It must be dismal to come of age in an era so drenched in utility as ours. What was once called soul hunger is now relentlessly thwacked aside by engines of ever greater efficiency, from effective altruism to generative AI. Even the animating realms of art and sex appear to have contracted to the merely serviceable, functional, and fair-minded.
With her new essay collection, Becca Rothfeld has launched a spirited campaign to reverse this state of affairs. Its title, All Things Are Too Small—drawn from the writings of a spiritually enthralled thirteenth-century mystic—is misleading, though, for her soundings do not apply to all things. As troubled as she is by growing wealth inequality and other policy offenses, Rothfeld steers away from political-economic affairs. Her intent is to revel in the shameless precincts of want and to protect its extravagances from a rising tide of minimalism, prudery, and justice seeking. Democracy has its place, Rothfeld argues, but nowhere near the wilds of erotic love or art.
If you don’t wince at cultural criticism framed almost entirely in the first person, Rothfeld is a pleasure to read. She fully inhabits her writing, which is fitting given the underlying theme of her essays: embodiment. Yet her take on the body also narrows her field of vision, not because it excludes the polis but because it elevates youthful carnality over other bodily truths embedded in the arc of life. Rothfeld is at her best when, putting all the personal sex talk on pause, she laments cultural forces arrayed against the spiky demands of thinking, judging, and creating. In “Wherever You Go, You Could Leave”—a title that sends up “mindfulness” maven Jon Kabat-Zinn’s best-selling Wherever You Go, There You Are—she describes her treatment for an early-college bout of suicidal depression as “letting go of judgmental and critical thoughts,” which led only to further alienation. Although its adherents claim that mindfulness has origins in ancient Buddhist monastic discipline, Rothfeld argues that it is actually rooted in the late-nineteenth-century, oh-so-American mind cure movement, whose hyper-rationalistic “spiritual” quest for mental healing fast descended into mere positive thinking. We don’t know precisely how young Rothfeld turned the corner, though heavy moviegoing was involved, which led to her work as a film critic. More decisive, it seems, was a conscious effort to dismiss “non-judgmental awareness,” which sounded to her to be “indistinguishable from depression or desolation.” The self and “its plans, its memories, and its obsessions,” she concluded, are not, as Kabat-Zinn would have it, “costly superfluities” that flatter “the feeling that we call ‘I.’”
Rothfeld has a keen eye for identifying common trends in distantly related cultural modes. In “More Is More,” she pairs Marie Kondo’s never-quite-finished home decluttering advice with the current vogue for the fragment novel, which drifts along in evasive pastiche with incomplete story lines, characters, and sentences. “The house that decluttering manuals invariably lionize—always a permutation on the same house, hotel-like in its immaculate impersonality—is sleek and geometric, with a palate of muted duns and grays. The contents are angular and unornamented, the furniture stark and skeletal.” And books, of course, are mainly banned from the premises. Like Kondo’s stripped-down domicile, the minimalized self of the fragment novel “reigns supreme,” because little else is left of the story but the “placeless, hungerless narrator with few acquaintances and even fewer cravings.” With incisive wit, Rothfeld argues that both share an ethos of transitory “endless beginnings” and “fresh starts” that negate their very purposes: the messy, accumulated memories and personal markings of habitation embedded in “home,” the novel as an art form.
Nearly all of these guidebooks and anecdotal tales feature the domestic realm over which women still preside with varying degrees of disproportionate responsibility and resentment—in spite of the exertions of the women’s movement. In her longest essay, “Only Mercy: Sex After Consent,” Rothfeld cuts to the heart of her own feminist plaint: Second-wave feminism’s call for sexual liberation has yet to be fulfilled. Now that the principle of consent has won the day, the next “phase” of #MeToo might be expected to take the form of a fight for women’s sexual pleasure on its own terms and not as a conduit to something else. But no. Attempts to reconceive sex in #MeToo’s victorious afterglow, notably in recent books by Atlantic staff writer Christine Emba and journalist Louise Perry, fall into what Rothfeld calls a “new puritanism.” This retreat into the stale provisions of traditional marriage, she argues, has far more in common with conservative attacks on individual autonomy by postliberals such as University of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen than with the individual pleasures and choices full-throated feminism might offer. Books such as those of Emba and Perry offer no guidance on satisfying sex. They also don’t reconcile the animality of sex with the postconsent assumption that it is socially contrived and thus tameable—in men, that is. Women are left pretty much unchanged, which is a telling un–sex-positive inconsistency. Besides, if you claim that desire is acculturated and thus can be reshaped, you’re in the same boat as radical second-wave feminists such as Kate Millet who called for burning down the patriarchy from top to bottom, including “marriage and the family as they have been known throughout history.”
Rothfeld is fully on board with altering marriage but wants to enlist the Party of Animality in the fight. Her question, simple but somewhat recherché, is What is sex itself for? What is “the sexual good life” on its own terms, independent of its utility in, say, reproduction, or warding off loneliness, or releasing nervous tension? Her answer, threaded throughout these essays, is that sex is its own good, in which unreasoning desire and what we make of it collide in an unstable compound of wanton, directionless, creative play. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen it before in the work of Rothfeld’s three theoretical muses: the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who articulated the concept of a “carnival” world of reversals of convention and threshold encounters; Georges Bataille, the French Surrealist philosopher of transgressive “erotism”; and the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, whose deeply aesthetic concept of “play” was “a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.”
Rothfeld rolls out models for this parallel “world apart.” One is the gay bathhouse, which offers “the possibility of being wanted for your body alone,” shorn of social identity. Such a prospect is “available nowhere else in modern society,” she says, quoting queer theorist David Halperin, although it would not be going out on a limb to suggest that most women have attracted just that sort of singularly sexual attention while, say, running out for milk in the morning, and have not always greeted it as “its own festival.”
Rothfeld’s own “magnificently perverted” marriage is another, more illuminating exemplar, one through which she airs her own erotic tastes and experiences. Like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, her essays are ripe with crude sex slang and graphic depictions of lust, topped by sadomasochistic kink. As D.H. Lawrence quipped, “You can put anything you like in a novel.” In a first-person essay, it comes off as exhibitionistic and—running as a touchpoint throughout the collection—obsessional, if sometimes played to great comic effect. Some of Rothfeld’s best work, particularly in film criticism, would have stood up well without such personal distractions. Her fine analysis of David Cronenberg’s grotesque visual metaphors of erotic transformation, from Shivers (1975) to The Fly (1986), is not enhanced by her autobiographical revelations. In a searching analysis of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, of which Claire’s Knee (1970) is the best known, Rothfeld bucks the conventional reading, arguing that the films do not capture “the triumph of moral imperative over wanton impulse” so much as recognize that “another way to recover eroticism is to recover restraint” imposed by a sense of forbidden evil. That said, it appears that the only restraint Rothfeld’s marriage respects is bondage play.
Not only is keeping the marital door open truly erotic, she claims, but it is also “more ethical.” In what reads as something like a code of chivalry, Rothfeld writes that “sex for its own sake involves a jubilee of generosity.” It takes “courage” to allow someone with whom you share no formal obligation to move you unpredictably at your most volatile erotic core. And it is astonishing, she continues, to be “served” such a “gift” without merit or bargaining. It also offers support to more egalitarian politics over in the public world. The “paradoxical aim of sexual politics,” Rothfeld argues reasonably,” “is to provide respite from politics.” Less persuasively, she claims that “we will need to stage anticipatory carnivals” of noncommittal carnal play to “envision” a better, more egalitarian political order. “Desire is democratic because it can afflict anyone,” she writes, “and it is revolutionary because it so thoroughly displaces everyone it afflicts, without regard for status or station…. We are equal—in our abjection.” Where “justice” rests on “proportion” and the fair allocation of one’s due, the “utopia” she envisions licenses “unfathomable largesse” to which we want to submit. Such talk furnishes a perfect example of the circular reasoning to which utopian thought is prone.
If a marriage holds together amid all this heavy expectation, Rothfeld says in “Our True Entertainment Was Arguing,” it is because its partners “have the courage to make themselves equal enough for love.” Like Walter and Hildy in His Girl Friday (and presumably Becca and her husband), the couple know how to “give as well as they get” in the mutual delight of endless conversation, of always having more to “tell each other.” But if that’s so, what can the old-school gay bathhouse–style-demiworld add except a little passing diversion? Why make such a big deal out of it? Rothfeld’s firm distinction between the political and personal spheres, her insistence on “two lives, simultaneous and perfect,” in love, art, and sex, might also be applied to the profane secrets of monogamous union, that presumed site of dreary “new puritan” obligation. But that would have blown her foil.
Postliberal concepts of the good life might go too far in reining in the excesses of individual freedom. But Rothfeld’s case for the world-changing powers of “good sex” does not offer rewards equivalent to them. The more tempered view of the good life raises enduring philosophical questions covering the entire life cycle. It considers friendship, child rearing, education, vocation, communal participation, worship, aging, death, and, yes, sex. In contrast, Rothfeld’s call for excess serves needs that are most addling in young adulthood and that change with the shifting demands of the body—one’s own and that of others. It offers, in other words, an incomplete account of human life. As Marie Kondo eventually discovered, she “kind of had to give up on” maniacal decluttering once she started having kids.
Note to Readers
In the print edition, our reviewer originally described Becca Rothfeld’s marriage as an open marriage. Read Rothfeld’s critique of this review and Catherine Tumber’s response.