The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability

Book review

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The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability
By Laura Kipmis
Pantheon Books. $23.95.

With Caitlin Flanagan badgering women to stay home with their kids and Linda Hirshman urging them to get back to work, the argument over women’s choices has grown increasingly shrill. Laura Kipnis’ contribution to the debate may not change anyone’s mind, but her alternately sardonic, insightful, and flip meditation on the embattled female psyche is a provocative salvo.

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.”

Kipnis admits that her perspective is most valid for “white middle-class and upper-middle-class chicks,” and heterosexual ones at that. And while she deliberately courts paradox on the question of how large a role culture plays in hampering full equality, she seems to want to have it both ways, belittling genetic determinism while arguing that “female anatomy…dictates the female condition.” In the end, The Female Thing is most effective simply as what Kipnis hints it may be: a cleverly convoluted map of her own mental terrain.


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“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

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