as a feminist, i found these claims about katie rophie uninformed at best, and i wanted to write a good, solid reply. as an author with a deadline looming, i simply didn't have the time. thank you for articulating these arguments, and putting forth these ideas with such clarity and forthrightness.
beth goldstein (yet another sex-positive feminist)
>
> Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 16:41:56 +0100
> From: Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>
> Subject: Liza and kelley on katie roiphe
>
> In message <199906122153.RAA29813 at smtp1.erols.com>, Liza Featherstone
> <lfeather32 at erols.com> writes
> >
> >Jim--
> >
> >What in the world *have* you been reading about sexual politics for the past
> >ten years, my good man? If by "light years ahead" you mean feminist,
> >sex-positive and critical of retrograde right-wing elements in the feminist
> >movement and in the mainstream, I can only assume you haven't read Ellen
> >Willis, Alice Echols, Susie Bright, Carole Vance, Dorothy Allison, Arlene
> >Stein, Ann Snitow, Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English, Joan Nestle, Gayle
> >Rubin...I could go on and on. most of those women have been writing since
> >the 70s and 80s and are still writing. Roiphe's first book displays complete
> >ignorance of the debates on sex that feminists had been having since before
> >she was born. And going a little more younger -- how about Bust magazine?
> >and if your idea of "light years ahead" is ahistorically caricaturing
> >feminists as hysterical prudes...that kind of crap is even easier to find.
>
> Of course, Liza is right that I haven't read all the authors she cites.
> I can only speak about what I do know. But I agree that Alice Echols
> stuff on pornography was very good (but I think it dates back some time)
> and Ehrenreich's book The Hearts of Men is also pretty remarkable (but
> published in 1983).
>
> I don't think there is any need to caricature feminism that so readily
> caricatures itself. I am thinking of Bea Campbell (Britain's Dangerous
> Places, read it and weep), Catharine Mackinnon (Only Words - I saw Liza
> Jardine in the papers today boasting of the way that feminism had raised
> the issue of rape crimes in Bosnia, one of the more grotesque pieces of
> war propaganda stirred up by Mackinnon), at the University of North
> London's Child and Women Abuse Study Group the argument of the continuum
> of male violence (you know the continuum, from paying compliments
> through rape to snuff films) with Liz Kelly and Jill Radford (see their
> 'Women, Violence and Male Power', with Marianne Hestor), or if you want
> to see a feminist argument against the pill, see Sheila Jeffries article
> in her collection The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism.
>
> Of course there is a lot of very good writing and research in feminism -
> in one sense there is bound to be since this is the cutting edge of
> contemporary social theory. But good as the theorising is, the tendency
> is reactionary. So for example, I'd happily agree that Carole Pateman is
> one of the most important writers in political theory, but the truth is
> that her books on the social contract are well argued cases against
> democracy and freedom. Similarly, I thought Drucilla Cornell's book The
> Imaginary Domain was full of conceptual richness - but ultimately (and
> in spite of a powerful instinct against repression) she makes a tortuous
> legal argument for the regulation of sexual manners by the state.
>
> Liza faults Roiphe for ignorance of debates that were taking place
> before she was even born. But the problem is rather as you state it, the
> alliance between feminism and liberation existed in an age when the
> powers-that-be were traditional moralists. Today's moralists are drawing
> upon feminism's own arguments. All of the liberationary trends are in
> works written in the 60s and 70s. 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.
>
> In message <3.0.3.32.19990612130542.00724a38 at postoffice.worldnet.att.net
> >, kelley <d-m-c at worldnet.att.net> writes
> >as for katie rophie, oh dear jim i hope you're ready for an exchange with a
> >sex positive feminist about just how utterly wrong i think you are.
>
> I'm still waiting to hear the case against. Two arguments stand out from
> each of the books.
>
> 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)
>
> The second is summed up in an exchange with some students during a sex
> education lesson about AIDS. The students (young men and women 15-16, as
> far as I remember) were being taught the importance of quizzing your
> sexual partner about his or her past partners, about abstinence and so
> on. All were taking the message about the dangers of sexuality to heart.
> Roiphe asked them whether a cure for AIDS would release them from this
> arduous ritualisation of the dating game. As the records it they were
> perplexed, unfamiliar to the idea that sex could be anything but
> dangerous, and, ultimately, they said, all of this would be necessary,
> even if there were no AIDS. Her point, as I read it, was that the
> supposed dangers of sexual experimentation pre-existed AIDS, which
> served, in this lesson, as the justification for sexual conservatism.
>
> >
> >oh and tell me more about why you came to be familiar with les chantes de
> >maldoror, comte de lautreaument.... thanks
> >kelley
>
> My father (a fan of surrealism) forced it upon me at an impressionable
> age (around 11, I think) along with De Chirico's Hebdomeros, the Texas
> Chain Saw Massacre, Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, Eraserhead,
> Arcade, Metal Hurlant and other underground comics. It was a blissful
> childhood.
> - --
> Jim heartfield
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 17:06:10 -0400
> From: kelley <d-m-c at worldnet.att.net>
> Subject: Re: Liza and kelley on katie roiphe
>
> Jim heartfield wrote:
>
> >Of course, Liza is right that I haven't read all the authors she cites.
> >I can only speak about what I do know.
>
> which means you share same flaw as kate: generalizing, rather uncritically
> in her case, from particular subjective experiences of feminism on her
> campus and her limited reading range to denounce Feminism as this and that.
> ham-handed scholarship, though perhaps fine for a list where you'll be
> called on the carpet for your claims and probably won't reach a mass
> audience. i mean, if no one ever said silly things on listserves what
> possible fun could they be?
>
> But I agree that Alice Echols
> >stuff on pornography was very good (but I think it dates back some time)
> >and Ehrenreich's book The Hearts of Men is also pretty remarkable (but
> >published in 1983).
>
> and isn't this the point--that folks have been working on these issues for
> quite some time. ehrenreich's text is a classic, still published, still
> being used in college courses. roiphe says nothing new in her criticisms
> of a certain variant of feminism, but she does argue it rather badly.
> honestly, look at how ehrenreich structures her argument in HM: she makes
> a claim, provides a theoretically sound, though not uncontestable, reason
> for examining 'cultural artefacts' produced by professional middle class
> men, and systematically analyzes, with humor and lucidity, various aspects
> of popular culture and science: popular novels, magazines, playboy,
> medicine, psychotherapy, film.
>
> roiphe bothers with none of this. she provides no reason for focusing
> largely on her experiences at harvard/princeton or among the circles of the
> eastern literary establishment. she provides no argument for how she can
> generalize from her expiences to Feminisms in general. she paints
> extremely biased caricatures of feminist classmates and never explains
> whether these people are real, profiles, character types, if she
> interviewed them officially, how she came to know them, what exactly her
> relationship with them was. though we get some clue later, they are rather
> acrimonious it appears.
>
> oh sure, i'm applying social science standards to a work of fiction i
> suppose....it's got to be fiction because a journalist is taught to have
> higher standards than this....
>
> i think it highly inappropriate to maintain that roiphe's got to be
> accurate in her claims just because 1] she says it is so and 2] what she
> says fits into your view of the world.
>
> >I don't think there is any need to caricature feminism that so readily
> >caricatures itself.
>
> i'm sorry, have you not heard of marxist feminism, socialist feminism,
> black feminism, black feminist thought, etc?
>
> I am thinking of Bea Campbell (Britain's Dangerous
> >Places, read it and weep), Catharine Mackinnon (Only Words - I saw Liza
> >Jardine in the papers today boasting of the way that feminism had raised
> >the issue of rape crimes in Bosnia, one of the more grotesque pieces of
> >war propaganda stirred up by Mackinnon), at the University of North
> >London's Child and Women Abuse Study Group the argument of the continuum
> >of male violence (you know the continuum, from paying compliments
> >through rape to snuff films) with Liz Kelly and Jill Radford (see their
> >'Women, Violence and Male Power', with Marianne Hestor), or if you want
> >to see a feminist argument against the pill, see Sheila Jeffries article
> >in her collection The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism.
>
> ok, but this hardly constitutes the entire canon of feminist scholarship.
> there are many feminisms and types of feminist scholarship--they have
> different analyses of "what the problem is" and "why the problem is" and
> "where to go from here"
>
> >Of course there is a lot of very good writing and research in feminism -
> >in one sense there is bound to be since this is the cutting edge of
> >contemporary social theory. But good as the theorising is, the tendency
> >is reactionary. So for example, I'd happily agree that Carole Pateman is
> >one of the most important writers in political theory, but the truth is
> >that her books on the social contract are well argued cases against
> >democracy and freedom.
>
>
> let's say, instead, that it's a well-argued case against a certain
> understanding of democracy and freedom. certainly there is no absolutely
> clear cut agreement as to what these to concepts mean or refer to.
>
> > 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.
>
> analyzing? i see absolutely NO analyzing or arguments being forged in
> _TMA_. i see assertions. i see opinions. but I do not see reasoned,
> documented, footnoted arguments.
>
> >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)
>
> well i stayed up late to make sure the three ankle-biters having a slumber
> party weren't surfing porno sites; so i took the opp. to read TMA, as it
> had just languished on my bookshelf for the past two years. so, i can only
> speak to that text.
>
> firstly, the claim above is patently untrue. not only are there many many
> arguments against this position, what seems to me a minority position w/in
> feminisms, but many feminists that i've read and/or know are virulently
> opposed to mackinnon, dworkin, et al. what can you possibly make of this:
>
> "women's don't want to pretend to be weak and passive. and we don't want
> phony, weak, passive acting men any more than we want phony supermen full
> of bravado and little else. what women want is for men to be honest.
> women want men to be bold--boldly honest, aggressive in their human
> pursuits. boldly passionate, sexual and sensual. and women want this for
> themselves. it's time men became boldly radical. daring to go to the root
> of their own exploitation and seeing that it is not women or 'sex roles' or
> 'society' causing their unhappiness, but capitalists and capitalism."
>
> carol hanischm 'men's liberation' 1975,
>
> i could provide endless quotes refuting this claim that some sort of
> unitary body of theory called Feminism supports the claim that all hetsex
> is violence and/or that it exists on a continuum with rape.
>
> it's just astounding to me to read this sort of stuff. i have *never*
> encountered a flesh and blood feminist who ever said that all sex is
> violent, nor even on a continuum with rape. feminists have all sorts of
> concerns and violence against women is part of it, but rape or date rape
> isn't the *only* concern. what they *have* said, often enough, of sex is
> that film, tv, commercials, adverts are often structured around rape
> fantasies--that's a lot different from saying that sex is on a continuum
> with rape.
>
> secondly, i have taught women's studies courses in several different uni`s
> and i've not yet encountered one woman who thought like any of the women
> roiphe caricatured. indeed, every single one was hostile to any attempt to
> equate hetsex with rape. indeed, the more steeped in feminism the more
> likely the woman was to support varieties of sexualities and argue for sex
> positive feminisms, rather than denounce all forms of sexual imagery as
> pornographic violence against women. what's also rather pathetic is that
> while she complains that her fictional Feminism portrays women as passive
> and weak, she paints women and emerging feminist as dopes, sheep mouthing
> whatever they hear or read, as if they can't think for themselves. hop on
> the women's studies listserv and you'll discover that women's studies
> professors hardly encounter this phenom. in their classrooms. there is a
> lot of resistance in the women's studies classroom, and students creatively
> reappropriate what they learn there.
>
> roiphe, it seems to me, fails to understand that feminists *become*
> feminists in a continual process that never really ends and that feminisms
> are dynamic processes, continually shifting in a process of internal and
> external critique. this is the beauty and agony of feminisms, it seems to
> me, something that a lot of marxists might take a cue from --though not
> because i think it'll resolve the acrimonious sectarian disputes. failing
> to understand this, she fails to grasp the pscyhological stages that
> feminists go through--often enough, at first, they are angry, seeing the
> world entirely through a lens that structures everything in black/white
> oppositions.
>
> she also fails to acknowledge that her experience is indeed confined
> largely to a college age, elite group of women and campus feminists. that
> matters a great deal. of course they flip out over date rape, etc....
> what other problems do these women face on those campuses? are they women
> who worry about always living on the edge of poverty? are they women who
> are worried about labor market segregation? are they women who live in
> worlds in which the family is often seen as a source of identity and
> solidarity against the world of workplace exploitation, oppression,
> domination? are they women who realize that the men in their lives often
> experience similar kinds of oppression and exploitation on the workplace or
> in encounters with the state, police, etc?
>
> no, women at harvard and princeton don't worry about these things because
> they generally aren't exposed to them. this rape crisis that she thinks
> she's discovered is very likely an effect of the institutions she went to
> and the social circles she's traveled in. it may well be real --there and
> then--but this does NOT make it an accurate, generalizable claim
>
> kelley
>