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The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability Hardcover – October 17, 2006

by Laura Kipnis (Author)

11 customer reviews

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In the female psyche nowadays, “contradictions speckle the landscape, like ingrown hairs after a bad bikini wax.” So writes Laura Kipnis, author of the widely acclaimed polemic Against Love. With “the gleeful viperish wit of Dorothy Parker” (Slate), Kipnis now offers a fresh and provocative assessment of the female condition in the post-post-feminist world of the twenty-first century. For every advance toward sexual equality on the part of women in recent years, she argues, some new impediment just “seems” to appear. Ironically, feminism ran up against an unanticipated opponent: the inner woman.

An ambitious and original reassessment of feminism and women’s ambivalence about it, The Female Thing brims with bracing and funny social observations informed by psychological acuity. For all the upbeat “You go, girl” slogans, women remain caught between feminism and femininity, between self-affirmation and an endless quest for self-improvement, between playing the injured party and claiming independence. Feminism is bedeviled by the same impasses and contradictions it seeks to rectify. But rather than blaming the usual suspects–men, the media–Kipnis takes a hard look at culprits closer to home, namely women themselves and their complicity in upholding male privilege, even as they resent men deeply for it. Which makes relations between the sexes rather thorny at the moment, and Kipnis serves up the gory details of the mutual displeasure between men and women in painfully hilarious detail.

In the tradition of The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch, this is a pathbreaking work. As audacious as it is historically and socially grounded, The Female Thing explores age-old quandaries: the war between the sexes, what women “really” want, and to what extent anatomy is destiny after all.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Three years after her controversial proadultery polemic, Against Love, Kipnis, a professor of media studies at Northwestern University, offers a wide-ranging and equally unorthodox investigation of "the female condition." She examines why women want both power and push-up bras, have fewer orgasms than men, why spouses have a harder time staying connected to each other after the wife quits work to stay home with the kids and why feminists keep focusing on rape, even though rates of female rapes are down while the rape of imprisoned men has escalated. Underlying the failure of feminism to achieve full equality for women, Kipnis says, is women's own ambivalence: they want feminism as well as femininity. Some of Kipnis's avenues of inquiry are well trod—Katha Pollitt, for example, has deconstructed the "opt-out revolution," whose foot soldiers are Ivy League–credentialed moms who trade high-powered careers for full-time motherhood, and Naomi Wolf long ago tackled the cosmetics industry. Countless critics have wondered why feminism was so easily co-opted by a market economy in which everyone works longer hours than they used to. Though not totally fresh, this fluid, sassy volume is guaranteed to electrify media and cocktail party circuits. (Oct. 17)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

At its core, the female psyche vis-a-vis its male counterpart fixates on four things: dirt, sex, envy, and vulnerability. No matter what else goes on in the time-honored battle of the sexes, the essential conflict can eventually find its way back to one of these areas. Distilling such gender issues into a tight discourse on the paradoxical stalemate of tradition versus progress in male-female relations, Kipnis offers a measured declamation on where the women's movement is headed--and where it has veered off course. Equal pay, equal pleasure, equal cleanliness, equal confidence: where gender parity is concerned, incongruities arise "like ingrown hairs after a bad bikini wax," claims Kipnis. Ambivalence abounds while activism idles, and who's to blame? Droll one minute, deadly serious the next, Kipnis is just as apt to point a well-manicured finger at women for social inertia as she is at men. Incisive, engrossing, controversial, and circumspect, Kipnis offers a trenchant examination of the political and personal state of contemporary feminism. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product details

Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (October 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375424172
ISBN-13: 978-0375424175
Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 11 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,106,879 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4244 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Women's Studies > Feminist Theory
- #17738 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Gender Studies

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Emily

Five Stars

March 10, 2018

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Item was as described! Quick delivery. Thanks!

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Bernard Chapin

The Evolution of the Feminist.

December 11, 2006

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Perhaps the best way to educate an audience about a particular subject is to outline the uniqueness of its properties, which is most easily done by juxtaposing its essence alongside what it is not. Professor of Media Studies at Northwestern, Laura Kipnis, in her new book, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability, uses this strategy to illuminate intrinsic female qualities via the four emblematic areas listed in the title. While it may sound rather popish, her brisk essays succeed in their goal. The author has produced a competent, intelligent, and valuable narrative.

It may surprise conservatives that a book written by a leftist-feminist could possibly appeal to them, and undoubtedly some will disagree with this reviewer's assessment. Although, The Female Thing's central theme is key to my reasoning. Kipnis believes that it is their own "inner woman," as opposed to men or a global conspiracy, that acts as the biggest barrier to women realizing the progressive utopia they deserve--a utopia for which, the author concedes, many women are not even interested. Females have certain refractory predispositions and fascinations which cannot be propagandized away. This is revealed in the female longing for men, the way in which feminine personality types persist despite their sometimes being cloaked in feminist garb, and the world's assigning to women a higher worth based on their bodies. By identifying Woman as a free-thinking agent, Kipnis infuses the opposite sex with responsibility, and this immediately places her on a plane far above her peers. Hopefully, more non-equity feminists will agree that, socially and psychologically, our "respective anatomies produce different situations." That's not to imply that she is a biological determinist, however. What she does state is that, "what kind of anatomy you've been assigned invariably structures the female experience here on earth." These views are a major advancement for feminism as they eschew the lie that only social construction makes us who we are.

The book's greatest strength are the arguments produced by the author's iconoclastic and insightful mind. Many novel ideas are on display. She clarified that women's empowerment came with a cost because much was lost in the process. Furthermore, has not femininity been on its own, from its earliest beginnings, an incredibly effective strategy for the acquisition of resources? From there, we turn to a major dilemma for the modern woman: one can't really be feminine and a feminist at the same time for they are mutually exclusive conditions. The former denies weakness and frailty while the latter promotes it. We find that the root of women's ever-increasing resentment of men--a resentment which is largely not reciprocated--is their own disavowal and self-deception. Their over expectations can be attributed more to a lack of personal fulfillment than to the inadequacies of men.

While The Female Thing may not be a precise fit for conservatives, it undeniably marks an advancement in our relations with feminists. Its pages are steeped in argumentation and debate as opposed to calls for castration and lesbianism. Laura Kipnis is her own woman and not a slave to dogma which is all we can ask for. When leftist-feminists desire truth over propaganda they become allies or worthy opponents instead of buffoons walking around blaming "the other" for their own poor decision making. If her peers follow her example, political correctness will join the gargoyle that sired it, Marxism, upon the list of intellectual viruses which only history will remember.

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Danica Pantic

It’s trash

January 24, 2018

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I want my money back, this book is privileged trash. I can’t believe this woman gets to write her insane woman-hating diatribes still.

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gregory madrid

Four Stars

June 26, 2015

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Interesting

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Tojagi

Not just another pretty take

May 10, 2009

I was relatively new to `gender wars' literature when I read this book. I really didn't know which side of the wars to put it on. I saw it as a journey into the female psyche, and a wonderful explanation for the spectrum of attitudes and behaviors women have had in our culture since the women's movement began. I can only speak from a man's perspective. But the many paradoxes of woman, the modern woman, are wonderfully revealed here and there with just one or two sentences. The author states that women are "left straddling two rather incompatible positions. Feminism and femininity are in a big catfight, nowhere more than within each individual female psyche."

She speaks of a "desperate quality to female femininity these days" with diets, makeovers and baby-doll drag and that it might have something to do with the failure of the institution of marriage, as social glue. She writes that while men fetishize women through pornography to the tune of nine billion dollars a year, women will spend $1.2 billion on romance novels. The endless hours of Soap Operas women watch suddenly made sense to me.

One of the biggest mysteries of feminism for me has been eco-feminism. It never made any sense to me at all. I was so happy the author finds it just as inexplicable. She also speaks about how women's cleaning fetish compared to men has something to do with their body image.

It appears this book hasn't gotten as much attention as other books for or against feminism. If that's true, I believe it is because more popular books deal with feminism politically. This book delves into the true source of all the craziness and conflict concerning gender and gender roles over the past three or four decades; specifically, it delves into the female psyche.

I reserve five stars for just the best of the best. But this is a wonderful book. Just what I was looking for.

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