Présentation de l'éditeur
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.
Extrait
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ENVY
Over the course of human history, cultures have endlessly vacillated when it comes to describing the differences between the sexes. For some reason, there’s been a certain fickleness. A male characteristic in one society is a female characteristic in another; at one moment men and women are opposites that attract, at another they’re counterparts who repel; they’re essentially similar or they’re essentially different, though typically not both at once. Whereas in our time, in the wake of feminism and the commotion about “roles” and the consequent sexual unrest, it’s now entirely possible for women to be both different and similar to men simultaneously, which promotes a certain confusion among the gal set, bouncing back and forth like tennis balls between competing theories of what women naturally are versus what women can become, or whether women should act more like men (“strong”) or more like powerful women (“strong”), at least once the remaining impediments to gender equality are finally overcome (society, bad self-esteem, the wage gap).
In other words, being female at this point in history is an especially conflicted enterprise, like Birkstenstocks with Chanel, or trying to frown after a Botox injection. But we should be getting used to it, since looking back thirty years or so, you can see the same dichotomies already peeking out from behind contending brands of second-wave feminism. In one corner we had Feminism Plan A: Strive for empowerment, smash those glass ceilings, sport-fuck like the guys, celebrate “strong women”—“You go, Mrs. Thatcher”—and impugn the intelligence of the opposite sex with frequency. In the other corner was Feminism Plan B: Demand respect for women’s inherent differences from men, for our nurturing capacities, our innate moral compass, our emotional intuitiveness, our built-in process-oriented . . . you know . . . process. Women’s power inheres in our bodies, our childbearing capabilities, our female sensuality—all of which deeply terrify men and society.
So which one should it be? The Feisty Feminist or the Eternal Feminine, careers or motherhood, ballsy or baby-doll—or why not
