Mother Jones: The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability

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There is an interesting review of The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability by Laura Kipmis
(Pantheon Books. $23.95) up at Mother Jones.

Here is a bit of it:

Kipnis, the author of Against Love: A Polemic, notes that the mass entry of women into the workforce has failed to transform social institutions as feminists once predicted. She's equally skeptical about what the future holds for stay-at-home moms. Her main point is that persistent gender inequities are linked to "the myriad impasses of the female condition." The problem isn't an antifeminist backlash, she claims, but rather women's ambivalence—about the prerogatives of men, their own sexuality, and the lure of housework. In her view, feminism has met its most formidable foe in femininity itself.

At issue, in part, is women's troubled relationship with their bodies, including "unconscious filth convictions" that are symbiotic with a consumer culture "bludgeoning housewives with a steady stream of overanxious cleaning advice." Kipnis is also wonderfully acerbic about the female orgasm, noting how biology and proscriptions against sexual assertiveness have contributed to "a nature-culture one-two punch, right to the female pleasure principle."

I have no idea what an integral feminism might sound like or look like, but this book might be a part of the conversation in moving toward a more integral model. It seems from this brief review that Kipnis has assimilated the major strains of American feminism and added in some of the French ideas (sounds like she has read Julia Kristeva).

Now if only there were some men writing about an integral masculinity rather than the drum-beating, touchy-feely types who call themselves the men's movement.

Tags: feminism, The Female Thing, Laura Kipmis, Mother Jones, integral feminism