Fuck You Katie Roiphe

Katie Roiphe was Lena Dunham before Lena Dunham had gotten out of diapers. Anointed by New York media as spokeswomen for their respective generations of feminists in their mid-20's,  only Katie has a terrible habit of assuming her (white, middle to upper class, college educated, extremely fortunate) experiences and social circles actually represent the experiences of most women.

Lena at least knows that her fictional account in Girls was representative of a small subset, even if many media behemoths did not. And why didn't the NY Times realize this?

Because of Katie.

Katie Roiphe is doing the same thing to #MeToo that she did to the discussion of date rape in the '90's and motherhood 5 years ago: basing its acuity on talking to 20 of her friends and then telling big time male publishers what they want to hear. She also claims that her 20 friends are afraid to have the complicated conversations about levels of harmful behavior publicly.

Other people have explained it better than I could, both in Slate  and in The Cut.

You should definitely read those. Really. But if you don't want to click over, read this excerpt from Rebecca Traister in The Cut. 

If Roiphe were looking for someone brave enough to question the dictum “believe all women” — which, as an aside, isn’t quite the thing; it’s “believe women” and I know plenty of feminists, including me, who don’t simply believe women as a blanket practice, but do tend to “listen to” and “trust” them, which are different — she could have quoted amply from Bari Weiss’s column, entitled “The Limits of ‘Believe All Women,’” in the New York Times. Roiphe didn’t need to offer deep anonymity to a friend who wanted to say that “the sources” accusing Al Franken of groping women were “sketchy”; she could have quoted Mika Brzezinski, who said the same (and also questioned whether we’re really supposed to believe all women’s claims) on MSNBC. Roiphe’s nameless friend who wished someone could admit that power is an aphrodisiac must have missed Laura Kipnis’s piece wrestling with the implications of that old Kissinger observation, in The New York Times Magazine. Uneasiness over the category collapses and anonymity of claims on the Shitty Media Men list has been expressed eloquently by so many women, including Doree Shafrir and Jia Tolentino; in the Times Magazine, Zoë Heller wrote of the subjective nature of accusation, of how “my unexceptional office banter is your horrifying insult.”

The best take, though, is probably the most succinct:

The Roiphe story is the Nunes memo of feminist discourse.

— Irin Carmon (@irin) February 4, 2018

At this point, though, calling Katie a feminist is like calling Nunes a patriot.

They're both loyal to the powers that be, not ideas like equality and honor.

They can both fuck off.