Katie Roiphe's morning after

In "Uncommon Arrangements," Roiphe seemingly describes the young Rebecca West, who had an affair and a child with married H.G. Wells, as needy and fishwifey, noting that Wells wanted "someone to care for him ... [while] Rebecca wanted someone to fuss over her." She kvells over Wells' long-suffering doormat of a wife, Jane. Describing her decision to stay with Wells after he had abandoned her and their newborn son, Roiphe writes admiringly, "Instead of responding to her husband's sudden absence with anger, Jane wrote to H.G. a warm understanding letter in which she blamed herself for being too possessive when he left, and set the relationship on its stable new course."

When I told Roiphe that I read this as a celebration of Jane's stoicism and a chastisement of West's demands for respect, she wrinkled her nose and said, "Really? I don't know why it came off that way." Asked if perhaps she was critical of West because she identified with her, she said, "I can imagine myself in Rebecca West's role, and maybe that does make you harder on someone."

Perhaps it's Roiphe's internal contradictions -- that she empathizes with the Rebecca Wests of the world but has made it her life's work to mock their high expectations and point out their hypocrisies; that she cannot decide between her desire for control and her desire for unbridled emotion -- that allow such varied reactions to her work.

"Some people see this book as telling them they should have affairs. Some people see it as a rousing defense of traditional marriage," she said, glad people can find in it what they want. "To me that is an interesting way to write," she said, "as opposed to what I wrote when I was younger, which was more domineering: Here's my idea, you must agree with me. I still like that kind of writing; I teach polemic at NYU, but that wasn't what I was after in this book so much."

Roiphe does teach polemic at NYU, hired as a professor at the school's well-regarded graduate program in Cultural Reporting and Criticism, founded in 1995 by pioneering feminist journalist Ellen Willis, who died of cancer last November. Roiphe's hire in the wake of Willis' death has led to what Alexandra Jacobs described in the New York Observer as "eye rolls" from "a certain social circle" that still views Roiphe as an antifeminist icon and her hiring an insult to Willis' memory. In fact, Roiphe has not technically taken Willis' job. Professor Susie Linfield has been promoted to running the program, and Roiphe is its second full-time professor.

Linfield has some choice words for anyone who questions Roiphe's appointment. "Ellen was completely uninterested in political correctness," she said by phone, adding that it was Willis who had originally hired Roiphe as an adjunct professor. Linfield later elaborated: "Both Ellen and I came out of feminism and the left ... Obviously Ellen was, and I am, aware that Katie does not come out of that tradition -- at all. The fact that we take seriously -- on an intellectual level, and as a writer and teacher -- someone with whom we have real disagreements apparently bothers if not angers some people. Frankly, I find that incredibly dispiriting if not appalling. And frankly, putting on that kind of intellectual straitjacket is exactly what we want our students to never learn to do."

Cultural critics might reasonably consider what it means to have Roiphe teach students where Willis once taught. But not all of them are appalled.

"I think she is not a ridiculous replacement for Ellen Willis," said feminist writer Jennifer Baumgardner, who has been critical of Roiphe's work in the past. "Superficially, sure, it's a total affront. But on another level I feel that Ellen Willis' philosophy about feminism was about not keeping herself ghettoized, because she knew it was through culture that these messages were really going to become transformative."

It doesn't hurt that everyone I spoke to who has been in a classroom with Roiphe -- Salon hires many of its interns from NYU's cultural reporting program -- raved about her teaching. "Katie's students adore her," said Linfield.

When I asked Roiphe -- who has taught a class called A Short History of Women Critics -- where she would place herself in the history of feminist writing, she blanched briefly, assuring me that she doesn't teach her own work, before answering.

"I often teach one of my favorite essays, which is Joan Didion's 'The Women's Movement,'" she said. "As I say to my students, there are some people who go to the barricades and there are some people like Joan Didion who stand at the cocktail party making fun of the people who go to the barricades. It's two different temperaments, and they're both admirable, and I would just be the person at the cocktail party making fun of the people at the barricades."

It's not lost on Roiphe or her critics that her mother was one of those protesting. "My mother was different," said Roiphe. "She was at marches with picket signs. I admire that feminist tradition as well, and feminist writing in a less ironic and satiric spirit. But there has to be room for both of those things. When my first book came out, there wasn't."

"The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus" (the "on Campus" part was dropped for the paperback edition to give it that extra backlash-fabulous oomph) was polemic, as Roiphe now admits, though she denied it at the time. In it, she attacked the anti-rape activists then advocating for blue-light safety systems, date-rape education, and holding Take Back the Night rallies, all of which Roiphe saw as fear-mongering that cast coeds as modern-day Clarissas, all weak and wobbly and awaiting their defilement in the hands of their Delta Tau Delta Lovelaces. Roiphe's feminist proclamation was that women loved sex too, and that "rape" was often simply subpar sex.

I was a college freshman the year that "The Morning After" was published, at a Midwestern Big Ten school. I lived in a dorm in the middle of the fraternity quad, on an all-female hallway on the ground floor. By the end of the year, I knew an awful lot of people who had had varying degrees of what Roiphe would call "bad sex" and what some of them called "rape" -- though never officially. Of all the women who felt that they had had sex against their will, I did not know of a case of date rape that was reported during my freshman year. I was furious at Roiphe, for sending a message to young women that all sex was OK sex, and that they were probably complicit in any violent sexual experiences they might have had. In my freshman year, Roiphe's book was jauntily kept in some fraternity houses, a talisman against the potential succubus of the date-rape accuser.

Roiphe based a good deal of her argument on anecdotal evidence that did not hold up under scrutiny, and on her dislike or skepticism of the women who got up at Take Back the Night rallies to tell their stories. The book was widely attacked by feminists like Gloria Steinem and Katha Pollitt; the latter carpet-bombed Roiphe's reporting in a review in the New Yorker.

In "The Morning After," as in her current book, Roiphe (less subtly) trafficked in some of the same appealingly retro complaints about women: that they are whiny and hypocritical. It's clear that the kind of female strength she admires is derived not from the courage to speak up about mistreatment but from stoicism: the willingness to suck it up, put your clothes back on, and chalk it up to the wildness of unsensible emotion. Weakness is the quality she most deplores, and "victimhood" is her favorite verbal spear.

Next page: "She's the Antichrist"