← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Laura Kipnis on the State of #MeToo
00:14:47
Laura Kipnis on the State of #MeToo
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:16]
B
I'm Dorothy Wickenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's Alexandra Schwartz talks to the writer and academic Laura Kipnis. Kipnis has been critical of contemporary feminism, but she thinks the MeToo movement has started an important conversation about heterosexual relationships.
- [01:39]
C
Laura Kipnes is a professor at Northwestern University, writing as a feminist about sex, culture and power in our society. She's written provocatively about pornography and sex scandals, and she's even written a book called Against Love. But Laura Kipnis views have brought her opposition with many other feminists on campus and off. She's written that sexual harassment policies don't empower women or further the cause of equality at all. And after she wrote about a harassment charge at her own university, two students filed a Title IX complaint against Kipnis, saying that her words contributed to discrimination. In their view, her arguments discouraged people from reporting rape or harassment and created a hostile environment on campus. Rather than backing down, though, Kipnis published a book last year about what she calls sexual paranoia. Now, that was before the MeToo movement and revelations about everything from the monstrosity of Harvey Weinstein or Dr. Larry Nassar to a bad date with the comedian Aziz Ansari. That was much discussed online. So Alexandra Schwartz, who's written about some of these issues for the New Yorker, wanted to talk with Laura Kipnes about the revolution that's taking place right before our eyes.
- [02:58]
B
So, Laura, I want to start with the article you recently published in the Guardian in response to a letter co signed by Catherine Deneuve and 100 other French women that protested what they considered to be the excesses of the MeToo movement. And you wrote, if the question is whether MeToo has gone too far or not far enough, the answer is obviously both.
- [03:19]
D
Yeah, I've been thinking at this moment about that Fitzgerald quote about intelligence being the ability to hold two contrasting ideas in your head at once. And now you need to hold about 20 contrasting ideas. I mean, I think that it makes sense to separate out MeToo into the sort of grassroots movement and all these women coming out and exposing things that have happened to them and talking publicly about things that were once private. And I think in a really interesting way, using expose as a political tactic. But then you've got these institutions and employers stepping in, wanting to cover their ass, I think, mostly, and turning this into a behind closed doors set of decision making about what is and isn't consent or where the line is and what goes too far and what kinds of sexual behavior should be allowed in the workplace without there being any public discussion about about that. And it's similar to what I wrote about is the situation on campus with Title ix, that it's all this stuff going on behind closed doors with bureaucrats and administrators seizing power from students or doing it in the supposed name of feminism. But actually it's about institutional power.
- [04:38]
B
It strikes me that there are some differences, though, between the campus situation and some of these institutional situations. With me too, because many workplaces do have codes of conduct. And I think a lot of what's come out with me too is that codes of conduct were being violated and employees were being made to feel that they effectively could not do their work. It wasn't just about negotiating sex or sexual encounters. It was very much about negotiating how you actually function in the workplace. Is that a distinction that you draw?
- [05:08]
D
Yeah, absolutely. And the distinction making capacity is something we really need to hold onto by our fingernails. Because I do think there are these different contexts for what's going on and these different stories. And one of the stories is the campus story. One of the stories is the Workplace story. And one of the stories now, the more recent, like, incarnation, is social life, you know, dates gone bad or actors 30 years ago who did something inappropriate in their kitchen. So we're getting all of this stuff kind of mashed together.
- [05:44]
B
You recently wrote a piece in which you talked about Gretchen Carlson's memoir about her time at Fox News. And you specifically point to one incident that took place early in her career, career in which a cameraman said sexually suggestive things to her and made her very uncomfortable, and she didn't say anything to him in the moment. And you criticize her for that. It comes back to an idea that you write about quite a bit, that women may make themselves more vulnerable or submissive in the moment than they should. And just to be clear, you're not talking about assault cases, but cases of harassment in the workplace or in dating life. It's a controversial idea, needless to say, because, for instance, in the Gretchen Carlson situation, there were real repercussions later when she did speak up at Fox News about harassment. And women face those kinds of repercussions all the time. If you see this as something that really could be corrected by women, in part, how would you recommend that women address those situations as they arise?
- [06:45]
D
One of the problems is that, of course, there's no completely perfect solution to any of this. And so when you start speaking about it in public, you're always assailed for not having the perfect solution. And, you know, so sorry, I wish that I did. I do think that submissiveness and yielding are not the right solutions. And I also think that, you know, it's probably likely that men are not going to change their sexual behavior immediately, although I think they're under strong threat that they should. But I'd also say one of the interesting things at this moment is that because of all of this private information that's being exposed, you get these play accounts of how an evening transpired, let's say. And, you know, I thought the Aziz story written, you know, by the pseudonymous Grace, or Grace told it to another reporter, was very interesting because her criticism of him was that he didn't read her signals adequately, you know, that she was sending out these signals that she wasn't into it, she wanted him to stop. But I think I put this on Facebook maybe. It also seemed to me that, you know, here you've got two people having dinner, and rather than order another bottle of wine and sit there for the evening and get to know each other, he calls for the check immediately and wants to go back to his place and she goes back there with him. So it seems like she also wasn't reading his signals. And I, you know, completely think he acted kind of grossly and his, what's at his place? He pulled out these porn moves on her that she didn't like all of that. But we've got to retain this idea that feminists have fought for, you know, over a century for women to be treated as adults in the erotic realm and as sexual agents. And that is going to include making mistakes and the right to make mistakes.
- [08:43]
B
Yeah, but I do think that so many of the cases we've heard about are not. Consent is not the issue. I mean, the issue is very much non consenting encounters.
- [08:52]
D
Right. And those should be, you know, punished. I agree. Any sort of sexual coercion or, you know, not taking no for an answer or I think you get to hit on someone once, not more than once, you know, so that's harassment. So all of those things go over the line. But you know, to go back to the Catherine Denouf letter, not written by her, but signed by her, you know, yeah, there is, there are these in between zones and I talked about liminal zones where, you know, the right to flirt, the right to have an innuendo laden conversation, the right to give a compliment. I mean, I think there are a lot of people legitimately worried that those forms of fun and pleasure and play, including at work, you know, that we're being turned into robots or, you know, that's the threat at work. We have to so suppress our, you know, erotic sides in our sexuality that, you know, I think it's probably not possible, but that also we all feel so constricted and joyless in those, in those circumstances.
- [10:03]
B
Well, it's interesting to me because I don't see how any of that can operate in a situation in which no or thank you but no doesn't apply. To me, it seems pretty obvious and necessary that if you want to get into a liminal zone like that, there has to be an option to totally turn it down without there being professional consequence and also without there being a massive humiliation ordeal consequence. And that to me is also about male vulnerability and a sense that men very often have of if they're rejected, they will persist. If they're rejected, it's a terrible thing. And that means that it's harder than it should be to refuse and to say no. So unless there is an easy and clear way of saying no and being heard, the other side of that can't really happen.
- [10:49]
D
I think that is why, you know, and here I sound kind of utopian, that this is an educational moment at best where there's a chance to reflect hopefully for men on their vulnerability or the ways in which they disguise it through their porny moves. And women reflecting on the ways that maybe they're complicit in sort of not reading what signals were being issued. There have been a lot of conversations that we haven't been having and including about male vulnerability, which I really like you bringing that up because I do think we forget that side of the story that, you know, oftentimes the person acting like the worst is, you know, deep inside some, you know, puny, threatened, runt like person. But I also think that women have to. This sounds sort of horribly old age, like an old age thing to do. But, you know, take some responsibility for the situations you put yourself into.
- [11:57]
B
Okay, well, I have a question since you, since you used the phrase old age, because one thing that's been coming up a lot lately and actually the Aziz Ansari story has been a flashpoint for it, is this sense of generational conflict among women and especially among self identified feminist women, where sort of roughly put, women who are older have been saying that young women don't quite understand the power dynamics of play or that young women aren't taking responsibility for their own actions. Sort of the young women are complaining too much. Younger women have been very frustrated on the whole with this response from older women and are saying that just because the situation used to be like this, that's no reason not to demand change and not to demand a better set of standards both for sex and for workplace conduct.
- [12:44]
D
Well, again, I think all of these things are true at once. I mean, I, like I've said, I'm kind of pro. Me too. And I do think that this sort of insurrectionary spirit is fantastic and exciting. And I do think social change I think will come about. And at the same time, I also think there's a certain amount of excuse making that I guess maybe I feel my generation allowed ourselves less.
- [13:15]
B
I also think that a major thing that's going on right now is that we're just talking broadly but hopefully with increasing specificity about great dissatisfactions with heterosexual sex and with the heterosexual sexual dynamic. And a huge part of that is on men. To me, more of it is on men. And maybe you and I disagree about that. But I'm wondering what you think men should be taking away from this and what you think men should be doing.
- [13:44]
D
I think that, you know, obviously men vastly need to change their sexual behavior and not assume that the stuff that they're doing is desired. You know, in terms of whether, I mean, yes, it's certainly men that need to change their behavior. And in all of the spheres that I'm talking about, campus workplace dating life, I think, you know, men have acted incredibly grossly. I also still would say that there's room for women to be self examining about their participation in some of this stuff. So, you know, there, I kind of just do feel that my generation's feminism, you know, I was a like inheritor of consciousness raising and ways in which women really try to be honest about heterosexuality as a relationship. Not just something that was done to women, but something that women who are heterosexual participate in.
- [14:52]
B
So do you think that MeToo could potentially be positive for that kind of conversation? Like, there's been so much talk about how it could be dampening Eros and how men won't be allowed to flirt anymore. But I actually think there's a way in which it could be very encouraging of Eros because it could lead to more open and honest conversations about how to treat partners better. Do you think that it's possible that MeToo could encourage some kind of positive result in terms of that?
- [15:18]
D
I think absolutely. I mean, that's my hope. And also.
- [15:22]
B
Yeah.
- [15:22]
D
That men think about their own behavior and think about porn and you know, how that's like some other sphere than what dates, what women, most women want on a date. So yeah, I think the kind of self examination that comes out of that, out of this can be great.
- [15:53]
B
That was Laura Kipnes talking to Alexander Schwartz.
- [16:02]
E
What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that, that eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I.
- [16:36]
B
Try to be an antidote to the.
- [16:38]
D
Unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online.
- [16:42]
E
To the best of my ability, every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die.
- [17:01]
B
False Tell me more.
- [17:03]
E
Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [17:14]
D
From. PRX.