They both are married and they both have strayed, in some form or another.
Actor-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger met with allegations of sexual misconduct just days before he went on to win California’s gubernatorial recall election last week. He apologized for having sometimes “behaved badly” around women.
Basketball star Kobe Bryant, scheduled to appear in court today for a preliminary hearing on charges he sexually assaulted a woman in a Colorado hotel room, says he is innocent of assault but did admit to “the mistake of adultery.”
But is adultery necessarily a “mistake”? One writer and social commentator doesn’t think so.
“All these politicians that are roaming around, at some simple level they’re just after some kind of gratification that is obviously missing from their lives,” said Laura Kipnis, author of a new book that looks at the meaning and cultural significance of adultery.
Although she doesn’t condone what the two celebrities did, Kipnis, a professor of media studies at Northwestern, says she understand the urge to stray. Such urges, it can be said, only bolster the sensational thesis of “Against Love” (Pantheon, $24).
In this self-described “polemic,” Kipnis argues that adultery is a natural and even positive response to the constraints of monogamy. Tripping effortlessly from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the plot of “Rosemary’s Baby,” she attacks romantic love as “a rickety lifeboat.” As for marriage, she writes, it is “desire organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees.”
“The book is written in a kind of persona,” said the 47-year-old Kipnis, whose mild, cheerful manner is anything but inflammatory. “There’s a voice to the writing [that] is this kind of provocateur. Then there’s the problem of having to go out in public and represent the voice of the book.”
But the naughty persona of “Against Love” has proven anything but off-putting to the media. The book has received glowing, even slightly dazzled reviews in the Tribune, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and other publications and has inspired feature stories in several national magazines. On the day she spoke with WomanNews, Kipnis had risen at dawn to appear on the “Today” show.
“I think [the book has fit into] a kind of `crisis in marriage’ discourse,” Kipnis said. “It’s being taken as a book about marriage, but I thought of it much more as a political argument, reviving certain kinds of connections between personal life and political life, like you saw in the 1960s.”
If she’s trying to hark back to the ’60s, then little wonder Kipnis portrays marriage as a kind of emotional battleground, “characterized variously by tedium, fighting, silence, or unreasonable, insatiable demands.” Her favorite target is the mass of rules and restrictions that romantic partners impose on one another, which she details in a chapter titled “Domestic Gulags.”
Restrictions of coupledom
Kipnis even compiled a list of such rules. Over the course of a year or so she and her research assistant asked everyone they knew: “What can’t you do because you’re in a couple?”
The results fill nine pages and range from, “You can’t leave the house without saying where you’re going,” to “You can’t return the rent-a-car without throwing out the garbage because the mate thinks it looks bad.”
“The two times I read parts of that list in public, people just looked like they wanted to kill me,” Kipnis said. “They looked like they just wanted to storm the exits.”
“Laura likes to be provocative,” said filmmaker Michelle Citron, a fellow professor at Northwestern. “She calls the book a polemic, and that’s what it is. It’s meant to confront us with ideas about the culture and our lives. I think people who find the book threatening somehow think that she [really] is against love, and I don’t think that’s true. I just think she’s written a polemic to get us to see things that are normally hidden.”
The most unexpected aspect of the coverage she has gotten, Kipnis says, is how much of it has tried to cram her into the role of a marriage expert. Though “Against Love” doesn’t offer a single tip on how to make marriage work, interviewers keep expecting Kipnis to provide answers.
“One thing that’s surprising is that people keep trying to take it as an advice book,” she said. “It seems [to reveal] a kind of desperation that you write a book called `Against Love’ and people are looking to you for advice.”
Still, Kipnis is accustomed to writing for a mainstream audience. A former video artist who serves on the faculty of Northwestern’s School of Communication, she crossed over from the rarified worlds of art and academe with the 1996 book “Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America” (Grove Press). In it, she joined what was then a mere handful of writers willing to defend pornography against what Kipnis called “a massive wave of social hysteria.” She has taken a similarly contumacious approach to subjects ranging from “white trash” culture to obesity.
For female readers, one of the most surprising aspects of Kipnis’ book may be its gender-neutral take on adultery. Kipnis had no interest in reinforcing the notion, familiar from movies such as “The First Wives’ Club,” that women are adultery’s main victims.
People can switch roles
“It’s the typical thing to make these sweeping generalizations about gender, and I didn’t want to generalize,” she said. “I think that gender roles are much more unpredictable than in the past, particularly with women having more financial independence. People in relationships can kind of switch roles–the woman can be `the guy’ sometimes.”
Kipnis carries her equal-rights approach into her discussion of recent political sex scandals, taking care to include former Idaho Republican Rep. Helen Chenoweth in her list of adulterous politicians. She is fascinated by the different ways public figures’ sexual misdeeds are treated, and is devoting her next book to the topic.
When it comes to scandal-ridden marriages like that of the Clintons and, more recently, Schwarzenegger and his wife TV journalist Maria Shriver, Kipnis acknowledges speculating about what’s going on behind closed doors.
“Let’s just hypothesize that a couple is in a relationship where they’re not having sex. Is the presumption that it’s illicit to look elsewhere? That’s the thing that never [gets] talked about,” she said. “People make all sorts of different arrangements, and everybody knows it at some level. Yet in public there’s no way of having a discussion that isn’t condemning.”
