In 2015, students at Northwestern University responded to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education with a protest march. Some carried mattresses. The author of the article, Laura Kipnis, a tenured faculty member at Northwestern, had gleefully denounced the state of campus sexual politics. Kipnis’s immediate target was a university policy, introduced the year before, that prohibited all romantic or sexual relationships between students and university staff or faculty members. In the piece, titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” she critiqued a “new paradigm” of trigger warnings and trauma, in which students had become “committed to their own vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency, and protected from unequal power arrangements in romantic life.” Kipnis, who has written books including “Against Love” and “Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation,” often voices controversial or contrarian views; here, as always, she took pleasure in stirring up a hornets’ nest. In a telling anecdote, she related that, a decade earlier, she had voluntarily attended a harassment workshop on campus (“Hoping my good citizenship might be noticed,” she wrote). The first guideline issued by the workshop leader was “Do not make unwanted sexual advances.” Kipnis couldn’t help herself. From the back of the room she called, “But how do you know they’re unwanted until you try?”
Kipnis is proud of her sense of humor. She says she is “after a certain insouciance of tone,” but she can be feverish, and even a little histrionic. She mixes cultural criticism with hyperbole, and doesn’t alter her style just because her material is sensitive. She knows that this can rankle. In the Chronicle article, alongside jokes about the children of professor-student relationships and confessions about her own student days (“We partied together, drank and got high together”), she described the wave of “sexual panic” that had resulted since 2011, when the Department of Education notified universities that under Title IX, the rule that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in institutions of higher education, they could lose federal funding if they were found to take insufficient measures against sexual harassment and violence. She may not be the first feminist to wind up on the wrong side of a generational divide, but few others have had Title IX complaints filed against them for their writing.
“I thought they were fucking with me,” Kipnis told me recently; she was sitting in a low leather chair in her apartment in Manhattan, where she lives when not teaching. She was wearing a button-down shirt and a pair of red velour pants. The decor was at once modern and cozy; a glass door separated the bedroom from the living room. “They felt at liberty to take this incredibly aggressive, overreaching move toward a professor—a feminist professor—on their campus.” In her article, Kipnis had cited a Title IX complaint filed against Northwestern regarding a philosophy professor, Peter Ludlow. The complaint charged that Ludlow had forced an undergraduate to drink alcohol and that he had groped her; Kipnis also made reference to Ludlow having “dated” a graduate student (she named neither student). The same graduate—who contested the word “dated”—claimed Kipnis’s essay contributed to a hostile educational environment.
In response, Kipnis wrote another article for the Chronicle, “My Title IX Inquisition,” about her “Midwestern Torquemadas” and the “kangaroo court.” (The article was published on the morning of May 29, 2015; later the same day, a university investigation cleared her of wrongdoing.) Writing begat writing. One of Ludlow’s lawyers asked Kipnis if she would be his faculty support person during the dismissal hearings against him. (Kipnis later wrote that it “was like watching someone being burned at the stake in slow motion, except this execution was catered.”) Ludlow resigned before the hearings concluded, but without signing a non-disclosure agreement. He gave Kipnis thousands of pages of documents, including background material, reports from the university’s Title IX investigator, e-mails, and the text messages between him and the graduate student.
A close reading of the Ludlow cases is the centerpiece of Kipnis’s new book, “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus,” in which she puts forward her argument for what she calls “grown-up feminism.” Kipnis quips that “bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated.” Similarly, she thinks professors guilty of quid-pro-quo harassment, in which sexual favors are demanded in exchange for something like a good grade or a promotion, should be fired, as should gropers and rapists. (“In cases where somebody’s directly supervising someone, that should be off-limits,” she told me, admitting that she could have been clearer about that in her first Chronicle article.) But she believes that the “leakiness” and “idiocy” of sexual desire cannot be contained by regulation; people need to learn to deal with it themselves. She disagrees with the idea, popular among some younger feminists, that true consent is impossible within a framework of asymmetric power. For Kipnis, it is precisely the dynamics of power—of status, money, appearance, age, talent—that create desire.
Kipnis had always wanted to write about a trial—she admires Janet Malcolm’s work and Diana Trilling’s true-crime book “Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor.” For ninety pages, Kipnis parses every line of Ludlow’s file, cross-examining the parties’ motives. She came to believe that he had been wronged. One of his accusers, she decided, was loose with the facts; the other had been a full and willing participant in the romance. At one point, she writes, as if playing a trial lawyer herself, “What would it mean to not consent to sending a thousand text messages?” She leaves the question hanging.
I had met Kipnis a few times before, most recently two years ago, when she attended a presentation I gave on literary criticism and affect. I recall her asking, during the Q. & A., “What’s so bad about aggression?” When we met in mid-March, she had just returned from Wellesley College, where she had participated in “Censorship Awareness Week.” Before she arrived, student activists had posted a video protesting her appearance; a week later, faculty members proposed new standards for bringing visiting speakers to campus. Since being investigated by Northwestern, Kipnis has become a mascot for free speech, occasionally asked to talk at libertarian or right-wing events. “The politics of this is still something I’m trying to figure out,” she said. We were drinking espresso from white cups decorated with clocks. “More people on the left should stand up and say that the stuff that’s happening on campus is not so unlike what’s going on off campus in terms of the anti-democratic tendencies, the authoritarian tendencies, the ease about suspending due process.”
Kipnis has attended a protest or two, but has never been much of an activist. She considers herself between worlds: a critic at art school, a writer of mainstream books in academia. The product of “free-range parenting,” she came of age as cultural studies was taking over American universities. She enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute in the nineteen-eighties, when her peers were interested in what she described as the “confrontational body work” of artists like Chris Burden and Vito Acconci and “that German guy who cut his penis off or something.” (Kipnis was probably referring to Rudolph Schwarzkogler, an Austrian artist who simulated the castration of a friend). She quickly abandoned painting to pursue photography and audio pieces.
“I still dream about San Francisco,” she told me. “It seems in dreams a kind of emblem of freedom. I have dreams about the hills—either the car that won’t get up the hill or the car that gets you to the top of the hill and you can’t see over the top and it’s going down. Something about the topography—you didn’t know what you were going to encounter. But that seems good.” She was initially “horrified” by the way some of the faculty would yell or berate students, but now she is grateful for having learned to defend her work. When the filmmaker and choreographer Yvonne Rainer came to campus for visiting critiques, Kipnis showed her a slide show, for which she had invited a homeless man to her apartment, dressed him in her clothes, and had him pose for her. Rainer said that the piece was exploitative, but arranged for Kipnis to attend the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Kipnis went to graduate school in Nova Scotia, where she studied feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. “I came at feminism that way more than reading Naomi Wolf or American people talking about how hard it is to be a middle-class woman,” she said. She is fascinated by the conflict between what people say they want and what they really want—suggesting, for instance, that “sometimes the reason you might object to something strongly is that maybe you also partly liked it, or you are disgusted by this professor because you’re also kind of attracted to him or want him to be attracted to you.” In the book, she puts forward an eye-catching explanation about binge drinking and sexual assault: that students get drunk precisely to act out retrograde gender stereotypes, in which men are aggressors and women passive to the point of catatonia.
Kipnis’s conversational style is digressive and assured. She says she feels uncomfortable in the confessional mode, but her writing makes breezy, if vague, use of her own indiscretions. She coyly drops the fact that, as a professor, she dated a graduate student. As an art student, she fell under the sway of “a Marxist-Freudian bodybuilder” who taught art history; during the semester, she asked him to go on a date with her. (He said no; she continued going to class.) Kipnis said she understands that some women find it hard to fight back when they are intimidated or scared—when she was an undergraduate, an intruder entered her bedroom window, and she was too frightened to move. (A roommate heard her screaming and came to her aid.) Now Kipnis advocates for mandatory self-defense training for students. But she described as “odd” the idea that some women have—“that all of this is going to be handed to you, that you’re going to be completely protected, that it’s supposed to be better than it is.” Kipnis is concerned by the “self-righteousness and virtue-mongering” that she thinks is “characteristic of this generation”—but added that she prefers not to make generalizations. “I have students who I think are wonderfully ironic,” she told me.
I mentioned the recent episode of “Girls” in which a famous novelist invites Hannah to his apartment to discuss a blog she has written about him sleeping with his young fans. The two discuss problems of consent; Hannah recalls having been stroked on the neck, in elementary school, by a teacher. Eventually the novelist asks her to lie down on the bed next to him, and unzips his pants. Kipnis loved the episode: the confusions of desires, the fact that no one was completely right or wrong. “Hannah starts out in this kind of self-righteous way, then sees that the situation is more complicated, then becomes sort of seduced by him,” she said. “The question is, how horrible does one regard that situation with the guy pulling out his dick?” For Kipnis, it was a moment of comedy. She often insists on pointing out the stupidity of male behavior, and its humor, as if refusing to grant it power. The episode also reminded her of “that perennial question” that she wrote about in “Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation”: “Do you want to fuck that guy or be that guy?”
I asked if she thought that the difference between those who talk about resilience, as she does, and those who talk about vulnerability might be that women of her generation had been more hardened by workplace battles with sexism and misogyny. Kipnis said that she herself hadn’t experienced sexism. She had experienced a little misogyny in academia, she clarified, but it had mostly come from “entitled male undergraduates” rather than from male colleagues. Women had sometimes, but not always, been helpful, especially in her early career.* “I’m sometimes a little cynical, maybe, about this community of women, and how we’re supposed to be part of it,” she said.
Two hours later, she sent me an e-mail with the title “ps sexism.” “I was trying to think more about this,” the e-mail began, “have I encountered it institutionally?” She mentioned that she was underpaid—but, she wrote, “I suspect it has more to do with having done what I wanted rather than jumping through institutional hoops, ie I don’t really fit into any discipline anymore.” She shared the story of the time a prominent figure in cultural studies threw a drink at her, then crawled across the room to bite her on the leg. “Now it’s become sort of a fond memory.” I wrote back and asked if we were on the record. “Yes on the record I guess,” she replied an hour later. “I should have said he *flirtatiously* threw a drink on me. I actually had to go upstairs and dry my hair.”
*This post has been updated to clarify the role that women have played in supporting Kipnis’s career.
