Unwanted Advances by Laura Kipnis

Author:Laura Kipnis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

I can’t say that I entirely understand Hartley, though I’ve certainly spent a lot of time pondering her. At one point Ludlow said to me, when I laughed at one of the text exchanges between the two of them—Hartley’s funny snarkiness was in full form—“You would have liked her back then.”

The change from then to now was startling though. In the 2011 texts, Hartley is confident, funny, and in control. She puts Ludlow in his place, she argues philosophy, she upbraids him when she’s peeved. There’s not an iota of intimidation or deference. In one exchange early on in the relationship, she proposes that the two of them get together, and Ludlow responds with a smiley emoticon. Hartley texts back, “We need to have a talk about how I feel about emoticons . . .” and then, rather instructively, “‘Use your words.’” It’s what parents say to their kids. This is someone in command of herself and the situation.

By March 2014, in her statements to Bobb, she’d come to view herself through a scrim of bathos. “I’m a shadow of my former self,” she tells Bobb. I truly didn’t understand how someone who’d once had a lot of spunk and originality could have spoken such a canned sentence unless she were playing a role. (Maybe she was: she repeated the very same phrase to a reporter from the Chronicle a year later—she also said she’d never considered her relationship with Ludlow romantic, nor had they dated.) Having been taken up by a trio of feminist advisors hadn’t done her much good—to the contrary, it seems to have transformed her into either a not very bright child, or a chronic dissembler.

Freud remarks somewhere that to achieve a “passive aim” may call for a large amount of activity. It was a line that often crossed my mind when thinking about this saga, and the style of passive-aggressive femininity that’s become ascendant, and institutionally endorsed, on our campuses.

One of the limitations of treating male sexuality as a primordial danger is that what’s dangerous is also alluring. Of course, as everyone knows, attraction can also flip into repulsion in an instant. Demanding institutional solutions to these essential human dichotomies is turning us into a society of sexual liars. The tough question becomes how colleges and universities can deal adequately with the external realities of sexual assault on the one hand and the inner realities of sexual ambivalence on the other, without building an accusation machinery so vast and indiscriminate that it becomes a magnet for neurotic schemes, emotional knife play, and monstrously self-exonerating agendas.

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