What I'm Reading: A Polemic

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (But really, it was four years ago in an office in Providence), there was a naïve little girl who have no clue what she wanted to do with her life. Actually, at that point, I--SPOILER ALERT: the little girl is me—was actually toying with the idea of being a classics major and working as a curator type. Boy was I wrong.
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That fateful summer, I wasted away the first few friendless days shopping in the bookstore on Thayer Street. I picked up some Jane Austen fan lit, which was remarkably unremarkable, and this book called Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti. Valenti, who filled pages of empowering, but still well-organized, arguments with satire and sarcasm, inspired me.

And for our final assignment in a writing class that I signed up for because I hoped it would help my college application process, we had to write about a particular subject. Anything. Inspired by a chapter in Valenti’s book about sex education in schools, I started reading and researching. I collected everything from studies to song lyrics (“You and me baby aint nothing but mammals/ So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”) and compiled them haphazardly in a Word document, padded with personal anecdotes and experiences.
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That fateful day, I found myself cross-legged on the floor of my professor’s office, where we had printed, cut apart, and scattered all of my paragraphs. We then laboriously worked to fit them back together into paragraphs that flowed and presented my argument in an organized fashion.

There, on the floor of that office, Brain Barf was born.

Once my argument was a little more cohesive, my professor got to reading. And, to my unexpected happiness, was actually very happy with the outcome. She liked my voice and how I was very one-sided in my debate. She called it a polemic. And when I asked what in the world a polemic was (it admittedly sounds like a plague), she pulled down a book from her shelves, a book she suggested I read that I looked up on Amazon once and forgot about entirely.
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Last week, that book just so happened to be delivered to Marie Claire. So I’ve been reading. And while there’s so much personality in the writing that sometimes I have to wade through the “voice” to get to the point, I’m thoroughly enjoying it thus far.

"Will all the adulterers in the room please stand up?"

In Against Love: A Polemic, Laura Kipnis looks at love and all the problems that it creates. She looks at it like a social institution, but then goes further, evaluating it through the lens of Marxist institutional theory. While I haven’t gotten much further than the intro, I’m deeply fascinated by a book that incorporates a reader’s advisory. It’s as though Kipnis is daring the reader to challenge her.

And the writing style is, obviously, that of a polemicist. It’s one-sided and biased, but Kipnis acknowledges her lack of diversity in opinion and goes on to challenge contemporary thought anyway.

As a self-proclaimed romantic who’s enough of a realist to realize that my thoughts are just that—romantic—I’m finding it immensely entertaining. However, it's also a bit depressing at times; comparing a relationship to the Industrial Revolution can have that affect. I’ll keep you posted.

Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis, $11.20