Quotes from Laura Kipnis

So exiled have even basic questions of freedom become from the political vocabulary that they sound musty and ridiculous, and vulnerable to the ultimate badge of shame-'That's so 60's!'-the entire decade having been mocked so effectively that social protest seems outlandish and 'so last century,' just another style excess like love beads and Nehru jackets. No, rebellion won't pose a problem for this social order.

it was only when children's actual economic value declined, because they were no longer necessary additions to the household labor force, that they became the priceless little treasures we know them as today. Once they started costing more to raise than they contributed to the household economy, there had to be some justification for having them, which is when the story that having children was a big emotionally fulfilling thing first started taking hold.

When sociobiologists start shitting in their backyards with dinner guests in the vicinity, maybe their arguments about innateness over culture will start seeming more persuasive.

We live in sexually interesting times, meaning a culture which manages to be simultaneously hypersexualized and to retain its Puritan underpinnings, in precisely equal proportions.

Women are still angry about feeling duped and undervalued, but instead of ignoring their kids and downing cocktails all day, as in Friedan's time, now we have the angry overdrive child-rearing style: motherhood as a competitive sport.

As if all that weren't enough, factor in the whole tedious millenial saga of female virtue, modesty, shame, repression, male ineptitude...in short, a cruel combo of anatomical inheritance and sexual inhibition for the gal set; a nature-culture one-two punch, right to the female pleasure principle.

Beyond the personal discomfort, her larger point was that women aren't going to achieve social equality until some technological alternative is invented to save us from being the only sex expected to go through it. If men were the ones forced to endure this ordeal, obviously such a technological solution would long ago have been devised.

But my quarrel with the concept of maternal instinct isn't why I never had kids myself. I was never particularly opposed to the idea of having kids—let no one say that I don't love kids! It always seemed like an interesting future possibility, the same way that joining the Peace Corps someday seemed like an interesting future possibility.

Sure, there have always been ideologues on campuses, but the old ideologues were at least expected to argue the validity of their ideas. The new brand are ideologues of feelings, and feelings can't be argued. Despite being a certified left-wing feminist, I just don't believe that experience or identity credentialize you intellectually.

Najtragi?niji oblik gubitka nije gubitak sigurnosti, nego gubitak sposobnosti da zamislimo kako bi život mogao biti druga?iji.

Just how much renunciation of desire does society demand of us versus the degree of gratification it provides?

Wanting more is a step on the way to a political idea, or so say political theorists, and ideas can have a way of turning themselves into demands.

Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home - it's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date.

Love is also a way of forgetting what the question is. Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home - it's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date.

Love is also a way of forgetting what the question is. Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home to assuage the letdowns of love at home - it's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date.

La terapia es una nueva industria que debe su onerosa existencia a la idea festiva de que la ambivalencia puede curarse, la madurez es una adaptación a las condiciones del entorno y la indocilidad una forma de neurosis.

we find mates who bring out the worst in us: a partner is sent by the universe as a character test, to expose what you're really made of.

Sure, writing has its moments of sublimity - grasping after the ineffable, realizing something just out of reach - yet at every instance modulated by the chronic substratum of shame about having taken a dump in public. - Humiliation Artists

unstable control freak, according to Jack Miles, God's unflappable biographer (God: A Biography).

Sure, writing has its moments of sublimity - grasping after the ineffable, realizing something just out of reach - yet at every instance modulated by the chronic substratum of shame about having taken a dump in public.

Uspješan suživot zahtijeva da se razlike izme?u dvije osobe u najmanju ruku svedu na to?ku me?usobnog toleriranja, premda je taj stupanj ?esto mogu?e dosti?i tek nakon što se volja barem jedne od dviju strana smanji toliko da je njome mogu?e upravljati - otprilike kao kada se tumor izloži golemoj dozi radijacije.