A gentle self-help guide disguised as memoir. Its true intention is to mitigate the damage wrought by paternal absence and the larger phenomenon of men abandoning one another. This worthy project is sabotaged by a marketing-minded approach that renders it incoherent ... Hotchkiss insists he hated women with no behavior to support the claim; he insists he had dramatic breakthroughs but then quickly returns to old patterns. Either significant information is being withheld, or the interpretation does not align with the facts ... A narrative so muddled can hardly be persuasive.
He has learned something about the way men subjugate women and why, but we are still fundamentally to him a puzzle to be solved ... Few of the social conditions that affect men now are taken up in Hating Women. Incel culture, dwindling economic conditions, nativism, and racial inequity are hardly mentioned at all ... His book wants us to move toward a new cultural standard. The problem is that he doesn’t seem quite sure of what that means. While he no longer treats women like sex dolls, he instead treats them like goddesses. He’s swapping one kind of object for another. As a culture, we have not outgrown the Madonna-whore complex.
Though readers might balk at some of Hotchkiss’s recommendations...they’ll admire his willingness to address flaws that might otherwise be pinned on lovers or parents. This has its moments.
