... electrifying ... that’s where Daum’s going — right to the messy part, where dinner party conversations go to die ... there are few apologies in these 'eight chapters of method-driven meandering,' with 'occasionally inflamed, possibly unhinged gut reactions' (part of the fun, and terror) ... Daum’s analysis of college 'rape culture' should make everyone (at least, Democrats of all ages) unhappy.
A brilliant and witty personal essayist, Daum injects the personal here too ... Daum is far from an all-out Peterson supporter, but her suggestion he has anything reasonable to say will make some dismiss her outright, thereby highlighting her nuance point, part of which is that it’s not necessary to buy into an ideology wholesale ... Daum’s taking-on of the excesses and hypocrisies of #MeToo, gaslighting, intersectionality, cancel culture and the commodification of feminism — nay, the very suggestion that such excesses and hypocrisies exist — will inevitably, wearyingly, rub some the wrong way, and they will say so, especially online, perhaps with an eyeroll GIF. Through my own decidedly Gen-X lens, The Problem with Everything never struck me as contrarian, but rather as a cri de coeur: a brave, necessary and, yes, nuanced, corrective.
Daum’s attraction to exploring whatever can’t be said in public—which she instinctively feels must be the truth, and not just our worst impulses—has at last led her astray ... Reading this book is like reading Twitter for hours on end, which is what Daum admits she has spent most of the past few years doing. Daum has, in the past, been a near-perfect chronicler of the texture of her own experience. The experience she describes most often in this book is the experience of sitting in front of a computer, alone. The most galling moments in The Problem with Everything are the ones that make me wistful for what might have been possible if Daum had pushed herself to go beyond her immediate responses to the outrageous events of the past three years ... Daum is so brilliant that I’m still shocked she hasn’t considered that congratulating yourself for toughness is much less important than making a world where [women's] toughness isn’t necessary ... It’s disappointing, on a personal level ... Since anatomizing her own self-delusions has always been her greatest strength as a writer, it’s also a professional failing.
... instead of documenting her life experiences, something at which she excels, Daum spends far more time arguing over simplified conservative and liberal talking points, exposing her blind spots to the current issues that color our experience: race, gender, capitalism, the internet, and power ... Daum wrestles with 'both sides' of issues in a manner that she would classify as the pursuit of nuance, but too often she just ends up seeming out of touch with people’s everyday lives and excessively attuned to arguments on the interne ... Daum oversimplifies constantly ... Daum is all over the place, arguing against one strawman after the next from a perspective that ends up feeling blinkered ... She’s a bit obsessed with ironic feminism, in fact, citing memes that are nearly a decade old (She mentions 'confused Betty White' GIFs so often that I’m convinced we’re not on the same internet) ... By writing that current feminism is angry, Daum’s arguments have more than a whiff of maternalistic condescension ... What’s frustrating about Meghan Daum is that, ultimately, she is a good writer...But the aimlessness throughout The Problem With Everything is confusing...Exploring 'both sides' is an obsession that doesn’t feel particularly useful or urgent. It seems to me that these times call for action rather than intellectual hedging ... For the first time, Daum’s writing feels evanescent, and that’s because she’s solely interrogating the online world, and not herself. At the heart of things, these incoherent arguments seem to be someone wanting — despite their best instincts — to connect.
If 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.
... a merciless take on modern feminism, woke-ness and cancel culture ... offers plenty of Daum’s trademark zingers ... But Daum’s book is messy; it meanders from topic to topic, and one-liners often stand in for real analysis. Daum spends little time contemplating the kinds of exclusion, injustice and pain that may lie behind the millennial intolerance she decries, and she offers no way forward beyond urging 'empathy' for those 'grappling with the confusions of their own doctrines' ... Too often the book gets bogged down in the same kind of narcissistic palaver Daum derides ... There isn’t much Gen X toughness on display here, and Daum’s detours into bildungsroman don’t enhance her critique of the modern left ... Daum isn’t wrong to worry about the ways in which 'social-justice activism [is] eating itself,' but her book ultimately devolves into a chronicle of navel-gazing — the kind that can only be experienced by those with a bit too much time on their hands, and a bit too much (dare I say) 'privilege' ... It’s particularly hard to know what to make of The Problem with Everything, because Daum ultimately seems to disavow part of her own argument ... 'To be human is to be confused,' Daum opines — but a bit more clarity would have been welcome in what could have been a truly audacious cultural critique.
Daum insists that she was not red-pilled, making few ideological commitments in the book beyond valuing disagreement. Her own 'nuance' seems to preclude commitment to any particular position ... When Daum writes that 'there must be something about being born in the late sixties through seventies that triggered an allergy to earnestness,' I think there is ample evidence—Wes Anderson, Dave Eggers, John Singleton—that she’s wrong ... 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 ... As a reviewer, I start to wonder if I should take the bait. Does light disparagement without reference to fact deserve to be countered? ... Daum complains about the overuse of 'gaslighting' but fails to recognize her own carelessness with language, including her reliance on Internet shorthand. Her book is littered with found phrases, from 'purity policing' to 'virtue signalling' to 'cancel culture.' She has fallen into the right-wing trap of thinking of intersectional theory as a 'doctrine' rather than a frame of reference. She has proclaimed independence by joining another herd.
[Daum's] real beef is not with oppression or inequality, but with millennials who have framed 'Trumpism as a moral emergency that required an all-hands-on-deck, no-deviation-from-the-narrative approach to cultural and political thought' ... Indeed, this could be fodder for an excellent, Salvador-esque examination of political culture in a time of crisis. But no matter how many times Daum invokes the spirit of Didion...she has nothing of Didion’s dispassionate precision. What we get instead are hopped-up rants against pussy hats cut with rueful digressions about menopause and marriage, like a dismal cross between a Bari Weiss op-ed and Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck. ... There are so many potential angles of attack on this deeply silly book that it is hard to know which to choose ... Her argument usually boils down to this: Meghan Daum herself was not directly disadvantaged by systems of oppression, and therefore she has trouble believing they exist ... Astonishingly for a book about feminism in 2019, she fails to discuss in any depth the examples of Harvey Weinstein or Charlie Rose or Les Moonves or even Donald Trump, all of whom have been accused of using their power to abuse women for decades without repercussions. To read her book, you would not think that the problem is the men who have long degraded women, but the women who have finally dared to speak up about it.
Daum's writing is brave and engaging; she does some hard thinking about our times and demands that we do too. Crucially, her insistence on nuance distinguishes her from people on both sides of Trump-era America: She is entirely willing to admit that she doesn't know if she's right.
... the best that can be said about Daum’s meandering tract is that its breezy, conversational tone goes down quick and easy. The worst that can be said is that it reads like a late-in-life coming-of-age story in which this 'straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied, (mostly) heterenormative white chick' giggles whilst unloading politically incorrect knowledge-bombs on her New York peers ... It’s not as if I didn’t find myself nodding in agreement here or there...But Daum, despite her own confidence, never steps up and proves why the world so needed this book—rather than a simple list of hyperlinks to the more robust Salon and New Yorker articles that informed it ... is at its weakest when it gets personal ... Conveniently, her targets are all straw(wo)men and caricatures—loony Social Justice Warriors who wear I DRINK MALE TEARS t-shirts while slaying on Twitter ... certainly she is entitled to her opinions on sexism, racism and whatever else, it would just be nice if they were more enlightening; I swear I’ve heard more eye-opening takes on some of these issues on an episode of Law & Order: SVU ... Daum’s not an insightful guide, and her conversion story is a cliché that she’s mistaken for something singular. She calls this book an 'extended rumination,' which is perhaps a fancy word for a self-righteous, 221-page Twitter thread. In which case: Unfollow.
Many of [Daum's] critiques touch on the surface of ideas without diving fully into them, relying on anecdotes to further her points. While Daum introduces some compelling ideas, such as the watering down of intellectual language to meet the speed of the digital world, some readers may wish for an overall more thorough examination of her arguments’ foundations.
This suspicion of other people’s authenticity underlies much of the book ... Now middle-aged, divorced, childless by choice, and feeling increasingly marginal, the author is dismayed by those whose energetic engagement with social and cultural problems fuels 'the exquisite lie of our own relevance' ... Sharp, brazen, and undeniably controversial.
She is most nuanced and perceptive when looking at the personal; for example, she draws an astute connection between this growing interest and the end of her marriage, and acknowledges that her opinions are informed by 'aging and feeling obsolete.' But the book is largely more cultural in focus ... Fans of Daum’s searching, incisive essays and memoirs will likely be put off; fans of her opinion columns and fellow contrarians may be more receptive.
