The Female Thing

In the female psyche nowadays, "contradictions speckle the landscape, like ingrown hairs after a bad bikini wax." So writes Laura Kipnis, author of the widely acclaimed polemicAgainst Love. With "the gleeful viperish wit of Dorothy Parker" (Slate), Kipnis now offers a fresh and provocative assessment of the female condition in the post-post-feminist world of the twenty-first century. For every advance toward sexual equality on the part of women in recent years, she argues, some new impediment just "seems" to appear. Ironically, feminism ran up against an unanticipated opponent: the inner woman. An ambitious and original reassessment of feminism and women's ambivalence about it,The Female Thingbrims with bracing and funny social observations informed by psychological acuity. For all the upbeat "You go, girl" slogans, women remain caught between feminism and femininity, between self-affirmation and an endless quest for self-improvement, between playing the injured party and claiming independence. Feminism is bedeviled by the same impasses and contradictions it seeks to rectify. But rather than blaming the usual suspectsmen, the mediaKipnis takes a hard look at culprits closer to home, namely women themselves and their complicity in upholding male privilege, even as they resent men deeply for it. Which makes relations between the sexes rather thorny at the moment, and Kipnis serves up the gory details of the mutual displeasure between men and women in painfully hilarious detail. In the tradition ofThe Feminine MystiqueandThe Female Eunuch, this is a pathbreaking work. As audacious as it is historically and socially grounded,The Female Thingexplores age-old quandaries: the war between the sexes, what women "really" want, and to what extent anatomy is destiny after all. From the Hardcover edition.

Laura Kipnis is a professor of media studies at Northwestern University. She has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of many essays and articles on sexual politics and contemporary culture, and of the book Against Love: A Polemic.


From the Hardcover edition.