Bookplanet: author and critic e-mail each other about The Female Thing

The Female Thing
Your arguments about narcissism weary me.
By Laura Kipnis and Daphne Merkin

From: Daphne Merkin
To: Laura Kipnis
Subject: The Commotion About Gender Roles

Hi Laura,

I feel I should be introducing myself, except for the fact that I also feel we've met somewhere before—in another life, perhaps, or in the unspoken communications that go on between writers who read one another and recognize bits of themselves. I am referring to what appears to be your impatience, which I share, with prescribed cultural attitudes—whether they arrive by way of the patriarchy or by way of feminist or post-feminist (or, for that matter, counterfeminist) authorities. In your recent book, The Female Thing , you question the latest P.C.-ish manifestations of the sexual zeitgeist—"the commotion about 'roles,' " as you put it, that we seem mired in these days—and adroitly hold it up to the scrutiny of your not quite ridicule but rather clear-eyed amusement.

I found myself whizzing through your reader-friendly prose (it's frequently overly casual, to my mind, and detracts from the seriousness of your underlying arguments, but I'll get to that shortly), smiling at your epigrammatic pronouncements ("it's always Value Day at the multiple-orgasm store") and witty descriptions, like the summation you provide of an episode of the painful-sounding British reality TV series Sex Inspectors: " 'She's a little bundle of insecurity,' diagnoses the perky female half of the therapeutic duo, studiously regarding a taped oral sex interlude featuring Charlotte hiding her head under a pillow while Jamie burrows away.' " Similarly, I admire your ability to state the inherent (but mostly unnoticed or unremarked-upon) glitches in a given stance in pellucid terms: "What's problematic about women's scorn for men," you quietly observe, "isn't that it's necessarily undeserved, it's that it's so steeped in disavowal. Disavowal not only takes a lot of useless intellectual effort that could be devoted to other things, but is self-deceiving." And then, in a deft shift, you move on from the issue at hand to a larger psychological truth: "Self-deception is deforming." Way to go, Laura, if I may sound like you for a moment.

Indeed, it's hard to imagine what self-respecting "gal" wouldn't warm to the way you poke holes in the largely unexamined assumptions and unconscious conflicts that inform so many of the media-manufactured trendlets of revisionist thinking that pass for wisdom in the present cultural discourse, particularly as it pertains to relations between men and women . It's hard to imagine, except for the fact that there are women—including, undoubtedly, Alexandra Jacobs, who reviewed your book in the New York Times —who don't like to be referred to as "gals." Or "chicks." I don't much care for it myself, truth be told, and devoutly wish that you would lose some of your more strenuously (not to mention irritatingly) breezy locutions in your next book. But I, unlike Jacobs, am willing to overlook your populist twang—which I attribute variously to you and your publisher's hopes for landing you an Oprah slot and to your being an academic specializing in media studies (which can't possibly be as flimsy a specialty as I conjecture it to be) rather than, say, gender studies (which would bring on a whole other unbearable vocabulary of "queering" and "privileging" and spotting "tropes" right and left)—to the unpopulist mind that lurks beneath.

So, here's the good and bad, as I see it. I like the way you tease out the flavor-of-the-month ideas that are taken as brilliant sociological insights rather than the most recent evolution of the cultural narratives we tell ourselves. (The notion of constructing narratives or stories out of our experience, the better to understand it, is one of your favorite conceits.) We need cultural critics like you, who pay close attention to low-brow appropriations as well as high-brow articulations, who recognize that ideological scripts can't leap over the "abyss between desire and intelligence" (although I'm not sure you really mean "intelligence" in this context so much as "rational thinking" or "the more evolved parts of our brain" or whatever it is that we place in opposition to our unmediated and resolutely unprogressive libidos), no matter how much we'd like to believe otherwise.

The problem of making cerebration intriguing to an elusive female audience who may prefer to watch Sex and the City reruns is one I'm all too familiar with as a commentator on books and culture for Elle , where I'm always worrying that I'll lose prospective readers to the more immediate gratifications of Jimmy Choo ads and Beyoncé interviews. But in being so intent on luring in the masses, you sell your thinking at too low a price of admission—if I may mix metaphors—with the result that you end up shoving some of your curvier (or, if you prefer, knottier) qualifications into footnotes or passing over them in haste, so the reader won't notice the less glib references—to "compensatory" mechanisms, say, or to "category violations" (a concept I've always been fascinated by)—between the many allusions to vibrators and G spots. It is also to this end, I assume, that you insist on peppering your text with a Cosmo -like seasoning of italics and exclamation marks. (Do you know that Helen Gurley Brown once said that exclamation marks were the sexiest form of punctuation? Don't you just love it ?!)

Let me wind up this dialogue-in-the-form-of-a-monologue—more akin to the much-touted but intractably solitary pleasures of masturbation than the complex but (to me) preferable pleasures of sexual intercourse—at least for the moment by saying that your book identifies fascinating quandaries (between the fears of our inner female, who frets about untight abs, versus our outer feminist, who believes men should just fucking grow up !) and asks necessary questions (is it possible or even desirable to mandate sexual equity?). But The Female Thing left me with an overwhelming sense of foiled expectations, perhaps because it seemed more like a prelude to a conversation than the conversation itself. That said, I'm curious to know what your own views are on all this—why are women so afraid of implicating themselves when they write about sex?—and wonder why, given your carefully egalitarian it's-just-us-girls-talking-among-ourselves tone, you retain a Sontag-esque opaqueness when it comes to your own experience. I'm not asking for confessionalism, merely for a few illuminating personal anecdotes. Finally: Do you really believe anyone looks at Naomi Wolf's oppressively self-regarding piece in New York as paradigmatic of anything other than itself?

Looking forward to hearing back from you—
Daphne

P.S. Just for the record, I don't know about G spots, but Germaine Greer is dead wrong about the "myth" of female ejaculation.


From: Laura Kipnis
To: Daphne Merkin
Subject: Bratty and Contrarian vs. Dry and Authoritarian

Hi Daphne,

It's true that we haven't formally met, but we were once in a room together: I was in the audience at a panel about women and work you did with Gail Sheehy and others. They were all in suits and heels (with commentaries accessorized to match), while you were sort of bratty and contrarian: I felt a deep bond. So I'm happy to be having this exchange with you.

By way of answering your opening comment about my overly reader-friendly prose, maybe I should start with a confession, which might serve the ancillary purpose of deflecting these complaints I keep getting that I'm not self-revelatory enough. (Confess! Confess! Doesn't women's culture these days start to seem a lot like Salem circa 1692? As I say in The Female Thing , the irony about female progress is that so much of what was once foisted on us by patriarchy now comes back under the banner of "free choice.") The confession concerns my employment situation in the dreaded world of academia, which you contrast to the populist twang of the writing. Although I do indeed receive a paycheck from a university, I'm actually a former filmmaker who went to art school and mostly teach on the production side of the curriculum. What I write about actually has little to do with what I teach, so I'm not really what you'd call a traditional academic. It's a little complicated to explain all this in a bio line, though I would have tried if I'd known that it would turn out to be a filter through which to read the book (not only here, but in the Times ).

How does this relate to the question of prose style? Having an art education, and having been steeped in an experimental tradition at an impressionable age, I find myself interested, as a writer, in playing around with style and address, and in the larger question of how to creatively revamp social theory writing—the critical-diagnostic tradition of books like Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism, in which the writing itself is often unbearably dry and authoritarian. How would you write social criticism in which the writing itself performs the critique, as opposed to relying on argumentation or didacticism; books in which the writing engages the reader at the aesthetic level, not a cognitive one alone?

In Against Love , given the subject (adultery), I tried riffing on the mode of the love letter: The writing was over-the-top and flirtatious, there were a lot of run-on sentences and excessive metaphors, a lot of playing around—you know, like adultery. I was trying to write to the cultural id, and I think people mostly understood that. In The Female Thing , I really thought it would be clear that I was parodying the style of women's magazines and girl culture—not because the publishers were hoping to land me on Oprah (though I'm sure they wouldn't have minded), but as an experiment in appropriation: refunctioning (in the Brecht sense) girly language and turning it on its head, into critique. OK, maybe it was a failed experiment, if that didn't come across. But it wasn't unserious. And the more obvious route—serving up anecdotes about my own life experiences, which I would proceed to explicate, thus enlightening my readers with hard-won lessons in progressive femalehood—this just didn't appeal to me. For one thing, isn't that a pretty tired-out idiom by now?

Daphne, you nailed me: I must also confess to having a certain fondness for Sontag-esque opaqueness. Yes, I know she's now highly disapproved of for not writing more revealing things about her hot sex life with Annie L., or her tormented bisexuality, or whatever the really true story was. But I just don't agree with you that women "are afraid of implicating themselves in sexual discussion" these days. On the contrary: I think the issue is that the sexual discussions themselves so often manage to simultaneously reinforce the most puritanical tendencies in the culture; in fact, this may be the signature achievement of contemporary therapeutic culture.

I feel on slightly thin ice here, as I'm corresponding with someone known for confessional writing. My own reaction to this genre is, I confess, a little mixed. Well, to be honest, I often find myself appalled—while also completely fascinated, of course. Not only by the magnitude of the narcissism, but by the losing battle between the requirement to display self-knowledge, and the vastness of what you simply can't know about yourself—most of which is usually all too apparent to your reading public. In today's literary confessionals there's generally a predictable structure: the passage from problem to insight; meaning that some variety of curative self-knowledge must be produced before a denouement can be achieved. One thing this means is that even self-styled bad girls—your essay on spanking, for instance, or Toni Bentley's The Surrender —end up renouncing some illicit sexual pleasure for the higher rewards of self-realization. (How depressing if it turns out that inside every bad girl, there's a reformed bad girl screaming to get out!) What's framed as daring truth-telling actually follows strict genre conventions, covertly appeals to the reader (or some higher authority) for approval, and the clichés structuring the self-realizations frequently seem to mirror the conventions of 12-step culture: the addiction-recovery-testimonial model.

There are actually numerous personal anecdotes in both The Female Thing and Against Love —they're just not framed in the first person. I tend to think, given the gaps in self-knowledge we're all afflicted by, maybe—to paraphrase Wittgenstein, not that I've actually read him—whereof we can't speak the truth, thereof we must be silent. Or if not silent, then at least a bit taciturn. In both books, it's my experience of the world that I'm writing about and reflecting on, while trying to come up with modes of doing that outside the usual formulas. I'm not saying that I've pulled it off. Only that these books have been experiments in crossing genres: social criticism and some version of personal writing (minus the first person), while refunctioning the stylistic tics of the subjects. Probably there should have been stickers on the covers explaining what I was going for.

There's much more to say. Here's a question for you: Do men need to grow up, or do women need to lighten up?

Laura


From: Daphne Merkin
To: Laura Kipnis
Subject: Bratty Beauties and Babyish Boys

Hi Laura,

Thanks for your considered response, which addressed some of my points, side-stepped others, and, I thought, deliberately misunderstood others the better to feature yourself as an unfashionably un-"confessional" writer (as opposed, say, to my own ostensible proclivities for self-revelation), when I know I went out of my way to make clear that I wasn't asking for confessionalism from you so much as some dips into the personal. But let me begin at the beginning.

For starters, I can't believe you were in the audience at that N.Y. Times panel, since I thought I saw only the faintest scattering of people out there in the mostly empty expanse of seats. The fact that the other three panelists all chose to dress like camera-happy CEOs on a hot Sunday in early June while I dressed in casual, wrinkled linens (my favorite look: The Devil Wears Flax ) does not in itself, of course, make me either a contrarian or bratty. And in any case, I recognize only one of those adjectives as a legitimate description of my personal style. "Bratty" is certainly not how I wish to come across. What I think I was—and it undoubtedly showed, because I've never been good at hiding my reactions (although I've been working on becoming more inauthentic, per the recommendation of a close friend)—was impatient bordering on infuriated with Sheehy's flaccid pseudo-sociology, custom-designed Web sites, and general aura of well-accessorized bullshit.

Second, I don't think it was clear that you were parodying the style of women's magazines and girl culture (is "girl culture" something dreamed up by media studies?). For that to succeed, you'd have to have abandoned all hope of making any real points—you can't have it both ways, at least not when it comes to persuasive writing—which I don't think was the case. And as long as you're confessing (there, I caught you) to a secret fondness for Sontag-esque opaqueness, may I say that I consider her d'haut en bas attitude toward her readers (much loved by French intellectuals of the murkier school) the least attractive aspect of her as a writer. I, for one, don't think she was obliged to be more revealing about her "hot sex life with Annie L."—which interests me not one whit, although I wouldn't have chosen to put it quite this way and I can't tell whether this is you being you or you being a parody of you—or even about her "tormented bisexuality." (Who says it was so tormented?) But I do find it of interest (and I suppose worthy of "disapproving" comment ) that Sontag conveniently sidestepped her own lesbianism, or what I understood to be her lesbianism. (You can never be too careful.) Especially considering the fact that she made it a habit of taking up causes and airing her (often wrongheaded) political opinions. Her staying mum on the subject, for all her championing of the marginalized (including the sexually marginalized) in literature and life and her own interest in erotic subtexts—" Fascinating Fascism " is still, to my mind, one of her virtuoso performances—struck me as a shrewd and deliberate decision not to alienate her male readers, especially those who came to her in the '60s, when she was a dark-haired, bratty beauty ( there's a brat for you), a pinup girl for the egghead crowd. And since I also think gay women writers with any prominence whatsoever are a rare breed, especially when stacked against the ever-swelling numbers of gay male writers, I believe it would have done them (and perhaps her) good to publicly identify herself as such.

As for your remarks about confessional writing, let me be honest in turn and say that I felt a wave of weariness come over me when I read your arguments about narcissism and self-styled bad girls, knowing even before I got to the end that they would lead inevitably ... sigh ... to yet another hauling up of my poor spanking piece. For the record, I regret one or two pieces I've written, but not that one: I think it was both intellectually and emotionally daring in the truest sense of the word. Most of the things I've read along those lines are neither as thought-through or as honest, including Toni Bentley's The Surrender , which would have been a far more profound—as opposed to largely sensationalistic—book if she had explored the psychology of submission beginning with her father and her choice of the dancer's life instead of focusing on the breathless hygienic preparations prior to her anal-sex sessions. I think artful truth-telling about anything is something of a high-wire act that requires less rather than more narcissism (and surely this word is so hopelessly overused that it has ceased to reveal any of its original meaning). You have to be as aware of what you're leaving out—what you don't know or don't want to appear to know, or, perhaps most important of all, don't want your readers to know about yourself—as what you choose to spill on the page.

As for truth-telling of a sexual nature, it's still terra obscura (virginilia ?) for women. Nothing much has changed in the discourse since Virginia Woolf theorized that it was the one area of writing women had still to uncover. I'm not quite sure why that should be so, except that women (especially women who think on the page) are more afraid of not being taken seriously than men are and more afraid of having their self-exposure made fun of. The Men—Mailer, Updike, & Roth Inc.—can natter away all they want about cunts and orgasms and the humiliations of desire, and no one takes that to be the sum of their parts. My more-than-a-decade-old spanking piece will forever be held over my head—notwithstanding hundreds of other pieces of writing—as a sign, a signpost, an object of derision, an object of envy. Now, that's a subject we should talk about one day: female envy.

Meanwhile, let me answer your final question about whether men need to grow up or women to lighten up. Both, of course, although have you ever met a person of either sex you liked who didn't have a good sense of humor? Meaning that most women I know, young and older, don't set such store by their own maxims that they won't bend them (OK, I'll stoop to conquer, bend over) for the right love object. Which leaves the onus on those baby boys we know as grown-up men.

Daphne

(Laura Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern and the author of The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability . Her previous book was Against Love: A Polemic .
Daphne Merkin is the author of a novel, Enchantment , and a collection of essays, Dreaming of Hitler)