The Female Thing: Dirt, envy, sex, vulnerability by Laura Kipnis

The Female Thing: Dirt, envy, sex, vulnerability by Laura Kipnis

Author:Laura Kipnis [Kipnis, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-09T23:00:00+00:00


Which brings us to another question: What is dirt? This may not be as obvious as it seems. The standard definition of dirt is “matter in the wrong place,” meaning that shoes on the floor are not much of an issue, but shoes on the bed cause distress; crumbs on a plate are fine, but crumbs on the floor are dirty, and so on. You begin to see that dirt is basically a conceptual issue: it depends on the categories you bring to it. But if dirt is in the eye of the beholder and cleanliness is a product of the imagination, how can there be any absolute standards, including yours, and the ones you may want to hold over those you reside with, or they over you? And where do these standards come from anyway? It's all very mysterious, like the popularity of Martha Stewart or the origin of dust. As psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie put it in a provocative 1937 essay “The Fantasy of Dirt”: “Our behavior towards things that are usually thought of as ‘dirty’ is replete with paradoxes, absurdities, confused assumptions, and mutually contradictory implications and premises.”

Dirtiness has an inherent psychological drama to it, a drama that cuts deep into the psyche. For the fastidious, which includes all of us socialized humans at least some of the time, there's the sense of something vaguely dangerous about dirt. It threatens us with chaos and disorder and … well, who knows what exactly? Try querying cleaning devotees about what's really so vexing about bathroom scum, why those crumbs on the counter just have to be wiped up before leaving the house, what prompts the urgent nighttime scrubbing fits, and you learn nothing, only that such impulses reside beneath the level of cogent thought, shrouded in a fuzzy blend of defensiveness and ersatz common sense. When pressed, just about everyone now rationalizes the danger feelings with authoritative-sounding concepts about disease or germs, but it's also obvious that these concepts come after the fact, to justify the anxiety that preceded the explanations.

A Kalahari Bushman believes that if a man sits on the female side of the hut his virility will be weakened. We fear pathogenic-ity transmitted through microorganisms. We're both marshalling our culture's version of pollution avoidance to triumph over abstract fears and dangers, because obviously the world is packed with them, they're frequently capricious and unpredictable, they hover in the anxious territory between the real and the imaginary, and so humans invent boundaries as a feeble mode of injecting some control into a phobia-inducing universe. But the joke's on us, since needless to say, the boundaries produce as many anxieties as they alleviate. Note that jokes themselves are an important anxiety-assuagement technique, especially jokes about boundaries: incest jokes, toilet jokes, bestiality jokes—try to think of a social boundary that isn't prime material for comedy. But the difference between us cosmopolitans and the Bushmen isn't that our behavior is rational and grounded in science and theirs in symbolism, because our behavior carries just as much symbolic meaning as theirs.



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