When is a handbag not just a handbag? When you’re shopping with author Laura Kipnis, whose new book, “The Female Thing” (out Oct. 17), tackles the current struggle between feminism (or, as the author puts it, “Don’t call me honey, d—head!”) vs. femininity (“I just found the world’s best push-up bra!”).
Who’s to blame for this cartoonish tug-of-war, which is arguably distracting women from larger social and political issues? Kipnis (who’s been known to play devil’s advocate) suggests it may be women themselves.
Take the aforementioned handbag: It’s symbolic of a certain part of the female anatomy, says the author – and one of the most highly coveted icons of femininity.
Coincidence?
“So much of female culture revolves around the sense that something is missing,” Kipnis says over coffee in a Chelsea boutique/cafe. “When you map that against the Freudian story, it’s kind of the same. It’s a thing nobody wants to hear, but is present in, like, every page of every women’s magazine.”
In other words, shopping is how women compensate for a nagging lack of something (“not a penis, don’t be so literal,” Kipnis writes in the book. “Just something”).
Fortunately for the clothingbeauty-fitness industries, the quest for perfection never ends.
Kipnis, a professor of media studies at Northwestern University, says she’s not out to offer any solutions for the conflicted female psyche, only to observe, analyze and satirize.
Her 2004 book, “Against Love,” took a similarly subversive, witty look at adultery – but was taken by some as a how-to guide for philanderers.
“What I found is if you write a book with ‘love’ in the title, everybody tries to turn it into an advice book,” she says. “And things are really in bad shape if they’re asking me!”
This time around, she had some burning questions about her own gender.
Why, she wondered, has the very word “feminism” fallen out of favor? Why do women have such a weird relationship with cleaning products? Why are they obsessed with orgasms, but not with the less-sexy issues of affordable child care or equal pay? What explains women’s chronic dissatisfaction with men – and why do they publicly high-five themselves for it?
“I had a certain sense of irritation at the way women talk about the situation of women,” she says. “It’s gotten more and more smug and self-congratulatory.”
Especially, she notes, when it comes to the business of advice. Once dispensed by authoritarian (and mostly male) doctors and experts, words of wisdom are now doled out by what Kipnis refers to as “professional girlfriends.”
In “The Female Thing,” Kipnis deftly satirizes the type of language found in this type of just-us-girls pop therapy: “Sign up here, because there’s a happier, more perfect you hidden in there,” she writes. “Be who you truly are. Once you’ve had a makeover, that is.”
“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel,” says the author. “You could just go on forever in parody mode.”
But, Kipnis adds, even she wasn’t immune from the glossy lure of women’s magazines. Says she, “I thought, if I had read these over the years, I would really know how to accessorize.”
