All hail to a book that has you cheering and jeering – maybe both, on the same page. At least the reader knows she’s been engaged.

“The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability” (Pantheon Books, $23.95) is infuriating and elevating. Media-studies professor Laura Kipnis writes about the female psyche with the same sharpness she displayed in “Against Love: A Polemic,” in which she took the reader on a wild and barbed ride through odd couple rituals like, say, cheating.

Kipnis wasn’t writing against love so much as examining (and debunking) some of the strange behaviors we attach to monogamy. (She also has written about pornography, Marx and scandal – among other topics – in publications from Slate to Harper’s to The New York Times.)

It’s hard to hate good writing – which is what the reader got in “Against” and can expect in “Thing” – but sometimes the flash and dash don’t quite cover her thin theses.

But it’s such a delicious read, and on topics you might not lump together. Her stuff on the nonexistent G-spot and the questionable maternal instinct is equally interesting. My favorite, though, is her chapter on sex, if only because it is the most problematic. Because, while she is a sharp observer, she seems (albeit reluctantly) to fall back on biological determinism, the notion that biology is most responsible for gender behavior, more than environment or sociology.

Women would be a lot happier – and a lot easier to deal with, she says – if technology wasn’t constantly “overriding female nature” with birth control and medical advances that have lowered the maternal death rate, among other factors.

Yikes. The only thing that moved me to sheath my sword was her writing on other topics, which sometimes zings:

“Take the current mania for thinness, the quest for fitness, the war on cellulite,” she writes. “Freed from compulsory childbearing, women have chained themselves to the gym. Once women suffered under whalebone corsets; now your skeleton must show through the skin for that fashionable look.”

Or consider breast implants, which Kipnis calls “secondary-sex-organ mutilation:”

“Here are so-called modern women slicing and dicing body parts to achieve a feminine ideal.” What’s so different from sex-organ mutilations practiced in other cultures?

Right on, sister! If Kipnis could free herself from arguing biology-is-destiny, I would ask her out for a beer. But in her chapter on cleanliness, she regurgitates a Freudian theory: If women didn’t possess vaginas that menstruate (and weren’t made to feel dirty about it all), they might not be such neat-freaks.

Housekeeping can be a sore topic, but to assume it’s the man who’s not holding up his end is ignorant. Why won’t he pick up his socks, Kipnis asks. Because he doesn’t have a need to prove he’s clean, that’s why. No one labels uniquely male body functions as filthy.

The woman is, Kipnis writes, “scrubbing away at those unsightly nose pores” while the man, dumb as a box of hair and secure in himself, steps cheerily over his underwear on the floor.

Sometimes reading “Thing” is a little like reading Maureen Dowd’s “Are Men Necessary?” which Kipnis mentions. But her bibliography is long and varied, while Dowd, The New York Times columnist, appeared to rely on her fashionable friends and former lovers for her book. There, too, a smart writer tried to disguise her sometimes provocative musings as well-thought-out theses. You’re reading and being entertained, and then there’s this … thing … that is impossible to support, no matter how you try.

In the end, Kipnis bounces too often against the Freudian wall. What if the modern-day woman wanted something as simple as companionship, as she can already pay her own way, thanks.

What if women aren’t so concerned that their bedroom floor be free of socks and kitchen sink empty of dirty dishes?

But maybe that’s another book.