Letters to the Editor
Christopher1988
Published Letters: 567 Editor's Choice: 40
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watch_this_space how can you be so hypocritical?
[Read the article: Katie Roiphe's morning after]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Roiphe wants to be a feminist as long as it means getting a job at NYU and getting on the talk circuit ($$$). But if it means having to associate with (gasp) critiquing inequality, she'd prefer not to. Well tough titty.
Feminism is a major industry, and you could easily argue that Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, etc. hold onto their sense of victimhood and continually find new ways to represent the oppression of women because there are so many book deals, magazine contracts, and pieces in the Times to make a living off of. In the 80's and 90's it was virtually impossible to get a job in academia without cowtowing to that form of feminism (what Women's Studies program would hire you? look at the trouble Roiphe still faces now What college with any sort of p.c. manual of behavior—and at that time, they all had them—would feel comfortable with you on the faculty?).
To play the "she'll do anything for a buck game" is not only insulting because you are calling her a whore (with all the issues of women's bodies as commodities and the attendant debasement it entails) but because it ignores the lucritive deals feminists have gotten since the early seventies.
The talk circuit? How many times have you seen Steinem on your television screen? How many times have you seen Roiphe?
Do yourself a favor and read Camille Paglia's Sex, Art and American Culture, in which she talks extensively about the difficulty getting an alternative voice heard. It's very interesting that Traister sidesteps Pagila completely, considering the latter had already burst on the national scene and was clearly an influence on Traister. And, um you know, happens to be sort of connected with Salon.
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watch_this_space,
[Read the article: Katie Roiphe's morning after]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Those conditions include Roiphe presenting a supposed "alternative voice" about gender inequality, when, in fact, she is simply saying the material conditions of the world are just fine thanks, and that the only problem is women's attitudes towards those conditions.
See, I just don’t think this is what she’s saying. I think she’s saying that relationships, and identifying causes for sexual experiences, is complex. When you have a situation where a girl willingly goes to a party, willingly drinks to much (and she's not new to alcohol or college parties), willingly goes to bed with a guy...and then the next day wonders if she made the right choice...and is told she was the victim of date rape...I think we have a real problem. That situation was going on back then. I can't speak to what the situation is today.
I think also that she’s counting on a dialogue. Her quotation of Didion is very important: there have to be people at the baracades, and there have to be people at the cocktail party. She identifies herself as the latter. But the very nature of the quote assumes that those women on the front line are important and are doing good work. I don’t think that in questioning a form of feminism she's saying things are just fine. That would be like saying if you don't want to throw out the US government, you must have no problem with the policies of Bush. I think Roiphe sees good in the relationships men and women have, even as she sees problems. In a sense, I think she's saying it's a part of the human condition that things can't be just fine. For anyone. And not that we should just take it, but that as mature adults it doesn't hurt us to accept we will find no perfect solutions even as we look for better ones.
I very much believe you have the right to critique her. I don’t think any one in the public eye is “above” such treatement. But what you get out of her books sounds very different from what I’m hearing. I’m hearing that sex is an area of mutual responsibility, and that women shouldn’t approach sex with fear, or be aggressively pushed to define a situation as rape when it might be something else.
I’m don't know your age, but I was a junior undergrad when The Morning After came out. Along with Paglia, Roiphe was a breath of fresh air, someone who didn’t see sex as a nightmare situation, from the start a punishing world of pain and abuse. Her more complex view of male-female interactions were closer to what I saw going on between the men and women I knew, and closer to what I experienced in my own male-male interactions (I know for me “no” certainly doesn’t always mean “no”; I’ve allowed myself to be in situations that compromised me, and that I knew I bore some—not all, by a long shot—responsibility for, because I agreed to them, and was somewhat into them even as I was also against them). It seemed to me that women—all women—were really being pushed at that time to consider themselve the victim of rape, the victim of brutal men, likely the victim of sexual abuse in childhood. It was a really good time for the repressed memory syndrome on the one hand and the very loose definition of date rape which was all a girl on campus had to satisfy—and with which a man could be expelled and his whole life ruined—on the other. In other words, I think it was a pretty dark time.
This does not mean real rape doesn’t occur. Nor that these rapes can't happen on dates. Nor that there aren’t abusive men. But I think Roiphe was providing a corrective for a ridiculously extreme swing of the pendulm.