Mari Ruti combines theoretical reflection, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to analyze the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Proceeding from a playful engagement with Freud’s idea of penis envy, Ruti’s autotheoretical commentary fans out to a broader consideration of neoliberal pragmatism. She focuses on the emphasis on good performance, high productivity, constant self-improvement, and relentless cheerfulness that characterizes present-day Western society. Revealing the treacherousness of our fantasies of the good life, particularly the idea that our efforts will eventually be rewarded—that things will eventually get better—Ruti demystifies the false hope that often causes us to tolerate an unbearable present.

Theoretically rigorous and lucidly written, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings is a trenchant critique of contemporary gender relations. Refuting the idea that we live in a postfeminist world where gender inequalities have been transcended, Ruti describes how neoliberal heteropatriarchy has transformed itself in subtle and stealthy, and therefore all the more insidious, ways. Mobilizing Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Jacques Lacan’s account of desire, and Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, she analyzes the rationalization of intimacy, the persistence of gender stereotypes, and the pornification of heterosexual culture. Ruti shines a spotlight on the depression, anxiety, frustration, and disenchantment that frequently lie beneath our society’s sugarcoated mythologies of self-fulfillment, romantic satisfaction, and professional success, speaking to all who are concerned about the emotional costs of the pressure-cooker ethos of our age.

"[Ruti] rescues penis envy from Freud's ludicrous literalism and feminism's merry spoofing. Readers versed in critical theory, a field renowned for its obscurantist prose, will find her book remarkably lucid." - Times Literary Supplement

"This is a gutsy, original foray into feminist theory, at once memoirish, polemical and even self-helpful, just the book for anyone up for an intellectual bone to gnaw on." - The Toronto Star

"A delightful book that spills over with insights into the everyday suffering that these neoliberal times produce in so many of us." - Hypatia

"Ruti’s Penis Envy might resonate particularly with young women who are caught up in the groundswell of the #metoo movement, and also set somewhat adrift by it." - ASAP/J

"Ruti offers lived experiences as well as cogent readings of Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, to make her case for how feelings of inadequacy are culturally reproduced, rather than biologically determined. . . .[Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings] invites discussion among men and women, the repressed and the celebrated, as a way of correcting fetishistic acceptance of phallic primacy." - Library Journal

"Ruti interweaves theoretical insight, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to lift the lid on the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Emanating from a playful engagement with Freud’s idea of penis envy, Ruti’s autotheoretical commentary fans out to a broader consideration of neoliberal pragmatism." - Public Seminar