I wrote this a week ago, and sent it out, but no one wanted it and I'm too late for the news cycle, but when I'm mad I can't let it go.
Oh * please* Katie Roiphe
Katie Roiphe’s essay The Naked and the Conflicted in last Sunday’s New York Times about young versus old male American writers and sex made me roll my eyes at first. It was long, kinda smart sounding, and totally annoying. I agreed with part of her point (less swagger and more ambivalence overall) and believe me, I wish there was more writing that explored sex. But it eventually made me so mad even though I know her shtick is to piss people off in the name of the polemic.
Seriously- why only men? White heterosexual men? No one I know still looks to white male heterosexual novelists to give us back a portrait of ourselves and our time, so why does Roiphe? Where is the diversity of our nation? She refers to Chabon and Franzen as “our great male novelists.” Come on.
Even if she insists on being so narrow minded to only look at old-white-satyr-novelists versus young-white-limp-dicked-novelists, couldn’t she pick the right white hetero novelists? Stephen Elliot, Steve Almond and Jonathan Ames should have been considered in any essay about white male writers whose work explores sex, and yes, sex as salvation. I guess they aren’t quite as anointed by the Times and Oprah as Franzen and Foer. (And since I originally wrote this Almond wrote this awesome and overlapping response to Roiphe –Katie Roiphe’s Big Cock Block- on Elliot’s website The Rumpus.) And maybe they aren’t as anointed because the critics at the Times don’t show much love for sexually explicit work, as Almond noted. But the Times and The New Yorker loved John Wray’s novel Lowboy -and so did I- and John Wray’s protagonist believes that if he has sex he can save the world. How’s that for sex “making things happen?”
She doesn’t write about the literary shift away from the novel and towards memoir at all. Which has been, um, kinda big the last ten years or so.
And most importantly to me- what about the women? Alice Munro, Mary Gaitskill, Dorothy Allison, Darcey Steinke, Eileen Myles? I would love to read an essay about what female writers are exploring sexually these days and WHY- and what that says about our culture at large. What about memoirs from Mary Karr, bell hooks, Catherine Millet, Kathryn Harrison and especially Toni Bentley’s The Surrender? (Bentley, through her search for meaning in the pleasures of anal sex, may be Mailer’s true successor.) What about Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick? Or are female writers too whiney and victim-y, hypocritical and weak for her?
Can’t at least some of the heirs to the White Male Novelists be women? Brown? Gay? Memoirists?
The Times did not allow comments, which led me to believe that Ms. Roiphe didn’t want to hear what the rest of us thought. Can’t Katie handle the twitterati and bloggerheads that wanted to take her on?
Novelist Jami Attenberg tweeted: @jamiattenberg re: roiphe nytimes piece. would have been awesome if it were abt women who write about sex really well instead of men who don't.
There was much discussion ranging from the funnily self promotional “Why wasn’t I included!” tweets of Jonathan Ames and Stephen Elliot:
@JonathanAmes iwish somebody would tell k. roiphe of the ny times that i devoted a whole chapter(18)to one bout of vigorous love-making in WAKE UP, SIR!
@S___Elliott Roiphe's argument cant handle me RT @quailty: @annacarollo: How would Roiphe's argument handle someone like Dennis Cooper? Or @S___Elliott?
To the slightly pissed off and ironic:
@karlsteel apparently Katie Roiphe has a wistful piece in the Times about the rapey literature of yesteryear.
@cthon1c Did Roiphe just call Safran Foer a fag?
And my favorite tweet about the piece, from Colson Whitehead:
@colsonwhitehead Per Roiphe, adding sex scenes to new book. Kinda wish protagonist wasn't a giant, talking ferret
And of course there was a lot of general commentary calling the pink illustrations emasculating and hilarious.
Blodic.us blog did an encapsulated commentary: “Old ones: assholes. New ones: pussies. Only pointed conclusion is that John Updike's still a perv.”
Ayelet Waldman (Chabon’s wife) tweeted a David Foster Wallace quote on Updike from the New York Observer a while back, from the same piece that Roiphe quoted.
And Jessica Crispin wrote on Bookslut: “I just realized it's just like everything else she writes: she states a few obvious things, a few not at all true things, then draws ridiculous conclusions from them. (Like, I don't know -- date rape is a myth, or feminists try to hide the fact that babies are awesome.) But she can write a wicked sentence on occasion, and make you think she's saying something astute with those true things. Then you think for a second and realize she's full of shit.”
I realize there’s a lot of vitriol aimed at Roiphe. I’ve got some myself- here's me being mean: Roiphe writes as if she doesn’t know what that wet thing is between her legs. She writes as if she wistfully looks back on the good old days when Norman Mailer wrote about sex and violence and actually stabbed his wife. And I’m someone- perhaps like Roiphe’s assumptions of Eggers’ and Chabon’s college girlfriends- who originally refused to even read Mailer after a Women’s Studies professor at NYU complained about his misogyny. But when I did finally read An American Dream I was blown away by the writing and the sex and the violence and loved it. I imagine Roiphe saying, “Oh don’t worry Normie, it’s not your fault you stabbed her. Women complain too much and get so mad about such crazy things!” Okay I’m out on a limb here and I know it- but my anger is still fresh from The Morning After – it felt like a personal attack 15 years ago when I was in college- as if I wasn’t a good enough feminist because I had the gall to go and get myself raped.
But honestly, what I find most annoying is Roiphe’s prudery. Her prissiness. Her unwillingness to examine WHY? She doesn’t look at how culture at large has changed since the age of the dinosaur dicks. She doesn’t even mention AIDS/HIV. Or porn. Is her point that back then, most people had to scour Mailer and Updike for the dirty bits? Now you can find it everywhere so maybe it’s less necessary? What about writing that lies in between literature and porn- look to the “Best Sex Writing” anthologies of Susie Bright and Rachel Kramer Bussel. Don’t you think an academic writing about sex and literature would want to consider sex in our culture as a whole?
I feel like the slutty girl in high school saying, "Oooh you're such a prude."
But I think she's intellectually prudish— which is worse.
