Katie Roiphe, a journalist and professor at New York University, has been trashed for her views on #metoo and in response she suggests there is a Stalinist tenor to the debate, which is trying to police thought and shut down free speech. She is concerned about the dangers of collapsing distinctions between different types of male misbehaviour and being indifferent to due process. She argues there is a “silent majority” who are deeply supportive of bringing abusers like Weinstein to book, but who think that crying foul over a stray hand or a sleazy date is counterproductive, undermining more serious cases of actual assault.
Her 1993 book, The Morning After, criticised what she called the “rape crisis movement” then sweeping college campuses. “If we assume that women are not all helpless and naive, then they should be responsible for their choice to drink or take drugs. If a woman’s ‘judgment is impaired’ and she has sex, it isn’t always the man’s fault; it isn’t necessarily always rape.” That brought accusations that she was “enabling misogyny” and this time round the attacks are even more vicious. She says: “There’s been a lot of flattening of misbehaviour, everything from rape to a bad date is getting chucked in the same bin. Real damage to reputations is being done; some of it justified, some of it not.”
Born 13 July 1968 6.30am New York with a psychoanalyst father and a noted feminist mother, she has a 12th house Sun Mars Venus in Cancer, so isn’t scared of an argument. Her Sun Venus square Saturn in forced-to-be-self-reliant Aries in her 10th, so she’s a curious mix of emotionally volatile and cool, a good organiser who gains respect through hard work. Her Sun Venus are also trine Neptune and sextile Uranus Pluto in Virgo in her 3rd, so she’s keen on leading-edge thinking and expressing herself with vigour.
Tr Uranus is conjunct her Saturn exactly now, as her Harper’s piece is published, which is a time tensions often erupt into the open. She’ll be challenged and pressured through 2018/19 with tr Pluto opposing her Sun and trine her Pluto.
She’s a stalwart personality so it’s not surprising she worries that the broader aspects of the #metoo debate, as she did in the date rape controversy, categorize women as weak and undermines their sexual agency.
Katie Roiphe, a journalist and professor at New York University, has been trashed for her views on #metoo and in response she suggests there is a Stalinist tenor to the debate, which is trying to police thought and shut down free speech. She is concerned about the dangers of collapsing distinctions between different types of male misbehaviour and being indifferent to due process.
Mary, To be honest I’d never heard of Katie Roiphe before; and she is, I suspect, deliberately provocative. But there’s merit in some of what she says. You can’t equate hand-on-knee or suggestive jokes with rape; and risk losing the argument if you do.
I’ve never been a fan of some of the date-rape claims. If you get blind drunk and don’t remember, then how do you know what on earth happened? Coercive drugging with roofies is a different matter – long prison sentences should follow.
There’s always a risk when these kinds of things surface that it goes too far, the public get satiated and switch off, a few false allegations get exposed and the whole thing dies a death. Apart from which it runs the risk of making women sound like weak, fragile creatures and all men like voracious sadists – which is not my experience.
#metoo is great since it took some women a great deal of courage to out their predators. But then others jumped on the bandwagon with less cause and the man-haters joined in. The debate needs to cool slightly and stabilise. Otherwise you’ll find firms won’t employ women for fear of harassment charges and men are becoming thoroughly confused.
From Mary: The posting system didn’t work for me on your Roiphe post, so I wanted to send this to you another way. I’m a fan of yours but was disappointed by that post, which struck me as reactionary in the same way that Katie Roiphe is.
I’m not a fervant me-too-er, but I have read about Katie Roiphe and think she is very deservedly being criticized for decades of bad-faith intellectual grandstanding at the expense of women. She was influential in sowing doubt about whether rape “really” existed to any significant degree on college campuses.
And please consider her duplicitous behavior recently when she was apparently going to dox the woman who started the Shitty Men in Media list. Roiphe was exposed because a fact-checker from Harper’s called the woman to confirm details for the article–yet Katie claimed she didn’t even know the woman’s identity.
Mainly I’m disappointed you are framing the “me-too-ers” this way–as if they are a mob. And yet I have yet to hear of an example where the me-too movement has gone to excessive lengths. Might they go too far? Sure. But have they? I don’t see it. And if they did, does that make Roiphe a victim? Not on the facts of her case. I’d say it’s long, long overdue to take their complaints seriously.
Why not do a post about the astrology behind Katie’s “attack” of Moira Donegan? I think that’s far more in tune with the zeitgeist. I don’t see women going backwards on this issue any time soon.