Laura Kipnis: A (Friendly) Male Response

Of course according to Freud — arguably a better theorist than therapist himself (He could get a little pushy with the patients) — desire is regressive, and anti-social, and there's no cure, which is what makes it the wild card in our little human drama. (And also so much fun.) It screws up all well-ordered human plans and lives, and to be alive is to be fundamentally split, fundamentally ambivalent, and unreconciled to the trade-offs of what Freud called, just a little mockingly, "civilized sexual morality." But Freud was long ago consigned to conformist therapy's historical ash can, collectively pilloried for his crimes against decency and empiricism. (Philip Wylie: "Unfortunately, Americans, who are the most prissy people on earth, have been unable to benefit from Freud's wisdom because they can prove that they do no, by and large, sleep with their mothers.") So don't sign up for therapy if you're looking for radical social insights — or social insights at all actually: what's for sale here is "self-knowledge." (Only a cynic could suspect it of being remedial socialization in party clothes.)" — Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

A few months ago I participated in a Jewcy email dialogue entitled, "Is Marriage the New Dating?" About halfway through the thing, Izzy recommended Laura Kipnis' Against Love, saying it'd help turn my jaundiced dissatisfaction with "settling down" before 50 an even healthier shade of yellow. Izzy was right, and I wish I'd read the book then. Kipnis is more fun and instructive than Marcuse: She's an orthodox Freudian when it comes to eros, but her take on civilization — at least as far as the concept tiptoes its way to the door of the master bedroom — is happily informed by classical Marxism. Kipnis argues that love becomes commodified and sapped of its thrilling, transcendent power the minute people start talking about relationships as being "work." (This is at once more obvious and elegant than Herbert's slightly fumbled "surplus repression" theory of not getting your groove on in bourgeois society.) This is not to say that she can't be a little clunky and cliched in her application of hot pink lipstick to drab symbols: "marital-industrial complex" performs the same smirking role that "feminine-industrial complex" does in her recent polemic The Female Thing. New rule: no more industrial-complexes in postindustrial society.

But a word of fraternal advice to my fellow clueless males: Read The Female Thing too. It's a bit desultory and disorganized — third wave feminism's "smoke 'em if you got 'em" prescription for future progress, as Emily Nussbaum laments in New York magazine. But I came away from it wanting desperately to found a support group called Darling, I Had No Idea. (Our exclusivity policy would be denying admittance to any male who had like reaction to The Vagina Monologues.)

Not "getting it" is our genetic entitlement; not even trying to is our crime.