In what seems to be a case of history repeating itself, the internet is ablaze with tub-thumping anger the week I speak to American writer Katie Roiphe. Caroline Criado-Perez, who campaigned for female representation on English banknotes, got 50 rape threats an hour on Twitter; Prof Mary Beard was bombarded with multiple misogynist comments on her appearance, followed by bomb and death threats.
Roiphe, a journalist, author and, some would say, ardent polemicist, knows the feeling well. From essays covering subjects from feminism to motherhood, and Mad Men to Susan Sontag, Roiphe's writing elicits a tsunami of criticism whenever it appears in the New York Times or on Slate.com. Her work is collected in a new book of essays, In Praise of Messy Lives, in which the writer says that women incite more vitriol online.
“The rage against women is more intense and personal. Every time I write about my own life, 10,000 people attack me for being privileged, narcissistic or for being a terrible mother. If a male writer gets criticism, it’s less likely that his wife, his children or his appearance will be dragged into it.”
Roiphe has been dealing with criticism since long before the internet arrived. In 1994, at the age of 25, she published her first book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus. In it, she argued that women on American college campuses who had regretful sex often cried date rape. It outraged many, but the controversy made her name. She was accused of fraternising with patriarchy and dismissing sexist behaviour as something women should just get over.
There were also death threats and police escorts when she attended talks. Roiphe acknowledges her youth in writing the book, but stands by her views. “At the core of the book was the idea that the political language we use to describe sex is inadequate. It’s not complicated enough to describe the murky, ambiguous thing that happens in sex. The things I’ve written that have made people the most enraged are usually because I’m saying something that has connected. When people get angry, it’s because you touch a nerve.”
Roiphe admits that her biggest “horror” would be to bore people with her writing and is happy to be dubbed an “uncomfortablist” and a contrarian (she confesses an admiration for the late Christopher Hitchens), but sees herself more in the vein of Rebecca West or Mary McCarthy.
Her work is personal, and often topical, funnelling her ideas about the world while exploring popular culture or politics.
The book's title is celebratory, but simultaneously laments things we've lost in modern life. In an essay on Mad Men, Roiphe argues that we admire the chaos of the characters – their daytime drinking, their affairs – because modern life is so structured towards order and propriety. Doing something for the intensity is out of fashion.
“Even though we live in more tolerant, liberal times, the pressure to live life a certain way smacks of the old conservative pressures of the 1950s. All this healthy and enlightened living is not making people happy. One of the most dangerous aspects of these new values occurs in parenting, so the people who ‘fall short’ – divorced people, single mothers – are judged harshly.
“Our idea of what constitutes a good life is very narrow and the definition of a good household, or how to raise a child, is oppressive.”
One of Roiphe’s regular declarations is that most babies born to women under 30 in the US are born to single mothers.
Roiphe is divorced with two children, who don’t share the same father. It’s a subject she has written passionately about: the fury at single mothers and women such as writer JK Rowling, or women like Kate Winslet and Sinéad O’Connor who have children with different fathers.
“All of these women have created stable homes but there is great fury at them. It’s an anger directed at women who live their lives outside conventional structures. Mothers who are single and a sexual free-agent are very threatening for people.”
Some of Roiphe’s most interesting writing has been in relation to motherhood, and there is a sense that her work is a red rag, no matter what she writes. After the birth of her first child, she wrote a personal, poetic essay about the “narcotic” effect having a baby had on her – which was also criticised (Roiphe concludes that if she wrote a shopping list, she would incite aggression).
In a piece called Disappearing Mothers (renamed The Feminine Mystique on Facebook in the new book), she questions what happened to her contemporaries once they became mothers. Specifically, why intelligent women were replacing their profile pictures on Facebook with photos of their children?
“I started to notice it at dinner parties, where the men were having interesting conversations at the other end of the table, while smart, literary women talked about the best strollers. I can do those conversations too, but I wondered why these women were only talking about their children.
“When I saw them replacing photos of themselves on Facebook with images of their children, it seemed like a metaphor for a larger kind of effacement.”
Roiphe is articulate and makes some excellent points. I find myself agreeing with her on as many issues as I disagree with her and there are few grey areas.
Roiphe thinks the internet hasn’t been good for feminism, fuelling criticism of other women. “There’s a competitive cattiness that comes into play with successful women. The feminist idea of sisterhood is pretty sentimental: women have always been pretty hard on each other. Women went from not working to dominating the workplace and there’s a lot of insecurity about that rate of change.
“Do you get up before work at 5am to bake cookies for your child’s birthday party or should you not work and stay at home? These questions are so fraught that it makes women feel better to judge other women.”
She points to the examples of Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo president Marissa Mayer as women who have been mostly criticised by their own gender. In an essay on Hillary Clinton, Roiphe points out the women of Clinton’s own social class, as well as other educated women, simply don’t like her. Why? Because she’s powerful and successful.
Asked if she is, in fact, a feminist, Roiphe pauses for a long time. “I consider myself one in the historical feminist tradition like Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir, not [US website] Jezebel”.
She doesn't identify with certain kinds of contemporary feminism but says she teaches Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman at NYU. Roiphe is hugely readable and contradictory. She is a feminist, but not afraid to pull up women on their aggression towards each other. Even if she's not always right (the date-rape issues are problematic) the intellectual vigour she applies to everything is refreshing.
In Praise of Messy Lives is published by Canongate
