Animated Merkin

"They don't mean what they say, they don't use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that's the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing's supposed to be about."

— Kingsley Amis, Jake's Thing

Any guess to what that plural pronoun referred to?

Steady now, old boy. My colleague Izzy, who went absolutely Aztec-faced over Hitch's "Women Aren't Funny" thesis in this month's Vanity Fair, has just recently said that my enduring interest in, and exegesis of, Laura Kipnis signals what may be a "feminist awakening." I certainly hope so. Though perusing Installment Two of my favorite Slate dialogue has my false male consciousness leaking out all over the place again.

Ladies, correct me if I'm wrong, but there hasn't been a greater display of catty megalomania masquerading as cultural criticism than what Daphne Merkin has got up to so far this week. She chivvies poor Laura for no other reason than Laura is not, alas, Daphne Merkin. Here's a whole paragraph all about the latter phenomenon, in case you have no plan whatsoever to actually read The Female Thing:

For starters, I can't believe you were in the audience at that N.Y. Times panel, since I thought I saw only the faintest scattering of people out there in the mostly empty expanse of seats. The fact that the other three panelists all chose to dress like camera-happy CEOs on a hot Sunday in early June while I dressed in casual, wrinkled linens (my favorite look: The Devil Wears Flax) does not in itself, of course, make me either a contrarian or bratty. And in any case, I recognize only one of those adjectives as a legitimate description of my personal style. "Bratty" is certainly not how I wish to come across. What I think I was—and it undoubtedly showed, because I've never been good at hiding my reactions (although I've been working on becoming more inauthentic, per the recommendation of a close friend)—was impatient bordering on infuriated with Sheehy's flaccid pseudo-sociology, custom-designed Web sites, and general aura of well-accessorized bullshit.

She goes on to make the absurd claim that Kipnis couldn't possibly be parodying women's magazine prose because to do so would scupper the whole intent of having something to say — never mind that a parody is, unavoidably, a statement about whatever it is you're parodying. Executed poorly, this literary trick can confuse the reader. So, for instance, I couldn't tell if Merkin was making herself the butt of her own joke when she wrote:

The Men—Mailer, Updike, & Roth Inc.—can natter away all they want about cunts and orgasms and the humiliations of desire, and no one takes that to be the sum of their parts.

Name me another sum for any of those writers. "Jew" would work if you removed Updike.

However, we get to the heart of the matter when it's disclosed:

As for your remarks about confessional writing, let me be honest in turn and say that I felt a wave of weariness come over me when I read your arguments about narcissism and self-styled bad girls, knowing even before I got to the end that they would lead inevitably … sigh … to yet another hauling up of my poor spanking piece.

Now it's personal. And boring.

I've learned nothing about women and far too much about Ms. Merkin.