Editor:
The feminist perspective in the universities in the '90s has become a male-bashing campaign. As Katie Roiphe points out in her book The Morning After, women have come a long way, and it looks like Victorian feminists are going to take them back. Critics of the feminist movement like Rene Denfield and Roiphe say feminism has become sidetracked on anti-phallic, anti-heterosexual extremism. The movement has been diverted from equality issues to a Victorian-style "moral and spiritual crusade." The Victorian feminist "solutions" to women's problems lead to sexual repression, limitations on free expression, and more prisons.
It is a view that holds that all women are hopeless victims of omnipotent male power and there is no such thing as desire within women. Women do not wish to be sexually desirable, they are being exploited by wicked men. The female body is evil and the male gaze is sin. But as Roiphe points out, what one woman may consider sexual harassment, another may consider sexual pleasure. Sexual harassment is everywhere and every man experiences it when he turns on the television and a woman luridly asks him to call her 900 number. Roiphe thinks today's women are often rewarded for being oppressed and rewarded for being sexy.
She also believes the "date rape" movement is more than a movement against rape. It is a movement to dictate Victorian codes of sexual behavior. Literature is dispersed by universities dictating appropriate sexual behavior. Roiphe writes that rape-crisis feminists have reproduced the idea that guarding women's bodies against male violation is a life-or-death issue. Date rape "survivors" are like Holocaust or plane crash survivors. Roiphe believes with their overt political psychology feminists have created the idea that date rape shatters a woman's life, that MTV, rape culture and "glamorized images of degraded women" have done this to her, she can never trust men again, society has allowed this to happen. With this view, Roiphe says, feminists are institutionalizing female weakness.
In Denfield's new book, "The New Victorians," she argues many feminists view all intercourse as rape, and women as morally superior. She also believes that women trapped in the cycle of welfare could care less about the crusade against pornography. Denfield says 19th Century Victorian-style feminists got sidetracked on anti-females mores of the time. She thinks the same thing is happening today. The movement has turned into a repressive moral crusade that has little to do with women's lives.
W. Steve McKinnon
Political Science Senior