Are Women Who Read ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ ‘Kind of Dim’?*

Charlotte Allen calls “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert’s lightning rod of a travel memoir, “hysterical,” “superficial,” and “gooily sentimental,” and points to its success as an example of why women are “kind of dim.” She did all this in a Washington Post opinion piece this weekend called “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?”, which, as of this posting, has 870 comments and counting.

Many of them, with good reason, say something like this: “I can’t believe the Washington Post would publish this nonsense.”

Update March 3, 1:54 p.m. ET: Responding to the backlash against the story, the Washington Post’s opinion editor says that the piece was intended to be “tongue-in-cheek.” From Politico: “Even if intended as a joke, the Allen piece clearly isn’t the best way for the Post to achieve its goal of bringing in more women readers, and it remains to be seen if the fallout continues today.”

Related on World Hum:
* One Man’s Odyssey into ‘Eat, Pray, Love’

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