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Update 2024: I got this wrong when I gave it one star in 2019. Yes, Ellis has a gay man's blindness to women's perspectives, and a rich
provocateur's apologism for rich provocateurs, but the meat of the book is Ellis making an earlier-than-most diagnosis of what western progressivism was becoming in the post-Obama years.
'The left was morphing into something it had never been in my lifetime: a morally superior, intolerant, and authoritarian party that was out of touch and lacked any coherent ideology'.
....

The most ok-est boomer-est book you may ever read. A rich white male conservative who has had it good since young adulthood is here to tell you how things are for women and black people and youth, and if you disagree you're probably upholding the cult of victimhood. Marvel at blind privledge as Bret dismisses Black Lives Matter because he doesn't like its 'aesthetics'. Watch as Bret uses his homosexuality as a shield to critique all social empowerment ventures as wussy disempowering victim worship. Hear gay male hot takes on the female experience, such as boys will be boys, critiques of the male gaze are disempowering to women (and hey, if Bret objectified a man then would feminists be as unhappy and if they weren't do they even want equality?), and pornography really exploits the male users because they are sad they can't fuck the woman on their screens. While there are valid criticisms to be made of Millenial cancel culture and the rise of identity politics, none of Bret's jabs land because the nuance of his social critique barely goes beyond yelling 'victimhood' at all things, he's busy patting himself on the back for being a brave Twitter contrarian, he's busy pretending to be an ambivalent centrist while functioning as a Trump apologist, and he's sadly just somehow devolved into a cantankerous Fox News grandpa parody of himself. There are few things to be thankful of that David Foster Wallace didn't live to see, but the sadness of Bret reduced to regurgitating a handful of tired conservative talking points may be one of them.