Katie Roiphe once needed bodyguards to give a book reading. In 1994, when she published The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, American campuses were awash with hysteria about the supposed date-rape epidemic. The 24-year-old doctoral candidate at Princeton attracted death threats for accusing anti-rape activists of conjuring a myth.
Three years later, she drew more fire with Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End, which argued that America's youth culture had been deadened by puritanism since the Aids crisis. Roiphe claimed the backlash against the sexual revolution and relentless sex education campaigns were killing the mystery and excitement of sex.
But with her new book, Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939, critics have raised the white flag. Upon its American release last year, the New York Observer announced that 'Katie-haters will be sorry to hear that it's very absorbing.'
A decade ago, Roiphe expected picketing whenever she spoke at a university. But since being hired last year as a journalism professor at New York University, she has been an insider in academia.
With a scholarly titled new book on the bourgeois topic of marriage, Roiphe is mellowing as she approaches 40. 'I wrote my first book when I was 23, so I certainly like to think I've matured since then,' she says.
In The Morning After, Roiphe charged campus feminists with depriving women of agency by encouraging them to view themselves as passive victims and see all men as potential aggressors. Rape awareness lectures, sexual conduct codes, Take-Back-the-Night rallies, key-chain alarms and blue-lit emergency phones did not empower women, in her view, but infantilised them.
She regrets not using a milder tone to protect herself from attacks, but feels that 'the brash adolescent way it was written was really effective in getting people to talk'. To her detractors, such as Naomi Wolf and Gloria Steinem, the book called for the return to a culture of blaming the victim, where women were ridiculed for speaking up about sexual abuse.