The Morning After

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This stimulating, sometimes scattershot mixture of anecdote and analysis, which has been excerpted in the New York Times Magazine as a cover story, is sure to make waves. As the daughter of Anne Roiphe, author of the feminist novel Up the Sandbox, Katie Roiphe arrived at Harvard in 1986 with a strong feminist sensibility. What she found there was a dogmatic feminism preoccupied with rape, sexual harassment and the image of women as victims. Now a 24-year-old Princeton grad student, Roiphe limits her argument here to a few elite campuses. She emphasizes the feminist value of personal agency when she warns against those who have expanded the term ``rape'' to encompass any unpleasant sexual encounter. She argues that rules about sexual harassment should be less vague, and that women should be able to handle petty sexual innuendo. She offers tart portraits of classmates who sought status from the contradictory powers of sexuality and feminist militancy, and attacks antipornography activist Catharinesic MacKinnon for her ``image of woman as child.'' Roiphe maintains aptly that feminists know less about rebellion than regulation. ``In my late-adolescent idiom . . . it was not about setting loose, as it once was, it was about reining in.'' (Sept.)

Library Journal

Roiphe, a graduate of Harvard and a graduate student at Princeton, offers a controversial counterview to some popular feminist attitudes toward date rape and sexual harassment, particularly on campus. Her premise is that such views reinforce Victorian attitudes of the helpless woman who must be protected. Sometimes scattered and flamboyant, Roiphe often sounds as extreme as those she criticizes. She targets ``take back the night'' marches and tends to downplay the effects of rape on its victims. Also, she does not always distinguish those feminists she criticizes from feminists in general. Nevertheless, she presents a powerful argument against the ``helpless woman'' image projected by some feminist groups on many college campuses. The Morning After was excerpted in the June 13, 1993 issue of the New York Times Magazine , and Roiphe was the subject of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (July 7, 1993). This is sure to be a controversial book on a controversial subject. Recommended.-- Sharon Bostick, Univ. of Toledo Lib., Ohio

Virginia Dwyer

Roiphe critiques current trends in the feminist movement, arguing that feminism, theoretical and on the street, is abandoning the goal of sexual equality by emphasizing fear and the role of victim. Rather than supporting women as fully capable of handling the natural rough and tumble of sexual desire--female as well as male--she charges that thinking about date rape, sexual harassment, and pornography is so protective as to deny women the freedom once promised by the movement. She cites examples of "take back the night" marches that indulge in being wronged and theoretical ideas that treat word and thought as equivalent to actions, meriting both condemnation and active restriction. It is unlikely that liberal or conservative readers will stay with her through all her objections; she sometimes seems a tad histrionic herself. Her questions, however, about fear, protection, and responsibility are asked with style and argued with convincing logic.

Kirkus Reviews

A gifted young Princeton University graduate student, daughter of novelist Anne Roiphe, defies current campus-based feminist assumptions, questioning the phenomena of date rape, hate speech, "Take Back the Night" marches, and the basis for the popularity of feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon (see above). At the heart of Roiphe's critique is a sense of betrayed promise: Growing up, she believed that feminism is "something like a train you could catch and ride to someplace better"—a tool for freedom and not simply a matter of "Take Back the Night marches and sexual harassment peer-counseling groups," of "being angry about men," and of "arguments and assertions that could not be made" because they had been judged politically incorrect by feminists. ("You could not say that Alice Walker was a bad writer," for example, Roiphe says.) Drawing in detail on her own undergraduate academic and social experiences at Harvard, she argues persuasively that a sort of feminist orthodoxy accompanied by mass hysteria has sprung up on campus, in which incidents of date rape have been hallucinated or fabricated, common language has become grotesquely politicized, and the concept of "sexual harassment" has grown to be a bloated form of self-pity. In an especially interesting chapter on the lectures of Catharine MacKinnon, Roiphe tries to break through what she calls "a closed belief system that is closer to religion than law"—failing to take into account, however, that the current beliefs that inform legal rulings are exactly what MacKinnon is aiming to change. Roiphe's perspective is limited but highly intelligent; and her most telling point is a well-documented dislike of a tendencyin feminist rhetoric to place women back in the role of naive victim—a role her mother's generation worked hard to overcome. A brilliant young contrarian voice, … la Mary McCarthy. (First serial to The New York Times Magazine)