"A Meteor of Intelligent Substance" "Something was Missing in our Culture, and Here It Is" "Liberties is THE place to be." Liberties, a journal of Culture and Politics, is essential reading for those engaged in the cultural and political issues and causes of our time. Liberties features serious, independent, stylish, and controversial essays by significant writers and leaders throughout the world; new poetry; and, introduces the next generation of writers and voices to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of today's culture and politics. In this issue of Liberties: Laura Kipnis on Genders Without Fear; Dorian Abbot's call to arms - Science to Politics: Drop Dead; Bernard Henri-Levy on What is Reading?; Bruce D. Jones on today's reality of Taiwan, China, America; David Greenberg examines The War on Objectivity; Helen Vendler on Art vs. Stereotypes through the work of Marianne Moore; Ingrid Rowland captures Thucydides on our Conflicts; David A. Bell exposes the Greatest Enemy of Democracy in France; Robert Cooper reports on Myanmar, Atrocity in the Garden of Eden; Steven M. Nadler on Bans and Excommunications, Then and Now; Morten Hoi Jensen on the State of Literary Biography; Clara Collier on Women with Whips - Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck; Celeste Marcus on Unknown Heroes of Modern Art; Leon Wieseltier reveals Christianism in Modern Politics; and, new poetry from Durs Grunbein, Nathaniel Mackey, and Haris Vlavianos.

A "New York Times Book Review" Editors' Choice

We all relish a good scandal. Why do people feel compelled to act out their tangled psychodramas on the national stage, and why do we so enjoy watching them? The motifs are classic--revenge, betrayal, ambition, madness--though the pitfalls are ones we all negotiate daily. After all, every one of us is a potential scandal in the making: failed self-knowledge and colossal self-deception--the necessary ingredients--are our collective plight. "How to Become a Scandal "is "an extremely smart, funny, acid, and beautifully written meditation on a scary truth that we all try desperately to ignore" (David Shields, author of "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto").

From the author of the acclaimed "Against Love" comes a pointed, audacious, and witty examination of the state of the female psyche in the post-post-feminist world of the twenty-first century.
Women remain caught between feminism and femininity, between self-affirmation and an endless quest for self-improvement, between playing an injured party and claiming independence. Rather than blaming the usual suspects-men, the media-Kipnis takes a hard look at culprits closer to home, namely women themselves. Kipnis serves up the gory details of the mutual displeasure between men and women in painfully hilarious detail.
Is anatomy destiny after all? An ambitious and original reassessment of feminism and women's ambivalence about it, " The Female Thing" breathes provocative new life into that age-old question.

"Artificial Mythologies " was first published in 1997. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Cultural critics teach us that myths are artificial. Cultural innovators use the artificial to make something new. In this exhilarating guide, Craig J. Saper takes us on an eye-opening tour of the process of cultural invention-willfully entertaining foolish, absurd, even fake, solutions as a way of reaching new perspectives on cultural problems. Saper deploys this method to reveal unsuspected connections among major cultural issues, such as urban decay, the dangers of television's power, family values, and conservative criticism of higher education.

The model Saper uses builds on the later works of the revered French cultural critic Roland Barthes. These works, Saper argues, suggest poignant, playful, and productive ways of engaging dominant methodologies and mythologies. Artificial Mythologies shows us how, by allowing the artificial-our received ideas, common responses, and cultural mythologies-full play, we can arrive at provocative new solutions. The book demonstrates that the very conceptions of media and sociocultural issues that stymie innovation can be made to serve the cause of invention.

Craig J. Saper is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Feminism is broken: the current attempts to protect women from sexual abuse on campus, and on line. Regulation is replacing education, and women's hard-won right to be treated as consenting adults is being repealed by well-meaning bureaucrats. In Unwanted Advances, passionate feminist Kipnis, find the object of a protest march by student activists at her university for writing an essay about sexual paranoia on campus. In response she starts to question women's role in national debates over free speech and "safe spaces". She explores the astonishing netherworld of accused professors and students, campus witch hunts, rigged investigations, and demonstrates the chilling effect of this new sexual McCarthyism on higher education. Without minimizing the seriousness of campus assault, Kipnis argues for more honesty: a timely critique of feminist paternalism and the covert sexual conservatism of hook-up culture.

In a book that completely changes the terms of the pornography debate, Laura Kipnis challenges the position that porn perpetuates misogyny and sex crimes. First published in 1996, Bound and Gagged opens with the chilling case of Daniel DePew, a man convicted-in the first computer bulletin board entrapment case-of conspiring to make a snuff film and sentenced to thirty-three years in prison for merely trading kinky fantasies with two undercover cops. Using this textbook example of social hysteria as a springboard, Kipnis argues that criminalizing fantasy-even perverse and unacceptable fantasy-has dire social consequences. Exploring the entire spectrum of pornography, she declares that porn isn't just about gender and that fantasy doesn't necessarily constitute intent. She reveals Larry Flynt's Hustler to be one of the most politically outspoken and class-antagonistic magazine in the country and shows how fetishes such as fat admiration challenge our aesthetic prejudices and socially sanctioned disgust. Kipnis demonstrates that the porn industry-whose multibillion-dollar annual revenues rival those of the three major television networks combined-know precisely how to tap into our culture's deepest anxieties and desires, and that this knowledge, more than all the naked bodies, is what guarantees its vast popularity. Bound and Gagged challenges our most basic assumptions about America's relationship with pornography and questions what the calls to eliminate it are really attempting to protect.

In "Ecstasy Unlimited", Laura Kipnis provides a collection of essays on popular culture, politics, aesthetics, feminism, and postmodernism, along with complete scripts from three of her videotapes. These essays, written from her perspective as a practising artist, in tandem with her videoscripts, are singular in bringing a wide range of theoretical sophistication to film and video studies. Kipnis challenges political and aesthetic orthodoxies. Her interpretations take risks at a number of levels, and do not easily fit into established disciplines and categories. Extensively illustrated with stills from her videotapes, "Ecstasy Unlimited" examines everyday life and popular culture produced by consumer capitalism in ironic - and, at times, very funny - ways. Laura Kipnis is a video artist and theorist whose work has been shown widely in the United States and Europe. Her latest video production is "Marx: the Video". She has written extensively on the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism, feminism, and popular culture. This book is intended for students and academics of media studies, cultural politics.

"Will all the adulterers in the room please stand up?" So begins Laura Kipnis's profoundly provocative and waggish inquiry into our never-ending quest for lasting love, and its attendant issues of fidelity and betrayal. In the tradition of social critiques such as Christopher Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism, "Against Love keenly examines the meaning and cultural significance of adultery, arguing that perhaps the question concerns not only the private dilemma of whether or not to be faithful, but also the purpose of this much vaunted fidelity.
With a novelist's eye for detail, psychological acuity, and linguistic panache, Kipnis at once humorously and seriously explores the rules and rituals of modern coupledom and domesticity (from the establishment of curfews and whereabouts to actual searches and seizures), even as she deftly analyzes the larger power structures that they serve. She wonders: Might adulterers be regarded not only as sexual renegades but as unwitting social theorists posing essential political questions about the social contract itself? What is the trade-off between personal gratification and the renunciations society demands of us? And is "working at your relationship" just another way of propping up the work ethicas if we weren't all overworked enough as it is? If adultery is ultimately a referendum on the sustainability of monogamy, how credible is the basic premise of modern coupledom: that desire for your one and only love can and will persist through a lifetime of togetherness (despite so much evidence to the contrary)?
"Against Love offers no easy answers. Rather it intends to engage you in a commonsensical and brave examination of the plight of themodern personality, caught between the vicissitudes of desire and the decrees of social conformity.

"From the Hardcover edition.