Roiphe Lacks Proof

"Someone's rape may be another person's bad night," writes Katie Roiphe in her controversial book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus. A year later, the debate her words sparked still reverberates in the media and on university campuses.

"The image of the delicate woman bears a striking resemblance to the fifties ideal that my mother and the other women of her generation fought to get away from," Roiphe recently told an audience of 500 at the Institute of Politics. Anti-rape activists, she contends, have manipulated statistics to frighten college women with a nonexistent "epidemic" of date rape, and have encouraged them to view sexist jokes, straying hands and leers as intolerable assaults.

To her credit, Roiphe asks some provoking questions: Is the women's movement cloaking itself in Victorian standards of female purity and helplessness? Isn't the women's movement about women standing up for themselves, instead of waiting for administrators to do it for them?

Yet the problem with Roiphe is not that she asks these questions, but that she just doesn't seem to have the evidence to substantiate her answers. The Morning After is poorly argued and full of misrepresentations and erroneous information. Roiphe may be, as she so smugly tells her readers over and over, the lone English graduate student who has actually read Clarissa, but it's clear that when it comes to the nonacademic world, she hasn't done her research.

Roiphe herself acknowledges in her introduction that The Morning After is not a scientific survey, but stems out of "frustration, out of anger, out of the names I've been called." Indeed, much of her slim book is dedicated to diatribes against her fellow classmates at Harvard and Princeton. She gets so bogged down in the personal, that she forgets about her attacks on the political. And where she does get political, she gets her facts mixed up.

Roiphe spends much of her time attempting to debunk a 1985 Ms. magazine study that found that one out of four women are the victims of rape or attempted rape. And while there are some valid criticisms of the Ms. study, Roiphe fails to address other, more conservative studies such as one conducted by the Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, that have found that 13 percent of adult American women--one in eight--have been raped at least once.

But whether it's one in four, or one in eight, the reality is that women are still getting raped. Dismissing widespread sexual violence as a myth is convenient, but doesn't really erase the problem. Roiphe herself smugly asserts numerous times that she was "date raped" and is none the worse for it; that may be so, but that doesn't mean it should be socially acceptable.

For Roiphe, the realm of sex is still a man's game, and if a woman wants to play, she needs to play by the rules. In one anecdote, she describes a friend who tells off obscene phone callers by informing them that she was her high school's "blow job queen." While that may be a worthy achievement, you have to wonder about an equation that links sexual service with one's own personal identity.

If, as Roiphe maintains, women have achieved sexual equality, why are they still affirming their sexuality through male orgasms rather than their own?

It's too bad Roiphe never bothers to address that question.

Hallie Z. Levine's column appears on alternate Saturdays.