For a celebrated and lifelong advice columnist, E. Jean Carroll luxuriates in a depressingly utilitarian view of men. It’s no wonder. They’ve seemed never to treat her as anything more than an object. The logical conclusion of Carroll’s “modest proposal,” her new book What Do We Need Men For?, is that men spent 75 years, from her near infancy to the pinnacle of her career, failing her. But readers also get a clear view of her post-Rawlsian brand of utilitarianism masquerading as feminism.
Woven with rather anodyne anecdotes of Carroll’s 4,099-mile road trip, traversing 30 cities named after women plus Seneca Falls, New York (“as it is the site of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention — the first in the history of the planet — I figure what the hell”), the book is one part memoir and another part road trip. Laced between her lamentations of The Most Hideous Men of Her Life, in which she most notoriously accuses President Trump of rape as well some dozens of others of assault or misconduct, are sometimes poignant, sometimes patronizing conversations Carroll conducts with women from Eden, Vermont, to Verona, Mississippi.
I say “patronizing” not because Carroll slips more than a handful of times in talking down to her interview subjects — a group of Kentucky women are written off as “manic pixie dream girls” for failing to provide a laundry list of desired female presidential candidates, and she balks at a black woman at a gun show — but because Carroll already had an answer for her question.
“You’re only on this Earth for one reason,” Carroll advises two Illinois college students, “To enjoy as many chaps as you can.”
Outside of sex, Carroll finds as many ways to write men off as possible. On its face and given her history, this is with good reason. From her old workplaces to her marriage to John Johnson, bad men have littered and pillaged Carroll’s life from childhood. (Neither Johnson nor any of the witnesses to the aftermath of his alleged abuse have denied Carroll’s allegations.) But Carroll misses the operative word there: bad men.
In an exchange with a Louisiana museum curator, Carroll asks the book’s eponymous question. Men, the curator notes, act as protectors from bad men. Carroll evidently remains unconvinced.
She shouldn’t be. Her world epitomizes the need for good men.
There’s the obvious factor of women’s outright complicity in her abuse. Carroll alleges that as a young child, both her babysitter and her babysitter’s boyfriend sexually abused her, and at just 4 years old, she claims, a girl of 11 or 12 did the same. But as with nearly all of her allegations, Carroll laughs it off. It reads like she has spent a lifetime trying to bury any trauma irreconcilable with a fading, fast-paced world that severed body from spirit.
Which, of course, brings us to the more salient case for men: to balance out the bad ones. From Trump, who categorically denies the allegation with two contemporaneously corroborating witnesses, to Les Moonves and other bosses, Carroll spent her adulthood in constant proximity to the pinnacle of midcentury power. She’s refreshingly unpretentious for a woman who spent her youth celebrated for her beauty and charm and her adulthood surrounded by fame and fashion. But the cast of characters surrounding her exude entitlement in every way. She stands up to multiple of her assailants and harassers, valiantly and without apology, but what difference does it make when the entirety of the Chicago and Manhattan elite all treat people like means to their own perverse ends rather than fellow human beings?
Her book reads less as an indictment of the pursuit of pleasure and more as one of the penchant to compartmentalize it from basic human dignity and respect. Today, Carroll lives in a cabin in the woods of the Wawayanda Mountains of the Hudson Valley, accompanied by just Vagina T. Fireball (her late mother’s cat) and Lewis Carroll, her poodle and road trip companion. She reads as goofy and irreverent, the kind of woman with little to lose and plenty to entertain with over a bottle of wine. As for her own self-proclaimed worldview, she seems to have abandoned half of it, claiming that Trump’s alleged assault was her last ever sexual encounter, nearly a quarter century ago. She claims, as with most incidents in the book, that it left her “strangely untouched.” Her tale tells a different story.
Tiana Lowe is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
