MixedThe Women’s Review of BooksIf you are a fan of middle-aged white feminists writing from a place of significant privilege who have failed to do much in the way of updating their political thinking since about the time Bikini Kill broke up, Meghan Daum’s latest, The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars is definitely the book for you. On the other hand, if you are a fan of middle-aged white feminists writing from a place of significant privilege who nonetheless manage to do some nuanced thinking about the inevitable excesses and dead ends of sociopolitical justice movements, this is also the book for you. This, in other words, is a deeply flawed and at times infuriating book, but is also a thought-provoking one ... Here’s the thing that bothers me most about this book: so much of what Daum decries is feminism and always has been. To call out today’s call-out culture as unhelpful and un- feminist is betraying nothing more than a rank, possibly willful, ignorance of the ways that feminists (and those in other social change move- ments as well) have often savaged one another with the same passion that gave them the courage to speak out for change in the first place ... Buried in Daum’s unhelpfully ahistorical and occasionally butthurt middle-aged- white-lady exegesis there are regular nuggets of thoughtfully complex exploration ... Ultimately, it is Daum’s call for nuance that rescues this book from its white feminism.
