It’s a good thing Laura Kipnis considers it a compliment to be called a “heretic” and compared to a “wrecking ball” smashing through modern rules of academic life.
Just read her new book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, a scorching, leave-no-barricade-standing, astute and almost unnervingly funny indictment of modern feminism, and you will see she has no fear of what she views as “officially sanctioned hysteria” taking over college campuses under the guise of protecting women from sexual assault.
In 2015, Kipnis, 62, a longtime cultural critic and tenured film-making professor at Illinois’s Northwestern University, published an essay, Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe, about sexual politics on American campuses which primarily targeted a then year-old university policy prohibiting students from having romantic or sexual relationships with university staff and/or faculty.
She wrote of her experience with professors as an undergraduate: “We partied together, drank and got high together,” and argued that the new codes “infantilised students and ramped up the climate of accusation.”
Kipnis’s latter point was quickly proven. Her essay led to student protest marches and complaints of “creating a hostile environment” under the aegis of Title IX, a federal statute created in 1972 to address gender discrimination on universities, which was amended in 2011 to encompass the more broadly defined “sexual misconduct”.
A follow-up essay, My Title IX Inquisition, detailed the 72-day investigation of the writer conducted in so secretive a fashion that for months Kipnis was forbidden from knowing the extent of the charges lodged against her. While being interrogated by university lawyers, she was not allowed to have her own counsel present. Coincidentally her article was published on the same day she was cleared.
Her inbox quickly blew up with tormented soliloquies from accused students and professors caught in the shadowy netherworld of Title IX charges. (She is empathetic but wearying of her de facto role as “Title IX Therapist.”) Kipnis also became a supporter of Peter Ludlow, a once-revered philosophy professor at Northwestern whose career was ruined after two female students accused him of sexual misconduct. Re-adjudicating his case is a focal point of Unwanted Advances. Post-publication in the US, Kipnis was sued by one of Ludlow’s accusers; the case is still pending.
The book was released in the United States in April 2017, six months before the exposés of film producer Harvey Weinstein led to an avalanche of women speaking up about sexual harassment. The British edition contains a preface addressing the #MeToo movement. As Kipnis makes clear, her feelings on over-policing sexual harassment claims in no way mitigates her contempt for those who take advantage of their positions of power to subjugate others. She writes, “In my view, what’s required of us at the moment is being able to hold a dozen contradictory views at once…Sure, stealing kisses is great…except that it turns women into sexual bounty, not desiring subjects.”
Several contradictory emotions fill me as I near her fourth floor Manhattan walk-up (where she lives when not teaching at Northwestern) on a rainy Monday: excitement, curiosity but also nervousness and an impulse to scurry home instead of ringing her buzzer.
Would the acclaimed critic aim her laser wit at me?
Dressed in a black and white shirt draped over black capri pants, Kipnis greets me at the door to her cozy, book-filled one-bedroom flat with a warm smile and offer of espresso or water. My apprehension at being intimidated by her intellect begins to dissolve when my iPad and keyboard refuse to sync (due more to operator error than equipment malfunction) and she offers me a keyboard or a laptop. I admit wryly, “I am technologically pathetic!”. When Kipnis, the author of six books and countless essays responds: “I’m backward at it too,” I feel an instant relieved bonhomie.
We also bond over our identification as “cultural rather than religious Jews.” Kipnis partially attributes her humor to an upbringing on the south side of Chicago. She describes a “wisecracking, cynical, knowing, urban flavor” to her family’s conversation that informs her smart, often caustic writing.
She was raised in secular fashion. “My sister and I were the only ones in our group who didn’t go to Sunday school. When I asked my father why, he said he and my mother could never agree on whether to send us to Reform or Conservative Temple.” Her mother’s version: Neither parent wanted to get up early on Sunday morning!
Her parents also urged intellectual pursuits, a call to arms Kipnis embraced with fervour. Among other accolades, the one-time video artist has won fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations as well as numerous raves for her writing. Indeed, the essay that led to her Title IX entanglement was included in Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen.
The sole negative legacy of her Jewish heritage was exemplified by her paternal grandmother’s habit of zeroing in on Kipnis’s flaws. “She’d say, ‘You’re too fat’ ‘Your clothes aren’t right.’ Mean!”
I share my theory that our tribe’s survivor essence factored into the “balls of steel” that enabled Kipnis to break the secrecy around the Title IX investigation and “blow the lid off,” damn the consequences. She laughs and says, “Maybe my risk-taking also comes from being a tomboy as a kid. I did a lot of jumping off things: steps, trees… ”
These days Kipnis is fearless in exhibiting what she defines as a “certain kind of insouciance on the page.” In Unwanted Advances she writes, “What’s being lost is the ability to publish ideas that go against the grain…but what’s the point of having a freedom you’re afraid to use? Which means I’m probably being led off campus by security guards as you read this.”
However Kipnis has gone from jumping out of trees to trepidation of physical discomfort. When she apologises for taking a quick call from her dentist to confirm an upcoming appointment, I share tales of my recent root canal and she not-so-mock shudders: “Root canal is a phrase that terrifies me!”
While willing to accept potential consequences of her literary risk-taking, Kipnis sidesteps online brickbats thrown at her work. “I don’t check Amazon reviews or Google myself.”
She can handle being disagreed with; what rankles is feeling her views are being distorted, such as when she’s accused of not being a feminist. Pushing herself forward in her blue armchair, she explains, “I’m fighting for the version of feminism that will push us in a progressive rather than puritanical direction.”
Settling back into the cushions, she says, “Once upon a time female students celebrated their sexual freedom and agency. Today they focus on their vulnerability. We’re breeding a generation of students deploying Title IX to remedy sexual ambivalence or experience.”
What she calls the “dumbing down of intellectual discourse” has led to a few public conflagrations with “left wing feminists who consider me the devil.” This past April she appeared on a panel with feminist scholar Roxane Gay at Pomona College in California. “There was no discussion to be had; I was hated. The students were lined up to take turns calling me a feminist misogynist.”
Did Gay, beloved author of Bad Feminist and the memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, ask for the audience to listen to Kipnis with an open mind? Kipnis makes a “zip your lip” gesture against her mouth to connote no, laughing, “You can put that on the record.”
In the universe of weirdness, in June Kipnis was recipient of the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award, established in 1979 by the publisher of Playboy, to honour people who stand up for freedom of speech in the US. She was handed “a rather nice cheque and a plaque” — no bunny ears — at a big awards ceremony in Washington, D.C.
The author and professor has never felt sexually harassed or discriminated against but has also never worked in an office setting.
However, reviewing Gretchen Carlson’s memoir, Getting Real, about the former Fox anchor’s lawsuit against then Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes made Kipnis seriously ponder proper boundaries in office culture: “No, I don’t think touching women’s bodies is okay, even in fun, and that includes (former US Senator) Al Franken grabbing women’s asses in photo ops.”
So, I ask, what can be done to help young college women regain a sense of agency and become as Kipnis has put it: “grown up feminists?”
She says with exasperation, “The notion of trauma somewhat enfeebles young people. I’ve had students tell me they’ve been diagnosed with PTSD after a romantic breakup.”
We agree there are no easy answers here but also concur that encouraging internalised helplessness can be retroactive and dangerous. As Kipnis writes in Unwanted Advances, “What would happen if we stopped commiserating with one another about how horrible men are and teach students to say, “Get your f-----g hand off my knee?”
The author is in a relationship but has no children. Her answer to my final question: “What would your advice be to a daughter about to go off to college?” is swift and ‘Kipnisian’: “Don’t drink so much that you pass out in a frat house!”
Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus is published by Verso Books
