Katie Rophie's The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism

When the hardcover edition of Katie Rophie=s book The Morning After: Sex Fear, and Feminism was first published in 1993, the author was attacked by feminist writers, university students and some faculty members for her views and lack of scholarship. Rophie=s major argument was that the new feminist movement was turning itself into a cult of victimhood, assigning women the role of powerless victims. It was this argument that set off the worldwide protest by feminists and their supporters.

The book, written by Rophie when she was a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, was based on her experiences, both personal and educational, and her observations as a Harvard undergraduate and at Princeton. In the Introduction to the 1994 paperback edition of her book, Rophie writes, AIn the pages of this book, devoted to the idea of women taking responsibility for their actions, I am writing against the grain.@ (P. xiv) She adds that she did not think there was anything Aparticularly outrageous@ in her book to warrant Athe fury it inspired.@ (P. xxii)

The Morning After was inspired mainly by the annual Take Back the Night March which occurs on college campuses across the country. Rophie passionately believes that the content and drama of these annual marches and rallies perpetuate the stereotype of women as passive and helpless victims who live in constant fear of being raped. The Take Back the Night advocates, however, believe that the march is one of empowerment with women givi

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feels is a conservative mood in the United States that emerged during the Reagan and Bush presidential years. To Rophie, Take Back the Night is an Aumbrella march covering fear in general, frustration in general, and the belief that men are out to get women in general.@ (P. 46) The key problem underlying the belief that men are free to walk around in safety at night while women are not is that neither males nor females has complete freedom to walk around at night. Freedom from fear, Rophie writes, Ais a mythical premise and a state of mind. No one has absolute immunity from freak perils and strangers in the dark.@ (P. 47) She cites Princeton=s campus security estimates that half of all assaults reported involved male victims, although she states that Amen represent only a tiny percentage of victims of stranger rape, but rape is much less common than other forms of assault.@ (P. 47) Rophie makes a valid point here. However, a major concern of Take Back the Night and women at college is not as much stranger rape as date rape, verbal coercion and sexual harassment. This is the area in which Rophie deviates the greatest from current feminist thought. AAccording the common definitions of date rape,@ writes Rophie, Aeven verbal coe

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