There's something delicious about this all-male panel of Wyoming justices and the editors ofHustler poring so assiduously over Dworkin's outré fantasies about androgyny and community. Though what's poignant in retrospect is that Dworkin's prodigious capacities for overstatement and hyperbole were matched only byHustler 's; Dworkin and Flynt were partners in their fondness for excess (perhaps also on the exciting dirtiness of sex). They definitely kept an eye on one another: there was a mutual fascination, enlivened by mutual abhorrence.
A similar mix of attraction and ambivalence has propelled me through these essays. I said at the outset that we're in search of our split-off other halves, but it's easy to miss them given the weird and disconcerting forms they sometimes take. The idea here was to be a crash test dummy, so to speak; open to the possibilities of accidental collisionsâto the surprises and perversities, and not least, the ruptures to various articles of faith about what it is to be a man or a woman. Consider this an interim report.
Â
Notes
The Scumbag
1 For the record, I teach filmmaking (though eventually became more interested in writing than in shooting films myself), so am actually a bit on the margins, academically speaking. (So I like to tell myself.)
2 Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility for the shooting though was never tried for it. He did receive multiple life sentences and a death sentence for other racially motivated killings.
The Con Man
1 The diagnostician also doesn't have to be a doctor. In Hitchcock'sMarnie , another movie about a repressed kleptomaniac, it's Marnie's former boss, the handsome department store heir Mark Rutland, who steps into the role, forcing the frigid Marnie to marry him, then raping her on their honeymoon. This turns out to be therapeutic though, because he also forces her to confront her buried traumatic childhood memories and since it's Sean Connery in his prime doing the raping (and it all happens offscreen), it doesn't seem like theworst thing in the world. I was once asked by a feminist film historian doing some kind of survey to name my favorite sex scene in a movie and said the first thing that came to mind: “The honeymoon scene inMarnie. ” She made a peculiar snorting noise with her sinuses; I felt mortified for years whenever I ran into her.
Juicers
1 Not much of a surprise, since the same dynamic has been unfolding on a global scale too, with cheaper labor abroad used to punish overly demanding workers at home.
The Lothario
1 I should interject that despite my having published a few rather mocking remarks at his expense on this subject inSlate, where he had a regular column, Hitchens was kind enough to blurb my last book, always the mark of a gentleman in my view. Because it was my habit to pick arguments with him whenever I saw him over the years, to mask my ambivalent admiration among other reasons (“other reasons” would include most of his political positions, which admittedly did nothing to mitigate the intellectual crush), I fear that he never actually saw me at my funniest, which made me take theVanity Fair piece all the more personally.
Humiliation Artists
1 And how many centuries before they stop appending “gate” to every scandal anyway, which only caught on after Nixon loyalistâturnedâcolumnist William Safire started doing it as a clever way of minimizing his former boss's crimes against the country, multiplying the “gates” ad infinitum to strip the original one of importance?
2 In fact, Roth's own psychoanalyst did make use of not very thinly disguised details of Roth's life in a published case studyâthis is Roth converting his own humiliation into fiction. He couldn't let it drop though, and brought Spielvogel back inMy Life as a Man, where the analyst once again unapologetically rips off his patient's life for a journal article.
The Manly Man
1 He was also a big supporter of former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who became embroiled in controversy and eventually resigned after publicly questioning women's aptitude for science.
2 In fact, this is an anxiety that's alive and well, and not just for neocons. See the February 2014 article titled “Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex” in theNew York Times Magazine by the problematic LA psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb.
Gropers
1 Just the other day I received a memo on new sexual misconduct policies at my university that referred to students who press harassment charges against faculty members as “survivors”âeven prior to any finding on the accusation.
2 For the record, I strongly believe that quid pro quo harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square.
3 In fact, my university's policies were further reformulated in early 2014, just as I was completing this book. Faculty and undergrads are now prohibited from dating or any other sort of consensual relationship, even when not in the same department.
Cheaters
1 I was once on the verge of publishing an ex's letters along with a wittily acerbic running commentary until halted by a cautious editor, so I must acknowledge that there's no high ground for me to claim here. But as Robert Lowell famously included his ex Elizabeth Hardwick's letters in a book of poems, there were distinguished literary precedents for this kind of thing, or so I assured myself.
2 “The stupid part was believing a 22-year-old can be strung along for 6 months, abandoned & trusted to keep quiet.” This was a tweet by the college student who'd received the original crotch shots from then-representative Anthony Weiner that led to his resignation from Congress (see “Humiliation Artists”); she was speaking here about one of her successors, the young woman who revealed the texts that demolished Weiner's mayoral chances two years later.
Self-Deceivers
1 In fact, many of Edwards's positions now look politically prescient.Atlantic columnist Peter Beinart used the occasion of progressive New York mayor Bill de Blasio's 2014 inaugural address to recall that it was Edwards's “Two Americas” campaign theme that renewed Democratic interest in economic inequality after Clintonism pushed the party rightward. Beinart faults Democrats for airbrushing Edwards from party history while borrowing his anti-poverty proposals to ride the postâOccupy Wall Street momentum.
Men Who Hate Hillary
1 At the moment she has yet to announce for 2016, though it's assumed she will. The head of the Republican National Committee has already promised to go after the “rough stuff” and run ad campaigns that will be “very aggressive.”
2 Feminists have long been Tyrrell's favorite punching bag in theSpectator : “disagreeable misanthropes, horrible to behold, uncouth and unlovely ⦠burdened by a splitting headache, halitosis, body odor, and other ailments too terrible and obscure to mention.” It's a bad thing about me, but I confess this made me laugh.
3 So firmly entrenched is this assessment among Hillary haters that when she momentarily teared up during the New Hampshire primary, this too was taken as evidence of her bitchery: she criedstrategically .
4 Not only did they eventually meet again, but Brock went on to become a major Clinton fund-raiser and self-styled media advisor; he recently started an opposition research shop called Correct the Record to aid her 2016 campaign.
Â
ALSO BY LAURA KIPNIS
How to Become a Scandal
The Female Thing
Against Love
Â
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LAURA KIPNIS is the author ofHow to Become a Scandal, Against Love, andThe Female Thing, which have been translated into fifteen languages. A professor in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University, she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the NEA. Her writing has appeared inThe New York Times, Harper's, Slate, andBookforum, among other publications. She lives in New York and Chicago.
Â
Â
MEN: NOTES FROM AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION. Copyright © 2014 by Laura Kipnis. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Â
www.henryholt.com
Â
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected] .
Â
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Kipnis, Laura.
    Men: notes from an ongoing investigation / Laura Kipnis.âFirst edition.
        pages cm
    ISBN 978-1-62779-187-8 (hardback)âISBN 978-1-62779-188-5 (electronic book)  1.  MenâPsychology.  2.  MenâIdentity.  3.  Masculinity.  4.  Man-woman relationships.  I.  Title.
    HQ1090.K575 2014
    155.3'32âdc23
2014011058
Â
e-ISBN 978-1-62779-188-5
Â
First Edition: November 2014
