KINDLE Ñ Unwanted Advances Ú Laura Kipnis
From a highly regarded feminist cultural critic and professor comes a polemic arguing that the stifling sense of sexual danger sweeping American campuses doesn’t empower women it impedes the fight for gender eualityFeminism is broken argues Laura Kipnis if anyone thinks the sexual hysteria overtaking American campuses is a sign of gender progressA committed feminist Kipnis was surprised to find herself the object of a protest march by student activists at her university for writing an essay about sexual paranoia on campus Next she was brought up on Title IX complaints for creating a hostil The first four chapters are really just an expansion of Kipnis' Chronicle of Higher Education article Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe where she argues that campus feminism orthodoxy inadvertently erases female autonomy in its uest for justice for victims of sexual assault By taking on narrow conceptions of power or so she argues campus feminism forgets that non institutional power can exist conferred for example by youth and beauty This challenges the simplistic narratives about how institutionally powerful men necessarily act in predatory ways when dating those without institutional power This argument along with a number of real cases of egregious title IX overreach would have made for a decent read already But it's chapter 5 and the coda at the end that really introduce the exciting stuff Here she argues that the earnestness of the campus activists and administrators in fact obscure the real issues 1 party cultures on campuses where way too much alcohol and drugs are ritually consumed 2 Gender dynamics at playRegarding #1 she's clear that she isn't blaming victims but insists that women consistently putting themselves in situations of diminished capabilities cannot be considered a win for feminism But the interesting avenue is #2 where she asks why men and women actually behave the way they do Does an obsession with a vocabulary of power flatten the real topography For example we all know the cultural stereotype of athletes in frats being particularly rape y not her phrasing What then she asks is their appeal to women Here she insists that we cannot understand what's going on on campuses without addressing how gender plays out in complex maddening irrational ways Alcohol can act as intensifier making some men play out stereotypical aggressive masculinity while alcohol might help some women exist in the grey space between consent and refusal by keeping at bay inhibitions that wouldn't allow a sober version of themselves from going through This might enable them to engage in sex an activity about which a great deal of ambivalence exists while not uite committing to it This is pure speculation about how to understand what's going on but is this narrative any worse that the now standard one about predators and their hapless prey By opening up lines of uestioning like this Kipnis continues her broader theme from her others works about how people are messy inconsistent and often in acute denial about themselves The book is sure to draw criticism unlike others Kipnis doesn't treat victimssurvivorsaccusers with kiddy gloves She feels free to uestion even dismiss their accounts of what happened when the evidence contradicts it And contentious she speculates about the motives of the accusers in her ironic Freudian fashion bringing a cudgel to the usual believe the victim imperative But that's part of what make Kipnis such a challenging and fun writer This isn't to pretend that sexual assault doesn't happen or isn't serious but that we need to think about these issues while keeping firmly in our minds the fact that these are our usual messy human beings we're thinking about
Laura Kipnis Ú Unwanted Advances PDF
Unwanted AdvancesUsness of campus assault Kipnis argues for honesty about the sexual realities and ambivalences hidden behind the notion of rape culture Instead regulation is replacing education and women’s hard won right to be treated as consenting adults is being repealed by well meaning bureaucratsUnwanted Advances is a risk taking often darkly funny interrogation of feminist paternalism the covert sexual conservatism of hook up culture and the institutionalized backlash of holding men alone responsible for mutually drunken sex It’s not just compulsively readable it will change the national conversati Laura Kipnis has written an exceptionally smart courageous and insightful book that dares to challenge the knee jerk lockstep orthodoxy of so called progressive thinking while demonstrating its sexually regressive foundation in Title IX procedures She documents with tart wit an able lawyer's gift with evidence and her own bona fides as a feminist to expose the travesties of justice perpetrated on college campuses The book reads fluidly and swiftly with elements of a legal thriller as she traces one professor's as well as her own experiences before Title IX Toruemada's exposing the egregious deprivation of due process fairness or sanity in the inuisitions that are increasingly common across university campuses Kipnis provokes readers to consider the nature of sex sexual violence and moral responsibility in complex honest and substantial ways than most writers addressing the topic today She is an exemplar of the value importance and power of intellectual freedom and authentic intellectual inuiry in our conformist climate She accomplishes all of this with a bravura writing style that is accessible jargon free and at times mordantly funny A terrific book