Men Explain Things to Me

Readers already fluent in feminist theory call the analysis basic, one dismissing it outright as “safe pop feminism,” another saying flatly “the ideas are very basic.” A line about veiling in Afghanistan draws repeated fire as a culturally clumsy moment that undercuts the book's authority elsewhere, and a second reviewer says the middle section loses its footing, with the essay pairing Woolf and Sontag singled out as weaker than the opening, one critic noting it “didn't feel to me as universal as the opening essay.” The book is dated to its moment: the Strauss-Kahn case and #YesAllWomen references now read as of-their-year, and at roughly 130 pages in the original edition, some want more follow-through than a short book allows. A sharper worry is persuasion itself, that the more acerbic passages “would be off-putting to men who don't already agree with her.”