Against Love: A Polemic (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Will all the adulterers in the room please stand up?..." (more)
Key Phrases: spousal politics, domestic coupledom, emotional bargains, Bill Clinton, New Yorker, Adam Phillips (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Less against love than against the cultural constraints that leads us to create wrong-headed ideas of love, this is book is the perfect antidote to any lingering social guilt about being happily single. Against Love: A Polemic will both shock and irritate, especially when you find yourself nodding your head in agreement while laughing at another broken taboo. Laura Kipnis (author of Bound and Gagged, Ecstasy Unlimited) clearly enjoyed writing this; she lets her wit run rampage over classic married situations and human emotions with results that include comparing adulterers to freedom fighters (using sharpened spoons to tunnel out from under love's barbed wire fences) and referring to tearful confessions of cheating as "funny little couple rituals." These make it fun, but the iconoclastic beauty is in her questions. How did good relationships come to be considered work instead of play? Why, unlike most of history and many other modern cultures, do Americans assume love and marriage go hand-in-hand? What lead to infidelity committed by public figures becoming a source of outrage? Kipnis doesn't have answers. Although urging us to have more compassion for our own desires, she expects her readers are smart enough to supply their own in response to her ideas. That attitude itself is a treat--if you're prepared to keep up through a complex whirlwind of Freud, Marx, Gingrich, Wollstonecraft, and several generations of pop culture. Jill Lightner

From Publishers Weekly

In this ragingly witty yet contemplative look at the discontents of domestic and erotic relationships, Kipnis (Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America) combines portions of the slashing sexual contrarianism of Mailer, the scathing antidomestic wit of early Roseanne Barr and the coolly analytical aesthetics of early Sontag: "Aren't all adulterers amateur collagists? We're scavengers and improvisers, constructing odd assemblages out of detritus and leftovers: a few scraps of time and some dormant emotions...." With a razor-sharp intelligence and a gleeful sense of irony, Kipnis dismantles the myths of romance surrounding monogamy and makes the case for why adultery is a reasonable, often used, escape hatch. Kipnis is often most funny when at her most provocative ("Feel free to take a second to mull this over, or to make a quick call: `Hi hon, just checking in!' "), but even her moments of sarcastic humor can have a sobering effect, as when Kipnis considers the reasons behind the public's obsessive need for reading about real and fictional stories of spousal murders, noting that "perhaps these social pathologies and aberrations of love are the necessary fallout from the social conventions of love." Kipnis is adroit at detailing (sometimes with "notoriously unreliable" sexual self-reporting statistics) how our desire for fidelity is often at odds with basic human needs for personal freedom, and is terrific in dissecting how-or so Kipnis's case goes-"family values" politicians like Newt Gingrich fail miserably to live up to their own rhetoric. In the end, she concludes that adultery and fidelity have to exist side-by-side: "let's face it: purity always flirts with defilement." Kipnis balances her scintillating, on-target observations on straying with an honest sense of compassion for human experience.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (August 26, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375421890
• ISBN-13: 978-0375421891
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #654,431 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Polemic + humor = Engaging Reading, November 16, 2003

By A Customer

Reading Laura Kipnis' Against Love: A Polemic, is a guilty pleasure, like drinking an extra glass of wine at dinner. In a dazzling display of wit, social science, and chutzpah, Kipnis takes on the prevailing ideal of monogamy and makes a case that monogamy is not the not the blissful byproduct of a committed love-match, but a social contract that serves to police and oppress both parties involved. The heros of marriage, in Kipnis' view, are the adulterers, boldly striking out against chafing domestic bonds.

In the chapter titled, "Domestic Gulags," Kipnis rebuts the idea that lasting relationships are hard work. "When monogamy becomes labor, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with marriage as a domestic factory policed by means of rigid shop-floor discipline designed to keep the wives and husbands and domestic partners of the world choke-chained to the status quo machinery-is this really what we mean by a `good relationship'?" (19). Kipnis holds up adultery as the acting-out of what our collective social unconscious already holds true. ". . . if adultery is a de facto referendum on the sustainability of monogamy-and it would be difficult to argue that it's not-this also makes it the nearest thing to a popular uprising against the regimes of contemporary coupledom (28). The current and rising levels of divorce and the increase in complicated extended family grouping (one expert calls it a family shrub instead of a family tree-because families now tend to grow horizontally, with exes and steps and ex-steps, etc.) are strong evidence that "contemporary coupledom" is a social institution changing before our eyes, while governments, politicians, and religious institutions continue to rely on an out-dated idea of marriage and simply encourage all the coupled to work harder . . . witness Louisiana's covenant marriage law.

Operating on this theory, Kipnis makes some salient points about our national obsession with the sex lives of politicians. While publicly upholding the virtue of holding to fidelity and marriage, many politicians were caught operating outside the bounds of their own marriages. Kipnis says, "What was a poor constituent to think? Maybe that dogged fidelity really isn't all it's touted to be? That out-dated vows should be rewritten, not just blindly reaffirmed (168)? She likens the politician-caught-with-his-pants-down phenomenon to politicians as players acting out our national unconscious and conscious confusion in "some new avant garde form of national political dinner theater." (30).

Social theory aside, Kipnis' descriptions of the process and feeling of entering an adulterous affair are dead on and extremely funny. Her first example involves hooking up at an academic conference, where she describes the interior monologue of the about-to-be adulterous player, " . . . you slowly become aware of a muffled but not completely unfamiliar feeling stirring deep within, a distant rumbling getting louder and louder, like a herd of elephants massing on the bushveld . . . oh God, it's your libido, once a well known freedom fighter, now a sorry, shriveled thing, from swaggering outlaw to model citizen, Janis Joplin to Barry Manilow in just a few short decades" (5).

Another point that rings true: at the heart of what makes adultery such a vibrant experience is that falling in love is not merely about loving the other, it's about rediscovering and falling in love again with oneself.

But love affairs can feel utterly transforming and how few opportunities there are to feel that way in normal life, which by definition militates against transformation. You get to surrender to emotions you forgot you could have: to desire and to being desired (how overwhelming that can feel when it's been awhile), and the thrill of the new thing, of course, but what really keeps you glued to the phone till all hours of the night is a very different new love object: yourself. The new beloved mirrors this fascinating new self back to you, and admit it, you're madly in love with both of them (132).

Kipnis' hilarious nine page listing of "What can't you do because you're in a couple" is worth reading aloud at dinner parties.

Does Kipnis really believe that adultery is the savior of marriage? While she uses all her intellectual powers and writerly charm to put together a compelling case, her main intent is to open a dialogue. One must know that the term polemic by definition is a one-sided argument, deliberately controversial in nature. As Kipnis says in her introduction, it's "designed to be the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z-Boy lounger" (4). Reading Against Love may rattle a few windows, and a few previously unexamined convictions as well.

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Writing it must have been fun, September 8, 2004

By	C. Brown (Evanston, IL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Kipnis romps through this book with such enthusiasm, it's a delight to read. She looks in every nook and cranny of relationships and holds forth expansively. What a sharp, clever mind is at work.

We're asked to consider many things about relationships, not just marriage and not just heterosexual relationships...why is it such a difficult thing for two people to get along, let alone love, over an extended period of time? She rightly says that the 50% divorce rate doesn't include the people who remain in marriages of misery. Kipnis offers adultery as a way in which people can feel the rush of coming to life, but she doesn't hesitate to describe the difficulties of taking that route and that it can easily be only a temporary escape. Why does our culture almost desperately hold marriage up as a standard, even while many of those promoting it most seem to have the greatest difficulty practicing what they preach?

When I finished the book I thought of the Buddhist idea that the source of suffering is desire. I also thought of how our society promotes desire as a universal good that should be followed at all times, particularly if the path leads into a store. Is it just a coincidence that while I am shopping for food at the grocery store I can hear love songs being played over the public address system? We want people to want, the encouragement, the inducement is constant. It drives our economy. With every taboo falling or fallen we are consumed with desire without restraint, arriving at our destiny as perfect consumers.

Marriage, institutionalized as the most private place of intimacy, is desperately supported because we'd like to believe there is some preserve where crass consumerism can't intrude, but as Kipnis relates we've taken marketing to heart and present ourselves as appealing products on the mating scene. Is it surprising that the product doesn't hold up over time? Image is everything from your car to your house to your job and if one shops for an appealing persona using one's own, how can the charade be expected to last when the pair become known to each other down to every image-busting detail of toothbrushing and body odor?

Our culture promotes levity, with everything light and easy and fun. Design life for yourself and don't take it too seriously! We all are practiced at that. But don't we also desperately long for there to be a place of deep and lasting meaning that lies beyond daily superficiality? Marriage is billed as such, but where is one to begin with little experience of sincerity, constancy, commitment and real joy, when we are constantly blinded by appearances?

Left unsaid in this book is what I think love is: the unaccountable desire to do for another in ways large or small, to put that person first for the pure pleasure of seeing that person happy, relieved, empowered as a result. There's joy in this benign power beyond anything one can do for oneself. When the other person feels the same way, it can't get any better, marriage or not. In such a situation, the relationship is not hard work because the thing to do is always clear and the ways in which to do it are infinitely varied; you become a craftsman of happiness, happy in your work. I believe Kipnis' book is not against this love, but against the easily exploitable, yet untenable popular image of love which can make a relationship seem like a prison.

34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kiss me, Kipnis!!, September 7, 2003

By	Joseph Dipietro (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

To steal a query from S.J.Perelman (and if you're going to pilfer a witticism, he da man), does anybody mind if I make love in public? After reading Kipnis' book, I feel liberated, as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders, as if I am at long last breathing great lungfuls of clear intellectual purity after a lifetime among the broken-spirited, colorless drudges and cat's paws of capitalistic romantic fantasy. Kipnis, you're my dream girl of the neo-Marxist relationship polemicists.

This is actually a pretty good read if you're comfortable with the smart-arsed academic, tongue-in-cheek variety. There is a completely unnecessary but fun-to-read bit at the beginning about what Kipnis intends through the polemic form, and like most books written on wide ranging subjects by the professoriat, Kipnis keeps so many argumentative balls in the air at once it's like watching a Benzedrined juggler. But the notion that adulterers are a species of avant gardists who are necessarily challenging the confines and assumptions of a social institution that needs some serious thought--if not a complete overhaul--is not without merit. (Actually, it's got a lot of merit, if you give her arguments half a chance.) That we are all in thrall of the notion of monogamous domestic coupledom, and use it almost as a substitute for notions of God in a secular world, or as something approaching an Aristotelian Form, is actually pretty consonant with the evidence. Almost everybody buys into the notion that a "True Love" is "out there somewhere," that it's just a question of object (the right person--you know "The One") but almost nobody questions these things. Or that the only receptacle for adult love is religiously sanctified, state sanctioned permanent monogamy. We have, as Kipnis eloquently put it, "mortgaged our emotional well-being to intimacy institutions that hinge on elaborate fictions themselves. ..." Erich Fromm made a similar point almost 50 years ago in "The Art of Loving," but Kipnis, bless her soul, is a lot funnier.

All in all, this book is an eye-opener, provocative in an elegant way, deft, devastatingly hilarious in places (the oyster metaphor on page 70 literally caused me to laugh out loud and drop the book). And if you're among the recently lovelorn (don't ask!) this book will do more to make you feel better than all of the Dr. Phil garbage in the world. My only gripe is that this book is so entertaining, so interesting, and so challenging--and the photo on the inside of the dust cover so fetching--that I wanted to take its author canoeing in the moonlight to pledge my eternal fealty to working for her happiness, and sing some Bing Crosby tunes while strumming a ukelele. My fault for reading that Giddins bio before attacking "Against Love," but, hell, some guys just never learn.