"It was in my women’s-studies classes, too, that I was first exposed to a corresponding movement that came to be known as sex-positive feminism."

"Mirroring the Reagan era’s 'me-first' ethos, it eschewed economic issues and those related to male violence in favor of a politics of personal fulfillment centered on the concept of female pleasure. (In my 'French Feminisms' class, the preferred term for such was jouissance.) The rough idea was that women should be celebrated not just as desirable objects but as desiring subjects, and that, in liberating their libido and seizing the terms of their objectification, they might liberate themselves, too. It followed that even entanglements that appeared to present asymmetries of power could be justified on the ground that the participants were acting out a fantasy or engaging in role-play. Conversely, the inherently emotional aspect of sex, along with its ability to make one human feel bound to another, went unmentioned. So did the fact that, in heterosexual relations, biology rendered the female party the more physically vulnerable one. It was thanks to this line of thinking—a line I later came to regard as casuistry—that I was able both to justify my affair and to identify myself as a feminist while conducting my personal life in a way that might suggest otherwise. That X considered himself a 'male feminist' and appeared to harbor few ethical qualms about what we were doing seemed to be further evidence that nothing about our situation could possibly be wrong. And, besides, wasn’t morality 'socially constructed,' too?... By the second month, I was in a quasi-fugue state."

Writes Lucinda Rosenfeld in "My Adventures in Deconstruction/A college affair turns coming of age into coming apart" (The New Yorker). 

X was a professor — at Cornell. The author, a Cornell junior majoring in comparative literature, was 20. X was 15 years older than she and married. The year was 1990.

Whatever a "quasi-fugue state" might be, a "fugue state" is, these days, in a medical setting, called "dissociative fugue" and defined as: "One or more episodes of amnesia in which the inability to recall some or all of one's past and either the loss of one's identity or the formation of a new identity occur with sudden, unexpected, purposeful travel away from home." 

What makes a good column about friendship?

Lindsay Beyerstein thinks the Double X friendship expert is a sociopath — but, interestingly, fails to denounce her as an anti-feminist, even though she thinks Double X is full of anti-feminists. She cites a particular item of advice — from Lucinda Rosenfeld — which essentially says toughen up and quit crying about how your friends aren't good enough friends. Plus, Rosenfeld has a background in unsentimental writing about friendship:

Before taking the gig at Double-X, Rosenfeld produced a substantial body of anti-friend literature, including a novel about friends who despise each other (the official website even lets you stick pins in a flash voodoo doll!). She's also the author of How to Dump a Friend (2001) and Our Mutual Friend: how to steal friends and influence people (2004).

But who would want to read a column that simply counseled people in the obvious? You should be a good and caring friend — which Beyerstein hastens to tell us she sure is. Beyerstein acknowledges that the advice she'd give the letter writer (whose friends abandoned her when she was in need) would be boring. So you'd have to find a different letter to write about, wouldn't you?

You have to come up with something surprising for the column to be readable. Here's the Rosenfeld column in question. Not that I'm interested in reading advice columns, but I do think female friendships are a fascinating subject for incisive analysis. It's a feminist topic, but I'd like some analysis that's scarily honest and unlubricated by feminist treacle.