NU Radio/Television/Film Professor Laura Kipnis received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as an M.F.A. from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She is a former video artist; in the last ten years, she has delved into writing and anti-monogamy activism. Recently, she promoted her new book Against Love: A Polemic on The Today Show and in the Chicago Tribune.The Northwestern Chronicle: In your new book, you talk about how in 1999, Rutgers University said that only 38 % of married Americans describe themselves as "happily married." Why is it that so few people are happily married, yet the institution of marriage still dominates?
Professor Laura Kipnis: The question I think I was trying to ask had to do with the fact that there is so much unhappiness and dissatisfaction that's taken to be the norm, and is taken to be just "how things are."
It's a big open secret, and somehow people take it as an individual issue, like it's their individual failure when these norms and institutions aren't providing the gratification that they're supposed to, and I was trying to look at it as a wider issue, like maybe the institution itself has failed, or the norms themselves are lying - are lies at some level. I think that was the kernel of the book.
NC: You wrote about how stagnant marriages might not only be economically beneficial, but socially beneficial in that they keep people in their ascribed roles. How so, exactly?
LK: There are all sorts of social functions for keeping people in states of dissatisfaction. For one thing, look at the industries that have arisen around unhappiness.
Not just the pharmaceutical industry - but that's huge. I mean, what huge business antidepressants are! And it just staggers me that it's very rarely asked, is it social conditions that are depressing, perhaps? - not just biochemistry that is responsible for depression....
What's involved there is a "prescriptive-ness" about how to be the right kind of person, how to be a normal person. So I was trying to point out that there are social benefits on an economic level, at the political level, in the sense of making a population afraid of change, and much more subdued and acquiescent. So in some ways depression does seem to create a much more docile population.
NC: So you're saying that adultery is a natural instinct that people should follow rather than locking themselves into an unhappy marriage?
LK: No, I wouldn't go that far. What's interesting to me in this context about adultery is that it's a way of registering dissatisfaction and protest in the absence of there really being public or official ways to think about alternatives...I mean, I don't think there's anything about adultery that's natural any more than there's anything about monogamy that's natural, but that they're responses to each other...
NC: Your book Bound and Gagged has been called [by Clarkson-Orme] "the future of porn studies." Is that how you see yourself?
LK: ...I think I gravitate toward writing about things that I feel puzzled by myself, and I think the similarity between pornography and adultery is that they're both incredibly culturally central, but their centrality is denied.
Pornography is a huge industry. Nine billion dollars a year is the estimate. Adultery is a huge social dynamic. They're both treated as off-center when actually they're very central.
NC: What do you see as pornography's function in society. Do people act out their adulterous urges with porno, rather than going out and doing them in real life?
LK: ...I think that in a society where there is a degree of sexual repression, pornography is the "other side." Pornography needs sexual repression, sexual repression needs pornography.
I don't think there's any kind of perfect repression - sexual or social - so they're kind of a codependent couple. The premise of the book I wrote about pornography is that pornography is a form of fantasy, and that actually what interested me with pornography was the way it became a vehicle for speaking about other things than only sex, like with Hustler.
A lot of what Hustler is about is class and class antagonism. So things that there isn't an official way to talk about get taken up in these alternative forms like pornography and these forms that are seen as marginal, but are also kind of central. I was interested in the other issues in pornography beside sex alone.
One of the chapters was about fat pornography and the way that in pornography you can have an alternative to the normal, thin, worked out body. You have this kind of rebellious body. So to me, pornography in all sorts of different ways takes up prohibited topics that there aren't other venues to discuss.
NC: How important is sex in relationships?
LK: ...What our society asks from its members is to renounce certain kinds of immediate pleasures and immediate gratifications, so there's a certain tradeoff that's built into the social contract of not doing everything you feel like doing at the moment you do it. And then you're supposed to get something back for what you traded off.
So the question I'm interested in is, in this contract - and marriage is part of the contract - are we getting as much back as we could? Are we giving up more than we need to? Could there be for freedom and less renunciation? That goes back to the 38 percent figure from Rutgers - why shouldn't there be more pleasure available from the world than that?
Sex is one form of that pleasure. So just not feeling alienated in all sorts of ways is a form of pleasure. I think people are pleasure-seeking animals...Yes, certain amounts of renunciation are required of us. We can't just go around humping whomever we want, whenever we want. We wear clothes. We don't just run around naked...
I don't really believe there is a state of nature. We're always cultured. Whatever's natural is always processed through the culture you're a part of.
NC: Is monogamy here to stay?
LK: (Laughs)....It's not really clear monogamy ever was here to stay. There's the official norm, and then there's all the things everybody's really doing. One question is, do we want to have an open discussion about what people are actually doing or not?...
One of the things that propelled me to write this book is the way that that became such a political issue during the nineties, with all the various political adultery scandals, and how much hypocrisy there was around the issue. You talk about pleasure!
One of the greatest pleasures I think that came during this era was when such a large percentage of the impeachment committee, who were hounding Clinton about what they thought he was up to, turned out to be doing pretty much the same thing themselves.
Half of them were exposed as adulterers, and all the people doing the moralizing turned out to have illegitimate children and secret mistresses (laughs), et cetera, et cetera, and one congresswoman who was one of the big moralizers turned out to be having a long-term affair with a married man.
So the way this becomes a big scene of projection and accusation and moralizing - that's worth talking about and exposing.
NC: At this point is there anything you would like to say to the young lovers walking around Northwestern's campus?
LK: Have a good time! (Laughs) There is a thing in the book that's a critique of this "good relationships take work" prescription, and the work ethic in general. It makes you ask, who's all this hard work for, who's all this renunciation for?
Partly, what I'm trying to do is make these not just personal questions, but also larger political and social questions. So when you're walking around in love and holding hands, you don't necessarily think about the larger issues, so that's what somebody who is a cultural critic or essayist can do, like step up and say, we don't only have personal lives.
We're also social beings and citizens and participating in these large frameworks, so I was trying to put those all in the same picture.
