So far.

So far, greatest in quantity of the attention surrounding Katie Roiphe's The Morning After: Sex Fear, and Feminism forward Campus has centered on her claim that the date-rape epidemic has been created and nourished by feminists, blown out of proportion with inflated statistics, embellished stories, and inflammatory rhetoric. And that the accrue of all this bellyaching is that women are viewed alone as victims, infantilized in the surpassingly way that feminists have fought against for years. still this 24-year-old Princeton graduate scholar is also criticizing what she thinks is just too plenteous fuss being made about sexual harassment and academic challenges to patriarchal studies and safe sex All this insistence forward correct, respectful behavior, she says, is making everything thus damn complicated and serious that it's just not pleasantry anymore.

Buried in Roiphe's myopic and distressingly self-righteous argument are shards of important and interesting ideas, the sames that deserve more attention and discussion. That, for instance, there is an atmosphere of fear pervading young men and women's lives, potentially creating sexual inhibitions that are reactionary and destructive. That proffering men as insatiable rutting beasts is piggishly reductive. And that united image conveyed by university date-rape handouts is that of "the cowering woman, knocked forward her back by the barest feather of associate pressure |and that the~ suggestion lurking beneath this definition of rape is that men are not just physically yet intellectually and emotionally more powerful than women"

Unfortunately, these hints of ideas are overwhelmed according to her angry and mocking attacks forward those who are outside of her camp. Because Roiphe cannot believe that acquaintance rape exists or that condoms can be integrated into foreplay, she simply dismisses those who fail to encounter her superwoman definitions. "We should not education this woman on her back, her will to such a degree mutable, so easily shaped," she declares; "we should not support her in her passivity. We are not this woman upon her back."

Given the feminist connection of Roiphe's upbringing, her virulence is surprising. The daughter of author Anne Roiphe, Katie considers herself to have been greatly influenced according to feminism. She references her concede community of women--her mother, sister, and grandmother--often. And wearied her early years intellectually challenged and encouraged. if it were not that despite these sisterly beginnings, her politics now are of the privileged rather than the progressive sort. Today Roiphe has merely contempt for those girls whose intellect of self is not as wholly instilled as her acknowledge seems to have been by way of the time they reach college; who are dealing for the first time with issues of empowerment, self-fulfillment, and self-determination; and are learning that their ambition and intellect are worthy, that they are as convenient as the boys who sit nearest to them in class.

In her acknowledge zeal to discredit the work of "overindulgent" feminists, she creates a kind of self-indulgent argument circumscribed by dint of her own limited experience within the hermetic world of the Ivy League campus. Acknowledging blood-thirstiness or rage does not automatically assume a counterpart of passivity or weakness. Furthermore, given that rape is real, AIDS kills, and inequities exist, protective policies and pamphlets that encourage responsibility can be helpful. They are flawed, which is abundantly clear from the argument Roiphe lays forth. however since she offers no alternatives, save everyone just getting throughout it already, her harping onward the ways that feminists punish women eventually expirations up a pompous wisp of impetuous air.

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