But Roberson is quick to reassure prospective readers that, like most feminists, she does not actually hate men. That is a cheap and easy (if not to say lazy) way of mentioning a current trigger to make her book seem more relevant. And maybe they don’t really get what I’m actually talking about when I say “date,” but it’s a lot closer than if I just started making up my own terms and telling people that some cute guy and I went on a blorg.

We don't have to have universal childcare, we don't have to have mental health services, we don't have to give people time to cook or clean or whatever else because it was assumed forever ago that women would do that stuff. Also, I think that if you picked up a book with a title about hating men, you’re already pretty hip to the ubiquity of sexism and toxic masculinity. Roberson intersperses her observations with references to pop culture, rom-coms, history and philosophy (“How to Date Men…” was inspired by, and is a sort of modern response to “A Lover’s Discourse”, Roland Barthes’s rumination on love, language and self). Both the fun sections, like lists of “flirts” that do and do not work, and potentially illuminating passages, such as one reflecting on her parents’ divorce and whether love is “fake,” are undermined by the fact that Roberson does not have much sustained experience with men and seems to be getting her information from a combination of romantic comedies, friends’ anecdotes, and ambient women’s-magazine wisdom.

Honestly, it’s not the responsibility of the oppressed person to constantly explain the details of their oppression to their oppressor, and it’s not like oppressors don’t have the same Google everyone else does. Pages later, she notes, “The lovely thing about crushes is that they’re not really about the person who is being crushed on at all!

We need to talk about our experiences so that we know what’s normal and so that we can identify patterns of oppression and figure out ways to overturn them.But one very real reason your passport needs to show your entire face/head (which is why you cannot wear, say, a motocycle helmet in your passport photograph) is t There's an actual psychology thing that telling a story multiple times helps crystalize the meaning of that event in your mind. I’ve come to see talking about love as similar to sharing everyone’s salaries, or to holding consciousness-raising sessions.

I recently started reading the book How to Date Men When You Hate Men by Blythe Roberson because I actually wanted to know, how do you do it? I had a best friend (a guy) who I hooked up with a few times, but we spent more time having platonic sleepovers and spending time together during the day more than anything else.

She also satirizes The Rules, the notorious bestseller with archaic advice about how to catch a husband, and seamlessly weaves in pop-cultural references to countless sources. Nothing in life lasts,” she says, citing the end of “Game of Thrones” and the collapse of Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan Tatum’s marriage as evidence. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I really like Harry Styles and Timothee Chalamat (as we all do), but when it comes to men that I actually have a chance of dating, I have a hard time. If you need to analyze someone’s texts to find a reading that means this person is into you, then maybe they aren’t into you. So much of the entertainment that is aimed at women is about men, finding men, appealing to men, etc.