Laura Kipnis: cultural and media critic, professor of media studies at Northwestern University, author of Against Love and The Female Thing. A feminist, but tries to avoid “being typecast as the pro-sex feminist…I get bored when people only ask me to write about those issues.”On beauty:
"The hidden 'double shift' for women is spending an awful lot of time worrying about the way they look…It’s not like women don’t realize this [impediment], but I think they feel defeated by it. You can be self-aware of these things and still be on a constant diet. You can have read every feminist book on your bookshelf and still have issues about food and eating and the way your hair is styled. I guess you're not required to subscribe to this kind of regime, but it helps you blend in and offers you more sexual opportunity...because that's still the way the heterosexual world is organized, despite all the supposed female progress."
3 comments:
I think of this as the abyss between our actions and our intellect--the dire need for women to internalize our analysis. I was surprised, I have to say, by how healing writing my book (Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters) was. I thought it would make me crazy, but it actually helped me become healthier.
Except I believe that some women do really enjoy looking nice - for themselves. When I put on makeup in the morning, I feel that it is my own little feminine ritual, a time to be with myself - putting on my war paint for the day.
Laura is my hero. I love her writing, especially her essays about pornography (her Hustler essay rocked me--I haven't before or since come across a more insightful discussion of class in porn).
I need to plug her Bound and Gagged--an excellent collection of porn theory.
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