The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism
by Katie Roiphe
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When Katie Roiphe arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1986, she found that the feminism she had been raised to believe in had been radically transformed. The women's movement, which had once signaled such strength and courage, now seemed lodged in a foundation of weakness and fear. At Harvard, and later as a graduate student at Princeton, Roiphe saw a thoroughly new phenomenon taking shape on campus: the emergence of a culture captivated by victimization, and of a new bedroom politics in the show more university, cloaked in outdated assumptions about the way men and women experience sex. Men were the silencers and women the silenced, and if anyone thought differently no one was saying so. Twenty-four-year-old Katie Roiphe is the first of her generation to speak out publicly against the intolerant turn the women's movement has taken, and in The Morning After she casts a critical eye on what she calls the mating rituals of a rape-sensitive community. From Take Back the Night marches (which Roiphe terms "march as therapy",and "rhapsodies of self-affirmation") to rape-crisis feminists and the growing campus concern with sexual harassment, Roiphe shows us a generation of women whose values are strikingly similar to those their mothers and grandmothers fought so hard to escape from - a generation yearning for regulation, fearful of its sexuality, and animated by a nostalgia for days of greater social control. At once a fierce excoriation of establishment feminism and a passionate call to our best instincts, The Morning After sounds a necessary alarm and entreats women of all ages to take stock of where they came from and where they want to go. show lessTags
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This book idealizes the sexual liberation of the 60s whilst berating the safe-sex culture of the 80s. The "sexual liberation" of the 60s was fraught with problems for women, problems she chooses to cheerfully ignore. She thinks that her mother's and aunt's positive experiences of the 60s mean that the 60s were wonderful and that her negative experience of the 80s and 90s mean that the sexual attitudes of her decades suck, taking anecdotal evidence to be the end-all be-all in arguments. The author is resentful of the fact that all colleges promote condom use -- it's not much of a "personal choice" when AIDS and cervical cancer are at stake, FYI. She also completely misinterprets Take Back the Night, which is about empowering and giving a show more voice to women, not victimizing them. She thinks that because rape and sexual harassment are talked about negatively, sex is given a bad rap. If she thinks that non-consensual attention and sexual assault are in the same boat as consensual sensual acts, then she is welcome to hold those views, but they seem pretty confused to me. No means no, but yes also means yes! Outmoded at best and poorly-researched and pro-rape at worst, this book can be summed up this way: "I don't like condoms, believe my mother's accounts of the fun of the 60s as demonstrative of everyone's experiences of that time, and think that sexual harassment is a compliment, so you other feminists better stop whining about rape and sexual harassment lest I get even more pissed off at you and blame you for making sex's reputation worse!" show less
While this book may seem overly polemical at the end of the first decade of our new millennium, as someone who was a university graduate during the early 1990s, the complaints in Roiphe's book ring true. While the pendulum swing the other way to 'raunch culture' as the new form of empowerment can be quite sickening, the celebration of victimhood, fear of sex, and the need for so many women to parade themselves as victims to feel they are part of the 'right' crowd was an awful period for feminism.
Another book that had me nodding in agreement at some points, but throwing the book at the wall at others.
daughter of Up the Sandbox author comments on current victim feminism
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8+ Works 1,228 Members
Katie Roiphe received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in English literature. Her articles have appeared in "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", "Esquire", "Harper's", and "The New Yorker", among many other publications. She lives in New York City. (Bowker Author Biography)
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Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Sexuality and Gender Studies, General Nonfiction, Sociology
- DDC/MDS
- 370.19345 — Society, Government, and Culture Education Education Theory of education; Meaning; Aim Social themes
- LCC
- LC197 .R65 — Education Special aspects of education Special aspects of education Social aspects of education Educational sociology
- BISAC
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- Members
- 247
- Popularity
- 130,955
- Reviews
- 4
- Rating
- (3.25)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 1
