The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus.

• Author: Abrams, Kathryn

Feminists have had notorious difficulty handling challenges from within our ranks. The "sex wars"(1) struggle, in which opponents of pornography and advocates of sexual expression tarred each other with claims of false consciousness, produced lingering hostilities. Mainstream feminists first decried the race critique as freighting their efforts with "extra baggage," and only slowly recognized that it exposed a dynamic of erasure within feminism itself. In the wake of the antagonism and wasted effort produced by these failures, some feminists have voiced an unsteady resolve: to give ear to the unorthodox in feminism, to attempt to reconceive feminist efforts along pluralist lines. This resolve has been challenged by the emerging controversy over "date rape" on university campuses. Camille Paglia fired the first shot, charging that campus rape policies resurrect parental protection, creating a generation of women unable to enjoy the "sizzle" of sex or protect themselves against its inevitable excesses.(2) Paglia's scattershot cultural indictment and adulation of a dark, immutable male sexuality ("Guess what, it's hot.")(3) confounded her message and made it difficult to gauge her target. Yet Paglia's challenge has been seconded in ways that are more difficult to ignore. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Katie Roiphe warned that exaggerated claims of date rape "betray[] feminism" by portraying women as fragile, vulnerable, and unable to negotiate the "libidinous jostle" of contemporary life without paternalistic rules and restrictions.(4) With the publication of her book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus,(5) Roiphe adds to the date rape critique the voice of an author explicitly concerned about the future of feminism.

Roiphe's book is ultimately unsatisfying, for both stylistic and substantive reasons. Its narrative is bathed in second-hand nostalgia for a golden age of sexual revelry that Roiphe never witnessed. Its subtext--that sexualized oppression is mainly a problem inside women's heads--is absurd outside the rarified atmosphere Roiphe describes, and makes little sense within it. Its relentless portraits of shrill campus leaders and their sulking, maladjusted followers will try the patience of all but the most generous feminist readers. Yet the book's larger message is one that feminists cannot afford to ignore. As a student drawing on recent experience, Roiphe speaks from the vortex of the controversy. While her rhetoric reflects the current taste for mocking "political correctness," her concern with women's fear-filled abdication of the sexual realm has a more established pedigree.

Roiphe's book voices the concerns of a subset of feminists, women old enough to have participated in the "sex wars" and young enough to dominate "Generation X." These women worry about whether depictions of pervasive male aggression and coercion imply female passivity; and whether advocacy of expanded legal protection signals a return to paternalism, or undermines a woman's assertion of individual responsibility for her own direction and security. They want to fight against the oppression of women without surrendering their belief in the present possibility of women's agency. The publication of Roiphe's book provides an occasion for feminists who do not share her views to think seriously about how to respond.

1. DATE RAPE'S OTHER VICTIM

   Roiphe argues that a campus movement that depicts women as victims of pervasive male sexual aggression has transformed feminists into thought police, and women into fragile vessels. Feminism has joined hands, she contends, with both authoritarianism(6) and the recovery movement.(7) The result is a growing wall of legal and social restrictions, and behind it, a generation of women who obsess about trauma and violation, yet lack the will or the savvy to direct their own sexual lives.(8)

   As stern as Roiphe's conclusions might seem, her argument is not structured as a polemic. It emerges from impressionistic portraits of college life, the apparently ludicrous extremes of which frame Roiphe's indictment. In form, her stories are oddly reminiscent of the narratives of Patricia Williams, an author who shares few of Roiphe's substantive perspectives.(9) Like Williams, Roiphe is a perplexed observer, a foreign correspondent in a world gone awry; she is confident in her own perceptions, yet vertiginously aware that they challenge the sanity of all those around her.

   The main thrust of Roiphe's argument is delivered in the first four chapters. The first chapter, "The Blue Light System," describes the cloud of sexual fear that has settled over many American campuses. Prodded on the one hand by campus education on date rape and, on the other, by growing concerns about the spread of AIDS,(10) students' lives are pervaded by a sense of vulnerability, a new and discomforting awareness that sexuality connotes risk.(11) At first, Roiphe handles this theme with poignant balance; as the chapter proceeds, however, that balance gradually tips in a single direction. According to Roiphe, college women's obsessive focus on weight and fitness reflects an effort to "elud[e] the pressures of the outside world,"(12) and the bathroom graffiti writers "aren't worried about enough freedom anymore--they are worried about too much danger."(13) She argues that in the date rape and safe-sex workshops students don't simply learn how to make refusal or condom use less embarrassing, they also learn how to acquiesce in politically prescribed views of the world.(14) "I look for signs of frustration, rebellion, dissent," Roiphe writes, "but there are only heads nodding in consensus."(15) The result is that the "hard, bright, hedonistic light"(16) of sexual freedom and experimentation--which Roiphe views as the birthright of the post-adolescent--has been replaced by the "blue light" of campus safety.(17)

   The "date rape crisis," the primary protagonist in this struggle to instill fear, is the focus of the following two chapters. In "Taking Back the Night," Roiphe offers a montage of images from the yearly marches that have become a cultural ritual in American campus life. To Roiphe, these marches represent the apogee of feminism as recovery: emotion-drenched spectacles of mutual affirmation in which young women discover the revelation of sexual violation as a route to power. Roiphe is frankly contemptuous of these events, dissecting the dress and bearing of the participants, parodying their utterances of support and the homogeneity of their discourse, pointing out instances in which the emotion of the moment has led women to embroider or fabricate rape charges.(18) Her frustration with these public displays contrasts sharply with her sympathetic rendition of a more personal revelation:

   Once, over a cup of coffee, a friend told me that she had been raped

   by a stranger with a knife. I was startled. Small, neat, self-contained,

   she was not someone prone to bursts of self-revelation. She described

   it, the flash of the knife, the scramble, the exhaustion, the decision to

   keep her mind blank, the bruises and the police. After she had

   finished, she quickly resumed her competent, business-as-usual

   attitude, her toughness, but I could tell how hard it had been for her

   to tell me. I felt terrible for her. I felt like there was nothing I could

   say.(19) This abbreviated, furtive revelation, made almost without breaking stride to a listener who remains trapped behind the silence of her own discomfort is, to Roiphe's mind, a normative point of reference. It is a model that neither blunts women's individuality nor "celebrate[s] their vulnerability .... [their] victim status."(20) The distance between this conversation, and the spectacles in which vulnerability and broken silence are parlayed into power, prompts Roiphe to investigate "not ... what the marchers are saying, but ... why."(21)

   Roiphe's ensuing scrutiny of the date rape crisis takes up the following chapter of the book. In "The Rape Crisis, or |Is Dating Dangerous?'," she argues that the "one-in-four statistic," the "epidemic" of date rape on campuses, reflects not a change in behavior but a new way of interpreting sexual encounters.(22) primed by freshman orientation programs that tout the pervasive hazards of non-public encounters, of mixing alcohol and sex, and of emotional as well as physical coercion, young women have begun to feel pressure and see danger in all heterosexual interaction.(23) Not only does Roiphe see in such warnings restrictive codes of ladylike conduct worthy of her grandmother's time, she also sees familiar images of fragility and asexuality in the portraits of guileless, bamboozled women.(24) "The assumption embedded in the movement against date rape is ... [that] men want sex, women don't," Roiphe argues. "In emphasizing the struggle--he pushing, she resisting--the rape-crisis movement recycles and promotes an old model of sexuality."(25)

   To Roiphe's mind, the conviction that sex is "our Tower of Babel,"(26) a zone of confusion and mutual misunderstanding, and the resultant longing for a simpler time of sexual innocence and social predictability, are baggage that feminists can do without:

   Imagine men sitting around in a circle talking about how she called

   him impotent and how she manipulated him into sex, how violated

   and dirty he felt afterward, how coercive she was, how she got him

   drunk first, how he hated his body and couldn't eat for three weeks

   afterward. Imagine him calling this rape. Everyone feels the weight

   of emotional pressure at one time or another. The question is not

   whether people pressure each other, but how that pressure is

   transformed in our mind and culture into full-blown assault. There

   would never be a rule or a law, or even a pamphlet or peer-counseling

   group, for men who claimed to have been emotionally raped or

   verbally pressured into sex. And for the same reasons--assumptions

   of basic competence, free...