From John Dryden’s essays onward, satire has persisted in English critical discussions as the domain of male writers. Dryden’s contemporary, Aphra Behn, has, accordingly, been excluded from consideration as a major satirist despite critics’ ongoing recognition of satiric elements in her works, especially her plays, and the reclamation of a couple of her obviously satiric poems. This essay examines masculine critical traditions set by Dryden and his successors along with their considerations of Juvenalian, Horatian, and Menippean satire in order to expose the forces shaping conceptions of satire as an inherently masculine genre. It simultaneously foregrounds the role satire plays in shaping eighteenth-century genres as it frames Behn as a major satiric writer. Ultimately, this essay places Behn alongside her male contemporaries, as satirist and – through satire’s deconstructive forces – as facilitator of new generic modes, notably literary criticism, miscellany poems, the novel, and comedy of manners. Just as she was second only in productivity to John Dryden, Behn rivaled him in witty social commentary on literary traditions and in challenges to those traditions by producing varied works that were satiric in their fabric.