Katie Roiphe - The Morning After

Roiphe's first book, The Morning After, argued that in many instances of supposed campus date rape, women are at least partly responsible for their actions. "One of the questions used to define rape was: 'Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?' The phrasing raises the issue of agency. Why aren't college women responsible for their own intake of alcohol or drugs? A man may give her drugs, but she herself decides to take them. If we assume that women are not all helpless and naive, then they should be responsible for their choice to drink or take drugs. "If a woman's 'judgment is impaired' and she has sex, it isn't always the man's fault; it isn't necessarily always rape."

In a 1995 interview, Camille Paglia described her as "the first intellectual of her generation." Paglia has since revised her opinion of Roiphe: "When Katie Roiphe came up in the mid-’90s, I thought she was going to be the intellectual of her generation, but she just withdrew after the huge flap about her first book, The Morning After. She drifted off into writing memoirs and talking about her personal life, and now has come back with some book on marriage. She didn't step up and that position is still vacant, so we now have absent two generations of young intellectuals in America."

Writing for The New Yorker, Katha Pollitt delivered a scathing review of The Morning After, writing, "It is a careless and irresponsible performance, poorly argued and full of misrepresentations, slapdash research, and gossip. She may be, as she implies, the rare grad student who has actually read "Clarissa", but when it comes to rape and harassment she has not done her homework." But, the controversial book wasn't without its positive reviews. Declaring it a "Book of the Times", The New York Times said "it is courageous of Ms. Roiphe to speak out against the herd ideas that campus life typically encourages." Likewise, The Washington Post Book World described the book as "clearheaded, wry, disturbing," saying "Katie Roiphe writes from the trenches of gender warfare."