On A Vindication of Love: acute feelings, acute intellects

My appreciation of Cristina Nerhing’s A Vindication of Love is up at NPR.

Nowadays a woman can claim just about anything as a badge of feminism. She can pursue a career, raise a child, or both; maintain a stable of lovers, marry, or both; serve in the military; sit on the Supreme Court; stay home and keep house; or take off her clothes for money. Short of infanticide, it’s difficult to conceive of any act that doesn’t fall within the big tent of women’s liberation.

Yet as Cristina Nehring observes in her sharp new polemic, A Vindication of Love, there is still at least one way to be instantaneously and conclusively stripped of feminist credentials — and that is to act impulsively, irrationally or self-destructively out of passion for a man.

You can read the rest, and an excerpt from the book, at the NPR site. See also Jessa Crispin’s praise, and Roiphe’s reaction.


Categories

Newsletter Signup

Subscribe to my free newsletter, Ancestor Trouble.

Newsletter

You might want to subscribe to my free Substack newsletter, Ancestor Trouble, if the name makes intuitive sense to you.