Books, Arts & Manners: Unhand Us, Miss MacKinnon!

The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, by Katie Roiphe (Little, Brown, 180 pp., $19.95)

FOR several years now I have been struggling with the problem of how to write a book about the “crisis” of “date rape” on college campuses. It’s a big quivering plum of a subject. You’ve got inherent salacious value—Coeds! Sex! You’ve got saleability. You’ve got incredible visuals: vivid, practically Boschean tableaux of youngsters chanting, “Cut it out or cut it off!” and of Take Back the Night marches under the moon with young women, like testifiers at the Salem witch trials, working themselves into a frenzy of selfpity and denunciation.

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Stephanie Gutmann

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The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, by Katie Roiphe (Little, Brown, 180 pp., $19.95)

FOR several years now I have been struggling with the problem of how to write a book about the “crisis” of “date rape” on college campuses. It’s a big quivering plum of a subject. You’ve got inherent salacious value—Coeds! Sex! You’ve got saleability. You’ve got incredible visuals: vivid, practically Boschean tableaux of youngsters chanting, “Cut it out or cut it off!” and of Take Back the Night marches under the moon with young women, like testifiers at the Salem witch trials, working themselves into a frenzy of selfpity and denunciation.