Katie Roiphe's morning after

Some may consider Roiphe an architect of the destructive schism between those in the women's movement who perceive themselves as "victims" and those who believe that the word creates an enfeebling paradigm. In fact, Roiphe merely, and possibly unknowingly, served as a megaphone, amplifying some of the battles that had raged for decades between the varied interests joined beneath the large umbrella of the feminist movement. Roiphe's NYU predecessor Willis had made her own name years earlier by opposing anti-pornography advocates like Catharine MacKinnon. Roiphe's success was in playing on the public's notion that feminism was threateningly monolithic and in casting herself as the lone dissenter storming its walls -- strong, sex-loving and unplagued by the fragility to which she is so allergic.

"She is definitely guilty of 'Well, I don't have this problem' thinking," said the writer Baumgardner. "She seemed to have no understanding that not everyone was her, and she may have been very unique in being so resilient or so lucky that she was never raped."

Baumgardner acknowledged her youthful abhorrence of Roiphe's work. "Initially I was like, 'She's the Antichrist," she said. "I had had a lot of personal experience around [rape] and I was offended by what she wrote. But I think I'm realizing that there was a gift in that book: the message that our generation could be feminists but could evolve and figure it out for ourselves. I came not to be threatened by what she had said, but to see it as an invitation to question things and think independently and call that feminism."

"I still believe everything I wrote in that book," Roiphe said, adding, "I wrote it when I was 23, and were I to write it now, I would write it differently. It's definitely the book of a very young person."

But the victimization-averse Roiphe is clearly still bristlingly pissed at her early critics. When I brought up Pollitt's New Yorker review, she said, "It was name-calling. She wrote, If Katie Roiphe was your friend, would you tell her if you were raped? ... It was a pretty personal attack."

Pollitt responded, "If you put yourself out there and write a controversial book, not everybody is going to love you, and her book was attacked very much on its content." Since Roiphe used the fact that none of her friends had been raped as evidence in her argument about the overblown nature of campus rape claims, Pollitt said, then it was not inappropriate to wonder if perhaps her friends had not confessed their rapes to her.

Pollitt's criticism, said Roiphe, "was like playground stuff ... I really encountered that when I wrote that book -- the schoolyard stuff. I would go into a taping of a radio show or a TV show, and no one would talk to me. You'd feel that atmosphere of the mean girls. I definitely experienced that aspect of feminism."

Of course, there are mean girls who write negative reviews about you in the New Yorker and there are mean girls who sneer at the rape testimonials of young college women, which is what Roiphe did, and no doubt accounts for some of the treatment she received in kind.

As it happens, I was the kind of mean girl who once refused to shake her hand, 10 years ago, when I was working in an office where she came in for a meeting. When I told her this, she looked only mildly surprised.

"George Will calls that book a barnburner," said Roiphe. "I don't regret that I'm the person who would write a barnburner. It's not really where I am now in my life. It's hard to be that person: You're talking about not shaking my hand. There were a million people who were not shaking my hand. People write to be loved, so it's distressing to write and be shunned, but obviously there was something in me that was drawn to that."

Roiphe doesn't disagree with critics like Deborah Siegel, whose new book "Sisterhood Interrupted" charges that Roiphe was partially responsible for the rupture between her mother's generation and her own. "I have to say my mother fully supported all my views," Roiphe pointed out. "Possibly because, you know, what choice did she have? I see my work in continuity with people like Betty Friedan and with what I see as the deeper purpose and real mission of feminism. But it was certainly a rupture with the personal-is-political, a woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle, Gloria Steinem type of feminism."

If she sees her work in line with Friedan's, she might consider a paragraph in the preface to "Uncommon Arrangements" in which she writes about the "dreary debates about marriage" that can "be entirely summed up in the question of who has cleaned up the smattering of Legos scattered across the floor of the baby's room." Roiphe wonders, "Why should there be so much fury attached to the most insignificant drudgeries of domestic life? ... Why when women have so many choices, are we still as angry as gloved suffragettes hurling bricks through windows? What unmitigated bliss, one does wonder, were we expecting?"

Here still is Roiphe's seductively low-pitched murmur, a signal tuned precisely for the ears of men who are sick of being hassled about the fucking Legos already. "This endless conversation about who is doing what in terms of house responsibilities and all that," said Roiphe wearily. "To me it goes back to that great Joan Didion essay: We are mired in the trivial."

But, I replied, citing Linda Hirshman's "Get to Work," which argued that the division of domestic labor is precisely where feminism has failed, we worry about the Legos because the person to whom it falls to pick them up (or to cook, clean, do the laundry and childcare) is the person who has less freedom to make money and live an independent life. And that person is often a she.

"How lucky we are that that should be our biggest issue," deadpanned Roiphe. "You'll find that it actually doesn't take that long to pick up the Legos. What really takes a long time is the three hours of rage and resentment about it."

As she talked about these issues -- even in the context of her new book, set a century and a continent away -- it's clear that Roiphe is, as she has always been, an embodiment of a particular kind of irritant: the kind that chafes at women unsure of how aggressive and polite, how sexy and militant, how earnest and ironic to be in this age when freedoms may be ours, but at a price that can still be painful. She has mellowed, certainly, in the 14 years since I first picked up her police siren of a book. Her writing has blossomed too; she shares a damnably silver tongue with fellow feminist bugaboo Caitlin Flanagan. Or perhaps it's her critics, some of whom developed our own sensibilities in reaction to her work, who have mellowed in our reaction to her.

As "Sisterhood Interrupted" author Siegel told me, "'The Morning After' provided the stimulus in some of her peers to commit themselves to feminism." Siegel, who was in graduate school in 1993, said, "She's the reason I do what I do. I was locked in the ivory tower and here was my peer talking about how women are no longer victims because she didn't know any. I found that insanely infuriating. I figured if Katie Roiphe was out there making these arguments, I wanted to write for a wider audience."

Katie Roiphe was probably the reason I do what I do, too. I asked her if she was aware, or felt any accomplishment, in having re-energized a feminist movement, or energized a new generation.

"I don't know if the people I was re-energizing should have been re-energized," she said with a dry laugh. "But to write something where somebody says you're the Antichrist ... I'm not above thinking that that's an achievement itself."

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