Feminism Under Fire

By MARGARET EMERY

TITLE: THE MORNING AFTER: SEX, FEAR, AND FEMINISM ON CAMPUS

AUTHOR: KATIE ROIPHE

PUBLISHER: LITTLE, BROWN; 180 PAGES; $19.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: A young writer critiques campus feminism, with mixed results.

Nothing churns up publicity like the spectacle of feuding feminists. Just ask Camille Paglia. With her rancorous condemnation of writers like Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf, Paglia vaulted from the mossy groves of academia to the glossy pages of Vanity Fair. Now comes Katie Roiphe, 25, to play the part of heretic in the feminist crusade. In The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, Roiphe targets what she calls the "rape culture" spawned by college feminists who claim that no woman is ever safe from the threat of rape or sexual harassment.

While offering provocative insights on campus feminism, The Morning After is crippled by clunky prose and Roiphe's self-absorbed, sometimes jarringly cynical tone. A Princeton graduate student, Roiphe relies heavily on personal anecdotes in this book, resulting in an uneasy mix of research and reminiscence.

Roiphe does make several persuasive points. She charges that college feminists, in their zeal to raise awareness about date rape, have given new life to an old stereotype: the innocent woman who must be constantly protected from men's dangerous sexuality. Definitions of date rape, she contends, now include circumstances ("verbal coercion") that trivialize real acts of sexual violence. Regretted indiscretions of the night before, Roiphe insists, cannot become rape the morning after.

In her most provocative chapter, Roiphe examines the Take Back the Night march, an annual event at many colleges in which self-identified rape victims march through campus and speak out about their rape experiences. Take Back the Night isn't a personal gesture of reaffirming control over one's life, Roiphe contends, but rather a form of public group therapy. The speak-outs have more in common with TV talk shows that feature recovering alcoholics and incest survivors than with the efforts to end violence against women.

But Roiphe's shrewd observations have an ugly undercurrent. At one point she suggests that accounts of rape given at the marches may be fabricated or embellished: "The line between fact and fiction is a delicate one when it comes to survivor stories," she writes. "It's impossible to tell how many of these stories are authentic, faithful accounts of what actually happened. They all sound tinny, staged." Her insinuation is a cheap shot, unprovable and callous.

When Roiphe alleges that date-rape awareness and campus safety lights create a climate of anxiety where none existed, she implies that fear of rape is irrational hysteria, churned up by frantic activists. But women do get raped, and being aware of one's vulnerability is prudent, not alarmist.

Those who have grown weary of the stale vocabulary still embraced by some feminists may enjoy this book's blunt indictment of the we-are-all-victims mentality. But others may be put off by Roiphe's awkward musings and disturbing flippancy. Feminism thrives on many voices, but The Morning After contributes little to the discourse.