The Female Thing

by Laura Kipnis

In the female psyche nowadays, "contradictions speckle the landscape, like ingrown hairs after a bad bikini wax." So writes Laura Kipnis, author of the widely acclaimed polemic Against Love. With "the gleeful viperish wit of Dorothy Parker" (Slate), Kipnis now offers a fresh and provocative assessment of the female condition in the post-post-feminist world of the twenty-first century. For every advance toward sexual equality on the part of women in recent years, she argues, some new impediment just "seems" to appear. Ironically, feminism ran up against an unanticipated opponent: the inner woman. An ambitious and original reassessment of feminism and women's ambivalence about it, The Female Thing brims with bracing and funny social observations informed by psychological acuity. For all the upbeat "You go, girl" slogans, women remain caught between feminism and femininity, between self-affirmation and an endless quest for self-improvement, between playing the injured party and claiming i