The following year, the magazine published another essay by Sandra Tsing Loh, 47, announcing the end of her 20-year marriage—she had an affair—and cautioning readers against what can happen when your husband considers mastering the perfect bouillabaisse recipe a more titillating activity than giving his wife an orgasm.

Meanwhile, remember Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, who once sat crouched on the floor, a young girl staring up at readers through all that self-conscious eyeliner? Now 42, Ms. Wurtzel wrote a piece in Elle this year about her fading beauty and the lonely dating life that accompanies it. Never too shy to turn herself inside out on paper, she is expanding the article into a book.

Now about me: I am 25 and single. If this were the 1950s, one of my multiyear relationships would have resulted in marriage by now. If this were the 1980s, I would concern myself only with purchasing a really nice shoulder-padded suit. Our mothers and grandmothers seemed to have sound instructions. But now—now that the generation of women ahead of us has begun to sound regretful, shouting at us, “Don’t end up like me!”—what we have instead are Cautionary Matrons, issuing what feel like incessant warnings.

Single 40-something women warn us about being too career-oriented and forgetting to factor in children; married women warn us that marriage is a union in which sex and fidelity are optional; and divorced women warn us to keep our weight down, our breasts up and our skin looking like Saran Wrap unless we want our husbands to later leave us for 23-year-olds.

Essays written by Cautionary Matrons are one of the few genres dominated by our gender; Laura Kipnis’ Against Love: A Polemic and Cristina Nehring’s A Vindication of Love, which landed on the cover of The Times’ Book Review, also come to mind. Not that men are strangers to personal narratives, of course. There’s Jonathan Ames, whose frank tales of his sexual adventures have landed him on HBO; and New Yorker writer Tad Friend, who as part of the research for his recently published memoir went on the self-absorbed quest of asking exes whether he was “a mild jerk or a total jerk.” But while men tend to be cheerfully self-deprecating, women are downright apologetic, asking themselves what they’ve done wrong and how to fix it.

Cautionary Matrons extend beyond nonfiction. In Lorrie Moore’s new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, the protagonist, a 20-year-old college student named Tassie Keltjin, looks over at the older woman who has hired her to be the baby sitter of a baby she has yet to adopt into an already lonely marriage and makes the following observation: “These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.”

And then there is ABC’s new show Cougar Town. It’s meant to tease out the empowering side of being 40 and single. But few viewers actually want to a visit a place where even someone as MILF-y as Courteney Cox self-tauntingly tugs the goose skin on her elbows—isn’t elbow skin supposed to be loose?—and refers to her vagina as a “coochie cooch.” And there is Jennifer Aniston. She’s not the Cautionary Matron; it is the hidden tabloid editor who sends her threatening missives by blowing up Ms. Aniston’s thighs alongside headlines shrieking: Old! Alone! Childless! 

Of course not all women are unhappy, despite that recent General Social Survey cited by Maureen Dowd and Time (and disputed by Barbara Ehrenreich in Salon). Tabloid-media powerhouse Bonnie Fuller instructed women on how to have the job, the guy and “everything else you’ve ever wanted” in her 2006 book, The Joys of Much Too Much. But how many others are encouragingly passing along the handwritten recipe of their success to us, their younger counterparts? Where are the role models less frightening than Bonnie Fuller?

‘GET MARRIED BY 32’

Last week, I brought all of this up to my friend Jenny, who is 29, single and works in publishing. We were at her Williamsburg apartment and she was making pork chops.

The phrase Cautionary Matron reminded Jenny of a woman whose novel she edited a few years ago. This 40-something author’s novel (and reality) was about an older woman who was desperate to have a child but was dating a man she didn’t like very much, and so over countless lunches and drinks, their talks about the book often turned to men. Or, more specifically, a man Jenny had broken up with and was considering reuniting with.

“And she said, ‘Well, you’re not in a position where you need to do that just yet,’” said Jenny. “But just make sure, whatever you do, that you get married by age 32. Because if you’re not married by 32, no one will want you and you’ll end up like me.”

Jenny leaned back in her chair and swirled her glass of wine. “It was just such a crazy thing to say!” she said. “But it was so honest, too, that it still haunts me. It’s not that I even think ticktock in a biological sense. I think ticktock in terms of what she said about turning 32! And how crazy is that?”

And yet the messages stick. After Jenny read Ms. Gottlieb’s piece in The Atlantic, she stayed an extra year in a relationship that she wanted to end at the time. “I was thinking it wasn’t working out, and then I read that piece and I thought, ‘Well, he’s a nice, cute guy who likes me; maybe I shouldn’t break it off,’” she said.

Last week, by phone, Ms. Gottlieb said this was not her intention and that her forthcoming book will clarify things a bit. (After the article, she received countless letters from women—alarmed by her tale of loneliness—who had read it and immediately got engaged to their less-than-scintillating boyfriends.)

“The article was like I was someone’s big sister and I was saying here’s my experience and all of the misconceptions I had,” Ms. Gottlieb said. “I think you guys are actually lucky because you’ll get a more mixed set of messages. When I was in my 20s, women were all about having it all and ‘a guy is great but he is not the main course.’ We got a single message and it was all, me, me, me, me, me. ‘You go girl!’ And now those of us that grew up with these messages are finally admitting that those messages of empowerment may actually conflict with what we want.”

Ms. Tsing Loh’s piece was directed at her generation, but she said she wasn’t surprised that young women were reading. She speculated about the reason for this apparent surge in matronly warnings: “I think because we’re really surprised!” she screamed into the receiver. “In our 20s, the world was totally our oyster. All those fights had been fought. We weren’t going to be ’50s housewives, we were in college, we could pick and choose from a menu of careers, and there were all these interesting guys out there not like our dads. We were smart women who had a lot of options and made intelligent choices and that’s why we’re writing these pieces. We’re shocked!” Shocked because even with all those choices, Ms. Tsing Loh’s marriage didn’t work out.

“It must be very confusing,” she said sympathetically. “We were the protégés of old-guard feminists: ‘Don’t have a baby, or if you must, have one, wait till your 40s.’ We were sold more of a mission plan and now you guys … Well, sadly, it all seems like kind of a mess. There is no mission. Even stay-at-home moms feel unsuccessful unless they’re canning their own marmalade and selling it on the Internet. You just have a bunch of drunk, depressed 45-year-old ladies going, ‘A-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH!’”

THE ANTI-MENTOR

At a birthday party later last week, in the West Village, I ran into my friend Caryne, who is 31, single, tall and striking, and works at a nonprofit. When I asked her if she’s ever had a Cautionary Matron, she widened her eyes and nodded. “I call her my Anti-Mentor!” she said.

Caryne’s Cautionary Matron is her former boss, who never married but had a series of disappointing romances. “Rarely do I hang up the phone with her and feel comforted. Usually, I feel anxiety and paralysis about the decisions that I need to make to avoid everything she warns me about.”

I asked Caryne why she thought our mentors have taken to enjoining rather than encouraging us. She said she had to think about it and rang me a few days later.

“They are the first generation of women who were presented with choices,” she said. “I think they are in the process of reflecting on a half-century of existence and are realizing that ‘having it all’ was really a lie. Sometimes I think the idea of ‘having it all’ can almost be more disempowering than ‘having it all’ because one is never allowed enough time or energy to excel in one area of their life.”

When confronted with grim advice, some young women go on the offensive. Said Jenny of her Cautionary Matron: “I think there is an element of jealousy there. If she can go back and do it over again, she would. But she can’t and I’m here so …”

Ms. Gottlieb had a response to this: “I think it’s part denial and part arrogance. I get it because I used to be that way in my 20s. I wanted the fairy tale. I thought that I deserved to have it, that it was my inalienable right! So that’s the arrogance, and the denial is that they simply can’t acknowledge that they, too, could become these older regretful women who wished they knew what was important in love earlier on. We’re not envious—we’re wiser.”

Ms. Wurtzel echoes this sentiment, writing in her Elle piece: “Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you’ve got all this great wisdom, you don’t get to be young anymore.” And later: “Oh, to be 25 again and get it right.”

When I contacted Ms. Wurtzel, hoping for an extra pearl or two about how I, as a 25-year-old, might learn from her mistakes and “get it right,” she emailed that she “didn’t have an audience in mind when I wrote it, but if anything I was thinking in terms of people who could relate to it, not so much people who could learn from it.” She also backpedaled a bit from her cautionary stance. “Of course, I’m 42 and I’m not married, but I don’t feel sorry for myself. … It’s not that I’m not sad sometimes, but I’m definitely not sorry.”

Perhaps. But then there’s this part in her piece about her love life today: “Dating this person for three months, that one for a few weeks, sometimes longer. They come, they go, someone is always coming as someone else is going; it’s not like there’s no one, but it’s all so lonely.”

When Jenny—already fearful about turning 32, thanks to her personal Cautionary Matron—read Ms. Wurtzel’s article, she emailed me the following: “Ugh. Now I am going to sit, coma-like, on the sofa and contemplate my impending decay. Great.”

ialeksander@observer.com

“I have the distinct pleasure … ,” he began in his droll, circumlocutory, Austrian-sounding speech. “I think today is a good day to say ‘pleasure’: I’m sitting between Esther Perel on my right, and Laura Kipnis on my left—I’m feeling like a very happy man today. We’re here to talk about a very serious subject—lust—but before I explore, explode the subject …. ” Then he went on to explain how the session would end: The admonitory opening flourish of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony would interrupt the ensuing colloquy, alerting him and us that 45 minutes (“the length of a psychiatric session,” Mr. Holdengräber said) had elapsed.

Ms. Kipnis and Ms. Perel are two recently minted experts in that perennial subject of journalistic concern: What Do Women Want? And though they spent parts of the session impugning the basic assumptions of each other’s work, they have many things in common.

Ms. Perel is the author of Mating in Captivity, a therapeutic book with an edge that recommends, among other things, fantasy re-enactments of “forced seduction” as a marital aid. Ms. Kipnis is the author of Against Love: A Polemic and, more recently, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability. Both of them parse out the highly contested meanings of sex, love, lust, marriage, romance and adultery in the postmodern, post-feminist age; both of them have a flair for the aphoristic; both stand opposed to the tiresome, indeed destructive, cant of other doctors, pundits and political activists who have taken up the subject before them. Each purports to speak forbidden truths that every honest woman knows.

These, of course, are the obligatory moves by which any would-be bold new voice conscripts itself to the very agenda it denounces (that of continuing a noisy and unedifying pseudo-controversy in the pages of our quality magazines)—which is not to say that either of them lack wit or say only things that are untrue. Poked and prodded by the deliciously hammy Mr. Holdengräber, who runs the library’s public-education program, the two put on a spirited performance that kept the audience engrossed and amused.

The audience consisted of tasteful couples d’un certain age whose attendance at such an event might be interpreted by a smart-alecky observer as a tacit confession. Interspersed in their midst were handfuls of younger, sensitive New Age guys accompanied by the kind of cashmere-clad, carefully groomed women you imagine enunciating with rapid-fire precision around a handsomely varnished seminar table at a college in New England. Ms. Kipnis and Ms. Perel’s provocative rhetorical salvoes had the appealing virtue of resembling genuine thought, without ever quite attaining it.

Ms. Kipnis began: “Will all the adulterers in the room please stand up?”

When no one dared take a stand, Ms. Perel said. “Will all those who have ever thought about adultery please stand up?”

A voice from the front row asked, “Can we just raise our hands?”

Ms. Perel then went on to marvel, in her toothsome French-Israeli accent, that Americans tolerate multiple divorces and remarriages but have “a great intolerance for the concept of renegotiating boundaries for adultery.” This intolerance emerges, Ms. Perel said, from a peculiarly modern—and a peculiarly American—idealism about relationships.

“It feeds into the idea that there is one relationship that can be for everything,” she said. “And if you find out that this relationship isn’t going to do that for you, you will opt out and say, ‘I chose the wrong person and will now look for the person who can really give me everything’—instead of questioning the structure of the relationship.”

Against this model, Ms. Perel made a case for the kind of adultery that can save a marriage.

“Some affairs are the death knell for a gasping relationship that was already on its way out,” Ms. Perel said. “But for many others, it’s the alarm that gets people reinvigorated and re-engaged—nothing like the threat of loss to get people interested in each other again, sexually or otherwise.”

Mr. Holdengräber then asked Ms. Kipnis if Against Love—which advances the quasi-Marxisant (Althusserian, to be precise) notion that modern monogamy, requiring endless work and the intervention of outside experts, is a form of voluntary collective imprisonment—was a pro-adultery polemic. In an oft-quoted passage, she described what she called the “domestic gulag,” spelling out, over eight pages, all the things she can no longer do as a married woman. Ms. Kipnis said that we might think of adultery as a kind of inchoate protest, expressing a “basic utopian impulse” for “something more.”

“Adultery doesn’t need me to be its proponent,” Ms. Kipnis said. “It’s doing quite well on its own.”

“But,” Mr. Holdengräber shot back, “I think it gains some momentum with you behind it!”

Mr. Holdengräber pressed Ms. Perel to explain whether the adultery she advocated was theoretical or active.

“Does the erotic only mean when people have had sex?” Ms. Perel asked. “People can sit with each other like this and discuss books and ideas and be in a completely erotic experience.”

“Indeed, indeed,” Mr. Holdengräber replied. “No, no, I completely agree.”

“I didn’t mean to implicate you!” Ms. Perel said.

“But why not?” asked Mr. Holdengräber. “Well—I’m sorry you don’t want to.”

Ms. Kipnis brought her skepticism to bear on the edifice of what she called the “therapy-industrial complex”: “Can you teach lust or desire at the point at which people go to these consultations?” she asked. “The flogging of something dead in order to instill some iota of life in order to perpetuate it—it’s hard for me to imagine a joyful sort of work of that sort. Is desire renewable?”

“It may look like I’m just another representative of my field, but I am actually a bomb within my field,” said Ms. Perel. “I’m just throwing over a lot of sacred cows and assumptions that have gone unexamined.” Chief among the cows she’s flayed is the therapeutic belief that “intimacy begets sexual desire.” To the contrary, Ms. Perel argued, intimacy and love can sometimes serve as an obstacle to the expression of sexual desire, which is “much more selfish, much more raw, much more objectifying, much less into that caring, protective element—which can be why it is harder to lust in the same place you look for stability and connection.”

The balance of the evening went to Ms. Perel. Mr. Holdengräber seemed to favor her, and every point that Ms. Kipnis made was met with a well-rehearsed speech from Ms. Perel, or with aggressive questioning by Mr. Holdengräber.

“There are all sorts of industries that thrive on trying to solve the problem of declining marital desire, from therapy to sex toys. The therapy-industrial complex is dedicated to producing optimism about this situation,” Ms. Kipnis said early on.

“But what about if Esther is actually helping people?” said Mr. Holdengräber.

“I do!” said Ms. Perel.

“If I was getting $250 an hour, I could produce optimism on demand, too!” Ms. Kipnis shot back.

“You mean because you are paid less, you are not inclined … ,” began Mr. Holdengräber.

“Far less,” said Ms. Kipnis.

“Maybe that’s why you’re not optimistic,” Mr. Holdengräber said.

Ms. Perel’s book is a glib masterpiece of absorption, repackaging the insights of D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer into sharp, simple aphorisms for the consumption of a therapeutic readership. Mostly she talked about the tension between adventure and security, and the difficulty of preserving mystery and imagination.

But her “edgier” insights were meant to tell educated, post-feminist men and women the kind of arguably retrograde things that popular entertainment has never ceased to revel in. Which is not to say they’re wrong.

“The democratic values that we cherish in the workplace and in many parts of our relationship don’t always work that way, erotically speaking,” Ms. Perel said. “Neutralizing all power differentials can be contrary to the way that desire operates. There is an element of aggression—that wanting, that hostility, that conquering urge—that is not allowed anymore in the equalizing, egalitarian model,” she added.

“We don’t want to go back to the way things were. But you may want the egalitarian model between 6 to 8 p.m. in the kitchen, and something else in the bedroom after 10 p.m.”

The ultimate paradox, however, of Ms. Perel’s paradox-laden book is the tidiness with which its paeans to ruthlessness, risk and the uncontainable power of the erotic are delivered. She quotes a sex therapist advocating rape fantasies as “healthy dominance and powerful surrender.” In this way, she makes the dangerous safe for all of us who want to derive the benefits of risk-taking without actually exposing ourselves to any potential harm—and all under the beneficent tutelage of a dynamic, well-spoken and fetching European therapist. It seemed an offer that few with the means to accept would want to refuse.

Ms. Kipnis seemed to concur. “I’ve written a lot in The Female Thing about how gender equality, in political and social terms, got mapped onto questions of sexuality such that a demand for men to be more like women became, in America, a kind of political demand. And female desire is much more complicated than that. We are dealing with the confusion.”

At one point toward the end, Ms. Kipnis conceded that for all her fire-breathing polemic against love, she has always been, in fact, and remains a romantic. “I’m intensely romantic,” Ms. Kipnis said. “Too romantic.”

A summary of the afternoon’s back-and-forth might be spelled out as a set of pointers to men like this: Be nice, but not too nice; talk to us, but don’t get mired in everyday triviality; be nurturing, but not smothering; and whatever else you do, however much you respect and treat us like equals in all other settings, in the bedroom, don’t you dare forget to throw us down onto the covers, or up against the wall.

It was the eve of the publication of her new book, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability, and Ms. Kipnis, who said she’s in her “late 40’s,” seemed a tiny bit nervous about how graciously she, and it, would be received. Ms. Kipnis called the book, which critiques women’s conflicted obsessions with cleanliness, romantic love, orgasms and rape, an “update on the topography of the female psyche.” She described the tone of some early reviews with that dreaded word: “mocking.”

“I’m curious to know if that will persist, and if writing about femininity actually will end up being my intellectual downfall and I’ll never be taken seriously again,” she said, looking austere at the Noho Star cafe for breakfast on Sept. 29. She was dressed for urban combat—or perhaps for battles of a cerebral nature—in a black sweater and pants, her white, almost translucent skin and angular features brought out by pink lipstick and smoky eyeliner. On her feet were tweed wedges with maribou poufs on the toes.

“You know, I think it’s not an unaggressive book, actually,” she continued in her elongated Midwestern drawl, an anxious furrow appearing between her eyes. “And I think any amount of aggression you put out in the world comes back to you.” Although that’s obviously something she seeks out: “I’m maybe playing a bit of a provocateur role,” she said. She took a bite of toast.

Ms. Kipnis, who teaches film production at Northwestern University, is not incorrect in thinking that the media needs more sharp, intelligent female writing. Instead, the proliferation of self-indulgent essays—retro first-person tales of dating, wedding-planning and baby-making—seem to do more for the author than the reader. Both the television and print worlds are crowded with self-important boys fighting amongst themselves, but there’s no Simone, Susan Sontag or even a kooky new Camille Paglia on the horizon. The literary landscape is as uninspiring as a girl’s credit-card balance after a Jimmy Choo sample sale—as Ms. Kipnis herself might write in her self-consciously irreverent voice.

“I did think what was missing was an element of honesty,” said Ms. Kipnis, who criticizes the work of Maureen Dowd, Caitlin Flanagan and Eve Ensler, not to mention most feminist academics and theorists (she does admire Barbara Ehrenreich). She refers to much of what goes on as “you go, girl” culture: “It’s a whole men-are-dogs, men-are-untrustworthy kind of advice literature which acts as if men are de facto emotional incompetents, and women are the ones with the soul and the depth and the emotional awareness,” she said, adding that women need to look inward to find the source of many of their problems. “It does seem so smug.”

Ms. Kipnis, however, doesn’t regard this as an irreconcilable problem; having made her name writing “academically” about subjects such as Hustler magazine and porn (a sure way to ensure that one’s college courses are always full), she seems intent on catapulting beyond the walls of academia and filling the void herself.

LAURA KIPNIS GREW UP IN, and now lives in, Chicago, but she’s openly ambitious about her desire to settle permanently in New York (“It’s fucking freezing there,” she said, among other things, about the Windy City).

She attended art school in San Francisco, became known as a video artist and then went on to publish articles in academic journals, which led to university teaching gigs in Madison and Michigan, as well as at New York University in 2002 and 2003. (Ms. Kipnis holds the title of professor at Northwestern without the coveted credential of a Ph.D.)

After publishing books in the academic world— Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America and Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender & Aesthetics—she made her mainstream debut with Against Love: A Polemic, a sassy book-length essay arguing that marriage and monogamy are suffocating and unnatural (“domestic gulags,” in her parlance), which was published in 2003. People—men in particular—seemed intrigued by a single-woman author who made a passionate case for adultery (although she said that she was once in a stable 12-year relationship and isn’t anti-marriage). The book was widely, and for the most part enthusiastically, reviewed.

“I was kind of amazed with that book,” Ms. Kipnis said, marveling at how “intellectually seriously” it was treated. “I thought that it would be polarizing, and I thought there would be some real bashing, but as far as I know, the reviews were just entirely … kinda celebratory and positive to an extent that just ... surprised me.”

Slate’s culture editor, Meghan O’Rourke, reviewed the book and later asked Ms. Kipnis to write for the online magazine. The collaboration led to pieces about Playboy, Deep Throat, Americans’ expanding waistlines and politics. Ms. O’Rourke described Ms. Kipnis as their “maverick voice on feminism.”

Most of Ms. Kipnis’ newest book was written in New York, in an apartment she owns in Chelsea, while she was on a two-year leave from Northwestern. When she’s in town, she hangs out with, among others, Ms. O’Rourke, as well as the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead and her husband. (Ms. Mead reviewed Against Love for The New Yorker and the two struck up a friendship.) In fact, Ms. Mead’s home was the setting of at least one of the dinner parties mentioned in the book, in which Ms. Kipnis described an “attractive successful single professional female in her mid- to late thirties” who was ranting at the table about what wimps most men are. Ms. Mead said that Ms. Kipnis is “excellent” to have at a dinner party.

“She can always defend herself and argue with people who aren’t necessarily used to being taken on,” Ms. Mead said. “And she’s always game. So I don’t think she’s ever declined an invitation.”

The dinner-party anecdote was meant to illustrate what seems to be Ms. Kipnis’ central point: that women have mixed feelings about their own emancipation. “[B]eing female at this point in history is an especially conflicted enterprise,” she writes sagely in the “Envy” section, “like Birkenstocks with Chanel, or trying to frown after a Botox injection.”

The 160-page riff that ensues is decidedly less focused than Against Love. Ms. Kipnis divides the female psyche into four quadrants (the “dirt,” “sex,” “envy” and “vulnerability” of the title), and within them covers sexual satisfaction (“orgasms have become an index of female progress”), housework (“it’s unclear whether the real domestic problem between the sexes is that men won’t clean or that women will”), rape (“It may come as a surprise to hear that as many men as women are probably raped [in prison] every year in the United States, and possibly more”) and women’s general love-hate attitude towards men. Freud makes an appearance on page 11, Naomi Wolf on page 145, with Nietzsche somewhere in between.

She pointedly avoids giving any sort of advice, which many women have probably come to expect from their fellow women. When asked what she hoped to accomplish with The Female Thing over breakfast, Ms. Kipnis paused.

“I think my ambition is to—I don’t know how this is gonna sound—but for the world to be a bit more interesting than it is,” Ms. Kipnis said. “So I’m … trying to contribute to making these conversations feel a little more interesting. And also, on a personal level, just kinda have fun.”

A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, Ms. Kipnis was party to a conversation with a very different tenor. She was the guest of honor at a seminar held at Columbia University to discuss the “Dirt” chapter of The Female Thing. A group of students, many likely from women’s studies (several bandanas and unshaved armpits were in attendance), and a handful of professors gathered around a conference table in a fluorescent-lit basement room. The whole exercise served as a potent reminder of both the perils and the luxuries of academic life.

One of those present, an older woman with short hair and spectacles, was squirming in her seat.

“I still don’t know what this book is about,” she harrumphed, furiously chewing her gum.

Ms. Kipnis swept in and took her place at the end of the table. After a heady introduction by one of the grad students, she explained that “femininity and feminism are in incessant conflict” with one another. She read several passages from the book’s preface aloud (“when it comes to the female situation, contradictions speckle the landscape, like ingrown hairs after a bad bikini wax,” etc.). While she spoke, her lips pursed into a perfect “O” shape that jutted out in front of her face.

“I loved reading this—it was so much fun, I felt like I was cheating,” gushed one young woman when Ms. Kipnis finished reading.

The conversation hopscotched around the table, covering questions of who Ms. Kipnis was hoping to reach with her book (“both academics and readers of Time magazine,” she said); the link between housework and pornography; the question of whether there is a “female propensity to masochism”; and the inevitable theme of ladies’ anatomy: “I kept coming back to the vagina,” Ms. Kipnis declared at one point, by way of explaining why women behave the way they do. “No matter how you get into the theory, it does come back to the fact that you have a vagina. It sounds stupid to say it …. ”

There was heated talk of “cross-cultural claims” and “transformational possibilities,” “social constructionism” and “materiality.” One of the three men in the room piped in that he had had “some impatience with the straight constructionist line” in the excerpt.

Ms. Kipnis seemed to be rather enjoying the friendly banter, until someone put forth a question that demonstrated that even an edgy, feminist contrarian has her limits. A man with a shaggy white mustache gathered the sheaf of papers spread out on the table in front of him with the efficiency of a government bureaucrat.

“I found it interesting that there was no reference at all to oral sex,” the man began. “ Feel-ah-shee-o or coo-ne-linguis raises all sorts of issues that you might have discussed—heh, heh! My sense is that feel-ah-shee-o occurs more and is expected more than coo-ne-linguis.”

Ms. Kipnis was staring at him, and somewhere somebody let out a giggle.

“Do you think that oral sex has any role in this discussion?” the man said.

It was a fair point, but Ms. Kipnis was having none of it.

“Uh … no, I didn’t take that up,” Ms. Kipnis said.

If scandals have their seasons, nothing suits summer like a steamy dose of adultery. This season we celebrate a cuckold, Hillary Clinton, whose top-dollar memoir renewed interest in the most delicious illicit affair of the 90's. And we malign an adulterer (and accused rapist), Kobe Bryant, the basketball superstar whose stony-faced mug shot graces tabloids everywhere.

One imagines Laura Kipnis-a professor of television, radio and film at Northwestern University and the author of Against Love: A Polemic -rubbing her hands in glee as she contemplates Mr. Bryant and his wronged wife, sad and repentant, giving yet another press conference. Her glee stems not from Schadenfreude but from delight at her own prescience: According to Against Love , public adultery scandals remain staples of American culture because adulterers are what all of us-restless, bored and numbed by the humdrum of our stable relationships-secretly wish to be. The public "impalement" of adulterers, especially Presidential ones, is a crucifixion in which others suffer for the very sin that we guilt-ridden masses yearn to commit.

The sin, Ms. Kipnis continues-brace yourself now for the book's clincher-that we ought to commit.

Ms. Kipnis has written a joyous, incisive tract in praise of adultery-and, as her title lays bare, against love. Why? For one, because no one else has. "Even sacred cows find their butchers. Except for love," Ms. Kipnis writes. Everybody loves love: We all "prostrate ourselves at love's portals, anxious for entry, like social strivers waiting at the ropeline outside some exclusive club." So it's easy to accuse Ms. Kipnis of playing the devil's advocate. It's easy to argue that Against Love plays switcheroo with totem and taboo just to give us a little thrill.

Easy, that is, until Ms. Kipnis-a witty and pliant thinker-wins you over. Against Love proves delightfully paradoxical: didactic and playful, intellectual and entertaining, high-brow yet eminently readable. The book is a polemic ("the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z Boy lounger"), a word slapped on Against Love like a disclaimer. Polemics, often intentionally over the top, must be taken with a grain of salt. They're not for everyone: "Feel free to leave," Ms. Kipnis graciously proposes, "if this is not your story-you for whom long-term coupledom is a source of optimism and renewal, not emotional anesthesia."

"Long-term coupledom"-Ms. Kipnis pens the phrase with one hand and holds her nose with the other. Against Love isn't against love itself, but against love's socially sanctioned incarnation, its "mandatory barracks": domestic arrangements in which we pledge body and soul to each other forevermore. A more exact title would have been Against Domestic Coupledom , but Against Love makes the better bumper sticker.

Ms. Kipnis' argument is clear and pointed. When it comes to relationships, the mantra is "Love takes work." But when, she asks, "did the rhetoric of the factory become the default language of love"? Love, that thing of joy and leisure, has become more labor than pleasure, thus making Marx's Capital the marriage manual of our time. Sex, that act of passion and spontaneity, is transformed by long-term relationships into mechanical procedure, performed on occasions when duty calls. "When monogamy becomes labor, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees," Ms. Kipnis asks, "is this really what we mean by a Good Relationship?"

Only adultery-Ms. Kipnis' superhero in the scarlet-lettered cape-saves us from emotional paralysis. Adultery resuscitates flaccid souls and comatose libidos: "Using love to escape love," Ms. Kipnis calls it. "It's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time."

With Against Love , Ms. Kipnis-a video artist turned essayist and social critic-has written a follow-up to her last book, whose title also reveled in shock value. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America argued against the criminalizing of fantasy in America and defended porn as a functional outlet for it; Against Love sets its claws on the social institution, marriage, that reins in our fantasies and unfettered desires. This dynamic-human desire repressed by social convention-ought to sound familiar: Ms. Kipnis is riffing off Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents , in which society's handmaidens are sublimation and repression.

Freud and Marx, with his analysis of labor's psychological effects, belong to Ms. Kipnis' holy trinity of theorists; the third is Foucault, who famously explored society's subtle means of policing its citizens. What is marriage, Ms. Kipnis asks, but the ultimate in state-sponsored social control, leaving us tamed, bored, repressed-in short, easily manipulated and passive citizens? Domestic coupledom-like soma in Huxley's Brave New World -is "boot camp for compliant citizenship"; adultery, on the other hand, turns us "from upstanding citizen to crafty embezzler: siphoning off ever-larger increments of this precious commodity, time, from its rightful owners-mate, job, children, housepets."

This is fairly radical stuff, and Ms. Kipnis seems aware that many would dismiss it as hyper-intellectual cant. So she has a strategy for making believers of us: She mostly avoids high-brow name-dropping, skips elaborate argument and historical exegesis-but dazzles us with a barrage of metaphor.

Adultery is "the municipal dumpster for coupled life's toxic waste of strife and unhappiness." It turns us from laborers to "amateur collagists" or "scavengers and improvisers, constructing odd assemblages out of detritus and leftovers: a few scraps of time and some dormant emotions are stuck together to create something unforeseen, to have new experiences."

Domestic love, on the other hand, is "denture adhesive. Yes, it's supposed to hold things in place; yes, it's awkward for everyone when it doesn't; but unfortunately there are some things that glue just won't glue." Coupledom's "enforcement wing" is self-help culture and therapy-the "world's most expensive lubricant," because therapy tries to get it out of us, that thing we've been bottling up and which needs to be released. Therapy absurdly informs us that the solution to the problem of marriage feeling like work is to work harder at marriage.

Tolstoy claimed that "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Ms. Kipnis would strenuously disagree. She sets forth a Chomskian universal "grammar" for unhappy coupledom: It includes the "You always/I never routine"; its euphemisms are "compromise" or "getting along"; its basic unit of speech is the interdiction, which produces a long list of what you, you poor coupled sap, can't do (a gem: "you can't be simplistic, even when things are simple").

Against Love goes national with a trip to the White House: Monicagate, for Ms. Kipnis, is a prime example of "spousal politics," in which a politician's worth is measured by his qualities as a husband. Bill Clinton's highly charged infidelity hearings were a "national bloodletting" in which, Ms. Kipnis observes, a nation of would-be adulterers failed to ask the most profound question of all: Why, for heaven's sake, was our President "risking so much for so little"?

We didn't ask because the answer is too unsettling. Grappling with Mr. Clinton's motives (the source lies somewhere in his "other" head) would mean grappling with the fact that good sense, good logic and "good" marriages only take us so far. Desire, on the other hand, reigns supreme; hence Ms. Kipnis' paean to it.

But here's a pressing question: Ought desire to reign? Ms. Kipnis' clever metaphors and shrewd analyses are a pleasure, but they leave us vacillating between extremes. Is there only the misery of domestic coupledom or the ephemeral joy of adulterous lust, Kevin Spacey in American Beauty or Diane Lane in Unfaithful ? It's rather fitting that a book about the insatiability of desire left me mildly unsatisfied, hungry for some solution to the problem Ms. Kipnis wisely lays out.

To be fair, I was warned: Against Love is a polemic, and polemics hardly ever offer middle-of-the-road solutions. "Maybe no one can be against love, but it's still possible to flirt with the idea," Ms. Kipnis says in closing. And intellectual flirtations, like polemics, "oscillate between affirming and denying the genuineness of their positions." This is not cop-out, but cunning strategy: If Ms. Kipnis blazes forth with fire, brimstone and academic gravitas against love and marriage, she'll be dismissed as an extremist or-heavens no!-a radical feminist. Flirtations, however, make us smile, not retreat.

Flirtations titillate, but they're doomed to end. And so we return, hot and bothered, to the mundane shelter of our daily lives. When we cool down, we remember the other word for a flirt: a tease.

Baz Dreisinger, an adjunct professor at CUNY, is working on her first book.