>That's what makes Roiphe's contribution original. She is analysing
>the repressive ideology of the present, not the one that was in
>place twenty five years ago.
Where does this ideology exist? Two places, from what I can tell. One is among a few privileged undergrads at expensive colleges, those who have recently changed their views about the world, or those who have nothing else to concern themselves with, yet. The other place is in the minds of people who have already decided that "feminist" claims about sexual assault are exaggerated or repressive. If you consider it important and original to caricature the complaints of primarily wealthy undergrads at elite institutions--a caricature that, as you say about feminism elsewhere, fairly well delivers itself--then certainly, Roiphe has made an original contribution.
Meanwhile, for the mass of shut-eyed non-thinkers in this world, Roiphe filters down as merely another reason those feminists ought to finally shut up. They're always raving about some exaggerated problem. One minute it's rape, the next, it's male compliments!
>The first is that feminists broke down the definition of rape from
>forced sex, to sex regretted, because they saw all heterosex as
>violation, with rape on a continuum with heterosex. (The Morning
>After)
One of the few things more depressing than reading Roiphe's warped History of Feminism and its Ills is reading someone else, quoting it uncritically. Who are these "feminists"? Obviously, white women in the 70's and 80's, not to mention a particular narrow and isolated strand thereof who were trying to carve out new liberatory possibilities in sexual and living relationships. Whether their experiments succeeded or failed (by external standards?), they are a drop in the bucket of women's critical responses to sexual assault and the relationships between different types of sexual violence or harassment. My recommendation, if we must pick a relatively recent starting point in order to trace a geographically and historically continuous "movement" for you, is that you return to the 1800's for some reading in feminist theory. You'll find a lot of it is written by black women. Be prepared for a radical challenge to your limited and inaccurate set of assumptions about Feminism and it's View (as if It were some Monolith) of sexual assault and sexual politics.
Jane G.
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