Laura Kipnis Quotes & Sayings

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. — Laura Kipnis

Here's the conundrum: We want to tell our stories! But if condensation is the language of wishes - especially the most verboten and destructive ones - the more you spell the story out, the less aesthetically charged it becomes. The question is whether untransformed experience can ever be aesthetically powerful, or whether it's simply interesting. Literary language is one solution, with its habits of duality - metaphor, irony - and other techniques for saying opposing things at once. For haunting the reader with ghosts of buried meanings.
Your story may be interesting, but what if, paradoxically, it's what you can't say that makes it lasting? — Laura Kipnis

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. — Laura Kipnis

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. — Laura Kipnis

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. — Laura Kipnis

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. — Laura Kipnis

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. — Laura Kipnis

[T]he hidden linguistic universe of companianate couples ... rests entirely on one generative phrase: 'Would you please stop doing that. — Laura Kipnis

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. — Laura Kipnis

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. — Laura Kipnis