katie roiphe

Liza Featherstone lfeather32 at erols.com
Fri Jun 11 07:42:08 PDT 1999


I was going to hold back on the grounds that I shouldn't waste any more words on her, but willpower is a weak fluttery thing. Katie Roiphe became a semi-famous anti-feminist in 1993 when she published first a NYT op-ed piece, then a book (THe Morning After_, "arguing" -- if either of those illogical and statistically warped screeds could be called an argument-- that date rape was a creation of hysterical puritanical campus feminists and neurotic women who regretted consenting to bad sex. for this she was dubbed very brave and maverick for not "towing the feminist line". then she wrote another book a few years later (Last Night in Paradise) making the much more interesting argument that middle-class heterosexual AIDS anxiety was out-of-proportion to any actual threat and a metaphor for other kinds of social anxieties. naturally no one paid much attention to that. but it was just as well, since it was actually just as stupidly argued as her first book -- she confusedly attacked sex ed in public schools and government-funded public health campaigns for fomenting AIDS hysteria -- when obviously that's the last thing they do, since such programs barely exist.

Perhaps some of the boys on the list can speak to her allure; it's always eluded me and I don't think I need to get catty.

Liza


>>Speaking of right-wing women, Hitchens has a terrible weakness for the
>>ineffable anti-feminist, Katie "Gloria Steinem Has No Sense of Humor"
>>Roiphe. As does James Heartfield, who's been very quiet lately.
>
>Who doesn't?
>
>(who's Katie Roiphe?)



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