I love Caitlin Flanagan. Love her. Like most women who appreciate living in a time that doesn’t require us to memorize meatloaf recipes, I can’t say that I agree with her politics, but that’s never dampened my adoration.

     I’ve been in this state before. At lunchtime in college, I’d race off to the cafeteria, eager to get my hands on the latest newspaper column by a certain gray-suited, perpetually smirking fellow student who was best known for his claim that homosexuality was an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. My friends, liberals like most of the student body, loved him as much as I did. Here’s why: A dirty little rumor claimed the he didn’t believe a word of his own punditry. If this story was true, then his bi-weekly 2,000 words about the divine wisdom of the Republican Party didn’t stem from his right-wing convictions; they were instead the product of simple creative genius, and we couldn’t help but marvel at the skill with which he executed his craft. Once, overcome with fury and passion at a particularly virtuoso performance, a boy at my table dashed across the room and flung himself into the columnist’s lap.

     Nothing compares to the needling pleasure of reading someone who says all the wrong things in exactly the right way. A collection of revised essays Flanagan published in the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife is ostensibly about housewives and their role in American culture. The book is that rare thing—a polemic that’s most fun for those who disagree with the author wholeheartedly. Sometimes, as when Flanagan argues that marriage obligates constant sexual availability on the part of the wife, I suspect she’s joking. But the real point of Flanagan is never just her provocations; it’s the dexterity with which she executes them.

     Flanagan calls herself an anti-feminist—she once told the New York Observer that “feminism and homophobia” were her two pet peeves—and most of her essays prove her right. Essentially, men’s tragic inability to do housework means that the sexual revolution was a bust. (I’m not generalizing. With Flanagan, all gender issues boil down to innate sex-specific cleaning skills, as if the knowledge of how to fold a bath towel correctly were coded on the second X chromosome.)

     A long piece in Ms. Magazine in 2004 laid out exactly what’s troubling about Flanagan: As the go-to girl on gender for two of our most respected magazines, she uses her elevated platform to attack feminism from a thousand roundabout angles, always carefully excusing herself from the demographic she’s trashing. She’s not a working mother, her two children and New Yorker contract notwithstanding. But she is a humble housewife, despite the fact that she has a housekeeper to do most of the work around the home. In short, she’s a bit of a weasel.

     But the way she weasels! Flanagan’s formula combines three parts cogent social analysis with one part screed about the failures of feminism. Citing June Cleaver, Flanagan looks at the way the 1950s housewife has become a metonym for the oppression of women, from movies like Far From Heaven to those greeting cards that smugly ask us to congratulate ourselves on not knowing how to cook. But of course June Cleaver’s era was actually rather short: “The Feminine Mystique was published within 20 years of V-J Day,” Flanagan reminds us.

     In other words, whether or not Cleaver enjoyed cooking a roast every night, the perfect housewife who holds down a freshly scrubbed nuclear family is not natural, but historical. Our reference points for women’s roles in and out of the home shouldn’t begin in the 20 years after World War II. All right, you think. Flanagan’s making sense. But within sentences she announces that this short-lived blip on the gender timeline is in fact that model by which we should all live. Gotcha again. Flanagan is a master of the bait-and-switch.