The subject under her magnifying glass might be men, but Laura Kipnis’s exuberant new book is just as interested in women, and in all the ridiculous ways that both sexes keep misunderstanding each other. Her essays are about real men and fictional men and every so often straw men, organised by genus (Operators, Neurotics, Sex Fiends and Haters) and species, including Cheaters and Men Who Hate Hillary.
It’s an ironic taxonomy, because the root of Kipnis’s fascination with men is their freedom not to be sorted, as women routinely are, into reductive categories like madonna/whore. Her aim is not to generalise away what makes particular men interesting, even the scumbags, stalkers and conmen, and it’s certainly not to lock them up in irredeemable categories. She explains in the essay Juicers – which manages to yoke together Lance Armstrong, the New Republic critic Leon Wieseltier, fabulist James Frey and Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men – that her real problem is what she calls her “moral wishy-washiness”. In other words, her inability to condemn strangers for infractions that derive, after all, from the otherwise esteemed quality of ambition. Or as she puts it elsewhere, in an elegant summary of the exhausting demands of the internet outrage-machine, “I don’t like having to rise to the bait like some sort of earnest marionette.”
Despite her moral relativism, or perhaps because of it, Kipnis frequently calls herself a “contrarian” — although she takes a good swipe at the late contrarian-in-chief, Christopher Hitchens, in an essay, The Lothario, that is partly about funny women – a category which Hitchens claimed didn’t exist. Kipnis’s previous, “rather conflicted” book The Female Thing, explored the pesky persistence of “traditional” feminine roles in a supposedly post-feminist world. A New York Times reviewer took her to task for fighting battles, like workplace harassment and political correctness, that in 2006 seemed passé.
Rising up again in this book, amid the furious resurgence of basic arguments about women’s cultural representation and their right to speak in public, those same fights feel absolutely of the moment. In the essay Gropers, for instance, Kipnis – a professor at Northwestern University – strides into the fraught arena of campus sexual politics, sceptically revisiting Naomi Wolf’s 2004 claim that the eminent Yale literary critic Harold Bloom had placed a clammy and indelibly traumatising hand on her knee 20 years before. It’s an old story about an old story, but such testimonies helped to push the policies of universities, including Kipnis’s own, toward outright bans on relationships between faculty and students, locking them into a predator/victim dynamic that denies the often intense, often mutual desire that can erupt in circumstances of unequal power. (Kipnis does say “for the record” that she’d see “quid pro quo harassers” violently punished.)
But her book is not about monsters, it’s about confused, self-deluding, libidinous men, whom we can’t just lock up or destroy: Tiger Woods, Anthony Weiner, Larry Craig. Kipnis yokes these famous “humiliation artists” to less familiar cases and switches up the lighting, in order to pose more interesting questions about their scandals. For instance, “what exactly is the lure of sex with celebs?” and why would a man have multiple “affairs” with exactly the kind of woman guaranteed to sell him out – ie, one who’s willing to have sex with him in the first place? Freud may be the glass in Kipnis’s lens, but she trains it on an engagingly diverse range of subjects – James Baldwin and People magazine, Jean-Paul Sartre and Weiner’s wiener, Larry Flynt’s Hustler and David Mamet. Altogether, Men is a trip: the driver might occasionally be lead-footed and erratic, and the road might not be going anywhere really new, but bombing down the straight it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
