Books in Brief

Books in Brief The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability by Laura Kipnis (Pantheon, 192 pp., $23.95). Thanks to Laura Kipnis, I overcame my addiction to chocolate, cancelled my weekly...

...but feminism says that's not acceptable...
...And while it won't be used in college classrooms, it will find a ready market among introspective female yuppies unsettled by their desire to read Cosmo, and mildly discomfited by their girlfriends' interest in the mall instead of the Middle East...
...moreover, I understand why I'm bothered by my preference for pop magazines instead of international politics...
...Whether or not we are actually addicted to cleaning such things—or femininity causes us to do so—is a matter of one's own judgment...
...Managing this—rejecting superficial pursuits while being okay with one's feminine self—is a small miracle, one that few women if any (I wasn't clear) are able to achieve...
...Vulnerability" was a different take on rape and the dynamic of women's subordination...
...I now know why I scour Glamour for tips on how to tame my latest flame instead of being intrigued by Kim Jong Il...
...The chapter rehashed a bit of the earlier innuendo, but did provide a more academic crescendo for a book that seemed otherwise designed to entertain...
...but either way, it was her most interesting postulate...
...It was actually an essay on why women are addicted to cleanliness: the house, society, sex, skin pores—you name it...
...Next comes "dirt," which I was sure was going to talk about the gossipy nature of my female cohorts...
...This, in turn, fuels the female consumer culture, causes women to get hitched (because we want to cash in on the economic and social advantages of being male), and causes strife in relationships because women want more and envy their partner's masculine advantages...
...Summing up: The Female Thing explores rather than proves the idea that females are victims of the desires that society has created for them...
...That's because Kipnis, in 192 quick pages, has helped me understand the inherent insecurities of my inner womanhood through the two-part theory of femininity versus feminism: "Femininity, at least in its current incarnation, hinges on sustaining an underlying sense of female inadequacy...
...This yin and yang of the female thing is explored through the lens of four psychological factors: envy, sex, dirt, and vulnerability...
...Envy"—"you denounce the source of your pain but still want what he has"—explores the female relationship to men through a sort of modern penis-envy rationale...
...Jillian Bandes...
...Feminism, on the other hand, wants to eliminate female inadequacy...
...Kipnis defines femininity as a machine that creates an insatiable desire for improvement—self-improvement, spousal improvement, world improvement—which men do not have...
...For 44 pages, Kipnis spares no adjective in informing her readers about the contradictory nature of female orgasms...
...The second chapter, "sex," reads like pornography...
...It is simple but enlightening...
...Cleaning up provides an outlet for femininity's insatiable desire for self-improvement...
...It's because society has bred me to operate that way...
...In order to be feminine, the modern woman is supposed to be muddled in frivolity, better at gossiping than growing her stock portfolio...
...Thanks to Laura Kipnis, I overcame my addiction to chocolate, cancelled my weekly psychiatric appointment, and no longer get anxious when my boyfriend doesn't call...
...Then, for the next eight pages she explains how kids just aren't appealing to educated women...

Vol. 12 • October 2006 • No. 3


 
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