In Defense of Women — A 1918 Shitposter With a PhD Vocabulary

Mencken is basically a 1918 shitposter with a PhD-level vocabulary, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

I picked this up on a whim - 4 hours and change, perfect for two commutes - after a coworker dropped Mencken's name during a team retro about "the illusion of competence in management." That quote spiraled into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, and here we are. I started it on a Thursday morning, finished it Friday evening, and spent the weekend arguing about it with Kevin, who kept saying "that sounds incredibly sexist" while I kept saying "yes, but also wait, listen to THIS part."

A Troll From 1918 Who Occasionally Lands a Hit

Here's the thing you need to understand about this book: Mencken isn't defending women in any way a modern person would recognize. He's running a satirical denial-of-service attack on everyone. His thesis is basically that women are smarter than men because they're more cynical, more practical, and less prone to romantic delusions - but he frames this through a lens so steeped in early 20th century gender essentialism that you'll flinch every other paragraph. He describes marriage as a trap that women set because they're shrewd operators, and men fall into because they're fundamentally stupid. He calls the average man a "numskull" with the emotional sophistication of a barn animal, and honestly? Some of those passages hit harder than they should in 2024.

But then he'll pivot into something like his extended riff on how women's supposed "emotionalism" is actually superior pragmatism - that women cry not because they're weak but because they've calculated that crying is efficient problem-solving - and you're like, is this proto-feminism? Is this misogyny wearing a feminist mask? Is this just a guy who loves being contrarian so much he's eating his own tail? The answer is yes to all three, simultaneously. I hit a similar wall of productive confusion with Man on the Moon, where the subject's own contradictions keep you from ever fully landing on an interpretation.

ML Cohen Does the Heavy Lifting on Tone

I went in with zero expectations on the narrator - never heard of ML Cohen, no Ray Porter vibes to lean on here. The narration is clean and competent. Cohen reads Mencken's prose with the right amount of dry distance, which is critical because this material needs a narrator who understands the irony without overselling it. There's no winking, no exaggerated comic timing, just steady delivery that lets Mencken's own absurdity do the work. For a LibriVox-origin recording, the audio quality is decent - no jarring pops or room noise that pulled me out. Not a standout performance, but serviceable for the material.

The problem is that Mencken's prose style is dense. Long, winding sentences full of subclauses and classical references that assume you know who Schopenhauer is and what the Suffragette movement looked like from a Baltimore newspaper office in 1918. At 1.5x, I found myself rewinding a couple of times during the chapter on "The Feminine Mind" because I'd zone out and miss the turn where he flips from apparent compliment to buried insult. This is not a 1.75x book. Maybe not even a train book, honestly - I got more out of it on the quieter return commute than the 6AM zombie shuffle.

The Debug Log: What's Aged and What Hasn't

Some of Mencken's observations land with surprising accuracy if you squint past the period sexism. His point that society systematically underestimates women's intelligence because it confuses "different strategy" with "lesser capability" - that's a framework that still maps onto tech culture in ways that made me uncomfortable. His takedown of male vanity in the workplace reads like he ghostwrote a Slack thread about senior engineers who confuse volume with value.

But plenty has aged like milk left on a Caltrain seat. His biological determinism is constant and unquestioned. His cheerful reduction of all female motivation to marriage-seeking is exhausting by hour two. And there's a chapter on women's physical appearance that made me do the involuntary cringe-face that got the guy next to me to scoot over one seat. You need to approach this as a historical artifact with occasional lightning bolts of insight, not as anything resembling a coherent modern argument.

Who Gets Value Here (And Who Should Hard Pass)

Perfect for: anyone interested in early American satire, the history of gender discourse, or just wanting to understand why people still quote Mencken. If you've read his other essays on democracy or religion and enjoyed the caustic style, this fits right in. It's a short listen - low commitment, high conversation-starter potential.

Skip for: anyone looking for an actual defense of women. Also skip if you need your audiobook narrators to carry the entertainment value - Cohen is competent but won't make a mediocre section sparkle.

The ROI Calculation

The ROI on this audiobook is weird. It's free or near-free on most platforms given its public domain status, so the cost is just 4 hours of your time. I got maybe two genuinely sharp insights, one great dinner argument with Kevin, and a better understanding of where a lot of modern "provocateur" writing traces its DNA. For a free 4-hour listen? That's acceptable. For a credit? Absolutely not.