Laura Kipnis

An analysis of the social ramifications of adultery examines its cultural significance, considering that adulterers may pose valid political questions about social contracts and offering a utopian vision that challenges the modern purposes of fidelity. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

A Polemic

Against Love

Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability

The Female Thing

From a highly regarded feminist cultural critic and professor comes a polemic arguing that the stifling sense of sexual danger sweeping American campuses doesn’t empower women, it impedes the fight for gender equality. Feminism is broken, argues Laura Kipnis, if anyone thinks the sexual hysteria overtaking American campuses is a sign of gender progress. A committed feminist, Kipnis was surprised to find herself the object of a protest march by student activists at her university for writing an essay about sexual paranoia on campus. Next she was brought up on Title IX complaints for creating a "hostile environment." Defying confidentiality strictures, she wrote a whistleblowing essay about the ensuing seventy-two-day investigation, which propelled her to the center of national debates over free speech, "safe spaces," and the vast federal overreach of Title IX. In the process she uncovered an astonishing netherworld of accused professors and students, campus witch hunts, rigged investigations, and Title IX officers run amuck. Drawing on interviews and internal documents, Unwanted Advances demonstrates the chilling effect of this new sexual McCarthyism on intellectual freedom. Without minimizing the seriousness of campus assault, Kipnis argues for more honesty about the sexual realities and ambivalences hidden behind the notion of "rape culture." Instead, regulation is replacing education, and women’s hard-won right to be treated as consenting adults is being repealed by well-meaning bureaucrats. Unwanted Advances is a risk-taking, often darkly funny interrogation of feminist paternalism, the covert sexual conservatism of hook-up culture, and the institutionalized backlash of holding men alone responsible for mutually drunken sex. It’s not just compulsively readable, it will change the national conversation.

Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus

Unwanted Advances

Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America

Bound and Gagged

"A fiercely argued, keenly insightful, hilarious investigation of the impact of COVID-19 on sexual and romantic relationships, in which the author situates her own and others' coupled lockdown experiences against larger backdrop: the politics of the virus, economic disparities, changing gender relations, the ongoing institutional crack-ups prompted by #MeToo and #BLM"--

A Diagnosis

Love in the Time of Contagion

An examination of how sexual fantasy and pornography are policed in contemporary American culture.

A Coisa Feminina

We all relish a good scandal—the larger the figure (governor, judge) and more shocking the particulars (diapers, cigars)—the better. But why do people feel compelled to act out their tangled psychodramas on the national stage, and why do we so enjoy watching them, hurling our condemnations while savoring every lurid detail? With "pointed daggers of prose" (The New Yorker), Laura Kipnis examines contemporary downfall sagas to lay bare the American psyche: what we desire, what we punish, and what we disavow. She delivers virtuoso analyses of four paradigmatic cases: a lovelorn astronaut, an unhinged judge, a venomous whistleblower, and an over-imaginative memoirist. The motifs are classic—revenge, betrayal, ambition, madness—though the pitfalls are ones we all negotiate daily. After all, every one of us is a potential scandal in the making: failed self-knowledge and colossal self-deception—the necessary ingredients—are our collective plight. In How to Become a Scandal, bad behavior is the entry point for a brilliant cultural romp as well as an anti-civics lesson. "Shove your rules," says scandal, and no doubt every upright citizen, deep within, cheers the transgression—as long as it's someone else's head on the block.

Adventures in Bad Behavior

How to Become a Scandal

From the author of the acclaimed Against Love comes a pointed, audacious, and witty examination of the state of the female psyche in the post-post-feminist world of the twenty-first century.Women remain caught between feminism and femininity, between self-affirmation and an endless quest for self-improvement, between playing an injured party and claiming independence. Rather than blaming the usual suspects–men, the media–Kipnis takes a hard look at culprits closer to home, namely women themselves. Kipnis serves up the gory details of the mutual displeasure between men and women in painfully hilarious detail. Is anatomy destiny after all? An ambitious and original reassessment of feminism and women’s ambivalence about it, The Female Thing breathes provocative new life into that age-old question.

Dirt, envy, sex, vulnerability

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Leon Wieseltier

David Thomson

Ramachandra Guha

Michael Ignatieff

Joshua Bennett

Mark Lilla

Sean Wilentz

Louise Glück

Adam Zagajewski

David Grossman

Sally Satel

Hannah Sullivan

Helen Vendler

Andrea Marcolongo

James Wolcott

Clara Collier

Celeste Marcus

Eli Lake

Moshe Halbertal

Julius Margolin

Shawn McCreesh

Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics is a quarterly of essays and poetry from some of the world's most celebrated independent thinkers, leading artists, and up-and-coming literary voices.

Volume I, Issue 1

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics

On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics

Ecstasy Unlimited

Liebe - eine Abrechnung

In this timely, insightful, and darkly funny investigation, the acclaimed author of Against Love asks: what does living in dystopic times do to our ability to love each other and the world? COVID produced new taxonomies of love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Will the cultural afterlife of Covid-19 be as lasting as that of HIV, which reshaped consciousness about sex and love in the intervening decades, even after AIDS itself had been beaten back by medical science? Will COVID end up making us more relationally conservative, as some think HIV did to gay culture? Will it send us fleeing into emotional siloes or coupled cocoons despite the fact that, pre-Covid, domestic coupledom had been steadily losing fans? Just as COVID revealed the nation to itself, so did it hold a mirror up to our relationships. In Love in the Time of Contagion, Laura Kipnis (often hilariously) weaves her own (ambivalent) coupled lockdown experiences and those of others against a larger backdrop: the politics of the virus, economic disparities, changing gender relations, the ongoing institutional crack-ups prompted by #MeToo and #BLM, even as she maps their effects on the everyday routines and occasional solaces of love and sex.

The author of How to Become a Scandal presents a heavily researched collection of essays on the archetypes of wayward masculinity to offer intellectual insight into notorious public examples.

Notes from an Ongoing Investigation

From the notoriously contrarian author of Against Love, a witty and probing examination of why badly behaved men have been her lifelong fascination, on and off the page It's no secret that men often behave in intemperate ways, but in recent years we've witnessed so many spectacular public displays of male excess—disgraced politicians, erotically desperate professors, fallen sports icons—that we're left to wonder whether something has come unwired in the collective male psyche. In the essays collected here, Laura Kipnis revisits the archetypes of wayward masculinity that have captured her imagination over the years, scrutinizing men who have figured in her own life alongside more controversial public examples. Slicing through the usual clichés about the differences between the sexes, Kipnis mixes intellectual rigor and wit to give us compelling survey of the affinities, jealousies, longings, and erotics that structure the male-female bond.

Laura Kipnis

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