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.