Katie Roiphe quote
February 1, 2014 8:03 AM   Subscribe

In her epic takedown of Katie Roiphe's The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, Kathy Pollitt writes that Roiphe says that she was "'date-raped' many times and none the worse for it." The idea of whether rape must be associated with trauma to be recognized as rape is relevant to a paper I'm writing, and I'd like to refer to her actual quote. What is the quote, and what page is it on?
posted by quiet coyote to Writing & Language (7 answers total)
 
Mod note: Couple comments deleted. Just looking for the Roiphe quote and the page number, not for anyone else's thoughts about rape. If your comment is the quote, please make that clearer. Thanks.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:37 AM on February 1, 2014


I don't know how to hyperlink to this Amazon preview, but it's on page 79. You can do a "search inside this book" for the keyword and view the page.
"People have asked me if I have ever been date-raped. And thinking back on complicated nights, on too many glasses of wine, on strange and unfamiliar beds, I would have to say yes. With such a sweeping definition of rape, I wonder how many people there are, male or female, who haven't been date-raped at one point or another. People pressure and manipulate and cajole each other into all sorts of things all of the time."
That's the closest I can find without having the actual book handy. There are about 7 results that appear using the keywords "date-raped."

I searched on the actual keywords you mentioned from the article, and "none the worse for it" doesn't appear via this search method.

I'll be interested to see what you find. I remember when this book first came out and what a sensation it was at the time.
posted by cardinality at 8:51 AM on February 1, 2014


Just FYI, if you end up quoting the New Yorker review in your paper, it's Katha Pollitt -- your link has the wrong name.
posted by neroli at 8:57 AM on February 1, 2014 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: Oops- thanks re: Katha/Kathy.

Does she ever explicitly say that she was not traumatized, beyond just framing it as a normative experience?
posted by quiet coyote at 9:03 AM on February 1, 2014


Mod note: One comment deleted. Folks, if you don't want to answer, just don't answer.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:22 AM on February 1, 2014


Response by poster: I will reiterate that I am trying to figure out the particular quote to which Pollitt is referring (if one exists), which is why I posted the AskMe instead of re-reading the book. I am not looking for Roiphe's ideas about how rape should be defined.
posted by quiet coyote at 9:28 AM on February 1, 2014


quiet coyote, I think that the part about "none the worse for it" (and maybe "many times") are just Pollitt's characterization of what Roiphe wrote (quoted in cardinality's comment).

For your own purposes, it seems fair (to me) to infer from what Roiphe said that she didn't suffer trauma. I wouldn't assume she was "none the worse for" her bad experiences, though, or that she herself would say that.
posted by torticat at 7:10 PM on February 1, 2014


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