we wouldn't suspect. We know that ruse, that's the ruse of the closeted gay man. McCarthy...Entirely speculative here, okay?...If we think about McCarthy's work from this sexual preference perspective we might start with this question: "What sexual preference is implied by a male writer who entirely omits women from his novels?" Come on, that's big fat "Duh," no? The answer isn't, "We don't know because he doesn't write about women." What about this question: "What sexual preference is implied by a male writer who entirely omits women AND SEX from his novels?"  Now, conjoining those two does suggest with some plausibility asexuality. I guess you could write a novel about rocks, theoretically, you don't have to write a novel about people or living things but that rocks would be the only thing you could write a novel about that didn't involve "the birds and the bees" and you can obviously write a novel about people and omit the birds and the bees thing, Dickens, but how many novelists write about people, don't mention women and don't mention the birds and the bees? Not many. One, maybe; not many. 

[In "No Country for Old Men"] There is a properly male attention to hardware: “a heavybarreled .270 on a ’98 Mauser with a laminated stock”; “the shotgun was a twelve gauge Remington automatic with a plastic military stock and a parkerized finish”; “he unzipped the case and took out a stainless steel .357 revolver and went back to the bed”; “a Tec-9 with two extra magazines and a box and a half of shells.”

I see.

"No Country for Old Men," huh? That's the title of the book? I see. 

I'm ready to rule. I-m-o, we have in Cormac McCarthy an iteration of the gay man's "affirmative misdirection" ploy in which the closeted gay man over-emphasizes-Man! does he over-do it.-his identity as a "real man" with interests only in "real man" stuff like violence, blood, destruction, death, guns and sleeping with his unzipped hardware.