The Politics of Rape

“IT’S TAKEN its toll on me, all this stuff,” sighs Katie Roiphe tremulously. “It’s been very wearing. All the sick letters saying ‘I hope you get raped, I hope you get raped’. The sheer hostility. The fact of being attacked and attacked and attacked. Going to a party and knowing that people there hate you. The nasty articles, the personal abuse. I just feel so under siege and misrepresented and somehow sacrificed.”

More than anything else, however, Katie Roiphe feels utterly exhausted. She’s been through the wringer during the past few weeks and consequently feels as limp, creased and saturated as a piece of sodden laundry. Until recently, Roiphe was just another twenty-five-year-old Princeton graduate toiling on yet another PhD dissertation. Today, she’s a major Feminist (note that capital F) bête noire, a woman who’s been the target of so much public and private vilification that she’s contemplating having a bullseye printed on her forehead. “I should probably get one on my back too,” she adds with only a slight grin.

To return to wash day speak, Katie Roiphe feels that she’s been well and truly hung out to dry. “I’ve been turned into a cartoon version of myself,” she says. “People are saying that I’m saying things that nobody who isn’t behind bars would say – that rape does not exist, that a man can do whatever he wants. All the nuances and complexities of the questions that I’m asking are completely ironed out and ignored. What’s presented has

very little to do with the book I wrote. It bears virtually no resemblance to what I’m actually saying.”

So just what is Katie Roiphe actually saying? Her thesis which began life as an op-ed piece in the New York Times and then grew into her controversial book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, is simple enough.

At its core is the belief that a certain type of feminism, what Roiphe calls “rape crisis feminism,” has gone too far and has now become counterproductive. She argues that feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and others vastly exaggerate the actual incidence of rape and encourage women to see almost all sexual contact as rape or sexual assault. This, she says, represents a return to a pre-1960’s morality of female victimhood, passivity and innocence.

“Again and again,” she writes, “the rape crisis movement peddles images of gender relations that deny female desire and infantilise women. We’ve come a long way, and now it seems we are going back.”

Roiphe takes as the starting point for her case what she describes as the “hysteria” and “irrationality” about rape which prevails on many US college campuses. Feminist academics have produced studies claiming that as many as one in four American women are the victims of rape or attempted rape by the age of twenty-one.

Consequently, a climate has been created at many universities in which No Means No rallies and Take Back The Night marches have become commonplace. Female students are routinely given pamphlets warning them about the perils of dating, and some colleges have even introduced explicit and extremely strict rules of conduct between the sexes. (In The Morning After, there’s a description of an actual date-rape workshop for freshers at which a group of students are shown an admonitory film about passive young women being plied with drink and then being taken advantage of by sober, cunning male seducers.).

Katie Roiphe regards all of this as a massive, indeed absurd, over-reaction. She argues that the one-in-four statistic on which much of it is based is gross hyperbole conjured up with the help of an ever-expanding definition of rape that encompasses everything from “verbally coerced sex” to “sex to which you consented but regretted the next morning.”

“We have to learn to separate bad sexual experiences from rape,” she asserts. “What I object to is an expanding definition of rape to include things like verbal pressure by the man. This suggests that women are these gullible, timid creatures that have no will of their own. I also object to the notion that if a woman is drunk when she has sex, that is enough to constitute rape. Are we saying that women are not adult enough to be responsible for their own intake of alcohol or drugs? A man may give a woman drugs, but she herself decides to take them.

“Imagine men sitting around in a circle talking about how a woman called him impotent and how she manipulated him into sex, how violated and dirty he felt afterward, how she got him drunk first, how he hated his body and couldn’t eat for three weeks afterward. Imagine him calling this rape. Sure, people do pressure each other into having sex. They do it emotionally and in many other ways. And people do things they don’t want to for lots of different reasons, like maybe they had too many glasses of wine. If somebody pressures you into sex and you let yourself be pressured, that’s you. That isn’t rape.”

For the record, Katie Roiphe’s definition of what does constitute rape is: “The use of physical force, the serious threat of physical force, or sex with somebody who is incapacitated, such as passed-out drunk.”

Roiphe’s argument, as she confesses herself in the introduction to her book, is essentially an impressionistic one, based on her personal experiences of “the rape crisis ideology” during her time as a student at Harvard and Princeton. However, she believes that she has tapped into something bigger than a spat about the sex lives of students on Ivy League campuses in the States. This, she says, is merely a symptom of how genuine, practical, rational (her words) feminism has been superseded by a brand of “intellectual fanaticism” that is deceptively puritanical and ultimately self-destructive.

“Feminism should be about women being successful and powerful, not about teaching women that they live in permanent danger from big, bad powerful men,” she avers. “Feminists, some feminists, have been irresponsible about the images and language they use. In saying things like ‘One in four women will be the victim of a rape or an attempted rape” or “One in nine men would rape if they could get away with it’ or ‘All men are potential rapists’, what you’re doing is creating and perpetuating the idea of permanent sexual vulnerability.

“Portraying men as aggressive animals who are trying to rape us all the time is not the way to clarify things. It is not in the interest of feminism because of what it’s implying about females. We’re back to being victims again, back to being unable to take responsibility for our actions and our lives.”

At a hundred and eighty big-print pages, The Morning After is little more than a sizeable pamphlet but, as far as some people are concerned, the book might as well be Mein Kampf. In America where it was published last June, Katie Roiphe was subjected to the kind of hate campaigns that are usually reserved for serial killers or child molesters.

Feminists charged her with betrayal. She was labelled “the Clarence Thomas of women” by one critic – a damning reference to the black Supreme Court nominee who was accused of sexual harassment. Hundreds of her fellow students at Princeton signed a petition against her and she was eventually forced to move to New York to avoid the hostility. Threatening and abusive mail became a daily occurence – many correspondents expressed the hope that she would be raped, some preferred to see her killed.

Katie Roiphe’s crime was that not only had she challenged the orthodoxy of a certain kind of feminism but, worse again, she had blasphemed against what is, she says, America’s newest and most personal religion, the Church of Victimhood.

“It is a religion and its temple is The Oprah Winfrey Show,” she says. “Identifying yourself as a victim seems to fulfil some kind of spiritual need for a great many Americans. It allows you to abdicate responsibility and to blame somebody else, two of the greatest pleasures of modern life. Look at Lorena Bobbit, say, or the Menendez brothers. In general, the idea that I’m not responsible and that I’m a victim seems to be really appealing. It gives you your authority and, of course, your excuse.”

And nowhere, according to Roiphe, is this abdication of responsibility more evident than when it comes to matters of the groin.

“This is a very confusing sexual climate we live in,” she states. “There is a crisis in sexual identity which stems from conflicting sexual pressures. We have all these pressures saying that we should be going out and having sex and, at the same time, all these other pressures – call it family values, whatever – saying that we shouldn’t. And then, there’s AIDS which is having a huge effect. It’s always been confusing to be seventeen but it’s especially confusing now for this set of reasons. There’s a lot of ambivalence around and the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.

“And, in the collision of all these pressures, there’s this movement which offers a vivid vocabulary. If you feel uncomfortable, maybe you were sexually harassed. If you feel miserable the morning after sex, maybe you were raped. It offers a clarity and that’s appealing.”

Roiphe argues that women are especially susceptible to this yearning for codes and certainties right now because they are going through such a period of rapid change.

“It’s a symptom of anxiety about that change,” she avers. “Think of the opportunities presented to my grandmother compared to the opportunities presented to me. One generation and such huge changes. Women are moving up and changing their role in society so, naturally, there is a sort of reaching for the reassuring and the familiar. It’s a response to women gaining power. We want rules. Rules to tell us exactly how to deal with sex.” But here’s the rub. Katie Roiphe asserts that many feminists have fallen into the trap of securing freedom behind a brand new set of walls.

“They’ve tried to empower women by empowering them right back to where they started from,” she says. “You can see it in feminist literature and magazines. In that Ms magazine book, Calling It Rape, the author actually talks nostalgically about when the universities acted in loco parentis and when there were single sex dorms which were havens of No Men Allowed. Those codes of behaviour that are issued to female students on American college campuses are unnervingly similar to the guides of etiquette and behaviour given to young women in Victorian times. They certainly bolster the Victorian stereotypes of male and female sexuality, that men are just out to get it and women don’t really want any. These are our grandmothers’ values.

“Of course, sophisticated modern-day feminists don’t use words like ‘honour’ or ‘virtue’ anymore. They know better than to say rape victims have been ‘defiled’. But it amounts to the same thing. We’re sacred vessels again. This is the logical conclusion of these rules. I don’t like rules. I don’t want to make them and I don’t want to have to obey them. Feminism shouldn’t be about rules.

“Apart from the Orwellian fantasy aspect of it, the cameras in the bedroom, there’s also the fact that there are young people who think that everyday sex is so dangerous that they need these kind of rules. They need someone to tell them how to actually do it. Why are those Take Back The Night marches the only consistent political events on many campuses? Yes, these young women are afraid of sexual assault but they’re also afraid of sex. That’s what it’s come to.”

Katie Roiphe has always known that anger is a very necessary part of the engine that powers feminism. Her experience since the publication of The Morning After, however, has brought her into close contact with a very dark side to this anger which she believes is often unacknowledged and always unhealthy.

“I’ve been faced with this all the time since last June,” she says. “Many of the kind of feminists that I’m talking about are people who maintain a constant level of fury in their personal lives that is frightening. When I talk to these people I can see it in their eyes. Feminists, for example, who portray someone like Lorena Bobbit as a heroine are not thinking about Lorena or John Bobbit, they’re thinking about their own lives and there’s this fury that isn’t acknowledged. Basically, my point is that we have to say, as Prospero says about Caliban, ‘Darkness, I acknowledge mine’.

“Of course, anger is useful politically. Of course, anger is what motivates people to change things for the better. But not at a point where it’s not understood and it’s not acknowledged. That side of feminism which someone like Andrea Dworkin represents, that extreme stand, is fuelled by brutal personal fury that clouds judgement and precludes rationality. And that kind of feminism is absorbed into the mainstream in all sorts of subtle ways.

“What’s dangerous in feminism and what’s making it hard to talk about things is this unacknowledged anger. I think rationality is so important and analytic clarity and things like this. You have to be rational. This doesn’t mean that we deny our emotions but we have to be rational about our emotions.”

In her book, Roiphe includes some extraordinary quotes from the aforementioned Andrea Dworkin. Here, for instance, is Ms. Dworkin at an early Take Back The Night march in the late seventies: “Men use the night to erase us. The annihilation of a woman’s personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality, and so the night is the sacred time of male sexual celebration . . . Male sexuality, drunk on its intrinsic contempt for all life, but especially for women’s lives, can run wild, hunt down random victims, use the dark for cover.”

What Katie Roiphe finds alarming about this kind of rhetoric is not its extremism but how easily the sentiments behind it were “subsumed” into mainstream feminism.

“Andrea Dworkin is a fanatic,” she says. “This is a woman whose biography has led her to certain conclusions and who has what, I suppose, is a pornographic imagination and so on. But her use of rape as metaphor, the idea of men as women violators, is what underpins the rape-crisis movement and all the other things I’ve been talking about. This is the point. How did this happen? Why did it happen? How did we get to the stage where this was seen to be true.

“In the book, I quote a line from Andrea Dworkin where she says that ‘the traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill’. Rape-crisis feminists, even those less imaginative or excessive than Dworkin, propagate this idea that all male-female relations involve a ritual violation. They often do this unconsciously or only by implication but that, in the end, is what it boils down to.”

Andrea Dworkin has yet to respond to Roiphe’s book. Most of the other big names in American feminism have not been so reticent and only Camille Paglia has offered any support for Roiphe’s arguments (“Camille has said nothing but nice things about me, in public and private”). Naomi Wolf, on the other hand, author of The Beauty Myth and Fire With Fire, has been one of her most virulent critics.

“At first, Naomi regarded me as an upstart and a bit of a spoiled teenager,” asserts Roiphe. “Now, she tends to attack me as an equal (laughs). But I find her a difficult person to argue with. She’s a moving target, she’s every which way. She’s constantly accusing me of things I don’t say. The latest is that I’m causing people to get AIDS because I said that it’s okay to get drunk and have sex with people! How do I respond to that. Defending a negative review of my book in The New Yorker she said, and I quote, ‘Roiphe is condemning women who over-identify with women’s all too real victim status’. How do you argue with someone who lives in a universe where that sentence makes sense.”

Life on the book campaign trail has been comparatively easy for Katie Roiphe on this side of the world. Sure, there’s been plenty of abuse and snide attacks but little hate mail and no death threats (though, after this interview, she still had to endure the ordeal of trying to get a word in edgeways while Brush Shiels played the buffoon on The Late Late Show).

“The reaction over here, especially in Britain, was frustrating in a different way,” she says. “I had this idea that the British media were going to be more interested in ideas than the American media which did not prove to be the case. They don’t react to your ideas but to you as a person.

“There’s a particular irony to articles written by British feminists, who feel that they’re not being taken seriously and that I’m writing about trivial things, writing about what kind of shoes I wear or the colour of my skirt or whether I ate a biscuit during the interview. To me, it’s not fair. It all seems to be based on presentation, especially women writing about women’s issues.”

A weariness descends whenever Katie Roiphe discusses reactions to her book. You can almost hear it fall on the tape. When I joke that if she’s annoying that many people she must be doing something right, she doesn’t even smile.

She just shakes her head.

“It’s not worth it,” she concludes. “You’ve probably got me at a bad time, at the tail end of this trip, but that’s how I feel right now. I don’t want to be a public figure. I’m not a political visionary. I don’t want to make rules for people. Naomi Wolf does. She loves it and she’s good at it. I’d prefer to just go home and write and not have to be so responsible all the time. But what I’ve discovered is that that’s not what people want. They want spokespeople. They want visionaries.

“Count me out.”