I got one of my Christmas presents to myself in the mail today, Laura Kipnis's new book, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy and Vulnerability. Any title with female, dirt, sex, envy and vulnerability has to belong in my library. (You can download an interview with Laura Kipnis on Audible.com or just read about it for free here. ) I just skimmed around in the book and found wonderful quotes like this:
I'm talking about gender progress and all the impediments to it, needless to say, since when it comes to the female situation, contradictions speckle the landscape, like ingrown hairs after a bad bikini wax.
I'm looking forward to the weekend when I have more time to read all my new books.
I first found Laura Kipnis browsing in the library and found her polemic, Against Love, the only book I've ever read that spoke out in favor of adultery and against love. Kipnis had about 200 pages filled with paragraphs like this one:
When monogamy becomes labor, when desires is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with marriage a domestic factory policed by means of rigid shop-floor discipline designed to keep the wives and husbands and domestic partners of the world choke-chained to the status quo machinery -- is this really what we mean by a "good relationship"?
The thing I like best about Kipnis' books is that even commonly held beliefs are challenged head on with nothing taken for granted. Too much of my life has been spent just accepting things as I have been told them. Nothing should be so sacred as to avoid scrutiny.
2 comments:
Sounds highly interesting. May have to take up reading again to experience this book (or these books) for myself.
What you are describing is otherwise known as "critical thinking." Far too little of that going on in our society.
I remember as a little boy, no more than 8 or 9 years old, looking around at the people praying away in church and thinking "this is bullshit."
I still think it's bullshit. But hey, it's profitable bullshit. Maybe I'll start my own ministry, or even my own church, to see if I can capitalize on the craze. Only in my church, it would be legal for whomever to marry whomever. Or not. It would be ok if they just fuck. I don't know that people need to be in any kind of a marriage. What's most important is that they are happy, they feel whole, and they are able to live the way they want to live, without big brother standing over the shoulder telling them what to do.
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