Thirty Years After 'The Morning After'
The following is a condensed version of "Thirty Years After The Morning After" by Elizabeth Grace Matthew, published at Law & Liberty.
Thirty years ago, Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism challenged the emphasis on “rape culture” and “date rape” that defined 1980s and 1990s feminism. The 25-year-old enfant terrible of a feminist discourse that focused on women’s victimization at the hands of men, Roiphe argued that, in the sexual realm, feminists should celebrate liberation and accept responsibility, not seek protection and embrace victimhood.
Three decades after The Morning After, the book remains relevant, controversial, and confounding, in part because Roiphe’s seminal defense of women’s sexual agency renders seemingly inextricable what are really two distinct arguments. The first, about women’s sexual indistinguishability from men, has proven too influential for our own good; the second, about women’s intellectual parity with men, has been ignored, much to our detriment.
Roiphe’s foundational contention is that women’s physical vulnerability in relation to men (which, like everyone in 1993, she did acknowledge as a biological reality) requires no unique legal protections, nor should it inspire any gendered social mores. In Roiphe’s view, women’s unequal sexual danger is an acceptable price for our equal sexual freedom: “Sex might be dangerous, but then so [is] driving a car.”
At women’s great expense, this assumption that women’s unique physical vulnerability requires no particular legal or social deference now undergirds feminist consensus around trans issues in ways that Roiphe could not have foreseen and likely did not intend. Across the country, female students and their parents are fighting to maintain our daughters’ privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms, as well as their safety and victories on athletic fields. Boys and men who identify as trans girls and women spike balls with dangerous force, steal athletic championships and records, and invade intimate spaces where women should be entitled to the same safety that men uniformly enjoy in their bathrooms and locker rooms (not to mention their prisons and shelters).
The second, related but distinct, strand of Roiphe’s argument was clearly, with 30 years’ hindsight, prophetic. Per Roiphe, if to any extent women are more apt than men to be agreeable, easily influenced, or intellectually dominated (whether due to biological predisposition or, as she would no doubt contend, to cultural norms), there should be no intellectual or psychological accommodation made within educational institutions for these deficiencies. Nor should we misappropriate the language of progressivism to pretend that such weaknesses are really strengths. When Roiphe’s friend complains that class discussion is too “phallogocentric” to make space for female voices and Roiphe counters that she always talks in class, the friend responds, “That’s because you have a masculine style of thinking.”
Roiphe assumes women’s intellectual parity with men, as do I; feminists in good standing, apparently, do not. But any feminism that denigrates reason itself as the sole province of dominating men while elevating utopian musings as the rightful province of other-regarding women is patently against women’s equality. The human capacity for reason is what separates us from the lower animals; women are every bit as human as men.
Feminists who redefine sentiment as morally superior to reason in an attempt to exempt their ideas from the thrust and parry of intellectual debate, instead imposing their cultural preferences by fiat, are asking not for equality but for special—infantilizing and subhuman—treatment. Two-year-olds have “voices.” So do dogs. But most of us don’t believe that morality requires equating toddler tantrums or canine yaps to substantive argument.
Yet, we are left today with an iteration of “feminism” that insists on protection from ideas that might offend and simultaneously elevates the feelings of the ostensibly marginalized over any facts that might refute those feelings. This approach, against which Roiphe argued so presciently thirty years ago, now defines not just feminist discourse but progressive political discourse as a whole.
“Feminist” and “antiracist” classrooms that decenter knowledge and argument in favor of impressions and experiences cultivate the impression of women and racial minorities as less authoritative and capable than white men. “Some feminisms,” per Roiphe, “are better than others.” Indeed, we have been elevating the wrong feminisms in academia for nearly half a century. As a result, we are now elevating the wrong progressive politics more broadly, as well.
Thirty years after The Morning After, it is long past time to offer women the unique physical protections we require and to withhold from us the infantilizing intellectual protections we don’t. But because society and academia today mostly do the exact opposite, women are being made into a new kind of second-class citizen.
Our increased physical victimization is the inevitable result of legal and cultural norms that treat us as biologically indistinguishable from men. Meanwhile, the offer of intellectual protection to women (as to any historically marginalized group) represents, as Roiphe intoned, our “personal, social, and psychological possibilities collapsed.”
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a Visiting Fellow at the Independent Women's Forum, a regular Opinion Contributor at The Hill, and a Young Voices Contributor. Her work has appeared in USA Today, America Magazine, Deseret News, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
