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LET'S DISCUSS ADULTERY, SHALL WE?
Jessica Valenti writes on Laura Kipnis' Against Love: A Polemic for our new print feature on the book that changed a writer's view of politics. (If you haven't been looking for them, be sure to go back and read Michael Tomasky on Milan Kundera, and E.J. Dionne on William E. Leuchtenburg.)
Valenti says Kipnis' takedown of monogamous relationships "made me think of feminism as the adultery of social norms. What do you mean you want to keep your own last name when you get married? Or refuse to buy that wrinkle cream? Or play baseball instead of softball? I liken feminism to cheating on the deeply ingrained gender standards that our society clings to as tightly as it holds on to the idea of love."
When a co-worker insisted I read Kipnis years ago, I was similarly taken with the book. Kipnis took my sexual politics and gave them a good shake.
Rejecting the norm of coupledom isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for adultery. Rather, it's a call to remember that the reason why some people (even feminists!) choose monogamy is because they are trying to craft a relationship with another person. The point of the boundaries is the other person you're defining them with, not the rules themselves.
Being concerned with policing the boundaries means that you're concerned about the boundaries, not the people involved in these relationships. This hypocrisy is writ large in the culture wars. Take your pick of the right-wing cliches -- you're against gay marriage, but on your third wife; you refuse the notion of reproductive rights, but you're on the pill.
And that's Kipnis' point -- focusing on adultery obscures the real battles. As she told an interviewer:
The question is what other social and political forms these current ideas about love prop up. How we love isn't unconnected to larger questions, for example how much social and political freedom we get or demand, or whether a society of compliant worker bees is what we really want to be.
What Against Love did for me was encourage me to remember that the integrity with which we conduct personal relationships is just as important as how we define the boundaries of them.
--Phoebe Connelly
COMMENTS (6)
Valenti's remark makes a kind of sense, but I'm not sure why she excludes social barriers of which the American Prospect crowd approves (eg Pay your taxes!). I think it is not reasonable to assume that "cheating on the deeply ingrained" standards, structures and expectations we have is as liberating as she assumes it to be and that the resulting disorientation is only a symptom of withdrawal from convention as opposed to a reaction at losing something important and organic.
Your remark is interesting, but at the same time, I am not sure why it is hypocritical to be worried about boundaries in relationships. The short-term desires of adulturers, or people demanding whatever other sorts of "social and political freedom" are alleged to be supported by the idea of love can get in the way of people who need those social expectations to find a meaningful (yes, this is too complicated to define in a blog comment) place instead of the shallow indulgence of sleazy sensualit, the pointless novelty of self-conscious fashionability, and the vacant repetitiveness of art which has as its only purpose the discovery and revelation of more and more obscure forms of alleged victimhood.
It's great that through feminism women have more control over their reproductive functions, their economic livelihoods and their familiy lives than before (related things apply to the gains of gay lib, another blow against regressive understandings of love). I guess I am just worried about the "counter-cultural" values of an intelligentsia that refuses to acknowledge how indebted it is to its own status quo, divisions of labor and even hierarchies leaving me with nothing but a promised six-billionth of the means of production while denying any chance of finding meaning in the world through finding making one person happy who wants to make you happy in the same way and making your own biological contribution to the future through organic childbirth (I do not think these are arbitrary goals, but even a comment of this length probably will not convince you of that).
Oh well. You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get women as a class to understand that they have as much dignity as men (although this can mean many different things), which is what we need.
Posted by: Moral Panicker | April 23, 2009 5:11 PM
This is ridiculous. My longtime partner and I are together because we cannot even pretend to be interested in anyone else romantically, it just isn't happening.
And as for the feminism quotes, my S/O just decided to keep her last name and I am fine with it. I like her better without make up looking normal and I wish all girls would play baseball instead of softball. Moreover within the second year after we were together we decided to always have separate accounts! Ha!
Posted by: MNPundit | April 23, 2009 9:16 PM
Oh, yawn.
The seventies were years ago, already.
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