Katie Roiphe

Last updated
Katie Roiphe
Katie Roiphe.jpg
Roiphe in 2013
BornKatherine Roiphe
(1968-07-13) July 13, 1968 (age 55)
New York City, U.S.
OccupationNonfiction writer, critic, professor
Period1993–present
Notable works The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (1993), Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939 (2007)
Parent Anne Roiphe

Katie Roiphe (born July 13, 1968) [1] is an American author and journalist. She is best known as the author of the non-fiction book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (1993). She is also the author of Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End (1997), and the 2007 study of writers and marriage, Uncommon Arrangements. Her 2001 novel Still She Haunts Me is an imagining of the relationship between Charles Dodgson (known as Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . She is also known for allegedly planning to name the creator of the Shitty Media Men list in an article for Harper's Magazine .

Contents

Background and education

Roiphe grew up in New York City, daughter of psychoanalyst Herman Roiphe and noted feminist Anne (née Roth) Roiphe. She attended the all-female Brearley School, [2] received an AB from Harvard University/Radcliffe College in 1990, and received a PhD in English Literature from Princeton University in 1995.

In 2001, Roiphe married attorney Harry Chernoff in a Jewish ceremony in Amagansett, New York. [3] They had one daughter, Violet; they separated in 2005 (the year Roiphe's father died), and later divorced. [4]

She subsequently had a son, and has defended being a single mother. [5] [6]

The Morning After

In her first book, The Morning After, Roiphe argues that in many instances of supposed campus date rape, women are responsible for their actions. "One of the questions used to define rape was: 'Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?' The phrasing raises the issue of agency. Why aren't college women responsible for their own intake of alcohol or drugs? A man may give her drugs, but she herself decides to take them. 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." [7]

In the review for The New York Times , Christopher Lehmann-Haupt praised the book, calling it a "Book of the Times" and stating, "It is courageous of Ms. Roiphe to speak out against the herd ideas that campus life typically encourages." [8] Writing for The New Yorker , Katha Pollitt gave the book a negative review, calling it "a careless and irresponsible performance, poorly argued and full of misrepresentations, slapdash research, and gossip." [9] Pollitt's review was in turn criticized by Christina Hoff Sommers in Who Stole Feminism? (1994). [10] The Morning After received a positive response from Camille Paglia, who called it "an eloquent, thoughtful, finely argued book that was savaged from coast to coast by shallow, dishonest feminist book reviewers". [11]

Cultural criticism

Roiphe's second book was 1997's Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End. She also began to contribute reviews and essays to Vogue , Harper's , Slate , The Washington Post , and The New York Times . In 2008, she published an essay featured in the anthology Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers. In her essay, entitled "Elect Sister Frigidaire", [12] Roiphe writes that Hillary Clinton is "in many ways the feminist dream incarnate, the opportunity made flesh, the words we whisper to little girls: 'You can be president. You can do anything you want.'" Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani noted that some of Roiphe's observations were in "stark contrast" to what Kakutani considered some of the "antifeminist" pieces in the collection. [13] She has also written a novel based on the life of Lewis Carroll and his relationship with the real Alice, called Still She Haunts Me, which was published in 2001.

In 2007, Roiphe published Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939. Donna Seaman, in the trade publication Booklist , gave the book a starred review, writing, "Roiphe, inspired aesthetically and philosophically by the writings and lives of these social and artistic pioneers, offers sophisticated psychological, sexual, and social analysis, fashioning uncommonly affecting portraits of uncommon men and women." [14] In The New York Times, the editor and critic Tina Brown called it "the perfect bedside book for an age like our own, when everything is known and nothing is understood." [15] In The New York Observer, Alexandra Jacobs conceded "Katie haters will be sorry to hear that it’s very absorbing. The author has done something constructive, for a change, with her contempt for the contemporary age’s lily-livered female psyche..." [16] Roiphe responded to some of her critics in an essay in Slate including Gawker . [17]

In 2012, Roiphe published the essay collection In Praise of Messy Lives. In The New York Times, critic Dwight Garner praised the book, writing, "I’ve begun recommending it to people, particularly to would-be writers, explaining that Ms. Roiphe’s are how you want your essays to sound: lean and literate, not unlike Orwell’s, with a frightening ratio of velocity to torque.... Among Ms. Roiphe’s gifts is one for brevity. She lingers long enough to make her points, and no longer. If I could condense my opinion of her new book onto a T-shirt, that Beefy-T would read: 'Team Roiphe.'" [18]

Controversy

In January 2018, Twitter users spread the information that Roiphe planned to name the creator of the anonymous Shitty Media Men list, a private spreadsheet that later became public. [19] The creator, Moira Donegan, outed herself preemptively in an essay for The Cut magazine. [20]

Academic work

Roiphe is a professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the Director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program. [21]

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Naomi Wolf</span> American feminist, journalist, and conspiracy theorist (born 1962)

Naomi Rebekah Wolf is an American feminist author, journalist, and conspiracy theorist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Faludi</span> American feminist author and journalist

Susan Charlotte Faludi is an American feminist, journalist, and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee commended for depicting the "human costs of high finance". She was also awarded the Kirkus Prize in 2016 for In the Darkroom, which was also a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christina Hoff Sommers</span> American author and philosopher (born 1950)

Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katha Pollitt</span> American poet, essayist and critic (born 1949)

Katha Pollitt is an American poet, essayist and critic. She is the author of four essay collections and two books of poetry. Her writing focuses on political and social issues from a left-leaning perspective, including abortion, racism, welfare reform, feminism, and poverty.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cathy Young</span> Russian-American writer (born 1963)

Catherine Alicia Young is a Russian-American journalist. Young is primarily known for her writing about feminism and other cultural issues, as well as about Russia and the former Soviet Union. She is the author of two books, a frequent contributor to the American libertarian monthly Reason, and a regular columnist for Newsday. In 2022, she joined The Bulwark as a staff writer. She describes her political views as "libertarian/conservative".

Victim feminism is a term that has been used by some conservative postfeminist writers such as Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf to critique forms of feminist activism which they see as reinforcing the idea that women are weak or lacking in agency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michiko Kakutani</span> American critic, writer (b. 1955)

Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.

Date rape is a form of acquaintance rape and dating violence. The two phrases are often used interchangeably, but date rape specifically refers to a rape in which there has been some sort of romantic or potentially sexual relationship between the two parties. Acquaintance rape also includes rapes in which the victim and perpetrator have been in a non-romantic, non-sexual relationship, for example as co-workers or neighbors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Kipnis</span> American cultural critic and author

Laura Kipnis, is an American cultural critic, essayist, educator, and former video artist. Her work focuses on sexual politics, gender issues, aesthetics, popular culture, and pornography. She began her career as a video artist, exploring similar themes in the form of video essays. She is professor of media studies at Northwestern University in the department of radio-TV-film, where she teaches filmmaking. In recent years she has become known for debating sexual harassment, and free speech policies in higher education.

<i>The Morning After</i> (book) 1993 book by Katie Roiphe

The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus is a 1993 book about date rape by author and journalist Katie Roiphe. Her first book, it was reprinted with a new introduction in 1994. Part of the book had previously been published as an essay, "The Rape Crisis, or 'Is Dating Dangerous?'" in the New York Times Magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Roiphe</span> American novelist

Anne Roiphe is an American writer and journalist. She is best known as a first-generation feminist and author of the novel Up the Sandbox (1970), filmed as a starring vehicle for Barbra Streisand in 1972. In 1996, Salon called the book "a feminist classic."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Camille Paglia</span> American feminist academic and critic

Camille Anna Paglia is an American academic, social critic and feminist. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is critical of many aspects of modern culture and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary American feminism and of post-structuralism, as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.

<i>Bossypants</i> 2011 autobiographical comedy book by Tina Fey

Bossypants is an autobiographical comedy book written by the American comedian Tina Fey. The book topped The New York Times Best Seller list, and stayed there for five weeks upon its release. As of November 2014, the book has sold over 2.5 million copies since its debut, according to Nielsen BookScan. Additionally, Fey's Grammy nominated narration of the audiobook has sold over 150,000 copies on Audible.com. A paperback reprint edition was released in January 2012, from Reagan Arthur Books, an imprint of Little, Brown. The front cover features hand model and actor Joe Rosario.

<i>Who Stole Feminism?</i> 1994 book by Christina Hoff Sommers

Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women is a 1994 book about American feminism by Christina Hoff Sommers, a writer who was at that time a philosophy professor at Clark University. Sommers argues that there is a split between equity feminism and what she terms "gender feminism". Sommers contends that equity feminists seek equal legal rights for women and men, while gender feminists seek to counteract historical inequalities based on gender. Sommers argues that gender feminists have made false claims about issues such as anorexia and domestic battery and exerted a harmful influence on American college campuses. Who Stole Feminism? received wide attention for its attack on American feminism, and it was given highly polarized reviews divided between conservative and liberal commentators. Some reviewers praised the book, while others found it flawed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roxane Gay</span> American writer (born 1974)

Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017).

<i>I Never Called It Rape</i>

I Never Called It Rape is a 1988 book by journalist Robin Warshaw. The book focuses on the hidden epidemic of acquaintance and date rape. The book is largely based on a nationwide study in the United States, the Ms. Magazine Campus Project on Sexual Assault. The title references the finding in the study that 73% of women whose sexual assault met the definition of rape did not identify their experience as such.

<i>Big Girls Dont Cry</i> (book) 2010 book by Rebecca Traister

Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women is a 2010 non-fiction book written by the American journalist Rebecca Traister and published by Free Press. The book focuses on women's contributions to and experiences of the 2008 United States presidential election. Traister places particular focus on four main political figures—Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, and Elizabeth Edwards—as well as women in the media, including the journalists Katie Couric and Rachel Maddow, and the comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who portrayed Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live, respectively. Traister also describes her personal experience of the electoral campaign and her shift from supporting John Edwards to Hillary Clinton.

Gray rape, also spelled as grey rape, is a colloquial description of sexual intercourse for which consent is dubious, ambiguous or inadequately established and does not meet the legal definition of rape. The term was popularized by Laura Sessions Stepp in her viral 2007 Cosmopolitan article "A New Kind of Date Rape", which says gray rape is "somewhere between consent and denial and is even more confusing than date rape because often both parties are unsure of who wanted what". The term "gray rape" has been criticized. Lisa Jervis, founder of Bitch magazine, argued that gray rape and date rape "are the same thing" and that the popularization of the gray rape concept constituted a backlash against women's sexual empowerment and risked rolling back the gains women had made in having rape taken seriously.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Barr Snitow</span> American feminist activist, writer, and teacher (1943–2019)

Ann Barr Snitow was an American feminist activist, writer and teacher. She was a co-founder of the New York Radical Feminists, and the (co-)author and (co-)editor of several books.

<i>On Women</i> 2023 essay collection by Susan Sontag

On Women is a nonfiction book by Susan Sontag published in 2023. Sontag's second posthumously published essay collection after At the Same Time (2007), it was edited by her son David Rieff and features an introduction by Turkish-American writer Merve Emre. On Women includes essays and interviews with Sontag about feminism, beauty, aging, sexuality, and fascism.

References

  1. Cooke, Rachel (31 May 2008). "The interview: Katie Roiphe". The Guardian . Retrieved 30 January 2019.
  2. Elizabeth Bumiller, "An Elite School Is Having a Tough Time Finding a Leader", New York Times, January 26, 1997.
  3. "WEDDINGS; Katie Roiphe, Harry Chernoff". The New York Times. 14 October 2001. Retrieved 12 August 2012.
  4. Traister, Rebecca (9 July 2007). "Katie Roiphe's morning after". Salon magazine. Retrieved 12 August 2012.
  5. Roiphe, Katie (5 October 2011). "Single Moms Are Crazy!". Slate. Retrieved 26 September 2017.
  6. Roiphe, Katie (11 August 2012). "In Defense of Single Motherhood". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 August 2012.
  7. Roiphe, Katie (13 June 1993). "Date Rape's Other Victim". The New York Times.
  8. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (September 16, 1993). "Divergent Views of Rape As Violence and Sex". The New York Times.
  9. Pollitt, Katha (October 4, 1993). "Not Just Bad Sex". The New Yorker.
  10. Sommers, Christina Hoff (1994). Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. Simon & Schuster. pp. 214, 298.
  11. Paglia, Camille (1995). Vamps and Tramps: New Essays. Penguin Books. p. xvi.
  12. Morrison, Susan, ed. (2008). "Contents". Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers. Harper. p. viiii. ISBN   978-0061455933.
  13. Michiko Kakutani, Candidate Clinton Scrutinized by Women, The New York Times, January 15, 2008.
  14. Seaman, Donna (June 1, 2007). "Uncommon Arrangements". Booklist.
  15. Brown, Tina (June 24, 2007). "Couples". The New York Times.
  16. Alexandra Jacobs, Roiphe Escapes From Herself, Delves Into Edwardian Marriages Archived 2008-05-20 at the Wayback Machine , The New York Observer, June 26, 2007.
  17. Roiphe, Katie (27 October 2011). "Gawker Is Big Immature Baby". Slate. Retrieved 26 September 2017.
  18. Garner, Dwight (November 27, 2012). "Defending the Unruly Realm: 'In Praise of Messy Lives,' Essays by Katie Roiphe". The New York Times.
  19. Garber, Megan (2018-01-10). "The Harper's Controversy: The Whisper Network Meets the Megaphone". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2018-08-24.
  20. Donegan, Moira. "I Started the Media Men List". The Cut. Retrieved 2018-08-24.
  21. "Katie Roiphe". Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, New York University. Retrieved 28 February 2020.