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
