A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2017
From a highly regarded feminist cultural critic and professor comes a
polemic arguing that the stifling sense of sexual danger sweeping
American campuses doesn't empower women, it impedes the fight for gender
equality.
Feminism is broken, argues Laura Kipnis, if anyone thinks the sexual
hysteria overtaking American campuses is a sign of gender progress.
A committed feminist, Kipnis was surprised to find herself the object of
a protest march by student activists at her university for writing an
essay about sexual paranoia on campus. Next she was brought up on Title
IX complaints for creating a "hostile environment." Defying
confidentiality strictures, she wrote a whistleblowing essay about the
ensuing seventy-two-day investigation, which propelled her to the center
of national debates over free speech, "safe spaces," and the vast
federal overreach of Title IX.
In the process she uncovered an astonishing netherworld of accused
professors and students, campus witch hunts, rigged investigations, and
Title IX officers run amuck. Drawing on interviews and internal
documents, Unwanted Advances demonstrates the chilling effect of this
new sexual McCarthyism on intellectual freedom. Without minimizing the
seriousness of campus assault, Kipnis argues for more honesty about the
sexual realities and ambivalences hidden behind the notion of "rape
culture." Instead, regulation is replacing education, and women's
hard-won right to be treated as consenting adults is being repealed by
well-meaning bureaucrats.
Unwanted Advances is a risk-taking, often darkly funny interrogation
of feminist paternalism, the covert sexual conservatism of hook-up
culture, and the institutionalized backlash of holding men alone
responsible for mutually drunken sex. It's not just compulsively
readable, it will change the national conversation.
