Name: The Female Thing
Rating: 3.166666666666667 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780375424175

Laura Kipnis

Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability

The Female Thing

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

Saw this cited in a paper but the writing style is much more early-2010s magazine adjacent than I expected. I finished the intro, envy chapter and half of the chapter on sex and skipped to the chapter on dirt. I think the chapter on dirt is the most interesting/insightful. I think Kipnis has interesting points about cleaning as an escape from an internalised existential feeling and does constantly cleaning affirm these feelings in a contradiction, but she stops short of developing the points fully. I didn’t enjoy the kinda snarky, lots of mid-sentence insertions style of writing, but someone else might find it makes the topic more approachable. 

Xiang

A study of the state of the female psyche looks at four key issues of feminism and femininity to reveal women's own complicity in their subjection as she explores the female condition in relation to the ideas of envy, dirt, sex, and vulnerability. By the author of Against Love. Reprint.

I.m. ruzz

Kipnis is the sort of woman I'd enjoy watching dissect a crowd of intellectuals, then sitting back and discussing it with her. Her mind, and tongue are razor sharp and she has that mystical ability to see what's plain behind the show and pomp of a lot of modern thought. No small feat. 

Against Love, her poorly named polemic against relationships, or more specifically against marriage--though titled so--was a rip roaring ride of research, biting wit, cleverness and general disregard for the common expectations of good behaviour when dealing with topics like love and marriage. If you haven't read it, do. 

This short book never quite reached the fevered pitch of Against Love, and in some senses you could almsot feel her stepping gingerly lest she engage the entire feminist cadre against her. The closest she gets to her true form of freewheeling intellectual destruction is in the chapter about the elusive female orgasm. The farthest while discussing rape. An uneven pace despite the brevity of the book. 

However, I think the book might be good primer to anyone interested in gender studies. Particularly as a jumping off point to other works that might expand more deeply. 

she ends the book with a valid description of a couple paradoxes of the modern idea of women as viewed through the lens of feminism and declares from that point is where a true look at the issue must begin. An odd sort of way to end a book. A page taken from the fluff passing as a heavy-handed appeal for a trilogy ala Angelina Jolie's Salt perhaps? Whetting our appetites for her real next novel? or testing the grounds to see how much flame is roused from this? 

a couple interesting threads of thought:

1. the idea that the preternatural mother instinct and mother bonding with child is actually a convenient construction of modern (or recent, historically at least) thought. 

2. that until the 1920s a goodly part of a doctors work was to deal with feminine hysteria. The cure for which was often manual genital massage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_h...

there are many more interesting morsels layered throughout the book and while they all tend toward her case--if she was actually making a case--even combined they failed, for me, to raise a coherent thread of thought in any particular direction. this is more like a review of the state of things than a discorse, or argument put forth. which in some way is a shame as where kipnis shines brightest is when she's dismantling some unsuspecting hacks work with the sheer violence of her thought. 

alas, perhaps the next book..

The Female Thing Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability

Reviews

Highlights