there’s a scene in dostoevsky’s the possessed where one character, confronted with his own complicity in a violent act, wonders whether a crime is truly a crime if everyone agrees to look the other way. we live in an age obsessed with crime—not just in the legal sense, but in the broader cultural compulsion to locate guilt, identify perpetrators, and mete out punishment. but is this fixation a reflection of justice, or merely the latest manifestation of our hunger for retribution?
in eros and psyche, laura kipnis navigates this minefield of sexual politics, cultural panic, and the punitive instincts that dominate our era. she does not plead for innocence—hers is not a world of pure victims and villains—but rather asks us to consider what it means to live in a society that increasingly confuses justice with punishment, desire with danger, and moral certainty with progress.
the puritanical paradox: policing desire in the name of liberation
modern sexual politics is a battleground where two contradictory impulses collide: a libertarian celebration of desire and an increasingly carceral impulse that views sex through the prism of harm. one moment, we are told that sexual liberation is essential to human freedom; the next, we are bombarded with discourses of trauma, coercion, and victimization that position desire as inherently suspect.
this contradiction is nowhere more evident than in #metoo, where feminist activism oscillates between a radical challenge to patriarchal control and a deep investment in punitive justice. kipnis challenges the movement’s most fervent adherents, noting that they often embrace the same “law-and-order” ethos they once critiqued. is a feminism that demands harsher sentencing, public shaming, and social ostracization really radical—or is it merely a repackaging of the old moral panics, dressed in progressive rhetoric?
if history teaches us anything, it’s that moral crusades have an uncanny tendency to devour their own. today’s heroes become tomorrow’s pariahs; the line between perpetrator and victim is ever-shifting. (see: the endless procession of disgraced public figures, each sentenced to cultural oblivion with the same ritualistic fervor that once greeted medieval heretics.)
monsters and men: the comfort of condemnation
there’s a psychological thrill to identifying a monster. it absolves us. it creates the illusion that evil is something external, something that can be eradicated, rather than an inextricable part of human nature. weinstein. epstein. the long parade of disgraced celebrities, each serving as a sacrificial scapegoat for a society that refuses to reckon with its own contradictions.
but what if our moral clarity is an illusion? kipnis reminds us that the mechanics of sexual power are never simple. take the example of harvey weinstein: he was, without doubt, a grotesque and predatory figure. but the spectacle of his downfall, the way he was dehumanized in court (mocked for his body, his physicality turned into a symbol of monstrousness) suggests that something else was at play. was this justice—or just another public exorcism, the kind societies enact to convince themselves that they have purged their sins?
punishment, after all, is easy. it allows us to believe that once we have cast out the offender, the problem is solved. it avoids the harder questions—about power, complicity, and the ways in which desire itself is structured by coercion. in its most simplistic form, #metoo risks reducing sex to a crime scene, where every encounter is parsed for signs of victimization. but as kipnis provocatively suggests, desire is rarely that clear-cut. it is messy, contradictory, and often impossible to legislate.
the carceral left: when justice becomes vengeance
for decades, progressives critiqued the excesses of the criminal justice system: the overreach of mandatory sentencing, the cruelty of public shaming, the moral panic that fueled mass incarceration. but today, many of those same voices demand swift, unforgiving punishment when the crime in question is sexual misconduct. (cue the “believe all women” litmus test, which ignores the messy realities of memory, perception, and false accusations.)
kipnis challenges this contradiction: why is it that feminists, historically the most vocal critics of punitive politics, now find themselves championing a form of justice that relies on spectacle, punishment, and exile? the answer, perhaps, lies in our cultural addiction to absolutes. the left once fought for complexity, for an understanding of human behavior that acknowledged power, history, and social context. today, it increasingly mirrors the moral absolutism of the right, reducing complex human interactions to binary categories of victim and perpetrator.
what is lost in this shift? nuance, certainly. but more than that: the possibility of a world where justice is something other than vengeance. the possibility of a sexual politics that does not oscillate between libertinism and puritanism, but instead embraces the inherent contradictions of desire. (as kipnis reminds us, sex has always been a site of power struggle—one that cannot be neatly contained within the confines of legal discourse.)
towards a politics of ambivalence
what if we abandoned the need for absolute moral clarity? what if we embraced, instead, a politics of ambivalence—one that acknowledges that human beings are capable of both harm and tenderness, that desire and coercion are often intertwined, that justice cannot be reduced to punishment alone?
this is not an argument for indifference. it is an argument for a more complicated, more honest reckoning with power. it is a rejection of the comforting fictions of victimhood and villainy, an insistence that real justice requires more than exile and denunciation.
perhaps the most radical act, in this moment, is to refuse the script that has been handed to us. to ask the harder questions, even when they make us uncomfortable. to sit with ambiguity. after all, if desire is as central to human freedom as we claim, then surely it deserves a politics that is more than just another iteration of control.
This text discusses the key arguments in Joann Wypijewski’s book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo.
