The Morning After: Sex, Fear, Feminism
By Kate Roiphe
Hamish Hamilton, 1993. 180 pp. $18.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Zanny Begg
From the ivory towers of Princeton, Kate Roiphe has let loose a tirade against the women's movement. Her book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, Feminism is a bristling attack on what Roiphe describes as "victim feminism" of the '90s. Drawing on the small, privileged sample of Princeton students, Roiphe attempts to explain her "anger" and "frustration" with feminism on campus.
The Morning After looks at the links between sex and fear which Roiphe feels are being promoted by the women's movement. Exploring this central theme, Roiphe leads the reader to very contradictory conclusions. Her strong libertarian tendencies and healthy suspicion of moralism make her a sharp critic of the more conservative "anti-sex" elements within the feminist movement. On the other hand, her sheltered background and superficial approach make her gloss over real dangers that exist for the majority of women.
Roiphe begins by bemoaning the increasing association between sex and danger "In the era of No means No", she writes, "we don't have many words for embracing experience. Now instead of liberation and libido the emphasis is on trauma and disease."
The main target of The Morning After is the campaign against sexual harassment and rape on campus. Roiphe argues that the campaign against rape has become a campaign against sex. Like Naomi Woolf, she criticises the women's movement for focusing on rape and women's vulnerability. She labels the anti-rape movement "victim feminism" and a "dead end gesture".
It is on this point that Roiphe is most coherent. She levels pertinent criticisms against a tendency in some sections of the women's movement to portray women as asexual in the campaign against rape. According to Roiphe, the emphasis on sex as dangerous has put feminists in the same camp as 19th century moralists. Roiphe very cleverly makes this point by comparing an 1857 manners guide, The Young Ladies' Friend, with a modern date-rape pamphlet. The message in both is that women are innocent, pure and asexual and men are dangerous and only after sex.
Roiphe takes this criticism too far, however, when she derides the annual take back the night marches as a celebration of women's victim status. She describes participants in the march, supported and encouraged by the crowd, getting up one after another and telling stories of how they were raped and abused. According to Roiphe, this has become "march as therapy".
Roiphe does not acknowledge that the take back the night marches have been mobilising increasing numbers of students in the struggle against rape and violence against women. Despite the limitations, this has to be a positive thing for feminist activists.
As Roiphe also clearly points out, she remains an observer and not a participant: "I remember when I was at college, looking out my window at the sea of faces". The influence and direction of political movements are determined by their participants. Roiphe's criticisms mean very little if she is not prepared to throw herself into the movement and argue for them.
In an attempt to trivialise the reality of rape for women, Roiphe documents two cases in which women invented stories of rape at a take back the night march. From these two isolated cases, she extrapolates that the movement has made victimhood powerful to the point where women want to identify as abused, to feel included and special.
Roiphe goes on to claim that rape is actually far more rare than the statistics indicate. The main evidence to support this claim is that none of her friends have been raped, and if rape was a real problem, she would have heard about it!
Roiphe's concern that the campaign against rape can deny women's sexuality is lost behind her own lack of understanding of how serious a problem sexual violence is.
According to Roiphe, men are not structurally more powerful then women. Roiphe sees it as "insulting" to suggest that men have innately more power then women in this society. Because she fails to grasp this central point, rape becomes an act of violence between unfortunate isolated individuals. It has nothing to do with sexism. It has nothing to do with inequality. It has nothing to do with the oppression of women.
Flowing on from this, Roiphe seems to suggest that there is then no need to build a movement that challenges sexism because women individually should shrug off their victim status and forget about feeling frightened. This is a key weakness in The Morning After.
Roiphe concludes by saying that she turned against the women's movement because "sometimes it's your friends that you have to fight". Her lack of understanding of the causes of women's oppression and the cruel reality for women beyond the cosy walls of Princeton make her the sort of "friend" the women's movement really doesn't need.