>I can't speak to her allure, personally. But I happily insist that both
>of Roiphe's books, The Morning After and Last Night in Paradise are
>amongst the best written on sexual politics in the last decade.
>
>The hostility to Roiphe's work is a measure of the fact that she exposed
>the shibboleth's of a one-time oppositional movement that is fast
>becoming the establishment.
>
>The central point is that the feminist movement has become conservative
>in its sex negativity, effectively coalescing with the moral panics of
>the Christian right. Who could disagree?
Actually anyone who knows anything about feminism could disagree.
I had the good fortune to meet Roiphe recently, at the party for Hitchens' Clinton book. She was there because Hitchens has quite the crush on her, which started when they were on the Charlie Rose show together. To answer Liza's question, the source of her appeal to men is pretty clear - glittery eye shadow, a mass of libidinous hair, and skirts that could double bandanas. But the woman is an idiot. She knows nothing about feminism and, at least in conversation, she doesn't seem all that bright. She actually claimed to me that Gloria Steinem was humorless and anti-sex. Gloria Steinem has many faults, but those aren't among them - she's funny and charming. She claimed that Katha Pollitt wanted to ban sexy speech, which is also completely wide of the mark. (That topic came up because a Brit sitting across the table from us recounted an anecdote about an old leftist he knew in London who said things like "nice ass" when an attractive woman passed by. He said, "American feminists would like to ban that kind of speech." I said I didn't really know anyone who fit that bill. Katie erupted with, "Oh Katha Pollitt would.") She seemed to know nothing about the debates over sex within feminism. She got famous because her mother's well-connected in New York literary circles and she said just what a bunch of conservative men wanted to hear. Fortunately, despite the hype, her first book was a total flop, selling just 10,000 copies; her second was even more of a failure. She's now writing a novel, a project that at least doesn't really require her to know much of anything.
Doug