So that answer alone, and its environs, brought the overall difficulty for me back to normal. Clue on ME TARZAN was brutally vague ( 7D: Famous introduction that was never actually used). Later, when I came back to this section, I just blanked on the Philippine island, as well as the, so getting that section to finally come together took work. Trouble started with ENTER _ for 14A: It'll give you a break. Puzzle felt pretty easy, but ME TARZAN proved particularly stubborn. All the long central Downs hold up, as does WASH DOWN. Mostly, though, the grid is solid, with some notable strong parts.

EVIL obviously has nothing to do with women, but doubling down on a movie with such juvenile humor and such an objectifying view of women.

The ensuing 'Austin Powers' answers (esp. I wouldn't have reacted to SHEILA alone, but crossing COEDS, it somehow compounds the assumed male perspective. SHEILA is another term I also find slightly condescending, and one I can only hear (in my head) in a man's voice. This moment happened pretty early in my solve (I had to abandon the NW when I got most of it but couldn't turn the corner), so.

But then (fittingly / ironically) SHEILA proved the appropriate WOMEN wrong, and I knew it was COEDS. At five letters long, I confidently wrote in WOMEN. Other recent clues have included the qualifiers 'quaintly' and 'in old lingo.' But here, in 2017. The NYT crossword itself clued COEDS as (emph. I can't / won't take COEDS unless it is clued in relation to some old movie title or otherwise flagged as old-fashioned.

Between the casual sexism and the obsession with a 20-year-old movie franchise I never found funny, I was a hostile solver for most of this, which is too bad, as the constructor seems to have some skill, and that central Down is golden ( 15D: Not right, sarcastically => YOUR OTHER LEFT).

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