Laura Kipnis > Quotes

“So exiled have even basic questions of freedom become from the political vocabulary that they sound musty and ridiculous, and vulnerable to the ultimate badge of shame-'That's so 60's!'-the entire decade having been mocked so effectively that social protest seems outlandish and 'so last century,' just another style excess like love beads and Nehru jackets. No, rebellion won't pose a problem for this social order.”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“[T]he hidden linguistic universe of companianate couples... rests entirely on one generative phrase: 'Would you please stop doing that.”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“it was only when children’s actual economic value declined, because they were no longer necessary additions to the household labor force, that they became the priceless little treasures we know them as today. Once they started costing more to raise than they contributed to the household economy, there had to be some justification for having them, which is when the story that having children was a big emotionally fulfilling thing first started taking hold.”
― Laura Kipnis, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“When sociobiologists start shitting in their backyards with dinner guests in the vicinity, maybe their arguments about innateness over culture will start seeming more persuasive. ”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“We live in sexually interesting times, meaning a culture which manages to be simultaneously hypersexualized and to retain its Puritan underpinnings, in precisely equal proportions.”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“As if all that weren't enough, factor in the whole tedious millenial saga of female virtue, modesty, shame, repression, male ineptitude...in short, a cruel combo of anatomical inheritance and sexual inhibition for the gal set; a nature-culture one-two punch, right to the female pleasure principle.”
― Laura Kipnis, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability

“Women are still angry about feeling duped and undervalued, but instead of ignoring their kids and downing cocktails all day, as in Friedan’s time, now we have the angry overdrive child-rearing style: motherhood as a competitive sport.”
― Laura Kipnis, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“I struggle with an embarrassing affliction, one that as far as I know doesn’t have a website or support group despite its disabling effects on the lives of those of us who’ve somehow contracted it. I can’t remember exactly when I started noticing the symptoms—it’s just one of those things you learn to live with, I guess. You make adjustments. You hope people don’t notice. The irony, obviously, is having gone into a line of work in which this particular infirmity is most likely to stand out, like being a gimpy tango instructor or an acrophobic flight attendant. The affliction I’m speaking of is moral relativism, and you can imagine the catastrophic effects on a critic’s career if the thing were left to run its course unfettered or I had to rely on my own inner compass alone. To be honest, calling it moral relativism may dignify it too much; it’s more like moral wishy-washiness. Critics are supposed to have deeply felt moral outrage about things, be ready to pronounce on or condemn other people’s foibles and failures at a moment’s notice whenever an editor emails requesting twelve hundred words by the day after tomorrow. The severity of your condemnation is the measure of your intellectual seriousness (especially when it comes to other people’s literary or aesthetic failures, which, for our best critics, register as nothing short of moral turpitude in itself). That’s how critics make their reputations: having take-no-prisoners convictions and expressing them in brutal mots justes. You’d better be right there with that verdict or you’d better just shut the fuck up. But when it comes to moral turpitude and ethical lapses (which happen to be subjects I’ve written on frequently, perversely drawn to the topics likely to expose me at my most irresolute)—it’s like I’m shooting outrage blanks. There I sit, fingers poised on keyboard, one part of me (the ambitious, careerist part) itching to strike, but in my truest soul limply equivocal, particularly when it comes to the many lapses I suspect I’m capable of committing myself, from bad prose to adultery. Every once in a while I succeed in landing a feeble blow or two, but for the most part it’s the limp equivocator who rules the roost—contextualizing, identifying, dithering. And here’s another confession while I’m at it—wow, it feels good to finally come clean about it all. It’s that … once in a while, when I’m feeling especially jellylike, I’ve found myself loitering on the Internet in hopes of—this is embarrassing—cadging a bit of other people’s moral outrage (not exactly in short supply online) concerning whatever subject I’m supposed to be addressing. Sometimes you just need a little shot in the arm, you know? It’s not like I’d crib anyone’s actual sentences (though frankly I have a tough time getting as worked up about plagiarism as other people seem to get—that’s how deep this horrible affliction runs). No, it’s the tranquillity of their moral authority I’m hoping will rub off on me. I confess to having a bit of an online “thing,” for this reason, about New Republic editor-columnist Leon Wieseltier—as everyone knows, one of our leading critical voices and always in high dudgeon about something or other: never fearing to lambaste anyone no matter how far beneath him in the pecking order, never fearing for a moment, when he calls someone out for being preening or self-congratulatory, as he frequently does, that it might be true of himself as well. When I’m in the depths of soft-heartedness, a little dose of Leon is all I need to feel like clambering back on the horse of critical judgment and denouncing someone for something.”
― Laura Kipnis, Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation

“Just how much renunciation of desire does society demand of us versus the degree of gratification it provides?”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“But my quarrel with the concept of maternal instinct isn’t why I never had kids myself. I was never particularly opposed to the idea of having kids—let no one say that I don’t love kids! It always seemed like an interesting future possibility, the same way that joining the Peace Corps someday seemed like an interesting future possibility.”
― Laura Kipnis, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Beyond the personal discomfort, her larger point was that women aren’t going to achieve social equality until some technological alternative is invented to save us from being the only sex expected to go through it. If men were the ones forced to endure this ordeal, obviously such a technological solution would long ago have been devised.”
― Laura Kipnis, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Sure, there have always been ideologues on campuses, but the old ideologues were at least expected to argue the validity of their ideas. The new brand are ideologues of feelings, and feelings can’t be argued. Despite being a certified left-wing feminist, I just don’t believe that experience or identity credentialize you intellectually.”
― Laura Kipnis, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus

“The more you nose around the subject of humiliation, the more perplexed you become about what pleasure actually is. To say that people don’t always use sex exclusively for pleasurable purposes is a pretty vast understatement. Yet how much can we grasp about the alternative purposes? Those “caught with their pants down” aren’t typically very forthcoming about what they hoped to accomplish. Weiner, once exposed, said, “I don’t know what I was thinking,” after he finally admitted sending the incriminating photos. “This was a destructive thing to do.” He further non-elaborated, “If you’re looking for some kind of deep explanation for it, I simply don’t have one.” No doubt anyone in possession of a libido has experienced the occasional fissure between brain and groin, and knows how carefully both must be monitored to avoid personal catastrophe. “I don’t know what I was thinking” is a phrase many of us have had cause to utter on occasion. Alcohol, that great disinhibitor, is a convenient after-the-fact explanation. Still, the general view is that when the brain suspends operations, it’s in the pursuit of enjoyment, not pain and humiliation. “I wasn’t thinking” is the customary code for “I had to stop thinking to have some fun.” The idea that we’re pleasure-seeking animals tragically constrained by the encumbrances of civilization is a lot more palatable than the idea that we’re destruction-seeking animals pursuing opportunities to degrade and humiliate ourselves in front of the world.”
― Laura Kipnis, Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation

“Here’s the conundrum: We want to tell our stories! But if condensation is the language of wishes—especially the most verboten and destructive ones—the more you spell the story out, the less aesthetically charged it becomes. The question is whether untransformed experience can ever be aesthetically powerful, or whether it’s simply interesting. Literary language is one solution, with its habits of duality—metaphor, irony—and other techniques for saying opposing things at once. For haunting the reader with ghosts of buried meanings.

Your story may be interesting, but what if, paradoxically, it’s what you can’t say that makes it lasting?”
― Laura Kipnis

“The whole reason I’d written about him so freely was that I never expected to face him in person and could therefore imagine him in ways that gratified my conception of who he should be: a white trash savant imbued with junkyard political savvy. In truth, I found the magazine completely disgusting—as I was meant to, obviously: it had long been the most reviled instance of mass-circulation pornography around and used people like me (shame-ridden bourgeois feminists and other elites) for target practice, with excremental grossness among its weapons of choice. It was also particularly nasty to academics who in its imagination are invariably prissy and uptight—sadly I’m one of this breed too. (A cartoon academic to his wife: “Eat your pussy? You forget, Gladys, I have a Ph.D.”)1 Maybe I yearned to be rescued from my primness, though Flynt was obviously no one’s idea of a white knight. (Of course, being attracted to what you’re also repelled by is not exactly unknown in human history.) For some reason, I tend to be drawn to excess: to men who laugh too loud and drink too much, who are temperamentally and romantically immoderate, have off-kilter politics and ideas. Aside from that, it also happened that in the period during which my ideas about things were being formed, the bawdy French satirist Rabelais was enjoying an intellectual revival in my sorts of circles, along with the idea of the “carnivalesque”: the realm of subversion and sacrilege—the grotesque, the unruly, the profane—where the lower bodily stratum and everything that emerges from it is celebrated for supposedly subverting established pieties and hierarchies. I was intrigued by these kinds of ideas, despite—or more likely because of—my aforementioned primness. Contemplating where one might locate these carnivalesque impulses in our own time I’d immediately thought of Hustler, even though back then I had only the vaguest idea what bodily abhorrences awaited me within its shrink-wrapped covers (as if a thin sheet of plastic were sufficient to prevent seepage from the filth within). In fact, the first time I peeled away the protective casing and tried to actually read a copy, I was so disgusted I threw it away, I didn’t even want it in the house.”
― Laura Kipnis, Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation

“Najtragičniji oblik gubitka nije gubitak sigurnosti, nego gubitak sposobnosti da zamislimo kako bi život mogao biti drugačiji.”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“Sure, writing has its moments of sublimity - grasping after the ineffable, realizing something just out of reach - yet at every instance modulated by the chronic substratum of shame about having taken a dump in public.
- "Humiliation Artists”
― Laura Kipnis

“Sure, writing has its moments of sublimity - grasping after the ineffable, realizing something just out of reach - yet at every instance modulated by the chronic substratum of shame about having taken a dump in public.”
― Laura Kipnis

“Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home - it's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date.”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“we find mates who bring out the worst in us: a partner is sent by the universe as a character test, to expose what you’re really made of.”
― Laura Kipnis, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis

“Uspješan suživot zahtijeva da se razlike između dvije osobe u najmanju ruku svedu na točku međusobnog toleriranja, premda je taj stupanj često moguće dostići tek nakon što se volja barem jedne od dviju strana smanji toliko da je njome moguće upravljati - otprilike kao kada se tumor izloži golemoj dozi radijacije.”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“Love is also a way of forgetting what the question is. Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home - it's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date.”
― Laura Kipnis

“unstable control freak, according to Jack Miles, God’s unflappable biographer (God: A Biography).”
― Laura Kipnis, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis

“Love is also a way of forgetting what the question is. Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home to assuage the letdowns of love at home - it's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date.”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“La terapia es una nueva industria que debe su onerosa existencia a la idea festiva de que la ambivalencia puede curarse, la "madurez" es una adaptación a las condiciones del entorno y la indocilidad una forma de neurosis.”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

“Wanting more is a step on the way to a political idea, or so say political theorists, and ideas can have a way of turning themselves into demands.”
― Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic