Kelley,
I don't think that the claim that Roiphe's description of the rape hysteria is restricted to one or two elite institutions works. It is a natural development from the underlying assumption in much feminist literature first that the barrier to women's emancipation is men (or 'patriarchy') and second that men are inherently violent. With those assumptions, it is natural to take the direction that Roiphe describes.
You will say no doubt that this is anecdotal evidence (sorry to introduce real world events), but in my three years at the - hardly elite - Middlesex Polytechnic, nearly twenty years ago, the women's group then campaigned for the same goals as those described in Roiphe's book: lighting, chaperones etc. At the same time the women's group conducted a violent campaign of intimidation against a lecturer, Peter Webb, author of an acclaimed book, Erotic Art, pouring paint over his car, shouting down his lectures etc. When Webb refused to be intimidated, the Women's Group approached the Tory representatives on the college's funding body, the Joint Education Committee, and appealed to them to have him sacked - and this at the height of the Tories own 'Victorian Values' campaign.
Maybe its different now, you could say. But my colleague at LM, Jennie Bristow, wrote the same story about the way that the National Union of Students' women's officers had tried to stir up anxieties about rape, demanding that the police should patrol the campuses! The NUS here in particular has institutionalised the 'anti-harassment' policies through the creation of women's officers in every college. Characteristically the first group to be banned under the new harassment policy was the students' Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Just this week I read that the national NUS women's officer is bringing harassment charges against the president of the Student Union. The backdrop is that the women's officer is in a Trotskyist party, while the President is a mainstream Blairite. So much easier to accuse someone of harassment than to defeat their political viewpoint.
Beyond college life the influence of sex-negative feminists upon the social services and the criminal justice system is extensive. The 'socialist-feminist' Bea Campbell is well-known for her influence on the Social Services in the North East which have pioneered the break-up of families on spurious abuse charges, lobbied for by Campbell.
The domestic violence group at University of North London are advisors to the Home Office on rape prosecutions. It was they who prompted the Home Office here to increase greatly the number of prosecutions taken to court. To their dismay the prosecutions increased - but so did the acquittals to the same extent, with no increase in convictions (this all described in David Rose's book In the Name of the Law). Juries continued to insist that the charges should be believable and proven. The proposed strategy of the UNL team is to lower the standard of evidence in rape cases. Already the law has been changed so that boys of eleven here can be tried for rape - leading to one grotesque case where the defendants were given crayons and colouring books to keep their attention in court.
My point put simply is that the ostentatious dismissal of Roiphe's two excellent books is not because she is old hat, or insubstantial - on the contrary, it's because she has hit the nail on the head. Feminists are unwilling to here the unpalatable truth: that what was once a movement of liberation has become one of repressive legislation and moral conservatism.
In message <3.0.3.32.19990614071048.0070c028 at postoffice.worldnet.att.net
>, kelley <d-m-c at worldnet.att.net> writes
>
> Jim heartfield wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
>jim, i forgot to note in my previous post that a more productive analysis
>of the campus rape crisis might well take a cue from ehrenreich. that is,
>why are blue lights, etc so readily installed on these campuses? what's
>going on there? might it be that elite institutions like harvard and
>princeton use these safeguards in their promotional literature? "parents,
>you can be rest assured that you're daughter is safe with us for the next
>four years. blue lights, workshops, safety training..." that'll be
>30grand/year, thank you very much. chaching chaching.
>
>the point: people in positions of power have an interest in focusing on
>these issues because then they don't actually have to take seriously all
>the other anlayses feminists have set forth, analyses that turn a much
>brighter beam on capitalism. i'm certain it's much cheaper to install blue
>lights and set up workshops than it is to actually pay women equitably or
>make sure that women actually get decent positions among the professoriate,
>to provide decent health care and other benefits to *all* women on campus.
-- Jim heartfield