Bookplanet: new book by non-proto-feminist Laura Kipnis

1. In Simone’s Shoes: Laura Kipnis Lets Loose on Big Ones
Roiling Academic Hits Feminists in Female Thing; She Says Don’t Blame Men
Book discussed: THE FEMALE THING: DIRT, SEX, ENVY, VULNERABILITY BY LAURA KIPNIS.
By Sheelah Kolhatkar (from NY Observer)

“Not to compare myself to Simone de Beauvoir—who is, you know, this vast intellectual heroine—but I remember reading something that she said about when The Second Sex came out in France, and that she just was mocked to death ,” said the author, professor, former video artist and feminist pundit Laura Kipnis.

It was the eve of the publication of her new book, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability , and Ms. Kipnis, who said she’s in her “late 40’s,” seemed a tiny bit nervous about how graciously she, and it, would be received. Ms. Kipnis called the book, which critiques women’s conflicted obsessions with cleanliness, romantic love, orgasms and rape, an “update on the topography of the female psyche.” She described the tone of some early reviews with that dreaded word: “mocking.”

“I’m curious to know if that will persist, and if writing about femininity actually will end up being my intellectual downfall and I’ll never be taken seriously again,” she said, looking austere at the Noho Star cafe for breakfast on Sept. 29. She was dressed for urban combat—or perhaps for battles of a cerebral nature—in a black sweater and pants, her white, almost translucent skin and angular features brought out by pink lipstick and smoky eyeliner. On her feet were tweed wedges with maribou poufs on the toes.

“You know, I think it’s not an unaggressive book, actually,” she continued in her elongated Midwestern drawl, an anxious furrow appearing between her eyes. “And I think any amount of aggression you put out in the world comes back to you.” Although that’s obviously something she seeks out: “I’m maybe playing a bit of a provocateur role,” she said. She took a bite of toast.

Ms. Kipnis, who teaches film production at Northwestern University, is not incorrect in thinking that the media needs more sharp, intelligent female writing. Instead, the proliferation of self-indulgent essays—retro first-person tales of dating, wedding-planning and baby-making—seem to do more for the author than the reader. Both the television and print worlds are crowded with self-important boys fighting amongst themselves, but there’s no Simone, Susan Sontag or even a kooky new Camille Paglia on the horizon. The literary landscape is as uninspiring as a girl’s credit-card balance after a Jimmy Choo sample sale—as Ms. Kipnis herself might write in her self-consciously irreverent voice.

“I did think what was missing was an element of honesty,” said Ms. Kipnis, who criticizes the work of Maureen Dowd, Caitlin Flanagan and Eve Ensler, not to mention most feminist academics and theorists (she does admire Barbara Ehrenreich). She refers to much of what goes on as “you go, girl” culture: “It’s a whole men-are-dogs, men-are-untrustworthy kind of advice literature which acts as if men are de facto emotional incompetents, and women are the ones with the soul and the depth and the emotional awareness,” she said, adding that women need to look inward to find the source of many of their problems. “It does seem so smug.”

Ms. Kipnis, however, doesn’t regard this as an irreconcilable problem; having made her name writing “academically” about subjects such as Hustler magazine and porn (a sure way to ensure that one’s college courses are always full), she seems intent on catapulting beyond the walls of academia and filling the void herself.

LAURA KIPNIS GREW UP IN, and now lives in, Chicago, but she’s openly ambitious about her desire to settle permanently in New York (“It’s fucking freezing there,” she said, among other things, about the Windy City).

She attended art school in San Francisco, became known as a video artist and then went on to publish articles in academic journals, which led to university teaching gigs in Madison and Michigan, as well as at New York University in 2002 and 2003. (Ms. Kipnis holds the title of professor at Northwestern without the coveted credential of a Ph.D.)

After publishing books in the academic world— Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America and Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender & Aesthetics —she made her mainstream debut with Against Love: A Polemic , a sassy book-length essay arguing that marriage and monogamy are suffocating and unnatural (“domestic gulags,” in her parlance), which was published in 2003. People—men in particular—seemed intrigued by a single-woman author who made a passionate case for adultery (although she said that she was once in a stable 12-year relationship and isn’t anti-marriage). The book was widely, and for the most part enthusiastically, reviewed.

“I was kind of amazed with that book,” Ms. Kipnis said, marveling at how “intellectually seriously” it was treated. “I thought that it would be polarizing, and I thought there would be some real bashing, but as far as I know, the reviews were just entirely … kinda celebratory and positive to an extent that just ... surprised me.”

Slate’s culture editor, Meghan O’Rourke, reviewed the book and later asked Ms. Kipnis to write for the online magazine. The collaboration led to pieces about Playboy , Deep Throat, Americans’ expanding waistlines and politics. Ms. O’Rourke described Ms. Kipnis as their “maverick voice on feminism.”

Most of Ms. Kipnis’ newest book was written in New York, in an apartment she owns in Chelsea, while she was on a two-year leave from Northwestern. When she’s in town, she hangs out with, among others, Ms. O’Rourke, as well as the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead and her husband. (Ms. Mead reviewed Against Love for The New Yorker and the two struck up a friendship.) In fact, Ms. Mead’s home was the setting of at least one of the dinner parties mentioned in the book, in which Ms. Kipnis described an “attractive successful single professional female in her mid- to late thirties” who was ranting at the table about what wimps most men are. Ms. Mead said that Ms. Kipnis is “excellent” to have at a dinner party.

“She can always defend herself and argue with people who aren’t necessarily used to being taken on,” Ms. Mead said. “And she’s always game. So I don’t think she’s ever declined an invitation.”

The dinner-party anecdote was meant to illustrate what seems to be Ms. Kipnis’ central point: that women have mixed feelings about their own emancipation. “[B]eing female at this point in history is an especially conflicted enterprise,” she writes sagely in the “Envy” section, “like Birkenstocks with Chanel, or trying to frown after a Botox injection.”

The 160-page riff that ensues is decidedly less focused than Against Love . Ms. Kipnis divides the female psyche into four quadrants (the “dirt,” “sex,” “envy” and “vulnerability” of the title), and within them covers sexual satisfaction (“orgasms have become an index of female progress”), housework (“it’s unclear whether the real domestic problem between the sexes is that men won’t clean or that women will ”), rape (“It may come as a surprise to hear that as many men as women are probably raped [in prison] every year in the United States, and possibly more”) and women’s general love-hate attitude towards men. Freud makes an appearance on page 11, Naomi Wolf on page 145, with Nietzsche somewhere in between.

She pointedly avoids giving any sort of advice, which many women have probably come to expect from their fellow women. When asked what she hoped to accomplish with The Female Thing over breakfast, Ms. Kipnis paused.

“I think my ambition is to—I don’t know how this is gonna sound—but for the world to be a bit more interesting than it is,” Ms. Kipnis said. “So I’m … trying to contribute to making these conversations feel a little more interesting. And also, on a personal level, just kinda have fun.”

A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, Ms. Kipnis was party to a conversation with a very different tenor. She was the guest of honor at a seminar held at Columbia University to discuss the “Dirt” chapter of The Female Thing . A group of students, many likely from women’s studies (several bandanas and unshaved armpits were in attendance), and a handful of professors gathered around a conference table in a fluorescent-lit basement room. The whole exercise served as a potent reminder of both the perils and the luxuries of academic life.

One of those present, an older woman with short hair and spectacles, was squirming in her seat.

“I still don’t know what this book is about ,” she harrumphed, furiously chewing her gum.

Ms. Kipnis swept in and took her place at the end of the table. After a heady introduction by one of the grad students, she explained that “femininity and feminism are in incessant conflict” with one another. She read several passages from the book’s preface aloud (“when it comes to the female situation, contradictions speckle the landscape, like ingrown hairs after a bad bikini wax,” etc.). While she spoke, her lips pursed into a perfect “O” shape that jutted out in front of her face.

“I loved reading this—it was so much fun, I felt like I was cheating,” gushed one young woman when Ms. Kipnis finished reading.

The conversation hopscotched around the table, covering questions of who Ms. Kipnis was hoping to reach with her book (“both academics and readers of Time magazine,” she said); the link between housework and pornography; the question of whether there is a “female propensity to masochism”; and the inevitable theme of ladies’ anatomy: “I kept coming back to the vagina,” Ms. Kipnis declared at one point, by way of explaining why women behave the way they do. “No matter how you get into the theory, it does come back to the fact that you have a vagina. It sounds stupid to say it …. ”

There was heated talk of “cross-cultural claims” and “transformational possibilities,” “social constructionism” and “materiality.” One of the three men in the room piped in that he had had “some impatience with the straight constructionist line” in the excerpt.

Ms. Kipnis seemed to be rather enjoying the friendly banter, until someone put forth a question that demonstrated that even an edgy, feminist contrarian has her limits. A man with a shaggy white mustache gathered the sheaf of papers spread out on the table in front of him with the efficiency of a government bureaucrat.

“I found it interesting that there was no reference at all to oral sex,” the man began. “ Feel-ah-shee-o or coo-ne-linguis raises all sorts of issues that you might have discussed—heh, heh! My sense is that feel-ah-shee-o occurs more and is expected more than coo-ne-linguis .”

Ms. Kipnis was staring at him, and somewhere somebody let out a giggle.

“Do you think that oral sex has any role in this discussion?” the man said.

It was a fair point, but Ms. Kipnis was having none of it.

“Uh … no, I didn’t take that up,” Ms. Kipnis said.


2. Feminism vs. femininity
In the impressive follow-up to her anti-monogamy polemic, Laura Kipnis explains why we feel a little uneasy when the possessor of a brand-new boob job proclaims, "I did it for myself."
By Laura Miller

From the first, it's had a hard time separating how things ought to be from how they really are, which has undermined not only its credibility but its confidence. We all know that "no" does not always mean no, and to have to keep insisting it does over and over erodes even the speaker's faith in herself; stridency is usually a way of sounding more convinced than you actually feel, and it doesn't fool anyone. Then there's the matter of dancing through the eggshell-littered territory of contemporary feminist thinking, knowing that legions of your putative sisters are poised to thrash you for the slightest variation from their (sometimes mutually contradicting) positions. If you anger them, chances are your own life will be dragged out for intensive and merciless scrutiny. If you don't, most likely your caution has made you fatally dull.

On the other hand, for feminism's critics, every day is a field day. Whether it's a nondenominational bomb-thrower like Camille Paglia, a right-wing mouth-frother like Rush Limbaugh or a bargain-bin attack dog like Christina Hoff Sommers, it's hard not to sound like a fearless iconoclast when you're up against such mincing, mealy-mouthed good girls. Whether the good girls have a point or not becomes immaterial. Propriety, which is what too much of feminism has become, is the natural target of humor, too, and if you're funny enough often enough at feminism's expense, you can even get away with never making a coherent argument: case in point being the career of Caitlin Flanagan.

Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University best known for her provocative defense of adultery, "Against Love: A Polemic," does an impressive job of finessing this impasse in her new book, "The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability." Despite the subtitle of her first book, "The Female Thing" is not the work of a polemicist -- nor does it put forth any especially innovative thoughts. Kipnis is like the intelligent woman's version of whatever Carrie Bradshaw was supposed to be on "Sex and the City." You've encountered most of the ideas in "The Female Thing" before, but Kipnis has a way of distilling them down to a well-turned sentence or two that's very pleasing. Hers isn't a gift to be taken lightly, since in the process she makes it clear how untenable many of those ideas are.

Kipnis' knack for epigrammatic sentences fills "The Female Thing" with what amount to some very high-nutrition one-liners. An example: "When it comes to murder, you're actually more than twice as likely to kill yourself as to be killed by someone else, giving weight to the old truism that you're your own worst enemy." She can be acutely funny, though (ironically) the less so the harder she tries to hit that Carrie Bradshaw sweet spot. If you read the four linked essays in this book in order -- and who are we trying to kid; you're going to read the one titled "Sex" first, like everyone else -- you'll have to cruise past a few wince-inducing references to Manolo Blahniks and terms like "the gal set," but don't let that deter you. There's plenty of steak in there, underneath the less convincing attempts at sizzle.

As Kipnis sees it, the situation that educated, middle-class Western women find themselves in is fundamentally absurd. To say so -- rather than pretending the solutions are obvious -- takes nerve. To say so with both humor and sang-froid -- unlike the legions of ethically tormented personal essayists or the pratfalling clones of Bridget Jones -- takes panache.

The absurdity comes from the disparity between our rapidly changing social landscape (including the advances of feminism) and the recalcitrant internal map Kipnis calls "the female psyche." Feminism, she writes, has collided with "an unanticipated opponent: the inner woman." The four essays in "The Female Thing" center on some of the most stubborn aspects of the inner woman, the impulses and irrational passions that suddenly rise up and swamp us despite our best efforts to stick to the designated feminist path. In fact, this rising up and swamping has happened so much in the past 30 years, and women have tried so diligently to redirect the path around the various trouble spots where it does, that by now the path itself is hopelessly muddled. It's like getting lost in the woods and following one promising little trail after another only to see it peter out in an impenetrable thicket.

Kipnis takes a modified Freudian view of this dilemma, which makes her exquisitely attuned to paradoxes. The strongest essay in the book -- "Vulnerability," which is about both sexual abuse and the fear of it -- contains two gemlike analyses of recent confessional writings by Naomi Wolf and the late Andrea Dworkin. Wolf recently favored the readers of New York magazine with a histrionic account of how, 20 years earlier, when she was one of his students at Yale, Harold Bloom put his hand on her thigh after a drunken dinner party. She presented this event -- and the refusal of Yale to address the matter when she finally decided to do something about it years later -- as a deep psychic wound.

"All this is a shade self-dramatizing," Kipnis writes, "but can we say that it's self-dramatizing in a particularly feminine way? The idioms employed have that feminist ring, but it's a genre of feminism dedicated to revivifying an utterly traditional femininity: wounded bird femininity, to borrow Joan Didion's useful formulation." Wolf's drama only makes sense (to the extent that it does make sense) when you understand that she regarded Bloom as so exalted an authority figure that she became "sick with excitement" at the prospect of meeting him, and that she expected nothing less than perfect satisfaction from Yale two decades after she failed to register a complaint. Kipnis' verdict: "this massive overinvestment in paternal figures and institutions has such an Oedipal flavor. The contradiction of Wolf-style devoted daughter feminism is its thralldom to the phallic mythos it's also so deeply offended by." That's very nicely put indeed, so well formulated that if it's not a new interpretation of this minor scandal, it might as well be. In wrestling with Dworkin's writings equating heterosexual intercourse with subjugation -- a more challenging task -- Kipnis is equally astute. "Dworkin didn't read the culture wrong: it's entirely true that all the idioms for penetration -- 'getting fucked,' 'screwed over' -- are about humiliation and exploitation. Which does make it hard to see how anyone can avoid a certain duality about the experience, even when it's pleasurable, as it often is! Dworkin is the great case study in the ambivalence of femininity: after all, she's hardly indifferent about penetration." As Kipnis notes earlier, Dworkin's key work, "Intercourse," hinged around her "wonderfully inflamed" indictment of the practice. "But," Kipnis goes on, "can there really be this much aversion without some corner of desire? The opposite of desire isn't aversion, it's indifference."

As you can see, Kipnis is a great parser of ambivalence -- and she views ambivalence as the defining condition of modern womanhood. In her essay on "Dirt" -- or, rather, about housework -- she reads a passage from Alison Pearson's novel "I Don't Know How She Does It," in which the heroine, a hedge fund executive, resentfully cleans the family kitchen at 2 a.m. after returning from a business trip. Kipnis wonders why so many women obsessively pursue a standard of cleanliness that no one else in the household considers essential. (Despite what such women will tell you, she notes, definitions of what's clean and what's not are neither universal nor unchanging.) "How is it," she writes, "that women have managed to over throw the shackles of chastity -- to cite another rather significant vestige of traditional femininity -- more easily than bondage to the vacuum cleaner?"

She suspects that at the root of this preoccupation lies the buried, primitive association of women's bodies -- and especially menstruation -- with dirt. Kipnis blames this on "the human symbolic imagination, that archaic thing, which isn't fully in sync with external realities like social progress. Maybe some day it will catch up." It probably won't if most of us remain largely unaware of its subterranean influence. "If women didn't have vaginas," Kipnis goes on to speculate, "would we take fewer bubble baths, be less susceptible to the newest cleaning product marketing campaign, let up on the cleaning standards (for those prone to occupying the household enforcer role), and simply not do more than 50 percent of the housework?" Since the vaginas are non-negotiable, the implication is it's time for an overhaul of the symbolic imagination.

In the essay on "Sex," Kipnis mostly focuses on the "erotically mismatched world we've inherited" -- at least for the heterosexual heirs. The lamentable truth is that "the procreative act" -- that is, heterosexual intercourse -- seldom results in orgasm for the female partner, only 20 to 24 percent of the time according to surveys. Kipnis cites the "feminist evolutionary biologist" Elisabeth Lloyd, who has discovered the even worse news that studies of sexual response don't distinguish between women who reach orgasm by intercourse alone and those who need additional stimulation of the clitoris as a "final push." When you subtract those women who (sorry) need a hand, "orgasm-attainment figures are so stunningly low that they seem to imply that reaching orgasm during intercourse isn't normal for the female of the species."

Kipnis compares this situation, hilariously, to "owning one of those hybrid cars that still have a few kinks to work out as your sole source of transport: the engine shuts down unexpectedly, though even when the engine's revved, it can't always be relied upon to get you where you want to go." Combined with the sexual inhibitions most cultures instill in their female members, this leads to a whopping "orgasm gap."

Even the supposedly gone-wild younger generation falls prey to this inequity. Kipnis writes that young women have described themselves as "participating enthusiastically in hookup culture -- one-night stands and booty calls," then complain that "the men involved 'don't care if you're getting off or not.' Yet these girls keep hooking up with them! Without even getting dinner for it! Welcome to the new femininity -- at least under the old femininity, you got taken to dinner." In response to reports from sex researcher Shere Hite, who has interviewed women claiming to enjoy "'emotional orgasm ... an intense emotional peak' followed by feelings of closeness," Kipnis quips, "There's a name for someone who would call that an orgasm: female."

Kipnis sees the current mommy wars as an echo of the old "vaginal-orgasm-versus-clitoral-orgasm dichotomy," in which women who could only climax with clitoral stimulation were told they were insufficiently adapted to their true, natural role as women. "To begin with," she writes, "we have the same cast of characters: the womanly other-directed type versus the masculine-identified striving autonomous type. And in both cases, a socially organized choice masquerades as a natural one, manufacturing a big dilemma where one doesn't really have to exist."

For although Kipnis is willing to admit that some parts of the female psyche have proven ferociously resistant to change, she doesn't think that the situation is intractable. For all her puncturing of feminism's sanguine notions about the malleability of human nature, she doesn't believe that the deep layers of the "symbolic imagination" are hard-wired. Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists may be "the go-to guys of the moment when it comes to thorny questions about human nature and gender roles," but they've yet to come up with a convincing justification for the perverse configuration of the female orgasm, for instance. "This is the crowd," she writes, "who likes to tell us how men and women got to be who they are (and will remain for all eternity) by supplying colorful stories about the mating habits of our hominid ancestors and selected members of the animal kingdom," making the usual comparison to Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories" -- fables about how the leopard got his spots, and so on.

Kipnis' is an exceptionally sensible voice at a time when people seem to believe that any long-standing cultural norm that can't be completely overhauled in a single generation must therefore be indelibly carved on the stone tablets handed down to Charles Darwin at the foundation of the modern world. And for all her low-key Freudianism, she knows when it's time to follow the money instead of the unconscious. During all the foofaraw about the "opt-out revolution" -- those young, Ivy-League women who are now abandoning the career track to be stay-home moms -- haven't you been wishing someone would say exactly this: "Somehow, as highly educated as these girls are, they don't seem to have heard about the 50 percent divorce rate! Somehow, they imagine that their husbands' incomes -- and loyalties -- come with lifetime guarantees, thus no contingency plans for self-sufficiency will prove necessary ... Somewhere Betty Freidan must be cackling..."

In the first essay, "Envy" -- which is not about catfights, but rather about all the things that men have and women want -- Kipnis asks us to consider the slowly closing gender gap when it comes to pay equity. If you look carefully, she points out, you'll see that "women's wages are up to 80 percent of men's because male wages are down, which evens things out. It looks as though the dirty little secret of the last 30 years is that the job market played women off against men to depress pay." While the sexes rage at each other about dating ethics and dirty socks, somebody (probably that little Monopoly guy with the top hat and cigar) has been laughing all the way to the bank.

Perhaps the most daring statement in "The Female Thing" comes in this first essay. Kipnis observes that even so acclaimed a feminist spokesperson as Eve Ensler, creator of "The Vagina Monologues," can turn around and do an entire stage show about how much she hates her belly. "Ensler works herself into intellectual knots trying to come to terms with these painful body insecurities," Kipnis writes, "but there's a simple explanation for the dilemma she can't quite decipher, which is that feminism and femininity just aren't reconcilable." Think about that one for a moment and consider how much an entire school of tortured female rumination hangs on the avoidance of this insight. "Though if internal gymnastics burned calories," Kipnis adds, "we could all have flatter stomachs, with far fewer hours at the fucking gym."

Femininity -- which Kipnis defines as "tactical: a way of securing resources and positioning women as advantageously as possible on an uneven playing field, given the historical inequalities and anatomical disparities that make up the wonderful female condition" -- seeks to ameliorate all these disadvantages by "doing what it took to form strategic alliances with men." But that means that femininity "hinges on sustaining an underlying sense of female inadequacy," which puts it in opposition to the goals of feminism. No wonder we feel a little uneasy when the possessor of a brand new boob job proclaims, "I did it for myself." I believe this is what Marx called false consciousness.

Scolding other women for failing to embody (literally) an appropriately feminist outlook has never really worked, and Kipnis doesn't seem the type to interrupt yet another rousing chorus of "I Enjoy Being a Girl," even if she felt like it. (I don't think she does.) Instead, she's suggesting that we stop lying to ourselves by pretending we can run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds. No girl should ever be surprised upon finding herself in that archetypal Carrie Bradshaw position of realizing that with all the cash she spent on ruinously expensive and joint-grinding high heels she could instead have bought a roof to put over her head. (That's the revelation that comes right before you learn you need knee surgery.) Don't say nobody ever warned you.


3. Book Review from Bookforum – by Toni Bentley

"I was talking with my therapist today," my girlfriend tells me. "I deny myself pleasure," she says, with wistful resignation.

Midforties, attractive, relationships but never the white dress ("divorces without the wedding," she calls them), my girlfriend has enticing men circling the nest—the Elvis look-alike Yugoslavian sailor, the Richard Gere look-alike Italian ("former") porn star. Doesn't she sleep with them? Or at least masturbate?

"So," I venture innocently, "like, er, what would be an example of depriving yourself of pleasure?"

"Well," she says, "like the other day, I was in the supermarket and I bought
the $2.19 toilet cleaner instead of the $2.99 one that I really like that smells like lavender." After making a quick mental note of the name of the good stuff, I offer my sympathies.

Toilets, cleaning, and female pleasure: My friend is in Laura Kipnis territory.

Kipnis is the feisty author of Against Love: A Polemic (2003), a witty, well-argued rant against the trials, tribulations, and—lest one forget—virtual impossibility of monogamy. Kipnis covered the ins and outs—social, emotional, biological, ethical—of adultery. Her conclusion? Go for it. Besides, you probably will anyway. We are, after all, not one of the 3 percent of mammal species that are naturally monogamous, and now, with genetic testing, it looks like even female birds can be two-nesting sluts. Tweet-tweet.

Kipnis doesn't think much of love either, calling it "both intoxicating and delusional, but in the end, toxic: an extended exercise in self-deception." On the other hand, she suggests, "a citizenry who fucked in lieu of shopping would soon bring the entire economy grinding to a standstill." Such a society does in fact exist: the lascivious little bonobos of the Congo. Genetically, we are 98 percent like the bonobos—and now we know what that 2 percent discrepancy entails: Retail. (And tails.)

Kipnis is back with a new book of essays titled The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability . While these four pieces appear more like a set of extended footnotes to Against Love than a book of their own, they nevertheless offer more of the relentless Kipnis POV, a perspective, she admits, that is all hers. God help us.

In The Female Thing , Kipnis takes on, well, you know, the "female thing." A brief survey of my local Starbucks reveals that men think that means "the clit" or, as a married man put it more delicately, "the crux, you know, of her legs." Women, however, regard "the female thing" as the whole thing —the entire psycho-sexual-intellectual-spiritual-hormonal insanity of being a woman. As in Against Love , Kipnis offers no answers but does a Derrida on the female situation and leaves us to sort out the awful mess.

Let's start with what Kipnis, in a wonderful phrase, terms the "vagina-clitoris fiasco"—"a cruel combo of anatomical inheritance and sexual inhibition for the gal set; a nature-culture one-two punch." What was the Big Guy thinking when he designed male anatomy to combine pleasure and procreation in the same place while leaving women to struggle with that half inch between their pleasure, a man's, and survival of the species? It might as
well be a million miles for all the trouble it has caused. One need go no further, so to speak, to find the source of that underappreciated, much-maligned female talent called masochism. What is the mystery here? Women are biologically designed to experience frustration.

According to Kipnis's research, as many as 58 percent of women "don't consistently have orgasms." She calls female sexual pleasure "one of human history's ongoing snaggles." A snaggle? It's a genuine wonder that women don't murder more than men.

Next female thing: the eternal debate over clitoral versus vaginal orgasms. Kipnis reports on notable feminists who have weighed in on the dilemma, and the news is depressing. Doris Lessing regarded a man who offered clitoral orgasms as one in flight from intimacy. Simone de Beauvoir had neither the clitoral nor the vaginal kind with Sartre—so much for the theory of women becoming attached to men via the oxytocin released during orgasm. Beauvoir was attached as only a woman who hasn't come can: with a vengeance.

Still, both Beauvoir and Germaine Greer found what the latter termed "digital massage" to be "pompous and deliberate," subjugating women still further. (Receiving pleasure is , by definition, a submissive act—get with the program, girls!) On the other hand, Greer encouraged women to hold out not only for their vaginal orgasms but for " ecstasy ." "Sounds good—where do you sign up?" quips Kipnis. But remember, fingers will profit you nothing.

One of Kipnis's overarching themes is, happily, not the old blame-patriarchy-for-everything theory but the enormous depths of "ambivalence among women themselves." Some women, however, clearly try harder than others and subscribe to what Kipnis calls "emotional orgasms." "There's a name for someone," she writes, "who would call that an orgasm: female."

Female masochism again raises its head with the curious current practice of "hooking up," where girls claim sexual "freedom," while the boys enjoy a waking wet dream. As for this new romance—more accurately described as the blowjob-in-the-toilet encounter—Kipnis writes, "at least under the old femininity, you got taken to dinner." Indeed, if this is female liberation, then give me death—or at least some decent "pompous and deliberate" digital subjugation. Wouldn't feminism dictate just the opposite: the eat-me-then-get-out-of-my-bedroom romance? I'll sign everyone up.

In "Envy," Kipnis updates the eternal mystery of what women want (Freud, Freud everywhere, so much for our despair). There is always, she explains, something "invariably missing ," hence, the "underlying sense of female inadequacy." The "Feisty Feminist," she writes, "wanted to have what men have, without stopping to consider whether it was worth having." Alternately, the "Eternal Feminine" looks like "an updated version of traditional femininity" and suggests that the "whole goddess-worshipping New Age veneer" has worn off. It is certainly difficult to imagine La Kipnis lighting incense and candles, toking up, and wafting about her sacred space chanting to Isis in an orange sequined caftan.

In the last essay, "Vulnerability," Kipnis riffs on the most valuable and troublesome orifice in the world, the "small furry thing" she calls a "pootietang." "Protecting that prized portal," she observes, "is virtually the bedrock of female experience." On the other hand, she suggests that "perhaps they're overpriced," rendering them more "theft-prone." She thus segues to suggest that women should stop worrying about rape—their worry is way out of proportion to the statistical likelihood. Rape could really be "construed as an equal-opportunity form of victimization," she suggests, somewhat sarcastically, and asks, What "prevents marauding gangs of criminally minded women from finding smallish men, holding them down, and penetrating them digitally [ would Germaine Greer approve? ]
or with other implements?" Dream on, Ms. Kipnis: One sees here an example of the author overreaching herself, swept away with ideas, language, and exasperation with her own sex, resulting in an insidious statement about a very serious subject. While enjoying the roller-coaster ride with Kipnis, occasionally one wonders about her real motives. Is she really just an intellectual show-off, a well-read performance artist, without real depth to her thoughts? Maybe. But wait, the loop-the-loop is not quite over.

My favorite chapter, "Dirt," brings us back to the toilet-cleaner question, where Kipnis is on firmer ground. "Do women care," she ponders, "a smidgen too much for cleaning?" "How will women ever really achieve social equality," she writes, "when even a high-paid glass-ceiling-smasher corporate go-getter type somehow can't stop herself from noticing what needs cleaning, thus winds up in the kitchen at two a.m. frantically scrubbing things?"

Meanwhile Kipnis offers the only practical advice in her stitch 'n' bitch book. On abrasive cleaners: "Soft Scrub rules." I would like to add, in a girlfriendy kind of way, that Soft Scrub will scratch the hell out of your bathtub if you have just had the enamel refurbished. Kipnis is clearly closer to glass-ceiling smashing than most women, but I, for one, will happily bring my broom to sweep her broken glass and then contemplate my lack of ambition during a long, hot soak in my scratched, but very clean, bathtub.

Kipnis's books offer a fascinating portrait of a woman dancing as fast as she can—with considerable grace, despite her Timberlands—around the miseries inherent in romantic love. For all her academic credentials—she is a professor of media studies at Northwestern University and the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants—one must be grateful that she has not squandered her anger in academic dryness. The Female Thing is , on the contrary, a virtual swamp.

So why is this passionate woman embedded in her Hummer on the front line of the war called love? Such pyrotechnic intellectualism about the least intellectual act in the world—fucking and its discontents—is revealing. Behind the bons mots and the clever observations, Kipnis reveals a certain contempt and superiority—in other words, a certain sadness. Laura Kipnis is in the end, I suspect, a true Romantic: disillusioned, shattered.

Hooray for her! She shows what a smart gal can do with disappointment and has, at least, put some energy into explaining it all for the rest of us. I am advised to offer a "full disclosure" here—my lucky day, I guess. Kipnis refers to my own addition to the genre of "obsessive female masochism," in my book The Surrender , as being "infused with the ecstasy of public self-exposure." I would like to add, to Kipnis's felicitous assessment, that the "ecstasy" of publication not only paled beside the sex that inspired it but seriously interfered with my sex life—how's that for masochism?

Kipnis, despite herself, has written yet another woman's memoir—but one better, and more original, than most. One thing's clear, Kipnis will only go down fighting. As for me, I'm now off to clean my toilet—with the lavender stuff. It's a female thing called Progress.

(Toni Bentley danced with Balanchine's New York City Ballet for ten years. She is the author of five books, most recently, The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir)