Against Love: An Interview with author Laura Kipnis

There are a thousand books out there telling us what it means to be a woman today. Unfortunately, most of the books focus on what’s wrong with being a woman today: not enough eligible men, our necks look funny when we age, there’s still a lack of gender equity, husbands aren’t helping with the housework, we’re either smothering our children or we’re not devoting enough time to them, and, of course, we’re not eating enough like the French/Japanese/whomever. But if you buy this hardback book for $25.95, the author is happy enough to tell you how to overcome all of that.

Laura Kipnis, who examined the state of modern monogamy in her book Against Love: A Polemic, now focuses on the state of modern femininity in The Female Thing. The book is divided into four sections focusing on what Kipnis sees as being the four problem areas for women: dirt (housekeeping), sex (the “orgasm gap” and the failure of the sexual revolution), envy (the self-help industry) and vulnerability (the fear of rape and physical harm from men). She offers anecdotes such as a power struggle between a husband and wife over the cutting of the dessert at a dinner party and then deconstructs the observations with some serious theory, namedropping Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

Which is not to say the book is impenetrable. At a little under 200 pages, Kipnis manages to be funny and irreverent, never afraid to position her more complicated ideas beside pithy and funny terms like the “feminine industrial complex.” She does not, however, sugarcoat the book with advice on how to overcome these issues. Her final sentence suggests she’ll leave it to the reader to figure out, stating, “A full accounting of the female situation at the moment would need to start roughly here.”

I sat down with Kipnis over a couple glasses of red wine to discuss her work.

Interview by Jessica Crispin

The last sentence I thought was very provocative. It seems like a challenge. Was it to other writers or to the individual reader?

To women more than to writers, I guess. I thought of the whole book as a challenge or intervention or course correction. I don’t mean to be grandiose about it. I have a hard time with conclusions because I don’t want to advise people on things. I don’t want to be overly conclusive. I think in both the last two books I tried to end on a questioning note.

Although that’s a common complaint about your books, that you don’t instruct people on what to do now that they’re questioning this large thing in their life.

That was the hilarious thing with Against Love. It turns out if you write a book with “love” in the title everybody wants to read it as an advice book. I was endlessly asked for advice. It was kind of hilarious. The thing I’d want to say to them is, and I’m supposed to solve the problem? There’s this problem with femininity, there’s this problem with love, and I’m supposed to? Any answer would be sort of glib. People ask for these things...

Read the rest of this interview on Bookslut.com

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