Adultery as an act of cultural rebellion

Laura Kipnis, author of "Against Love," talks about Newt Gingrich's wanderings and the absurd dream of monogamy.

By David Bowman

Sep 3, 2003 | "My God, didn't that book terrify you?" a woman gasps to me over the phone. We're both writers. Both married -- although not to each other. She had just reviewed the book "Against Love." I was about to interview its author, Laura Kipnis. My friend talks in a hushed voice -- she doesn't want her husband to hear. I tend to be soft-spoken on the phone anyway, but I chirp out, "'Against Love' was a hoot!"

My wife looks up from her knitting. On the phone, I hear a male voice in the background. Hubby is coming. We hang up.

I wish I had a chance to tell her why I feel this book is such a hoot. Sure, Kipnis proclaims that love is a "sacred cow" and she is the "butcher." And what's really on her chopping block is marriage, or any relationship that demands sexual and emotional fidelity. Of course, the roads that lead from monogamy are all named Libido Street. The libido is endlessly hungry for variety -- its cravings no secret to Kim Cattrall's character Samantha in "Sex and the City," or any American boy two years into puberty. Guys spend their lives dealing with it. Most women are surprised, then deal with it, too.

I think my married friend was taking Kipnis' metaphors of how icky fidelity is (it's a "tobacco patch," "toxic waste," "anesthesia") too literally. Those metaphors tend to showboat the real point of the book -- that marriage is the capitalist state's way of making its citizens into obedient workers. Adultery is the escape valve that lets us rebel against our husbands and wives, instead of clubbing our bosses to death with our lunchboxes.

Be that as it may, Kipnis -- who is a professor of media studies and author of "Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics" -- really does butcher the sacred cow of marriage better than Wendy's, McDonald's or Burger King. But she does it in a way some critics have called delightful. Still, this is not a book that you'll want read in bed -- unless you are sleeping alone. Salon spoke to Kipnis by phone.

Let's make this interview as exciting as adultery.

I'm game. Let's get naked.

OK. You first.

I am! A phone-sex interview, this is so fun.

Are you married?

Well, here's the thing, David, you're talking to this person who has written this entire book about love without using the first person once. That should give you some clue it's not that kind of book.

You did reveal you're a "late bloomer."

I said that?

Yeah. Here. Let me read it back to you: "Bliss: often synonymous with intense sexual reawakening -- or for a few of us late bloomers, an erotic initiation ...

I thought of myself conducting an experiment to write about social issues in a different way, having invented a literary persona, which is not necessarily synonymous with me -- the actual naked authoress talking to you. I think the book was written from a lot of different stances. It's the adulterer. It's the cuckolded person. It's society. A lot of voices woven through it. So "us late bloomers" is one of those personas.

Let's talk about the mammal side of love. Don't you believe that because males want to fuck multiple females to spread their seed around, so women invented monogamy to choose whose offspring they would carry?

I think all that social-biological stuff is such a façade. I don't want to go down that road. What about the importance of culture? I have a great joke that nobody else understands: When sociobiologists start shitting in their backyards when they have dinner guests over, we'll all start believing their arguments.

Huh?

Culture intervenes and takes precedent over how we conduct ourselves. We're not shitting in backyards -- are you?

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