Oh, Ada, Katie Roiphe’s anti-feminist enfant terrible persona is so tiresome. In almost everything she writes she blames puritanical feminists for making sex no fun. But it’s hard for me to take her celebration of Norman Mailer’s violent sex scenes seriously, given that Mailer famously stabbed and nearly killed one of his six (ahem) wives. When Roiphe talks about the bygone belief in sex that could change things, possibly for the better, I think: for whom?
Anyway, what Roiphe calls “postfeminist second-guessing”—on the parts of ambivalent male characters—we could additionally call “post-sexual revolution second-guessing.” Younger guys might realize that some of the stuff Mailer and Roth thought was so great actually has some fallout, emotional or otherwise. Roiphe should read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Hearts of Men, which convincingly argues that the sexual revolution was always partly an attempt by men to escape the confines of stereotypical masculinity. For some, that meant the violent sex and threesomes that seemed incompatible with respectable marriage; for others, perhaps, it meant sex in which they didn’t have to be the initiators or always at the ready for. Some guys don’t want to be conquering heroes.