Laugh-old-loud funny from the IWF

Those witty gals at the Independent Women's Forum Daily Blog are at it again. This time, they deconstruct a Slate essay by Laura Kipnis, a professor of "media studies" at Northwestern University. Without having read the essay, I gather from the gals at IWF that Ms. Kipnis is upset that women are still fool enough to try to dress attractively for men. Below are some tidbits from this great post:

I love it when doctrinaire feminists try to tackle the stuff that women are really interested in: clothes, makeup, and looking good. You get hilarious sentences like this one: "For some reason, the majority of women simply would not give up the pursuit of beautification, even those armed with feminist theory." Laura Kipnis, the author of this observation in an essay in Slate, is a professor of "media studies" at Northwestern University. "Media studies," for those unitiated into life behind the ivied walls, is a hot new academic discipline in which you can get a Ph.D. for watching "The Sopranos" and putting it into a trendy Marxist context. You can tell that Kipnis is an academic by her essay’s opening clause: "America’s obsession with fat is increasingly colonizing the cultural imagination...." *** At any rate, Kipnis, like many a feminista before her, is wringing her hands and wondering why, oh why do women, after some 30 years of hectoring by NOW, continue to wear high-heeled shoes and go on diets? Why do they crave so much to be attractive to men? I have a simple answer to that one: they like men, and it’s fun to gussy up your looks to appeal to them. *** But strangely enough, 99 percent of women, even those as clad in as thick a hauberk of "feminist theory" as Kipnis, go for femininity when they ought to be going for feminism. Why, why, why? Because, dammit, they’re heterosexual! Kipnis laments: "Heterosexuality always was the Achilles heel of feminism." *** Silly as Kipnis sounds, she’s a sage in comparison to the cultural artifact she’s reviewing as a media-studies maven in her Slate essay: radical dramaturge Eve Ensler’s new play, The Good Body. Ensler’s last dramatic work, "The Vagina Monologues," was about you know what. The subject matter of this latest work is Ensler’s pot belly. Ah, what "feminist theory" has come to: women writing about women writing about getting fat.