Christy Wampole wants us to live without irony. In her weekend essay for the New York Times’ Opinionator section, the Princeton lit professor encourages all of us—not just hipsters—to recognize the paucity of sincerity in contemporary American culture and  “determine whether the ashes of irony have settled on you as well.”

The essay’s been getting a lot of play, popping up again and again on my Twitter and Facebook, and there certainly are points to be admired, particularly from a feminist perspective. While I think irony and apathy are often unfairly conflated, Walpole is right that irony, often a mark of privilege, can dampen political enthusiasm and discourage progress—a point stressed in a number of recent pieces