Women Explain Things to Me
On Katie Roiphe’s Trojan horse feminism, which empowers women to keep men empowered
Katie Roiphe’s new book, The Power Notebooks, is dedicated to a man. But even if it weren’t “For Tim,” it would be for men, the same way her first book was for men. That would be The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, which argued that women were at least partially responsible for their own rape. Roiphe hasn’t really stopped liberating men in her work since 1993 though parts of this book might trick you into thinking she has finally turned her attention to women.
The Power Notebooks’ uncharacteristic entry point is Roiphe’s numerous toxic romantic relationships: The man with whom she had everything in common except for him not wanting their baby; a hookup fresh out of electroshock therapy who took issue with her complimentary use of the word “dangerous;” the husband who kicked her out of the car with their howling child. As these various affairs tip from mere dickishness into actual abuse, Roiphe studiously avoids the word. “To call him abusive is to admit his power over me,” she writes of her troubling first marriage to a man identified only as “H.” (A quick Google, as Roiphe with her tremendous intellect is no doubt aware, points to attorney Harry Chernoff.) “It feels like it is giving him power to say he abused it.”
