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The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars
A NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2019 SELECTION
From “one of the most emotionally exacting, mercilessly candid, deeply funny, and intellectually rigorous writers of our time” (Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild) comes a seminal new book that reaches surprising truths about feminism, the Trump era, and the Resistance movement. You won’t be able to stop thinking about it and talking about it.
In the fall of 2016, acclaimed author Meghan Daum began working on a book about the excesses of contemporary feminism. With Hillary Clinton soon to be elected, she figured even the most fiercely liberal of her friends and readers could take the criticisms in stride. But after the election, she knew she needed to do more, and her nearly completed manuscript went in the trash. What came out in its place is the most sharply-observed, all-encompassing, and unputdownable book of her career.
In this gripping new work, Meghan examines our country’s most intractable problems with clear-eyed honesty instead of exaggerated outrage. With passion, humor, and most importantly nuance, she tries to make sense of the current landscape—from Donald Trump’s presidency to the #MeToo movement and beyond. In the process, she wades into the waters of identity politics and intersectionality, thinks deeply about the gender wage gap, and tests a theory about the divide between Gen Xers and millennials.
This signature work may well be the first book to capture the essence of this era in all its nuances and contradictions. No matter where you stand on its issues, this book will strike a chord.
From “one of the most emotionally exacting, mercilessly candid, deeply funny, and intellectually rigorous writers of our time” (Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild) comes a seminal new book that reaches surprising truths about feminism, the Trump era, and the Resistance movement. You won’t be able to stop thinking about it and talking about it.
In the fall of 2016, acclaimed author Meghan Daum began working on a book about the excesses of contemporary feminism. With Hillary Clinton soon to be elected, she figured even the most fiercely liberal of her friends and readers could take the criticisms in stride. But after the election, she knew she needed to do more, and her nearly completed manuscript went in the trash. What came out in its place is the most sharply-observed, all-encompassing, and unputdownable book of her career.
In this gripping new work, Meghan examines our country’s most intractable problems with clear-eyed honesty instead of exaggerated outrage. With passion, humor, and most importantly nuance, she tries to make sense of the current landscape—from Donald Trump’s presidency to the #MeToo movement and beyond. In the process, she wades into the waters of identity politics and intersectionality, thinks deeply about the gender wage gap, and tests a theory about the divide between Gen Xers and millennials.
This signature work may well be the first book to capture the essence of this era in all its nuances and contradictions. No matter where you stand on its issues, this book will strike a chord.
255 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 22, 2019
141 people are currently reading
3216 people want to read
About the author
Meghan Daum
16 books435 followersMeghan Daum is the author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a personal chronicle of real estate addiction and obsessive fascination with houses, as well as the novel The Quality of Life Report and the essay collection My Misspent Youth. Since 2005 she has written a weekly column for The Los Angeles Times, which appears on the op-ed page every Thursday. She has contributed to public radio's Morning Edition, Marketplace and This American Life and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, Vogue, Self, New York, Travel & Leisure, BlackBook, Harper's Bazaar, The Village Voice, and The New York Times Book Review.
Equal parts reporter, storyteller, and satirist, Meghan has inspired controversy over a range of topics, including social politics, class warfare and the semiotics of shag carpet. She has been widely praised in the press and elicits particular enthusiasm from Amazon.com customer reviewers, who have hailed her work as everything from "brilliant and outrageously funny" to "obnoxious, arrogant, rambling dribble," (sic). Meghan's work is included in dozens of college textbooks and anthologies, including The KGB Bar Reader, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, and The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence.
Born in California in 1970, Meghan was raised primarily on the east coast and is a graduate of Vassar College and the MFA writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. She spent several years in New York City before making her now-infamous move to Nebraska in 1999, where she continued to work as an essayist and journalist and wrote The Quality of Life Report. Meghan has taught at various institutions, including California Institute for the Arts, where she was a visiting artist in 2004 and taught graduate nonfiction writing. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Alan Zarembo, and their sheepdog, Rex
Equal parts reporter, storyteller, and satirist, Meghan has inspired controversy over a range of topics, including social politics, class warfare and the semiotics of shag carpet. She has been widely praised in the press and elicits particular enthusiasm from Amazon.com customer reviewers, who have hailed her work as everything from "brilliant and outrageously funny" to "obnoxious, arrogant, rambling dribble," (sic). Meghan's work is included in dozens of college textbooks and anthologies, including The KGB Bar Reader, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, and The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence.
Born in California in 1970, Meghan was raised primarily on the east coast and is a graduate of Vassar College and the MFA writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. She spent several years in New York City before making her now-infamous move to Nebraska in 1999, where she continued to work as an essayist and journalist and wrote The Quality of Life Report. Meghan has taught at various institutions, including California Institute for the Arts, where she was a visiting artist in 2004 and taught graduate nonfiction writing. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Alan Zarembo, and their sheepdog, Rex
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November 7, 2019
I'm a few years younger than Meghan Daum. Not many; I'm still Generation X. I want my generational credentials known, so that my objections to this book cannot be characterized as millennial snowflake gripes. If you were to ask me, I'd have my own issues with some of the areas she raises. I've read Daum's essays before and enjoyed them; she continues to have a good, conversational style, and I don't mind the personal navel gazing portions of her essays.
I knew I was in for a treat when right in the intro, she says "Feminism has achieved many of its goals." Sure, we have an equal pay act, but we don't actually have equal pay, so that's not so achieved, is it? It managed to exceed my low expectations; I kept picking up my notepad to argue with it. The best things that can be said are that it's brief and that she occasionally shows some personal insight.
This book isn't worth a thorough fisking because of its fundamental shallowness. Daum is interested only in a superficial reading of contemporary feminism as espoused in tweets, hashtags, and clickbait listicles. At no time does she engage with serious contemporary feminist thought or even indicate that she's tried to do so. It's like punching at air: sure, #badass on twitter is irritating, but she doesn't answer or even ask the fundamental question: are pussy hats and Everyday Feminism supposed to *be* feminism? Social media anything is doomed to shallowness. Saying that isn't getting us anywhere in exploring the differing meaning of feminism.
There are legitimate gripes to have with social media culture--the YA twitter dustups that have cancelled books (that their critics haven't always read) are a prime example. The internet "rules of engagement" can be used to quash sincere objections as well as bad faith critics. But there's no real depth to it, only a tirade.
Daum wants there to be a generational divide--and there is, certainly, to some extent. In her mind, the difference is toughness. Those of us who grew up in the 70s had the benefit of a more gender neutral childhood and then learned toughness in the 80s and 90s. Again there's something to the differing gender experiences of GenX and millennials and perhaps more understanding on both sides would be useful. The toughness argument, though? Yes, we tossed it off. We played the cool girl. It didn't pay off for us. Wall Street punished women just as brutally for keeping their heads down. There are generational differences that could be dealt with with nuance. Instead, we get "Young women are doing it wrong."
Daum believes that contemporary feminism is about casting women as permanent victims and denying our own power. I didn't see evidence that she'd even tried to understand her opponents' thought process. My experience has been that women are fueled by anger, not victimhood. Yes, there's a commodification of feminism, a branding, the lazy, hashtag twitter feminism. Plenty of GenXers have had their hand in it. Who created Lean In? Sheryl Sandberg did. She romanticizes her childhood freedom, but the GenX parents raising the "coddled" GenZ of today don't restrict their children solely because of scare stories about stranger danger.
She labels things like using PMS as an excuse "toxic femininity" and equates them to toxic masculinity. Again, lazy and shallow. Yes, women do this; is it worthy of analysis, yes; is it equal, no. At least she doesn't engage with race; it's peak White Feminism, but frankly it would probably have been awful if she had.
Daum perceives her peers, the NPR listening liberals, to be hypocrites who lionize Ta-Nehisi Coates because they feel they have to and will be lambasted online if they don't, while secretly disagreeing. There's something here to internet pressure and virtue signalling--I've witnessed it myself. But instead, she uses it as a springboard for her attraction to "free speech" YouTube, because it engages in different points of view.
In sum, this is 200+ pages of complaining about how the the youth of today are snowflakes and social media is terrible, masquerading as an explanation of culture wars.
I knew I was in for a treat when right in the intro, she says "Feminism has achieved many of its goals." Sure, we have an equal pay act, but we don't actually have equal pay, so that's not so achieved, is it? It managed to exceed my low expectations; I kept picking up my notepad to argue with it. The best things that can be said are that it's brief and that she occasionally shows some personal insight.
This book isn't worth a thorough fisking because of its fundamental shallowness. Daum is interested only in a superficial reading of contemporary feminism as espoused in tweets, hashtags, and clickbait listicles. At no time does she engage with serious contemporary feminist thought or even indicate that she's tried to do so. It's like punching at air: sure, #badass on twitter is irritating, but she doesn't answer or even ask the fundamental question: are pussy hats and Everyday Feminism supposed to *be* feminism? Social media anything is doomed to shallowness. Saying that isn't getting us anywhere in exploring the differing meaning of feminism.
There are legitimate gripes to have with social media culture--the YA twitter dustups that have cancelled books (that their critics haven't always read) are a prime example. The internet "rules of engagement" can be used to quash sincere objections as well as bad faith critics. But there's no real depth to it, only a tirade.
Daum wants there to be a generational divide--and there is, certainly, to some extent. In her mind, the difference is toughness. Those of us who grew up in the 70s had the benefit of a more gender neutral childhood and then learned toughness in the 80s and 90s. Again there's something to the differing gender experiences of GenX and millennials and perhaps more understanding on both sides would be useful. The toughness argument, though? Yes, we tossed it off. We played the cool girl. It didn't pay off for us. Wall Street punished women just as brutally for keeping their heads down. There are generational differences that could be dealt with with nuance. Instead, we get "Young women are doing it wrong."
Daum believes that contemporary feminism is about casting women as permanent victims and denying our own power. I didn't see evidence that she'd even tried to understand her opponents' thought process. My experience has been that women are fueled by anger, not victimhood. Yes, there's a commodification of feminism, a branding, the lazy, hashtag twitter feminism. Plenty of GenXers have had their hand in it. Who created Lean In? Sheryl Sandberg did. She romanticizes her childhood freedom, but the GenX parents raising the "coddled" GenZ of today don't restrict their children solely because of scare stories about stranger danger.
She labels things like using PMS as an excuse "toxic femininity" and equates them to toxic masculinity. Again, lazy and shallow. Yes, women do this; is it worthy of analysis, yes; is it equal, no. At least she doesn't engage with race; it's peak White Feminism, but frankly it would probably have been awful if she had.
Daum perceives her peers, the NPR listening liberals, to be hypocrites who lionize Ta-Nehisi Coates because they feel they have to and will be lambasted online if they don't, while secretly disagreeing. There's something here to internet pressure and virtue signalling--I've witnessed it myself. But instead, she uses it as a springboard for her attraction to "free speech" YouTube, because it engages in different points of view.
In sum, this is 200+ pages of complaining about how the the youth of today are snowflakes and social media is terrible, masquerading as an explanation of culture wars.
October 25, 2019
This book, much like "Coddling of the American Mind" or Katie Herzog's twitter feed (where I first heard of the book) is the sort of thing that I need to read under the cover, when no one is looking. Reading it is a bit like watching pornography, in that I feel like I'm enjoying the comfort of my baser urges, rather than trying to expand my mind or improving myself as a person. It is the sort of book that I am hesitant to read, out of fear that it it will encourage me to give into those baser urges and start complaining about the Left and offending (or at least annoying) the members of my own tribe. I feel particular bad given that, as a straight, white, married, upper-middle class, educated, healthy man, I check pretty much every "privilege" box there is.
Then again, there is only so much BreadTube you can watch before you want some reassurance that you are not alone in thinking that, maybe I'm not quite on board for all of this. In recent weeks in particular, triggered in no small part by CountraPoints being "cancelled" for not having her position on trans rights quite right, I've been feeling particularly reactionary, even if I'm still well within the Liberal camp. It is nice to hear someone else who has never voted for a Republican, who identifies as a liberal, and who generally would like to see the country move a bit left, or at least away from the current Trumpy-GOP, talk about how there are maybe some problems with how the Resistance going about accomplishing that goal.
I'm not quite sure what it says about me that I enjoy this sort of thing, while at the same time feeling bad for doing so. Then again, I think exact conundrum what the book is about. One line from the book, (or at least Daum's article Nuance: a Love Story, from which I believe one of the chapters was at least adapted) really resonated with me, and perhaps goes some way to answer this question. As Daum explains,
So perhaps I feel a little dirty for having read the book, but I definitely enjoyed reading it. I'd recommend it to all my friends if I wasn't so afraid of being judged for doing so.
Then again, there is only so much BreadTube you can watch before you want some reassurance that you are not alone in thinking that, maybe I'm not quite on board for all of this. In recent weeks in particular, triggered in no small part by CountraPoints being "cancelled" for not having her position on trans rights quite right, I've been feeling particularly reactionary, even if I'm still well within the Liberal camp. It is nice to hear someone else who has never voted for a Republican, who identifies as a liberal, and who generally would like to see the country move a bit left, or at least away from the current Trumpy-GOP, talk about how there are maybe some problems with how the Resistance going about accomplishing that goal.
I'm not quite sure what it says about me that I enjoy this sort of thing, while at the same time feeling bad for doing so. Then again, I think exact conundrum what the book is about. One line from the book, (or at least Daum's article Nuance: a Love Story, from which I believe one of the chapters was at least adapted) really resonated with me, and perhaps goes some way to answer this question. As Daum explains,
I would have taken equal if not more delight in criticizing the political right if there was anything remotely interesting or surprising about doing so. But bashing the right, especially in the age of Trumpism, was easy and boring, the conversational equivalent of playing 'Chopsticks' on the piano. Inspecting your own house for hypocrisy was a far meatier assignment.
So perhaps I feel a little dirty for having read the book, but I definitely enjoyed reading it. I'd recommend it to all my friends if I wasn't so afraid of being judged for doing so.
October 23, 2021
Oct. 8, 2021 edit:
Disloyalty to intellectual orthodoxy in our free world doesn’t bear the grim consequences it does under totalitarian regimes. No one will be sent to the gulag for failing to toe the line. But we cannot successfully fight misinformation without the ability to think and speak without fear. How can we discard bad ideas if we cannot discuss and refute them? It is all an attempt to rid us of crime by ridding us of freedom.
Garry Kasparov: What We Believe About Reality - The New York Times - June 2, 2o21
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/sp...
Can't resist adding this article that just came my way. Mr Kasparov's thoughts are among the most level-headed I've come across lately- and a fine addition to what Ms Daum tried to say in this book a few years earlier.
I don’t live in the US, so I’m not familiar with many of the names, organizations and platforms the author mentions. What I am familiar with is her scepticism and bewilderment at the new norms that have been defining the way we think and deal with some of the decidedly ugly and unfair situations that are part of anyone’s life in any era, ever since the concepts of power struggle and self justification started shaping human behavior.
Once more America seems to be setting the tone of mass movements but the rage, verging on hysteria, that goes with it leaves me and many who live across the pond dubious of the level-headedness and methods of those advocating social justice in the 00s.
This book (finally) pushes back against liberal sanctimony and the overuse of political correctness; all the more brave because it comes from someone belonging to the ranks of liberalists. If nothing else she reminds us that “nuance” is still an option, that there IS in fact a “dictatorship of good intentions” as Didion wrote many years ago. And that labels such as misogyny,sexism, white supremacy, sexual harassment have been used with a devil-may-care attitude in recent years, destroying reputations and lives in the blink of an eye - or a Twitter post.
I liked the way she interweaves her opinions with her own life story and doesn’t shy away from admitting to the weariness and scepticism that come with middle age. I’m of her generation and I too am not convinced that barricading behind the vernacular of the collective is the best way to deal with personal rejection, confrontation and other unpleasantnesses that will inevitably come your way, no matter what sex, race, class or ethnicity you belong to.
And it was about time somebody mourned for the demise of humor, the spiky kind that doesn’t conform to the rules of political correctness.
I sincerely hope Meghan Daum hasn’t been expelled from the aforementioned ranks of her country. But then, no, she mustn’t have; after all it’s America, there’s room for everyone and everything including nuance and tolerance- notions that luckily have always found their way against the collective madness.
Disloyalty to intellectual orthodoxy in our free world doesn’t bear the grim consequences it does under totalitarian regimes. No one will be sent to the gulag for failing to toe the line. But we cannot successfully fight misinformation without the ability to think and speak without fear. How can we discard bad ideas if we cannot discuss and refute them? It is all an attempt to rid us of crime by ridding us of freedom.
Garry Kasparov: What We Believe About Reality - The New York Times - June 2, 2o21
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/sp...
Can't resist adding this article that just came my way. Mr Kasparov's thoughts are among the most level-headed I've come across lately- and a fine addition to what Ms Daum tried to say in this book a few years earlier.
I don’t live in the US, so I’m not familiar with many of the names, organizations and platforms the author mentions. What I am familiar with is her scepticism and bewilderment at the new norms that have been defining the way we think and deal with some of the decidedly ugly and unfair situations that are part of anyone’s life in any era, ever since the concepts of power struggle and self justification started shaping human behavior.
Once more America seems to be setting the tone of mass movements but the rage, verging on hysteria, that goes with it leaves me and many who live across the pond dubious of the level-headedness and methods of those advocating social justice in the 00s.
This book (finally) pushes back against liberal sanctimony and the overuse of political correctness; all the more brave because it comes from someone belonging to the ranks of liberalists. If nothing else she reminds us that “nuance” is still an option, that there IS in fact a “dictatorship of good intentions” as Didion wrote many years ago. And that labels such as misogyny,sexism, white supremacy, sexual harassment have been used with a devil-may-care attitude in recent years, destroying reputations and lives in the blink of an eye - or a Twitter post.
I liked the way she interweaves her opinions with her own life story and doesn’t shy away from admitting to the weariness and scepticism that come with middle age. I’m of her generation and I too am not convinced that barricading behind the vernacular of the collective is the best way to deal with personal rejection, confrontation and other unpleasantnesses that will inevitably come your way, no matter what sex, race, class or ethnicity you belong to.
And it was about time somebody mourned for the demise of humor, the spiky kind that doesn’t conform to the rules of political correctness.
I sincerely hope Meghan Daum hasn’t been expelled from the aforementioned ranks of her country. But then, no, she mustn’t have; after all it’s America, there’s room for everyone and everything including nuance and tolerance- notions that luckily have always found their way against the collective madness.
January 24, 2020
I'm about a year younger than the author, attended an equivalent (possibly even more PC) liberal arts college, also used to drive a 20+-year-old Volvo, and my first concert was Laurie Anderson (the song "Excellent Birds" with Peter Gabriel is mentioned a few times) at the Beacon Theater with my mom, who raved about this and bought it for me for Xmas. I really appreciated, first of all, how well Daum writes, how the sentences fly across and down the pages, how she's intelligent and amusing without erring too much on either side or getting too reportorial too often. I felt the impulse to skim a few pages when she for example relayed info about Title IX ramifications in the #MeToo age. It's not that I didn't want to learn -- more so I was so engaged when she was relaying her experience growing up in the totally androgynous sexless 1970s I remember, comparing it to the highly gendered kids today, or when she delivered the insight that we Gen Xers will be the last generation to remember a world unsaturated by technology. Therefore I very much trusted her as my guide to the toxic technology era, something I very much try and fail to limit my exposure to. As a veteran of a super-PC college experience, I too died laughing at Team America (especially its coprophiliac puppet sex scene, probably the funniest thing I've ever seen in a movie theater), and I've rolled my eyes like a Gen Xer presented with the surge of Twittery PC-dom pervasive online, especially when expressed by relative contemporaries who had traditional educational experiences (ie, went to colleges with frats instead of co-ops) and now live online and utter reductive viral virtue-signaling phrases such as "toxic masculinity." Off the top of my head, I can only muster a few such phrases (eg, "virtue signaling") without consulting Twitter, but Daum is down the street and around the corner immersed in that world and therefore a fantastic guide. That's really what this is: a guidebook for at this point somehow older and still mostly analog brains curious about shitstorms in the news originating in the digital but spilling into the real world (although that binary isn't really "relevant" anymore). I also liked how this is the story of her divorce and how she immersed herself in the squirmy horrors of Twitter and later and to a greater extent the nuanced discussions of what she calls Free Speech YouTube. I definitely "relate" to how she still considers herself a feminist democrat but now that she's older has more of an open mind and can't quite abide by the far left automatic online "canceling" of whosoever says or does anything not perfectly PC. It's a book that is certainly about what's happening now, or happened just last year or the year before that, and so I really wonder how it will read in a decade or more. I think it'll endure as a memoir of a woman coming to terms with middle age, divorce, loneliness, and considered at-length articulation of an evolving political sense largely in reaction to partially formed character-restricted virulence all around her online. Thanks, Mom!
January 26, 2020
I keep re-writing this review. I think that shows just how fraught these topics are and how scary it is to imagine being misunderstood on these topics. I keep imagining people reading this review and thinking that I hold regressive or anti-feminist views. I want to hedge hedge hedge, as if any of that will matter. It's probably my longest book review on Goodreads. At times, I feel inclined to overshare extremely personal stories about my own traumas to show that I know that "being tough" is not some panacea, that I know I can't avoid victimization just by avoiding victim-narratives.
Sometimes, in a relationship, you get to this stage where each of your "truths" is harmful to the other person, but where hiding those truths condemns the relationship's future. So you embark on this extremely painful process of revealing things to one another that seem to exacerbate the trouble between you, things that seem to make things worse -- that do make things worse -- in order to create hope for any future. And the whole time you are exposing each other to this horrible pain, you have no idea whether it will actually create space for healing, or if you'll just end up a broken husk of a person and have to end the relationship anyway. If you don't know what I'm talking about, oh man, I hope you never do.
I wonder if this is what women are doing to one another right now. If this is why conversations about feminism with other women can often feel so excruciating, so threatening. Why it's terrifying to deviate from what others think. Why we get so damn angry at one other for daring to have different experiences of womanhood, why we take it personally when some woman employs a different psychological defense to manage the world than our own preferred defense mechanism. Maybe this is what fourth-wave (or whatever) feminism is.
Ever since I discovered Meghan Daum's essays four years ago, I have rated her books three stars. But somehow I also excitedly keep buying her books and devouring them in a matter of days. Of all writers who write about their own lives, I relate most to Daum. I devour her because she articulates ideas I've had trouble articulating. I give her a middle-of-the-pack rating because, like my own thoughts, I'm never quite satisfied with hers.
Like Daum, I am conflicted about everything. I don't so much have opinions as leanings. One of my deepest held beliefs is that it's dangerous to hold beliefs deeply. I am morbidly curious about perspectives that I find abhorrent, and I dig into them with a gusto that likely leaves onlookers wondering whether I've adopted those abhorrent ways of thinking.
Like Daum, I'm a liberal who finds herself critiquing liberal thought frequently while occasionally defending conservative perspectives. Daum writes, "I would have taken equal, if not more, delight in criticizing the political right if there was anything remotely interesting or surprising about doing so." Oh Meghan with an h, this Megan without one feels you there. Many years before Trump, my mind began to go numb every time I listened to a critique of the right. It's all so obvious, all so true, all so very, very boring (Natalie Wynn being the exception that proves the rule). "Bashing the right, especially in the age of Trumpism, was... the conversational equivalent of banging out 'Chopsticks' on the piano."
That boredom with good ideas has fostered the fraught pastime of fishing bad ideas from the disposal, wiping them off, painting over the ugly parts, and repurposing them. The thoughts that emerge aren't elegant, but they aren't dull either.
The response to this book is polarized, and it seems like Meghan Daum intended that, or at least resigned herself to it (she instructs her writing students, "No one will love you unless somebody hates you.") One of the sources of contention is the generational divide she describes between genX feminists and millennial feminists, "We were obsessed with being tough. They are obsessed with being fair."
As an "elder millennial", "xennial", or at least "normal human being that doesn't perfectly fit broad-brush descriptions of any marketing category", I relate most deeply to Daum's "tough" feminists. I feel inspired and empowered, not insulted, when Daum says, "Feminism has achieved many of its goals" (a favorite pull-quote from skoffing critics). Call me crazy, but I like to be reminded of just how much women have accomplished over the last century: the passage of laws around equal pay and reproductive rights, the ability of wives to initiate divorce, access to education for women, etc. This isn't to hang a mission accomplished banner, but rather to reinforce just how much progress we can continue to make if we continue fight for it.
I tend to align myself most with those feminist ideas and policies that empower and inspire me. I don't feel empowered or convinced by the idea that all women must or should naturally be in near constant fear of predation (eg. "This fear of violence is as profound as violence itself because it shapes -- and narrows -- the lives of women in so many small ways: We forgo a nighttime event because we don't want to travel home alone afterward. We forgo an evening jog because running at night is a luxury only men possess.") Brief tangent: this concept is mostly put forth by women of privilege, as many women don't have the luxury of avoiding night shifts or "dangerous" neighborhoods. I spent a lot of time in the "dangerous" neighborhoods of DC and SF fifteen years ago, neighborhoods other women would sometimes tell me were too risky to visit during the day, let alone at night. These neighborhoods are people's homes. And these fears are more often racially and socioeconomically driven than they are gendered.
I don't feel empowered when we talk as though men's lives are enchanted, while ours are beleaguered. I prefer feminist works when they acknowledge men's disproportionate rates of unemployment, homelessness, and social isolation. I prefer feminist works that also analyze how toxic masculinity traps men, how sometimes it works out to women's benefit. (eg. I went to a violent school in 6th grade, where all boys either learned to fight or got beaten up regularly. Most of the girls also got into physical fights on occasion, but girls were also allowed to opt out if they chose. I relished being a girl that year.)
As Daum points out, "... too many women seem to have difficulty understanding why a homeless man who whistles at a young woman as she's off to her fancy internship every morning is not exactly a foot soldier for the patriarchy." There is plenty of great feminist criticism out there that acknowledges the complexity of power dynamics in these kinds of daily interactions, but few people actually read the good, deep, nuanced stuff, compared to those watch "10 hours of walking in NYC as a woman" and leave it there. It's fair to critique Daum for ignoring all the good work out there, but I don't think she mischaracterizes the broad trends.
Like Daum, I feel good when I feel tough and in control, and I don't when I see myself as a victim. When I think about the time a (drunk) late-middle-aged, married professor asked me to drink wine from his mouth and then probably docked my grade after I refused (his grading system was too obscure to know for sure), I feel sad for him, outraged for his wife, but personally unscathed. I was abroad, and my credits transferred as all pass/fail. In my version of the story, he's the impotent, pathetic character. I'm the one with the power to walk away, to humiliate him. I have my youth, my dignity. He has neither. Is this narrative more or less true than the one in which he wielded his patriarchal power within a culture of toxic masculinity to attempt to coerce me sexually? I don't know, but I know which one serves me better.
Daum writes, "I wonder if my real problem with young feminists... is that many of them are insufficiently awed by toughness. They don't boast about it as children. They don't value it inordinately as adults. They refuse to be shamed for vulnerability."
I think Daum's critics miss her irony here and throughout the book. She and I and all our tough feminist peers are so ashamed of our vulnerability, we can't admit to it. We'd rather blame ourselves for the stories where we didn't fare so well than see ourselves as victims. When others are "insufficiently awed by toughness," they strip us of our defenses. How dare they.
I'm not sure the tough/fair or tough/vulnerable dichotomy is really generational. I just think you have some people (including me and Daum) who take pride in toughness, and some people who resent having to be tough. If you've always resented having to be tough, these social changes are a huge relief. You can take off the mask, relax a bit. But if you've developed a sense of pride in your toughness like me, like Daum, then you're losing something right now: you're losing the opportunity to show off, even if only to yourself. To be clear, this is not a "good" emotional response-- I don't believe that emotions are good or bad. They just are. And what I'm describing are two real emotional responses that can set women at odds if we don't listen more carefully to one another.
A lot of critics seem to miss Daum's constant self-critique, self-skepticism, and the complexity of her perspective. But others critique complexity altogether. In a New Yorker review of the book, Emily Witt writes, "Like Daum, I think posting 'Fuck Trump' on Facebook is less helpful than encouraging nonviolence in word and deed. But, to rephrase Didion: to make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone with the certainty to break them. It was people unburdened by Daum’s ideas about 'nuance' who took to the streets after police shootings, and named the men responsible for serial sexual assault and harassment, and insisted on a widespread revision of language to acknowledge our gender identities. It is telling that Daum ignores the positive benefits of these movements, or the real risks to safety and reputation taken by the people who initiated them."
I'm mystified by this critique. Daum refers several times to a campus protest she witnessed while in college at Vassar. On the one hand, she can't imagine herself in their shoes. She acknowledges exactly what Didion suggests: she lacks the certainty to participate. And while she can't and won't find that kind of certainty in herself, she seems to admire it in the protesters: she sees the influence of their demands all over campus 25 years later at her reunion.
I think we need both kinds of people, those that tend towards certainty and the perennially conflicted, to do good work in the world. But hey, I'm on team conflicted, so of course I see it both ways.
More than that, I'm disturbed by the idea that the only way to arrive at certainty is to ignore nuance rather than to acknowledge it, analyse it, and determine that this action still needs to be taken within this complex world. By keeping your eye on those nuances, you are more likely to recognize when you need to course-correct.
I was sad to see Witt's review end with, "[Daum] has proclaimed independence by joining another herd." Witty, but reductive. If Daum has "joined" a herd, it's likely just to see where they take her and to check out the view. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, in fact, I think it is a core-liberal value that we should endeavor to see the world from as many vantage points as possible, to empathize with others rather than to patronize them.
Sometimes, in a relationship, you get to this stage where each of your "truths" is harmful to the other person, but where hiding those truths condemns the relationship's future. So you embark on this extremely painful process of revealing things to one another that seem to exacerbate the trouble between you, things that seem to make things worse -- that do make things worse -- in order to create hope for any future. And the whole time you are exposing each other to this horrible pain, you have no idea whether it will actually create space for healing, or if you'll just end up a broken husk of a person and have to end the relationship anyway. If you don't know what I'm talking about, oh man, I hope you never do.
I wonder if this is what women are doing to one another right now. If this is why conversations about feminism with other women can often feel so excruciating, so threatening. Why it's terrifying to deviate from what others think. Why we get so damn angry at one other for daring to have different experiences of womanhood, why we take it personally when some woman employs a different psychological defense to manage the world than our own preferred defense mechanism. Maybe this is what fourth-wave (or whatever) feminism is.
Ever since I discovered Meghan Daum's essays four years ago, I have rated her books three stars. But somehow I also excitedly keep buying her books and devouring them in a matter of days. Of all writers who write about their own lives, I relate most to Daum. I devour her because she articulates ideas I've had trouble articulating. I give her a middle-of-the-pack rating because, like my own thoughts, I'm never quite satisfied with hers.
Like Daum, I am conflicted about everything. I don't so much have opinions as leanings. One of my deepest held beliefs is that it's dangerous to hold beliefs deeply. I am morbidly curious about perspectives that I find abhorrent, and I dig into them with a gusto that likely leaves onlookers wondering whether I've adopted those abhorrent ways of thinking.
Like Daum, I'm a liberal who finds herself critiquing liberal thought frequently while occasionally defending conservative perspectives. Daum writes, "I would have taken equal, if not more, delight in criticizing the political right if there was anything remotely interesting or surprising about doing so." Oh Meghan with an h, this Megan without one feels you there. Many years before Trump, my mind began to go numb every time I listened to a critique of the right. It's all so obvious, all so true, all so very, very boring (Natalie Wynn being the exception that proves the rule). "Bashing the right, especially in the age of Trumpism, was... the conversational equivalent of banging out 'Chopsticks' on the piano."
That boredom with good ideas has fostered the fraught pastime of fishing bad ideas from the disposal, wiping them off, painting over the ugly parts, and repurposing them. The thoughts that emerge aren't elegant, but they aren't dull either.
The response to this book is polarized, and it seems like Meghan Daum intended that, or at least resigned herself to it (she instructs her writing students, "No one will love you unless somebody hates you.") One of the sources of contention is the generational divide she describes between genX feminists and millennial feminists, "We were obsessed with being tough. They are obsessed with being fair."
As an "elder millennial", "xennial", or at least "normal human being that doesn't perfectly fit broad-brush descriptions of any marketing category", I relate most deeply to Daum's "tough" feminists. I feel inspired and empowered, not insulted, when Daum says, "Feminism has achieved many of its goals" (a favorite pull-quote from skoffing critics). Call me crazy, but I like to be reminded of just how much women have accomplished over the last century: the passage of laws around equal pay and reproductive rights, the ability of wives to initiate divorce, access to education for women, etc. This isn't to hang a mission accomplished banner, but rather to reinforce just how much progress we can continue to make if we continue fight for it.
I tend to align myself most with those feminist ideas and policies that empower and inspire me. I don't feel empowered or convinced by the idea that all women must or should naturally be in near constant fear of predation (eg. "This fear of violence is as profound as violence itself because it shapes -- and narrows -- the lives of women in so many small ways: We forgo a nighttime event because we don't want to travel home alone afterward. We forgo an evening jog because running at night is a luxury only men possess.") Brief tangent: this concept is mostly put forth by women of privilege, as many women don't have the luxury of avoiding night shifts or "dangerous" neighborhoods. I spent a lot of time in the "dangerous" neighborhoods of DC and SF fifteen years ago, neighborhoods other women would sometimes tell me were too risky to visit during the day, let alone at night. These neighborhoods are people's homes. And these fears are more often racially and socioeconomically driven than they are gendered.
I don't feel empowered when we talk as though men's lives are enchanted, while ours are beleaguered. I prefer feminist works when they acknowledge men's disproportionate rates of unemployment, homelessness, and social isolation. I prefer feminist works that also analyze how toxic masculinity traps men, how sometimes it works out to women's benefit. (eg. I went to a violent school in 6th grade, where all boys either learned to fight or got beaten up regularly. Most of the girls also got into physical fights on occasion, but girls were also allowed to opt out if they chose. I relished being a girl that year.)
As Daum points out, "... too many women seem to have difficulty understanding why a homeless man who whistles at a young woman as she's off to her fancy internship every morning is not exactly a foot soldier for the patriarchy." There is plenty of great feminist criticism out there that acknowledges the complexity of power dynamics in these kinds of daily interactions, but few people actually read the good, deep, nuanced stuff, compared to those watch "10 hours of walking in NYC as a woman" and leave it there. It's fair to critique Daum for ignoring all the good work out there, but I don't think she mischaracterizes the broad trends.
Like Daum, I feel good when I feel tough and in control, and I don't when I see myself as a victim. When I think about the time a (drunk) late-middle-aged, married professor asked me to drink wine from his mouth and then probably docked my grade after I refused (his grading system was too obscure to know for sure), I feel sad for him, outraged for his wife, but personally unscathed. I was abroad, and my credits transferred as all pass/fail. In my version of the story, he's the impotent, pathetic character. I'm the one with the power to walk away, to humiliate him. I have my youth, my dignity. He has neither. Is this narrative more or less true than the one in which he wielded his patriarchal power within a culture of toxic masculinity to attempt to coerce me sexually? I don't know, but I know which one serves me better.
Daum writes, "I wonder if my real problem with young feminists... is that many of them are insufficiently awed by toughness. They don't boast about it as children. They don't value it inordinately as adults. They refuse to be shamed for vulnerability."
I think Daum's critics miss her irony here and throughout the book. She and I and all our tough feminist peers are so ashamed of our vulnerability, we can't admit to it. We'd rather blame ourselves for the stories where we didn't fare so well than see ourselves as victims. When others are "insufficiently awed by toughness," they strip us of our defenses. How dare they.
I'm not sure the tough/fair or tough/vulnerable dichotomy is really generational. I just think you have some people (including me and Daum) who take pride in toughness, and some people who resent having to be tough. If you've always resented having to be tough, these social changes are a huge relief. You can take off the mask, relax a bit. But if you've developed a sense of pride in your toughness like me, like Daum, then you're losing something right now: you're losing the opportunity to show off, even if only to yourself. To be clear, this is not a "good" emotional response-- I don't believe that emotions are good or bad. They just are. And what I'm describing are two real emotional responses that can set women at odds if we don't listen more carefully to one another.
A lot of critics seem to miss Daum's constant self-critique, self-skepticism, and the complexity of her perspective. But others critique complexity altogether. In a New Yorker review of the book, Emily Witt writes, "Like Daum, I think posting 'Fuck Trump' on Facebook is less helpful than encouraging nonviolence in word and deed. But, to rephrase Didion: to make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone with the certainty to break them. It was people unburdened by Daum’s ideas about 'nuance' who took to the streets after police shootings, and named the men responsible for serial sexual assault and harassment, and insisted on a widespread revision of language to acknowledge our gender identities. It is telling that Daum ignores the positive benefits of these movements, or the real risks to safety and reputation taken by the people who initiated them."
I'm mystified by this critique. Daum refers several times to a campus protest she witnessed while in college at Vassar. On the one hand, she can't imagine herself in their shoes. She acknowledges exactly what Didion suggests: she lacks the certainty to participate. And while she can't and won't find that kind of certainty in herself, she seems to admire it in the protesters: she sees the influence of their demands all over campus 25 years later at her reunion.
I think we need both kinds of people, those that tend towards certainty and the perennially conflicted, to do good work in the world. But hey, I'm on team conflicted, so of course I see it both ways.
More than that, I'm disturbed by the idea that the only way to arrive at certainty is to ignore nuance rather than to acknowledge it, analyse it, and determine that this action still needs to be taken within this complex world. By keeping your eye on those nuances, you are more likely to recognize when you need to course-correct.
I was sad to see Witt's review end with, "[Daum] has proclaimed independence by joining another herd." Witty, but reductive. If Daum has "joined" a herd, it's likely just to see where they take her and to check out the view. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, in fact, I think it is a core-liberal value that we should endeavor to see the world from as many vantage points as possible, to empathize with others rather than to patronize them.
November 18, 2019
Wtf is this bullshit?!
"Feminism has achieved many of it's goals"
Oh really?🙃
I don't really understand why this book needed to be written, but it's just her babbling her opinions that flip flop and how she's so cool for having these unpopular opinions.🤷🏼♀️
This book should have been a Twitter rant that the author hates so much.
"Feminism has achieved many of it's goals"
Oh really?🙃
I don't really understand why this book needed to be written, but it's just her babbling her opinions that flip flop and how she's so cool for having these unpopular opinions.🤷🏼♀️
This book should have been a Twitter rant that the author hates so much.
November 20, 2019
This is the second book of essays by Meghan Daum that I've read, and I liked it even more than The Unspeakable. Its subject is the post-Trump strain of feminism to which American women these days are expected to subscribe and which since late 2016 has lauded at various points silly things like pussy hats (when I first heard of these, my reaction was, "Really?") and not-so-silly things (Daum relates the story of a male graduate student who was reported for sexual misconduct due to an incident he thought was consensual; while agreeing that no one but the two people involved will ever know the whole truth and that the woman accusing him could have been right, Daum nonetheless dares to ask, "...why do so many young women seem so willing to recast unpleasant or regrettable sex into violative sex?").
Daum is ambivalent about sharing these kinds of doubts. A lifelong liberal and feminist, she states up front that she was terrified to write this book knowing the backlash it would incite. But to her credit, once the writing gets underway, she pulls no punches and states what she thinks with articulate honesty, awareness of her own biases and shortcomings, and acknowledgment that some women have a much harder road than others in terms of sexist treatment.
Her presentation has one flaw: she dwells too much on her self-perceived irrelevance. "What I'm faced with now," she writes, "is a failure to be the right kind of feminist during a time when we're told we can't afford to be the wrong kind...I'm not an emergency-response feminist. I'm not wearing the ovary sweater and the pussy hat like flashing siren lights. I am not refraining from criticizing the #KillAllMen brigades on the grounds that there's a war going on and we can't afford to break ranks. Instead, I'm asking if this is really what feminism should look like."
To me, irrelevance is beside the point. The salient question is, "Is she right?" Overwhelmingly, I think she is. "Not to burst anyone's social-media-induced bubble, but there probably aren't as many evil people out there as some like to insist there are. There might be a lot of assholes, but the number of literal Nazis that walk among us, as with the number of men who hate women, likely doesn't live up to the hype. But I'm beginning to think the culture is effectively mentally ill, or at least notably unwell. I believe there's never been a civilization as emotionally needy as this one. I believe we've never spent more time lying to friends on social media--You look amazing! You're a genius! You're a goddess! You're a badass! You're brave!--for the sole purpose of getting those friends to lie back to us."
In the end, she realizes that everyone, even those trendy young people who enrage her on social media, becomes irrelevant at some point. (I'd add that people of good faith should just....get off of social media...but I know that's just my attitude as another irrelevant Gen Xer.) I'm glad Meghan Daum was willing to be the unpopular voice crying out in the wilderness. Maybe no one else is, but I'm listening.
Daum is ambivalent about sharing these kinds of doubts. A lifelong liberal and feminist, she states up front that she was terrified to write this book knowing the backlash it would incite. But to her credit, once the writing gets underway, she pulls no punches and states what she thinks with articulate honesty, awareness of her own biases and shortcomings, and acknowledgment that some women have a much harder road than others in terms of sexist treatment.
Her presentation has one flaw: she dwells too much on her self-perceived irrelevance. "What I'm faced with now," she writes, "is a failure to be the right kind of feminist during a time when we're told we can't afford to be the wrong kind...I'm not an emergency-response feminist. I'm not wearing the ovary sweater and the pussy hat like flashing siren lights. I am not refraining from criticizing the #KillAllMen brigades on the grounds that there's a war going on and we can't afford to break ranks. Instead, I'm asking if this is really what feminism should look like."
To me, irrelevance is beside the point. The salient question is, "Is she right?" Overwhelmingly, I think she is. "Not to burst anyone's social-media-induced bubble, but there probably aren't as many evil people out there as some like to insist there are. There might be a lot of assholes, but the number of literal Nazis that walk among us, as with the number of men who hate women, likely doesn't live up to the hype. But I'm beginning to think the culture is effectively mentally ill, or at least notably unwell. I believe there's never been a civilization as emotionally needy as this one. I believe we've never spent more time lying to friends on social media--You look amazing! You're a genius! You're a goddess! You're a badass! You're brave!--for the sole purpose of getting those friends to lie back to us."
In the end, she realizes that everyone, even those trendy young people who enrage her on social media, becomes irrelevant at some point. (I'd add that people of good faith should just....get off of social media...but I know that's just my attitude as another irrelevant Gen Xer.) I'm glad Meghan Daum was willing to be the unpopular voice crying out in the wilderness. Maybe no one else is, but I'm listening.
July 18, 2019
I’ll be honest: I loved Daum when I was younger. Lately, she’s had some takes that I don’t love. But I wanted to read this....I skimmed much of it because after the first few chapters, I just couldn’t stomach the tone of this anymore. I guess I should have expected it, given the title of the book - but the condescension and derision were just too much.
January 30, 2020
I understand and respect the attempt to introduce nuance into our thoroughly degraded politics but alas, Daum isn’t up to the task despite believing stridently in her own intellectual rigor. She conflates “the left” and liberalism, decries generational dissonance in an alarmingly ahistorical way, makes wild (and incorrect) claims that some people -like Ben Shapiro!- contribute real value to our discourse, takes shots at those who adored Coates’ popular book while ignoring his far more essential essay on the need for reparations, and has a surprisingly shallow understanding of intersectionality. She strikes me as little more than the typical NPR/Ny Times/TED Talk member of the chattering class who fancies herself an intellectual. In this way, she inadvertently becomes part of the very problem she decries.
December 3, 2019
Meanderings of a middle-aged cynic or the musings of a voice of reason? My vote goes to the latter, though I'm sure the millennials and Gen Ys that inspired this book already have a fatwa on Meghan Daum's life...or maybe they simply consider her and her viewpoints completely irrelevant, unworthy of outrage, a relevant question that she ponders near the end of the book.
So, at the risk of sounding stodgy myself, I'm fucking SICK TO DEATH of what amounts to blanket condemnation of entire groups of people, ideas, corporations, movies, etc...that don't perfectly align with what today's generation considers “woke” and “acceptable,” punishable by intense online bullying and only resolved with the offender goes into hiding or publishes a woefully remorseful apology. Much like the author, I find this kind of cultural surveillance to be sanctimonious and self-righteous and harmful to our culture if we're all forced to self-censor for fear of being attacked by an online mob. How is this a democracy? I fear the left has cleared the way for a kind of purity policing—enforced and amplified by social media—that is sure to backfire somehow or other...We need to stop devouring or own and canceling ourselves.
As Daum points out, it's not necessarily the voice of a generation that she fears, but what amounts to a small and loud minority utilizing social media as a kind of megaphone in which to publicly denounce anyone who doesn't share their particular vision of activism, facts be damned. She takes umbrage with people's branding of themselves as “badasses” and “feminists,” without doing what it takes to earn the title. In her day, she says, you more or less had to escape captivity in North Korea or sit in a Greenpeace raft in the Southern Ocean facing down the harpoon of a Japanese whaling ship in order to be designated a badass. Today, no such bells and whistles are required.
If this sounds like a bit of a rant it is. I'm of Daum's generation, and I'm as equally flummoxed by the massive cultural shift that's happened, seemingly overnight, as she is. I may sound entirely tone-deaf to the issues being discussed in the book, but I think it they are secondary to the point she's trying to make about a perhaps unintended effect of outrage culture, which is that its stultifying people's willingness or ability to express an opinion that doesn't jibe with the very narrow definition of what's considered acceptable and inoffensive. If we shoot down every dissenting opinion by labeling people as “racists” or “misogynists” without listening to the argument and considering its nuances, than we're just as bad as the patriarchy or whatever we claim to be fighting against. How is that not driving people to the brink of insanity?
So, at the risk of sounding stodgy myself, I'm fucking SICK TO DEATH of what amounts to blanket condemnation of entire groups of people, ideas, corporations, movies, etc...that don't perfectly align with what today's generation considers “woke” and “acceptable,” punishable by intense online bullying and only resolved with the offender goes into hiding or publishes a woefully remorseful apology. Much like the author, I find this kind of cultural surveillance to be sanctimonious and self-righteous and harmful to our culture if we're all forced to self-censor for fear of being attacked by an online mob. How is this a democracy? I fear the left has cleared the way for a kind of purity policing—enforced and amplified by social media—that is sure to backfire somehow or other...We need to stop devouring or own and canceling ourselves.
As Daum points out, it's not necessarily the voice of a generation that she fears, but what amounts to a small and loud minority utilizing social media as a kind of megaphone in which to publicly denounce anyone who doesn't share their particular vision of activism, facts be damned. She takes umbrage with people's branding of themselves as “badasses” and “feminists,” without doing what it takes to earn the title. In her day, she says, you more or less had to escape captivity in North Korea or sit in a Greenpeace raft in the Southern Ocean facing down the harpoon of a Japanese whaling ship in order to be designated a badass. Today, no such bells and whistles are required.
If this sounds like a bit of a rant it is. I'm of Daum's generation, and I'm as equally flummoxed by the massive cultural shift that's happened, seemingly overnight, as she is. I may sound entirely tone-deaf to the issues being discussed in the book, but I think it they are secondary to the point she's trying to make about a perhaps unintended effect of outrage culture, which is that its stultifying people's willingness or ability to express an opinion that doesn't jibe with the very narrow definition of what's considered acceptable and inoffensive. If we shoot down every dissenting opinion by labeling people as “racists” or “misogynists” without listening to the argument and considering its nuances, than we're just as bad as the patriarchy or whatever we claim to be fighting against. How is that not driving people to the brink of insanity?
November 5, 2019
5* doesn't mean this is perfect, nor the best essays ever, nor that it didn't read like solipsism on occasion. But much more often it made me want to jump off my couch, scream Yasss!, and pump-fist like an Oscar recipient decrying some slight to deafening applause. Meghan Daum's achievement isn't that she found new insights--I think, or hope, that many more see things similarly without letting on--but that she put them in, well, near perfect prose. It's about time.
December 26, 2019
I am a big Meghan Daum fan -- I've loved everything she's written until this, which I found a bit half-baked. I agree with Daum about some things, especially her observation that people are perpetually performing their wokeness. But isn't that better than people not being woke at all? And aren't people just generally performing EVERYTHING, especially on social media?
It just didn't feel to me like this book needed to be written. Like Daum I'm a Gen-Xer, though younger than her by a few years. I'm also an academic -- historian and women's studies professor -- and I just wasn't convinced by her overly generalized descriptions of generational divides. Sometimes I felt like these were the musings of a person who spent way too much time on Twitter instead of having person-to-person conversations about things other than Trump and #MeToo. Also, yes, I agree with her that both women and men are capable of being shitty to one another, but almost all the evidence demonstrates that men have historically been, and continue to be, shitty to women in some very specific ways that feminism is meant to be addressing. Things are maybe changing incrementally on this front, but there is still enough work to be done that talking about generalized failings of generic genderless human beings is more than a little premature.
It just didn't feel to me like this book needed to be written. Like Daum I'm a Gen-Xer, though younger than her by a few years. I'm also an academic -- historian and women's studies professor -- and I just wasn't convinced by her overly generalized descriptions of generational divides. Sometimes I felt like these were the musings of a person who spent way too much time on Twitter instead of having person-to-person conversations about things other than Trump and #MeToo. Also, yes, I agree with her that both women and men are capable of being shitty to one another, but almost all the evidence demonstrates that men have historically been, and continue to be, shitty to women in some very specific ways that feminism is meant to be addressing. Things are maybe changing incrementally on this front, but there is still enough work to be done that talking about generalized failings of generic genderless human beings is more than a little premature.
August 20, 2019
Meghan Daum's The Problem with Everything is a mess, but at least it knows it. The book opens with back-to-back apologetic messages, one a letter from Gallery Books's Aimée Bell and the other the introduction by Daum, that serve to strap you in for the ride. Daum's intention was to write a pure critique of modern feminism, with the election of Hillary Clinton as the jumping-off point, but Donald Trump's surprise win, along with a few surprise developments in Daum's personal life, threw the project off course. The final product is a ... meditation (Yeah, that'll do) on everything you see on the book's cover: the MeToo movement, rape culture, misogyny, gaslighting, call-out culture, safe spaces, social justice, you name it. Yes, feminism, too.
At its most focused, The Problem with Everything reads like The Coddling of the American Mind minus the charts and as told by an excitable narrator. Where Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff acknowledged numerous times that the highly sensitive college students who began making news in 2015 for yelling at professors over Halloween costumes were perhaps just a blip on the radar, Daum has you believe that the hysterics of Twitter is the new normal, that it all doesn't simply vanish when you, say, close your laptop and go to the grocery store. By the time the book reaches its keep-calm-and-carry-on final paragraphs, you wonder what the big deal was in the first place.
Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books for the ARC in exchange for this review.
At its most focused, The Problem with Everything reads like The Coddling of the American Mind minus the charts and as told by an excitable narrator. Where Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff acknowledged numerous times that the highly sensitive college students who began making news in 2015 for yelling at professors over Halloween costumes were perhaps just a blip on the radar, Daum has you believe that the hysterics of Twitter is the new normal, that it all doesn't simply vanish when you, say, close your laptop and go to the grocery store. By the time the book reaches its keep-calm-and-carry-on final paragraphs, you wonder what the big deal was in the first place.
Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books for the ARC in exchange for this review.
March 16, 2024
I agree with the author and think our level of outrage, “cancel culture”, and how the patriarchy is blamed for a number of problems, when it’s difficult to make a logical connection, is perplexing.
Daum talks about how women are reverting to victimhood when it's unnecessary and unwise to do so. If certain men are so bad, and don't have the power to diminish us, why are feminists punching down instead of up?
Like the author, I am a Gen-Xer. I was born in 1972. In my experience, things weren’t as rosey for women growing up as they were for Daum. I come from a different background and socioeconomic class than the author and I don’t think I can fully support the author’s assertion that things were mostly okay and equal for women. I didn’t think about mental toughness as much as the author. Maybe if I had more mental toughness, or awareness, my experience would have been different.
I agree with the author that scrutiny and nuance has mostly been eliminated from social and mainstream media. The impulse is to blame and shame, and the inclination to group people into either horrible or righteous piles is the new norm.
Read and see what you think. Talk about it with your friends if you’re lucky to have friends to talk about these sorts of ideas. Daum is smart and entertaining and I’ll continue to read everything she writes.
Daum talks about how women are reverting to victimhood when it's unnecessary and unwise to do so. If certain men are so bad, and don't have the power to diminish us, why are feminists punching down instead of up?
Like the author, I am a Gen-Xer. I was born in 1972. In my experience, things weren’t as rosey for women growing up as they were for Daum. I come from a different background and socioeconomic class than the author and I don’t think I can fully support the author’s assertion that things were mostly okay and equal for women. I didn’t think about mental toughness as much as the author. Maybe if I had more mental toughness, or awareness, my experience would have been different.
I agree with the author that scrutiny and nuance has mostly been eliminated from social and mainstream media. The impulse is to blame and shame, and the inclination to group people into either horrible or righteous piles is the new norm.
Read and see what you think. Talk about it with your friends if you’re lucky to have friends to talk about these sorts of ideas. Daum is smart and entertaining and I’ll continue to read everything she writes.
December 1, 2020
I really expected to love this book. I love most books! Most of my ratings are 5 stars, honestly, maybe 4. It doesn't happen often that I read something I truly don't enjoy, but this was... weird. And hard to follow. Repetitive. Basically just a long Facebook rant disguised as a book. I'm still sort of spinning.
I've liked a lot of the author's past work and so looked forward to reading a book of nuance, of grey areas, of the space between extreme ideas. I love books that challenge us to see past the black and white of a situation and contemplate the many small factors that every large problem encompasses. This is not that book.
I am an elder millennial that identifies as progressive or liberal. I'm also more moderate in some ways than many people I know, much slower to outrage or jump to conclusions. I often say I WOULD feel more moderate, except that there are people truly trying to take away rights from and oppress people, so we have to keep fighting for progress in social areas. This is all to say, I'm not a super left-wing SJW, though I'm strong in my convictions that we should try to make the world a better place for all people. Basic stuff, honestly.
So really, I should love this book, I think! But it's so....off. It's so patronizing and irritable. The author basically lumps all young feminists or liberals together into the brand of crazy virtue signaling, hashtag using, overly amped up screaming young people that the media (especially social media) likes to portray us as...."snowflakes" or whatever. She spends half the book reassuring us she's a really, really good person who just sees things more clearly due to her age (which she dedicates a great deal of energy to struggling with as well). She wants us all to show more empathy, but seems to equally hate everyone, deeming men essentially useless, feckless, and insecure, many women "just as toxic" as men (whatever that means), and most people as suspicious, most likely faking whatever they are saying they feel.
I'm not surprised that she often mentions feeling lonely in her life- who on earth does she actually enjoy being around?
This is a ridiculous review. It's too long. I just couldn't leave it unsaid, because instead of making me feel intellectually stimulated, better informed, or really anything positive, this book left me feeling attacked, confused, and irritated.
Another general theme seems to be "my generation of women just laughed off horrible behavior from men, because we were so TOUGH, and it's so annoying younger women want to actually start calling it out." As if they did my generation a favor by letting men get away with sexual assault and workplace harrassment. At one point she lets it be known she thinks something is just different in the "psychology" of women on an evolutionary scale that causes us to make professional decisions differently.... she doesn't explain this, as she doesn't explain many of her little "shock bombs", or add any explanation or help us to understand what this could mean.
I honestly think she's just trying to be edgy and shock. Which irritates me because now I've lost hours of my life essentially reading a long, compiled version of stuff I see people posting on social media just to be contrary. Congratulations, you're so much better than all of us working to make things better in the world. Your cynicism is so cool. Wow, impressive.
I have to also say, for the number of times the author seems to decry how people look for other people to stroke their egos on social media, or say the right things, or post the "right" memes in response to things, she sure is proud of how she found a section of Youtube full of people like her, who think like her, who say things she thinks back to her, and who make her feel less alone by being the same as her. The exact thing everyone does on social media. She's basically built her own echo chamber and is now more sure than ever that she is "right" about everything.
She attempts to be self-deprecating, I think, except I'm not sure she believes it. She definitely says some things I agree with, sure, but I didn't pick up this book to have my own knowledge mirrored back to me. I learned some more in-depth info about certain issues (ex: Title IX sexual assault policies), but she only presents facts or information to back up and reinforce whatever point she is trying to make, offering nothing of both sides, no solutions, no ideas. It's like a perpetual Devil's advocate argument that lasts 200 pages.
I'm sorry she's angry. I'm sorry for her that she feels lonely and irrelevant. I think she could get a lot more traction out of trying to understand what younger generations are actually trying to accomplish and why, however. You can't see the actual grey area in between if you villify the groups on both sides so completely that you refuse to even try to understand their points.
I'm happy for her they had gender-neutral bathrooms when she was younger, how nice, but thinking my generation is ridiculous for celebrating their return after decades of conservatism turning the tides backward and trying to scare people into thinking people who aren't cisgendered are sexual deviants- that's just displaying an acute misunderstanding of the issues. How nice for you that you didn't have to fight for that. We do. We did. We are winning. Dismiss intersectional feminism all you want, but I'm proud of my generation for realizing White women left an awful lot of other women behind. Make fun of us for hyping each other up on social media with words like "badass," but we are choosing to see the problems you are so proud your generation ignored. We could use a little extra boost sometimes, a little camaraderie, to remind ourselves we aren't fighting these battles alone.
I wish her luck. I also wish I had skipped this book. I don't remember the last time I felt that way.
I've liked a lot of the author's past work and so looked forward to reading a book of nuance, of grey areas, of the space between extreme ideas. I love books that challenge us to see past the black and white of a situation and contemplate the many small factors that every large problem encompasses. This is not that book.
I am an elder millennial that identifies as progressive or liberal. I'm also more moderate in some ways than many people I know, much slower to outrage or jump to conclusions. I often say I WOULD feel more moderate, except that there are people truly trying to take away rights from and oppress people, so we have to keep fighting for progress in social areas. This is all to say, I'm not a super left-wing SJW, though I'm strong in my convictions that we should try to make the world a better place for all people. Basic stuff, honestly.
So really, I should love this book, I think! But it's so....off. It's so patronizing and irritable. The author basically lumps all young feminists or liberals together into the brand of crazy virtue signaling, hashtag using, overly amped up screaming young people that the media (especially social media) likes to portray us as...."snowflakes" or whatever. She spends half the book reassuring us she's a really, really good person who just sees things more clearly due to her age (which she dedicates a great deal of energy to struggling with as well). She wants us all to show more empathy, but seems to equally hate everyone, deeming men essentially useless, feckless, and insecure, many women "just as toxic" as men (whatever that means), and most people as suspicious, most likely faking whatever they are saying they feel.
I'm not surprised that she often mentions feeling lonely in her life- who on earth does she actually enjoy being around?
This is a ridiculous review. It's too long. I just couldn't leave it unsaid, because instead of making me feel intellectually stimulated, better informed, or really anything positive, this book left me feeling attacked, confused, and irritated.
Another general theme seems to be "my generation of women just laughed off horrible behavior from men, because we were so TOUGH, and it's so annoying younger women want to actually start calling it out." As if they did my generation a favor by letting men get away with sexual assault and workplace harrassment. At one point she lets it be known she thinks something is just different in the "psychology" of women on an evolutionary scale that causes us to make professional decisions differently.... she doesn't explain this, as she doesn't explain many of her little "shock bombs", or add any explanation or help us to understand what this could mean.
I honestly think she's just trying to be edgy and shock. Which irritates me because now I've lost hours of my life essentially reading a long, compiled version of stuff I see people posting on social media just to be contrary. Congratulations, you're so much better than all of us working to make things better in the world. Your cynicism is so cool. Wow, impressive.
I have to also say, for the number of times the author seems to decry how people look for other people to stroke their egos on social media, or say the right things, or post the "right" memes in response to things, she sure is proud of how she found a section of Youtube full of people like her, who think like her, who say things she thinks back to her, and who make her feel less alone by being the same as her. The exact thing everyone does on social media. She's basically built her own echo chamber and is now more sure than ever that she is "right" about everything.
She attempts to be self-deprecating, I think, except I'm not sure she believes it. She definitely says some things I agree with, sure, but I didn't pick up this book to have my own knowledge mirrored back to me. I learned some more in-depth info about certain issues (ex: Title IX sexual assault policies), but she only presents facts or information to back up and reinforce whatever point she is trying to make, offering nothing of both sides, no solutions, no ideas. It's like a perpetual Devil's advocate argument that lasts 200 pages.
I'm sorry she's angry. I'm sorry for her that she feels lonely and irrelevant. I think she could get a lot more traction out of trying to understand what younger generations are actually trying to accomplish and why, however. You can't see the actual grey area in between if you villify the groups on both sides so completely that you refuse to even try to understand their points.
I'm happy for her they had gender-neutral bathrooms when she was younger, how nice, but thinking my generation is ridiculous for celebrating their return after decades of conservatism turning the tides backward and trying to scare people into thinking people who aren't cisgendered are sexual deviants- that's just displaying an acute misunderstanding of the issues. How nice for you that you didn't have to fight for that. We do. We did. We are winning. Dismiss intersectional feminism all you want, but I'm proud of my generation for realizing White women left an awful lot of other women behind. Make fun of us for hyping each other up on social media with words like "badass," but we are choosing to see the problems you are so proud your generation ignored. We could use a little extra boost sometimes, a little camaraderie, to remind ourselves we aren't fighting these battles alone.
I wish her luck. I also wish I had skipped this book. I don't remember the last time I felt that way.
December 6, 2021
Meghan Daum is old enough — just — to be my mother. She is, in fact, the exact age of my adoptive father's second wife.
Since nearly the entire premise of this work could be retitled "the problem with college-educated twenty-somethings these days," I did find her references to skinny jeans and Tumblr to be hilariously dated. Millennials are no longer the youth generation. When this book was published, 2019, I was a thirty-one-year-old adjunct university instructor (with no benefits or job security, natch), far from being a student myself. So when she says that the world is changing at an accelerating rate, she's not wrong.
When it comes to Gen X re-examinations of #problematic sexual encounters, I found the Katie Roiphe piece about having sex with her rabbi at 15 to be more interesting, for being all the more horrifying to my Pumpkin Spice Girl sensibilities. Daum at her best can take a phenomenon — urban boho-bourgeois indebtedness, most memorably — and make you re-evaluate it. My problem with this book is that there's very little that's fresh here.
Maybe part of my resistance to Daum's implicit message — certainly not her style, which is always lucid —is that I identify far more with Eileen, her try-hard friend whose desk got ejaculated all over. She had no money from her family for college, so she knew she'd have to make perfect grades including in math/science. She sucked it up and "switched out her chair," literally but even figuratively. Daum is unapologetically a snowflake of aesthetics — "Carpet is Mungers" from My Misspent Youth: Essays is almost Sedaris-level in its self-indulgence and commitment to principle (namely, that carpet is a soul-killing, suburban cause of giving up the will to live, like, oh I don't know, "Live Laugh Love" signs or a guy who has a waifu poster above his bed) — so it's interesting that she can't cHeCK hER prIVileGe.
Eileen, like me, didn't really have the choice to follow only her artsy-fartsy interests, so you don't see many of us saying that the real problem in society is that you have to get blasted at a party to whisper that maybe you ... gasp ... listen to John McWhorter. (I mean, really, who doesn't?)
I think this book would be improved by a more thorough examination of the best arguments for the things she seems to not even disagree with that much, but merely find somewhat annoying. The most sympathetic character in the narrative is her ex-husband. I wonder if her love of ironic detachment made her feel that marriage was just a bit, ahem, cheugy. That would be a book I would be interested in reading.
Since nearly the entire premise of this work could be retitled "the problem with college-educated twenty-somethings these days," I did find her references to skinny jeans and Tumblr to be hilariously dated. Millennials are no longer the youth generation. When this book was published, 2019, I was a thirty-one-year-old adjunct university instructor (with no benefits or job security, natch), far from being a student myself. So when she says that the world is changing at an accelerating rate, she's not wrong.
When it comes to Gen X re-examinations of #problematic sexual encounters, I found the Katie Roiphe piece about having sex with her rabbi at 15 to be more interesting, for being all the more horrifying to my Pumpkin Spice Girl sensibilities. Daum at her best can take a phenomenon — urban boho-bourgeois indebtedness, most memorably — and make you re-evaluate it. My problem with this book is that there's very little that's fresh here.
Maybe part of my resistance to Daum's implicit message — certainly not her style, which is always lucid —is that I identify far more with Eileen, her try-hard friend whose desk got ejaculated all over. She had no money from her family for college, so she knew she'd have to make perfect grades including in math/science. She sucked it up and "switched out her chair," literally but even figuratively. Daum is unapologetically a snowflake of aesthetics — "Carpet is Mungers" from My Misspent Youth: Essays is almost Sedaris-level in its self-indulgence and commitment to principle (namely, that carpet is a soul-killing, suburban cause of giving up the will to live, like, oh I don't know, "Live Laugh Love" signs or a guy who has a waifu poster above his bed) — so it's interesting that she can't cHeCK hER prIVileGe.
Eileen, like me, didn't really have the choice to follow only her artsy-fartsy interests, so you don't see many of us saying that the real problem in society is that you have to get blasted at a party to whisper that maybe you ... gasp ... listen to John McWhorter. (I mean, really, who doesn't?)
I think this book would be improved by a more thorough examination of the best arguments for the things she seems to not even disagree with that much, but merely find somewhat annoying. The most sympathetic character in the narrative is her ex-husband. I wonder if her love of ironic detachment made her feel that marriage was just a bit, ahem, cheugy. That would be a book I would be interested in reading.
February 20, 2020
This book has drawn some heat, so in order to properly review it, it might be wise to pop on some boxing gloves. That would make it pretty hard to type, though, so I’ll forge ahead without.
I picked up this book because I fear the progressive left has become a bastion of intolerance. I see entire generations of people screaming into an echo chamber and proudly thinking they’re effecting some kind of meaningful change in the world. I hear insults hurled at anyone who doesn’t subscribe entirely and without reservation to The Doctrine. I talk to people who think the world is purely binary: good and bad, light and dark, us and them. (From these permutations, these people, of course, have correctly deduced The Way.)*
These things are troubling to me, a liberal feminist who believes in nuance, so I was looking forward to reading how Daum tackled them in her book. The answer, cheekily, is nuanced itself. There’s a bit of curmudgeonly “back in MY day!” fist-shaking going in, and occasionally issues get reduced more than they should. But Daum refuses to pretend that everything is simple and straightforward and binary, and in these highly, highly partisan times, we never hear that voice. It’s as if we’re so afraid of ideas or, I don’t know, *ourselves,* maybe, that it’s easier to just follow along with the people who claim to have it all figured out.
I’m either paraphrasing or directly plagiarizing here, but someone once said America likes sides, not subtleties. I didn’t agree with everything Daum said, but I felt happy to be in the company of someone who won’t get on board the Train of Perpetually Outraged Persons.
It’s complicated, though, because there’s a lot to be outraged about. I mean shit, our country is a complete and utter disaster. But how do we fix it? By labeling everyone who doesn’t agree with us an oppressor? That doesn’t seem...fruitful. But then what — do we simply smile and tacitly condone ugliness and hate in the name of civility? I guess the point is you do both, and you do neither. It’s somewhere in between. It’s nuanced, it’s messy, it’s complicated. Just like humanity.
*To be clear, I’m guilty of ALL of these things. It feels so viscerally good, and it provides a fleeting sense of power in a time when I otherwise so often feel power*less.* just saying: I AM WITH YOU. I GET IT!
I picked up this book because I fear the progressive left has become a bastion of intolerance. I see entire generations of people screaming into an echo chamber and proudly thinking they’re effecting some kind of meaningful change in the world. I hear insults hurled at anyone who doesn’t subscribe entirely and without reservation to The Doctrine. I talk to people who think the world is purely binary: good and bad, light and dark, us and them. (From these permutations, these people, of course, have correctly deduced The Way.)*
These things are troubling to me, a liberal feminist who believes in nuance, so I was looking forward to reading how Daum tackled them in her book. The answer, cheekily, is nuanced itself. There’s a bit of curmudgeonly “back in MY day!” fist-shaking going in, and occasionally issues get reduced more than they should. But Daum refuses to pretend that everything is simple and straightforward and binary, and in these highly, highly partisan times, we never hear that voice. It’s as if we’re so afraid of ideas or, I don’t know, *ourselves,* maybe, that it’s easier to just follow along with the people who claim to have it all figured out.
I’m either paraphrasing or directly plagiarizing here, but someone once said America likes sides, not subtleties. I didn’t agree with everything Daum said, but I felt happy to be in the company of someone who won’t get on board the Train of Perpetually Outraged Persons.
It’s complicated, though, because there’s a lot to be outraged about. I mean shit, our country is a complete and utter disaster. But how do we fix it? By labeling everyone who doesn’t agree with us an oppressor? That doesn’t seem...fruitful. But then what — do we simply smile and tacitly condone ugliness and hate in the name of civility? I guess the point is you do both, and you do neither. It’s somewhere in between. It’s nuanced, it’s messy, it’s complicated. Just like humanity.
*To be clear, I’m guilty of ALL of these things. It feels so viscerally good, and it provides a fleeting sense of power in a time when I otherwise so often feel power*less.* just saying: I AM WITH YOU. I GET IT!
October 28, 2020
I gave this book 90 pages, though I nearly abandoned it in the Intro. There is good Meghan Daum writing, like the essays (not the books) My Misspent Youth and The Unspeakable, in which she wrestles with her life choices and voices uncomfortable truths with honesty, like how she got herself into debt by wishful spending, or her mother's death was tedious, not moving. There is bad Meghan Daum writing, like the essay about being an honorary lesbian because she has short hair and doesnt like fripperies. This book falls into the latter camp for me. In it, Daum does not have the critical nuance necessary for complex topics like #MeToo. She spends a great deal of print excoriating outliers, and giving way too much attention to the kind of momentary memes that are sparked by emotion and fizzle out, which I won't perpetuate by repeating here. This is not thoughtful analysis, it's the kind of off-the-cuff lazy criticism that might earn you an admiring nod from centrist white people at a party, but not the morning after. To dismiss microaggressions, claim feminism has "met many of its goals" and that it began in the 1960's, to set up a generational rift, to harp on passing bad choices as if they're legit, are all poor rhetorical choices that had me pulling back, shaking my head, grimacing at the text. Perhaps there is some of the good essayist Meghan Daum in the latter half of the book, but I gave her 90 pages, and that was too much.
November 4, 2019
I struggled with this. I like Daum’s honesty and penchant for self-reflection. The problem with, if not everything, then long chunks of this book is that wit and self-deprecation aren’t nearly enough to make me sense she’s truly considered the arguments of the other side. As a fellow Gen Xer and a lesbian, I also don’t remember the ‘70s to be as liberating for girls as she makes them out to be. Sure, Jody Foster and Kristy McNichol were on our TV screens, but let’s look at who they were allowed to play—girls desperately trying to get laid by boys at summer camp, and/or tomboys who would eventually mature into healthy heterosexuals. That McNichol only came out five years ago, and that Foster condescendingly compared the activists who’d bravely come out decades before she did to Honey Boo-Boo style attention seekers provides a much clearer picture of the reality. Daum herself says nostalgia is a sign of dementia. I can thank this book for assuaging my fears.
January 10, 2020
The author needs to step away from Twitter for like 20 seconds. That's it. I believe in her.
This book is tired, boring, and full of hypocrisy, but that's par for the course for self-described contrarians.
“It’s a burden – not to mention infuriating – to watch social conservative lawmakers try to manage their own sexual demons and clusterfucked value systems by policing the rights of others.”
This book is tired, boring, and full of hypocrisy, but that's par for the course for self-described contrarians.
“It’s a burden – not to mention infuriating – to watch social conservative lawmakers try to manage their own sexual demons and clusterfucked value systems by policing the rights of others.”
September 18, 2019
I love a good essay or two about virtue signalling. Like most books of essays I read (which isn't many), I felt this could have been condensed.
February 11, 2021
This book could have been a tweet
March 31, 2020
Estoy haciendo un informe de lectura, un documento típicamente imparcial, sobre un libro que despierta todo tipo de emociones, muchas de ellas negativas (al menos en mi caso). Esto no quiere decir que este libro esté mal escrito; de hecho, es probable que la autora buscara justamente eso. Si veis puntos flacos al activismo actual, o no, pero os interesa leer un nuevo punto de vista al respecto; si queréis removeros en vuestra silla pensando "Esta mujer hace un flaco favor al feminismo" mientras, a la vez, pensáis "Esta mujer está haciendo un gran favor a la libertad de expresión y a la calidad del debate político e intelectual actual"; si queréis ponerla a parir (porque llevo haciéndolo estos 10 días) pero sabéis que en futuras conversaciones repetiréis sus palabras con convencimiento, leed este libro. Y, por favor, hacedlo rápido, necesito hablar de esta señora con alguien.
December 18, 2021
I have long been a fan of Megan Daum's work, and I'm really torn about this book. I think she does something important in it, which is to ask the questions that progressives, and feminists in particular, often feel they cannot ask while still being true to the cause. She articulates points clearly that I'll admit I've been too uncomfortable at times to think too much about. And she gives some voice to the so often ignored Generation X, which I really appreciate. However, as a "mostly-straight", cisgendered, highly educated white woman, she makes a wise choice to essentially stay in her lane of experience, but I fear that in her efforts to do so, she's in a situation where she never checks her blindspots. Too often in this book, I felt she should have given more acknowledgement to the experiences of people with less privilege than she has. I appreciate that she doesn't try to speak for others, but in some ways her important arguments end up coming off as a little too aloof and maybe a little whiny.
All that said, I know I have felt in recent years that the only wisdom people seem to care about these days is the wisdom of youth, and this book reminded me that life experience matters. So, if you are a Gen X'er and find yourself occasionally scratching your head, wondering if you are becoming crotchety and feeling like arguments about feminism today can be super under-nuanced, you should read this book. I'd love to hear what you think. (3.5 stars)
All that said, I know I have felt in recent years that the only wisdom people seem to care about these days is the wisdom of youth, and this book reminded me that life experience matters. So, if you are a Gen X'er and find yourself occasionally scratching your head, wondering if you are becoming crotchety and feeling like arguments about feminism today can be super under-nuanced, you should read this book. I'd love to hear what you think. (3.5 stars)
November 26, 2019
I'm giving this four stars primarily for Daum's courage in writing this book, not as much for the outcome/execution. She will surely get enough nasty mail without me piling on. She does something in public I am probably not alone in pondering in private -- question some of the touchy cultural issues surrounding the #MeToo movement and beyond.
I don't always agree with her take. (Xx: I like pussy hats - they add a much-needed element of humor/sarcasm/irreverence and diversity to the women's marches, somewhat protecting them from pomposity). And her disenchantment with everything seems heavily colored by her sadness over a pending divorce. Those of us with happier marriages (knock wood) don't necessarily believe that there is a problem with everything -- although there are plenty of problems!
I do agree with other things, like her acknowledgement of "toxic" females (not just "toxic" males) and irritatingly sanctimonious young feminists and the unfortunate way that #MeToo has turned women into "victims" who are not responsible for their own actions/decisions/mistakes.
I was bummed to see that she spent the distressing post-Trump victory period in 2017 teaching at the University of Iowa --- I would have tried to meet her.
I don't always agree with her take. (Xx: I like pussy hats - they add a much-needed element of humor/sarcasm/irreverence and diversity to the women's marches, somewhat protecting them from pomposity). And her disenchantment with everything seems heavily colored by her sadness over a pending divorce. Those of us with happier marriages (knock wood) don't necessarily believe that there is a problem with everything -- although there are plenty of problems!
I do agree with other things, like her acknowledgement of "toxic" females (not just "toxic" males) and irritatingly sanctimonious young feminists and the unfortunate way that #MeToo has turned women into "victims" who are not responsible for their own actions/decisions/mistakes.
I was bummed to see that she spent the distressing post-Trump victory period in 2017 teaching at the University of Iowa --- I would have tried to meet her.
August 3, 2021
My second DNF of the year, which I hate doing since writers work HARD and I feel books need to be finished to gather the full extent of the author’s thrust. Also, it’s my first one-star review in a long time, which I hate doing too because see above about writers working hard, but no one should read this unless you enjoy the solipsistic bombast of right-wing talk radio.
Meghan Daum is salty the world changed, and she thinks contemporary women are a bunch of whiny snowflakes for insisting men behave better. Instead of asking Millennial women why they feel the way they do and interrogating those answers, she spends the three chapters I did read talking about last century where women took it on the chin when a male colleague jizzed on their desk or propositioned them in the work environment. Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense to me either. She also has a lot of opinions about how children are being raised these days although, of course, she has none herself—a point she admits but that doesn’t keep her from sounding off.
Daum is Gen X, but this is your standard, unhinged Boomer rant. Skip it unless that’s your jam.
Meghan Daum is salty the world changed, and she thinks contemporary women are a bunch of whiny snowflakes for insisting men behave better. Instead of asking Millennial women why they feel the way they do and interrogating those answers, she spends the three chapters I did read talking about last century where women took it on the chin when a male colleague jizzed on their desk or propositioned them in the work environment. Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense to me either. She also has a lot of opinions about how children are being raised these days although, of course, she has none herself—a point she admits but that doesn’t keep her from sounding off.
Daum is Gen X, but this is your standard, unhinged Boomer rant. Skip it unless that’s your jam.
March 12, 2020
I wasn't sure what to expect from this book. The author mentions near the beginning that it would be formatted like a long-form essay, which it pretty much was.
The numerous reviews from screeching leftists here convinced me to pull the trigger on this one, to be honest. Take a look at some of the bad reviews on here, if you need to get a sense of what I'm talking about.
Despite my high hopes, there was nothing in this book that I had not heard about long ago. The author mentions a contingent of hysterical pussy-hat wearing #MeToo women, and takes a few well-deserved shots at some of their hyperbole and incoherency. She laments that modern "3rd" and "4th wave" feminism has largely gone off the rails. Good stuff.
While it was not written badly, I guess I was just expecting more from this one.
It is more a story of the author's personal journey navigating the polarized climate of today, than a data-rich book. To be fair, it is titled "My Journey Through the New Culture Wars", so you can't say it pretended to be otherwise...
3.5 stars.
The numerous reviews from screeching leftists here convinced me to pull the trigger on this one, to be honest. Take a look at some of the bad reviews on here, if you need to get a sense of what I'm talking about.
Despite my high hopes, there was nothing in this book that I had not heard about long ago. The author mentions a contingent of hysterical pussy-hat wearing #MeToo women, and takes a few well-deserved shots at some of their hyperbole and incoherency. She laments that modern "3rd" and "4th wave" feminism has largely gone off the rails. Good stuff.
While it was not written badly, I guess I was just expecting more from this one.
It is more a story of the author's personal journey navigating the polarized climate of today, than a data-rich book. To be fair, it is titled "My Journey Through the New Culture Wars", so you can't say it pretended to be otherwise...
3.5 stars.
June 26, 2019
Daum is a powerful thinker and writer - this memoir / cultural commentary comes squarely from her experience as a Generation Xer. Daum writes in the foreword that the book took a long time to finalize, and I almost feel that way writing this review! While I didn't always agree with her thoughts, I'm an Oregon Trail generation person (in between X and Millennials) so it made a lot of sense. And I definitely agreed that there is a problem with everything, and we must tease it apart in order to make positive change... even if we never make change at all, at least we must try. Daum explores the gray areas between the far left and the far right, and challenges the notions of groupthink that dominate today's society.
April 17, 2020
I agree with her on about everything, but I don't think it's a good book. Like a few others have mentioned, these essays have no teeth. She imagines, she wonders, she grapples, she spends a lot of time defending her liberal credentials and inoculating herself from possible criticism while decrying that writers have to do that. I would much rather read a book by someone who goes a little too far but makes me think, like Camille Paglia or Katie Roiphe.
November 13, 2022
Ten stars.
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