Fly Melon

Read Laura Kipnis’s The Female Thing: Dirt, Envy, Sex, Vulnerability.  [A point in favor of the Oxford comma, for those interested: it allows you to omit the ‘and,’ though that’s not technically grammatically correct.]  I acquired it on a recent trip to Strand.  Having gone in to purchase two specific books, neither of which was in stock, I left with four completely different books.  The blurbs on the back of Kipnis’s book, though positive, point out that the strength of the book is not its even-handedness, its cogence, its thoroughness, or its evident but not over-stated intelligence, but rather sauciness.  In fact it isn’t particularly even-handed, cogent, etc.  Kipnis writes books that create buzz.  She revels in setting contradicting ideas side-by-side, gesturing at their deficiencies with a roll of the eyes, then ending the paragraph with a snarky comment and tromping off to the next inconsistency. 

Her observations are interesting, particularly those that touch on women’s own ambivalence about how they wanted to be treated, how they want to act.  I particularly enjoyed her discussion of pornography, a section of which culminates like so, “Pornography’s critics take porn very literally, as if it purports to be social realism, but a better comparison would be sci-fi, another genre that takes the ‘what if things were different?’ approach to bodies and societies….Sexual synchrony between men and women—what an interesting prospect to contemplate.”  Of course the production of porn is a social reality, a fact that gets in the way of any attempts to generalize about whether the fantasy is harmless.

Back to the family, there’s a portion of the “Sex” chapter in which Kipnis reels off a spate of historical facts about higher infant mortality, the practice of naming an infant after its dead sibling, infanticide, child abandonment, sending children to wet nurses following birth and to foundling hospitals or workhouses when economic circumstances dictated it, then concludes that the maternal instinct is “a culturally specific development, also an economic luxury.”  She drastically oversimplifies here.  Certainly there’ve been external circumstances in various societies throughout history that have amplified or restricted expression of this instinct, if it exists.  But that doesn’t mean there is not instinct—only that the current cultural response to it is one that might be altered.  Kipnis wants us to bring about a “culturally specific” instinct that puts equal weight on the paternal instinct.  Fair enough.  Educated women with reproductive control are by far less likely to procreate, which means that birth rates in first world countries have declined.  The trend is due, at least in part, to the fact that women get the short end of the stick.  Haha.

Kipnis touches on many controversial issues, makes a few pithy observations, then moves right along—and I can imagine a reading of her book would provide fodder for arguments for months.  And she leaves you wanting to know more, at least in order to make your own case.  Good stuff.