“It is invigorating and irritating, astute and facile, rigorous and flippant, fair-minded and score-settling, practical and hyperbolic, and maybe a dozen other neurotically contradictory things. Above all else, though, Unwanted Advances is necessary. Argue with the author, by all means. But few people have taken on the excesses of university culture with the brio that Kipnis has. Her anger gives her argument the energy of a live cable … Now: I certainly appreciate Kipnis’s forensics. And the story she tells is psychologically complex. But one of the women in Ludlow’s case comes across as genuinely troubled…if that’s the case, isn’t that an argument in favor of forbidding relations between faculty and students? Because some students might not be able to handle them? … Kipnis never minimizes the devastating consequences of sexual violence. And she’s on to something, really on to something, when she rails against the ‘neo-sentimentality about female vulnerability.’ But the most powerful and provocative part of her book, its final chapter, suggests that today’s young college women really do suffer from a crisis of agency. The pressure to drink themselves senseless and then hook up is so pervasive that they seem to have trouble saying no.”
–Jennifer Senior, The New York Times, April 5, 2017
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