[The author of this open letter is Heidi Howkins Lockwood.--ES]
Dear Katie Roiphe,
In your “Katie Roiphe: this much I know” piece
posted on The Guardian this past
July, you said you know that you make people uncomfortable because you claim
that women are partly responsible for their own date rapes; you know that women
who enjoyed Fifty Shades of Grey are
fantasizing about being the submissive sex again; you know that you get under
people’s skin.
Unfortunately, Katie Roiphe, you haven’t gotten
under my skin – though I wish that you would. I wish that you’d get under my
skin, in my skin, in my mind, under the covers of my silence with me, for just
an hour. You can trust me. I won’t show you anything you don’t want to see.
I won’t. show you. anything. you don’t want to see.
I won’t show you what it’s like to be raped, because you don’t want to see it; in
The Morning After and other pieces, the
fact that you haven’t talked to many rape survivors is clear in your insistence
that a rape which fits even your “violent force” criteria for a rape doesn’t
count as a rape if the victim doesn’t call it that. I won’t try to show you the
body of research that shows that rape and attempted rape is an epidemic in the
U.S., because you don’t want to see it; instead of following the scholarly
journals that this research appears in, you opted to concentrate on a single
article in Ms. Magazine. I won’t show
you what it’s like to work in an environment rife with sexual harassment,
because you don’t want to see it; instead of talking to women who have been
harassed, instead of soliciting anecdotes from all corners, you have bolstered
your arguments with anecdotes and quotes from your own narrow niche of
bourgeois friends.
But I will show you why your “The Philosopher and
The Student” piece in Slate was despicable, ignorant and mean-spirited. I will
show you how a power differential can twist reality. I will show you how your
refusal to see is the product of
creating a narrative in which you yourself are victimized.
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