'New York' Catfight: Nussbaum v. Levy
In the intro to her review of Laura Kipnis's latest, The Female Thing, Emily Nussbaum asks a good question:
Where, oh where, is the great lady pundit of our age? I'm talking about the writer that the 18-year-old freshman can read to pieces. Virginia Woolf, say. Or Gloria Steinem in the sixties, maybe Germaine Greer or Nora Ephron in the seventies, Susie Bright and Mary Gaitskill and Susan Faludi and even the early Naomi Wolf in the eighties. It's okay if the person is a bit of a wackadoo. She doesn't have to solve the whole problem at once. But it would be nice—in this era of Camille and Caitlin, that legion of smirking anti-feminist contrarians—to have a truly devastating spokeswoman on the other side.
Guess her fellow 'New York' contributing editor Ariel Levy's recent work of lady punditry, Female Chauvinist Pigs (new in paperback!), didn't float Nussbaum's boat.
