At one point, as I was reading the book and thinking of my comments for an Amazon review, I turned to the comments from other authors on the back cover. You always assume that, well if they didn’t endorse the book they wouldn’t be on the cover. However, all five comments are spot on, and I could not do any better. So on Amazon, choose the “hardcover” tab, then “look inside”, and click on “back cover” to read them.
The following comments are my rambling thoughts, not Kipnis’; please don’t prejudge her book based on what I’ve written. Unwanted Advances is nuanced, balanced, and works on multiple levels. In no way does she minimize the frequency, risk and damage of sexual assault. She wants to empower women, not make them dependent upon an Orwellian, dangerous, expensive and largely ineffective bureaucracy. She wants women to be both assertive and aware, while acknowledging the very messy world of sexual emotions, i.e. to give them “agency”, not dependency. Ironically, only in the university would this not be common sense.
On reading the negative comments here on Amazon it appears to me that either the commenters didn’t really read the book or they are so invested in the philosophy of Jacques Lacan that they’ll brook no dissent.
Kipnis doesn’t mention Lacan, but I’ll quote from Frederick Crews “Follies of the Wise”. For Lacan, women are “… voiceless, helpless objects of persecution. And that image has suited the purposes of radical feminists who are themselves far from voiceless or helpless. If they really sought gender equality, they would be mortified by Lacan’s depiction of female incapacity. Instead, they seek a total expose of the fearfully aggressive male psyche, and Lacan provides an avenue, however chimerical, to that end. So strong is his doctrinal charm in this regard that the egregious sexism of his personal behavior is left entirely out of account.”
Of course I can’t help thinking that this is just part of a larger postmodern picture where everyone is a victim except heterosexual white males. And like all Marxist regimes in the past it starts eating its own vanguard class who are forced to show greater and greater fidelity to the leader’s socially constructed beliefs to survive (and be a survivor). The vast enforcement apparatus is all knowing and all seeing because everyone knows they should report on their neighbors (reporting shows solidarity and deflects suspicion). The slightest comment or gesture may be the sign of a victimizer and should be reported to the agency for investigation and later reference. The rules are unknown and the trials secret to more effectively terrorize and silence dissent and so the outside world continues to revere it (i.e. fund it with money and consult its vanguard class).
One negative comment was that Kipnis wrote too much in the first person. But that’s a positive, not a negative. This arbitrary Title IX regulatory overreach, is as she says, 50-50 plus a feather, or he-said/she-said plus bias, and that feather weighs a ton, or equivalently, the bias permeates all parties and the whole process; there is no bloody knife with fingerprints (and if there’s a sizzling email, well it’s evidence for the prosecution, rarely for the defense). So Kipnis is being as clear as possible to the reader by alerting us at all times as to her thinking, motivations, and bias. That perspective is necessary and honest in examining this Orwellian process. And it’s why, as an insider - as a feminist, professor and Title IX defendant - she writes so effectively on this subject.
Furthermore, as a film professor she knows how to connect with the reader. For example, at the end of the book when the university’s counsel viciously upbraided Ludlow in the termination hearing, I shared her anger and understood her “sense of self-recrimination ever since” for not responding. She brings the reader into the story.
Part of what makes this subject both interesting and scary is the expanding definition of “unwanted advances”, not only in scope, but also in time. Thus as the definition expands it can also capture prior years events, like applying new laws retroactively. Nick Haslam, at the University of Melbourne, discusses the expansion aspect in his paper, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology”.
But I’ll quote from Nathan Glazer’s “The Limits of Social Policy” regarding concept creep on the notion of equality and its results because it nicely parallels the issues here. “[Equality] first expresses itself in a demand for equality in political rights and political power; it moves on to demand equality in economic power, in social status, in authority in every sphere. And just as there is no point at which the sea of misery is finally drained, so, too, there is no point at which the equality revolution comes to an end, if only because as it proceeds we become ever more sensitive to smaller and smaller degrees of inequality. More important, different types and forms of equality inevitably emerge to contradict each other.”
“Social policy thus, in almost every field, created new and unmanageable demands. It was illusory to see our social policies as only reducing a problem; any policy has dynamic aspects such that it also expands the problem, changes the problem, generates further problems. And social policy is then challenged to deal adequately with these new demands that follow the implementation of the original measures.”
“Demands that required enormous expenditures for their fulfillment were often presented, not only by advocates but by experts, as if they were the absolute minima for a decent society.” A whole new “professional” and “expert” class arises to administer and enforce the new demands and they, in turn, need support organizations and advocacy groups to promote their mission and members. And their mission grows and expands, as it must.
The secrecy requirements of Title IX have certainly aided its expansion by disabling society’s defenses, like a malicious virus that disables the immune system.
Again, these are my comments, not Kipnis’. But if you’ve made it this far, I’ll plug two other excellent books I’ve read recently: “Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran”, by Laura Secor, recently out in paperback, and “The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia”, by Tim Tzouliadis, also available in paperback. Like Kipnis’ book, they’re great stories, well told.
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