Charlotte Shane

  • Work It

    IN THE ART OF LOVING (a 1956 book that is, disappointingly, much drearier than it sounds), psychoanalyst Erich Fromm identified a “disintegration of love” in Western society. He went on to denounce relationships that “follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.” As Fromm—a member of the Frankfurt School movement seeking to unify the precepts of Marxism and psychoanalysis—saw it, coupling was now largely a matter of investment and profit: People had begun to view themselves as products, commodities whose use they should leverage for maximum personal

  • culture June 26, 2015

    Apocalypse Baby by Virginie Despentes

    “I am furious with a society that has educated me without ever teaching me to injure a man if he pulls my thighs apart against my will, when that same society has taught me that this is a crime from which I will never recover,” Virginie Despentes writes in King Kong Theory, her 2006 manifesto about quintessential feminist questions of rape, sex work, and beauty standards.

    “I am furious with a society that has educated me without ever teaching me to injure a man if he pulls my thighs apart against my will, when that same society has taught me that this is a crime from which I will never recover,” Virginie Despentes writes in King Kong Theory, her 2006 manifesto about quintessential feminist questions of rape, sex work, and beauty standards. Despentes is a French writer and director who owes most of her fame—or notoriety—to Baise-moi, the violent novel-turned-film about two mistreated female protagonists whose rage is resolved only by remorseless, indiscriminate

  • culture January 31, 2013

    Swoon by Betsy Prioleau

    It’s a sad time to be heterosexual. Men are angry at women, women are angry at men, and nobody’s getting the type of action they want. But here comes a book to solve all that, to clear away confusion, restore male dynamism, and rekindle the spark of chemistry in straight mating. The jacket copy of cultural historian Betsy Prioleau’s Swoon promises to reveal “surprising seductive secrets” of the old masters in the interest of giving the beleaguered modern man a leg up on the nigh impossible task of wooing a modern woman. Subtitled “Great Seducers and Why Women Love” them, the book purports to