LOVE IN THE TIME OF CONTAGION

Cultural critic and essayist Kipnis explores how Covid-19 and the socio-economic turbulence of recent years have reshaped concepts of dating, love, sex, and interpersonal closeness.

For Kipnis, who has written multiple well-received books about love and sexuality, the pandemic has done far more than reorganize the way the world operates; it also “infect[ed] our relation to other people’s bodies.” In this witty four-essay collection, she explores how the pandemic, in tandem with such preexisting crises as political polarization, accelerating economic disparities, and racial and sexual injustice, has permanently altered intimate relationships. Like a “viral imp of the perverse,” Covid-19 contributed to massive loneliness throughout the world via lockdown scenarios and social distancing. In the U.S., writes Kipnis, “the flailing government response” only added to the anxiety about the “fatally divided nation” America had become under the “biohazard” that was the Trump administration. The virus also laid bare the grim reality that some in this country—e.g., the poor and people of color—were “more disposable than others.” In the realm of relationships, Kipnis quips that the pandemic became a kind of metaphor for what consciousness-raised heterosexual women had been feeling all over the world: that men began to feel “like germs.” The author’s own long-term relationship was suddenly exposed as a “neurotic pact” that verged on co-dependent. For millions of others, physical contact had become “a crisis.” A dearth of safe spaces in which to interact drove many—in particular, tech-savvy, undersexed young professionals—to seek connection online only to find themselves caught up in a chaotic, very public swirl of personal dramas. Fearless and sharply observed, this book suggests that future post-pandemic challenges will have less to do with its biological legacy to humanity and more to do with the impact of a virus on interpersonal closeness.

Provocative and darkly humorous.