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.