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Songs of Innocence and Experience: Dominance Feminism in the University

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Songs of Innocence and Experience: Dominance Feminism in the University SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE: DOMINANCE FEMINISM IN THE UNIVERSITY Kathryn Abrams Editor's note: This article is based on a book review of Roiphe's book is ultimately unsatisfying, for The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on both stylistic and substantive reasons. Its narrative is Campus, by Katie Roiphe. Reprinted by permission of bathed in secondhand nostalgia for a golden age of the Yale Law Journal Company and Fred B. Rotham sexual revelry that Roiphe never witnessed. Its and Company from the Yale Law Journal, vol. 103, subtext that sexualized oppression ismainly a prob- pp. 1533-60. lem inside women's heads-is absurd outside the Roiphe describes and makes rarefied atmosphere Roiphe's Feminists have had notorious difficulty handling little sense within it. Its relentless portraits of shrill challenges from within our ranks. The "sex wars" campus leaders and their sulking, maladjusted fol- book voices the struggle, in which opponents of pornography and lowers will try the patience of all but the most advocates of sexual expression tarred each other generous feminist readers. Yet the book's larger mes- concerns of a with claims of false consciousness, produced linger- sage is one that feminists cannot afford to ignore. As ing hostilities. Mainstream feminists first decried the a student drawing on recent experience, Roiphe subset of race critique as freighting their efforts with "extra speaks from the vortex of the controversy. While baggage" and only slowly recognized that it exposed her rhetoric reflects the current taste for mocking feminists, women a dynamic of erasure within feminism itself. In the "political correctness," her concern with women's wake of the antagonism and wasted effort produced fear-filled abdication of the sexual realm has a more old enough to by those failures, some feminists have voiced an established pedigree. unsteady resolve: to give ear to the unorthodox in Roiphe's book voices the concerns of a subset of have participated feminism, to attempt to reconceive feminist efforts feminists, women old enough to have participated to dominate along pluralist lines. in the "sex wars" and young enough in the "sex wars" That resolve has been challenged by the emerg- "Generation X." These women worry about whether ing controversy over "date rape" on university cam- depictions of pervasive male aggression and coer- and young enough puses. Camille Paglia fired the first shot, charging cion imply female passivity and whether advocacy that campus rape policies resurrect parental protec- of expanded legal protection signals a return to to dominate tion, creating a generation of women unable to paternalism or undermines a woman's assertion of individual responsibility for her own direction and enjoy the "sizzle" of sex or protect themselves against "Generation X." its inevitable excesses. Paglia's scattershot cultural security. They want to fight against the oppression of indictment and adulation of a dark, immutable male women without surrendering their belief in the sexuality ("guess what, it's hot") confounded her present possibility of women's agency. The publica- message and made it difficult to gauge her target. Yet tion of Roiphe's book provides an occasion for femi- Paglia's challenge has been seconded in ways that nists who do not share her views to think seriously are more difficult to ignore. Writing in the New York about how to respond. Times Magazine, Katie Roiphe warned that exagger- ated claims of date rape "betray feminism" by por- "DOWN BY LAW"? traying women as fragile, vulnerable, and unable to Feminists might begin by disaggregating the parts of negotiate the "libidinous jostle" of contemporary the negative imagery Roiphe invokes. One reason life without paternalistic rules and restrictions. With that women within the dominance framework are the publication of her book The Morning After: Sex, viewed by critics as passive or dependent is that they Fear, and Feminism on Campus, Roiphe adds to the rely on mechanisms provided by the state, the uni- date rape critique the voice of an author explicitly versity, or other institutions to challenge sexualized concerned about the future of feminism. injury. July 1994 13 We might ask, first, why the resort to state or preted. Most people interpret the actions of those other quasi-legal protections should connote depen- around them in light of stereotypes, which include dence, vulnerability, or passivity. In fact, recent not only stigmatizing caricatures but also shorthand memory offers potent counterexamples of groups explanations that help people assimilate complex whose resort to law was not associated with images of aggregations of facts. One factor that encourages the vulnerability or dependence. Black litigants in 1960s disparate imagery remarked above isthat the actions school desegregation suits were not viewed by ob- of the groups "blacks" and "women" tend to be inter- servers as "cowering" behind a wall of legal rights. preted according to different stereotypes. Women They were depicted as asserting themselves, claim- invoking legal protections may be characterized as ing their rights, and pressing strongly for the rectifi- dependent or vulnerable, because women, as a group, cation of injustices. Why are 1960s blacks (a group have often been characterized as vulnerable and that included women) and 1990s women (a group dependent. Moreover such characteristics have ex- that includes blacks) depicted in such different ways? plicitly been invoked, sometimes by women, in seek- One explanation may be that civil rights activists ing state intervention on their behalf. were prepared to rally, march, engage in nonviolent An additional piece of the puzzle-that ex- Black resistance, and expose themselves to considerable plains why black litigants have not been character- physical danger, in addition to litigating their cause. ized in that way, although some of them are women, litigants in Yet feminist activists also rely on methods other and female litigants have, although some of them than litigation; critiques of feminist rallies and edu- are black-is provided by the analysis of Kimberle 1960s school cational initiatives occupy much of Roiphe's book. Crenshaw. Crenshaw argues that cultural imagery Other factors seem to be at work in shaping contrast- relating to blacks reflects popular perceptions of desegregation ing images of the two overlapping groups. black men, whereas cultural imagery relating to One factor may be the mediating stereotypes women reflects popular perceptions of white women, suits were not through which the actions of each group are inter- thereby dichotomizing the relevant imagery in ways viewed by observers as "cowering" behind a wall of legal rights. that would not be possible were the images to ad- with some women's experience of, or aspiration for, dress the experiences of black women. autonomy. Changing social views of government inter- vention may be a second factor shaping the diver- WOMEN'S VICTIMIZATION AND AUTONOMY gent perceptions of the resort to law. Black civil WOMEN'S rights litigants may have escaped characterization as But why is a given woman's experience of, or aspira- vulnerable or dependent because the government tion for, autonomy inconsistent with the recogni- protection invoked by litigation was not, at that tion of socially created obstacles that prevent many time, understood to imply dependence. A Reagan- women from addressing sexualized injury on an indi- era mobilization of public sentiment against Great vidual basis? When feminist theorists say that we Society programs has resulted in a reconcep- should permit women recourse to law without re- tualization of governmental protection; it is now quiring them to address offenders on their own, they more likely to be construed as conferring an un- are not necessarily saying that women are intrinsi- earned advantage or as connoting the dependent cally unable to resist acquaintance rape or speak straightforwardly to sexual harassers. It is important, character of the beneficiary. As the increasingly Ciov er- acrimonious debates over affirmative action and in light of critiques such as Roiphe's, to ask how to the detri- welfare reform have demonstrated, these images those positions have become confused, mental protection now impede African American men and women, as ment of feminist efforts at reform. on a group well as women of a variety of races. How the revelation of constraints is now more likely A third reason for the divergence in the images comes to be understood as a statement implicating that re- may be the unexamined assumption of a public- any given individual is the first question to be construed as private distinction. Exclusion from a school system quires attention. The confusion reflects, in part, a The decision is, according to this framework, a public wrong, misapprehension by feminism's critics. conferring an which makes (public) legal redress entirely appro- to authorize legal intervention in response to par- priate. However, sexualized injuries-particularly ticular acts may imply no statement whatsoever unearned those such as date rape and sexual harassment that about the acts' victims. Laws that make theft or occur between acquaintances-are thought to be assault a crime make no statement about the capac- advantage or as private wrongs. Despite the fact that they have been ity of victims and require nothing more than that rendered public by the creation of a legal claim, victims give evidence. Even laws that premise inter- connoting the some critics persist in seeing their prevention or vention in part on the difficulties faced by victims in rectification as a private matter, a matter of indi- effecting private resolution do not claim to describe dependent vidual responsibility. Thus the resort to legal means all members of the victim class. They may be based in such cases represents the failure of individual on the probability of barriers to individualized re- character of the responsibility-the woman's responsibility-to pre- sponse or the probability of barriers in the most they are not inconsistent with the vent or resolve the problem.
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