Writer Meghan Daum Thinks You Need To Toughen Up

“ IF 2018 WAS the year that the concept of ‘cancel culture’ went mainstream,” writes Meghan Daum near the beginning of The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (Gallery Books), “then 2019 may be the year that cancel culture cancels itself.”

- NICK GILLESPIE

The 49-year-old essayist and novelist writes regularly on feminism, liberalism, and the weaponization of political correctness. In her new book, she contends that “by framing Trumpism as a moral emergency that required an all-hands-on-deck, no deviation-from-the narrative approach to cultural and political thought...the left has cleared the way for a kind of purity policing—enforced and amplified by social media—that is sure to backfire.” The Problem With Everything is her clarion call to chill out and allow people to be more complicated, contradictory, and human.

In October, Daum sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie to discuss generational warfare, the proper role of a writer in society, and why in the end she’s (at least a little bit) optimistic for the future of American political discourse.

Reason: Your book is a critique of fourth-wave feminism. What does that mean and what’s your beef with it?

Daum: I would describe fourth-wave feminism as something social media-based. It has to do with expressions of empowerment and solidarity in terms of memes and hashtags. I started noticing it maybe around 2014, early 2015. It coincided with the issues that were coming up around sexual assault policies on college campuses. But a lot of it was rooted in this idea that we’re going to complain a lot about men and punch up at men.

Who’s “we,” Kemosabe?

These are young women—women in their 20s, women in high school. But a lot of older women and middle-aged women are glomming on to this the way one does if you want to stay with the times. I consider myself a feminist. I have always been a feminist. I’m a liberal—[though] increasingly I’m informed that I am not. But what troubled and interested me was that I had grown up alongside second-wave feminism.