★★★★☆ Reasonable and Passionate

I Hate Men

Pauline Harmange

First, an apology. Although I read Moi les hommes, je les déteste in French, this review will be in English. Of the languages I understand well enough to read a even a short book in, French is my weakest. I could not possibly write more than two sentences in French. I do not regret the choice to read it in the original. I often felt that Pauline Harmange's French expressed subtleties that would not easily be conveyed in English. Furthermore, there is a thing that happens when you read in a language you command poorly -- you think hard about the meaning of every word. This pays dividends. Besides, I learned new French words, including many that my high school French teacher unaccountably never taught us.

I was surprised to find that, despite the title, je les déteste is a reasonable and well-reasoned essay. It is also passionate. There is no contradiction. Let us dispense immediately with the absurd fallacy that logic and passion are mutually exclusive. David Hume wrote "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions". If there is no passion behind your logic, You're Doing It Wrong.

For my sins, I read a few negative reviews. je les déteste is a brief essay -- I spent two hours struggling through it in French, but it would have been half an hour in my native English. Conciseness is a good thing! In fact, in the Afterword of the English translation I Hate Men, Harmange writes, "I Hate Men has been described as light and not remotely radical. I agree. I never intended to write a digest of feminist theory, and there’s nothing in these pages that has not been written before." Harmange is a young woman in her twenties, and writes like one. I hope we can all agree that "young woman in her twenties" is not a character flaw, and that no writer should be condemned for being that. Jane Austen probably wrote her first draft of Sense and Sensibility (Reason and Passion!) at the age of 19.

I was surprised to find that the English translation, I Hate Men, contains an Afterword not present in the French edition Moi les hommes, je les déteste. This Afterword describes events around and after the initial publication, and is worth a read.

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