Best 10 quotes of Laura Kipnis on MyQuotes

I don't think that the forms of feminism that are prevailing on campus are left wing. It's a conservative form of feminism in gender politics and there [isn't] anything particularly progressive about it. That's what is baffling. You've got conservatives acting like liberals touting free speech and due process.

It can't only be men who are the focus of assault prevention. Women should be too. To say that that puts the blame on victims to have to prevent their own assault is crap and has to be treated as crap.

I think that relations between professors and grad students can be messy and not entirely boundable. Part of the problem is that those boundaries become eroticized. I don't think people are quite so managerial with their sexuality. By suggesting that sex can be successfully regulated, we're imposing stupidity on the issue.

On the question of women's sexual freedom or female independence, there are still issues that haven't been worked out. There's an aura of traditional gender roles that is not talked about that really permeates these conversations. There is this vacillation between a desire for independence and having the kinds of sexual freedom that men have and, on the other side, issues about female vulnerability and susceptibility to male aggression and violence. We need more honesty about the actual conditions in which sex is happening.

So exiled have even basic questions of freedom become from the political vocabulary that they sound musty and ridiculous, and vulnerable to the ultimate badge of shame-'That's so 60's!'-the entire decade having been mocked so effectively that social protest seems outlandish and 'so last century,' just another style excess like love beads and Nehru jackets. No, rebellion won't pose a problem for this social order.

When sociobiologists start shitting in their backyards with dinner guests in the vicinity, maybe their arguments about innateness over culture will start seeming more persuasive.

As if all that weren't enough, factor in the whole tedious millenial saga of female virtue, modesty, shame, repression, male ineptitude...in short, a cruel combo of anatomical inheritance and sexual inhibition for the gal set; a nature-culture one-two punch, right to the female pleasure principle.

Here’s the conundrum: We want to tell our stories! But if condensation is the language of wishes—especially the most verboten and destructive ones—the more you spell the story out, the less aesthetically charged it becomes. The question is whether untransformed experience can ever be aesthetically powerful, or whether it’s simply interesting. Literary language is one solution, with its habits of duality—metaphor, irony—and other techniques for saying opposing things at once. For haunting the reader with ghosts of buried meanings. Your story may be interesting, but what if, paradoxically, it’s what you can’t say that makes it lasting?

Najtragičniji oblik gubitka nije gubitak sigurnosti, nego gubitak sposobnosti da zamislimo kako bi život mogao biti drugačiji.

Uspješan suživot zahtijeva da se razlike između dvije osobe u najmanju ruku svedu na točku međusobnog toleriranja, premda je taj stupanj često moguće dostići tek nakon što se volja barem jedne od dviju strana smanji toliko da je njome moguće upravljati - otprilike kao kada se tumor izloži golemoj dozi radijacije.