Katie Roiphe: Stop Calling Women Sluts (But Pinch Their Asses All You Want)
Sex troll Katie Roiphe has taken yet again to Slate to bravely and counterintuitively slay a liberal shibboleth about human sexuality. This time, she is reminding self-satisfied lefties that Rush Limbaugh isn't the only "slut shamer" on the block. Democrats shame sluts, too. Stop shaming them!
I guess you'd call it slut-shame-shaming. Roiphe is sick of pious liberals imposing their bourgeois values on sexually confident women. Proud, willful ladies should be free to discuss their erotic lives as they wish without the "vicious or catty bursts of rage, or calm-holier-than-thou reflections on other people's sluttiness or condescending screeds about how pathetic or sad or distasteful or lonely or sleazy it is to live so outside of conventional life" that so many liberals reflexively resort to. Spare us your screeds! Let us live our lives free of your condescension!
That sounds sort of reasonable, I suppose. I mean, it's sort of unfair to ask women to constantly face down jibes and epithets just because of their sexuality, right? What kind of world are we living in if we let powerful people constantly direct hurtful remarks at "sexually voracious" ladies?
Let's ask Katie Roiphe, shall we?
Is the anodyne drone typing away in her silent cubicle free from the risk of comment on her clothes, the terror of a joke, the unsettlement of an unwanted or even a wanted sexual advance, truly our ideal? Should we aspire to the drab, cautious, civilized, quiet, comfortable workplace all of this language presumes and theorizes? At this late date, perhaps we should be worrying about different forms of hostility in our workplace.
That's Roiphe writing in the New York Times, four months ago, rushing to the aide of accused sexual harrasser Herman Cain. The piece was entitled "In Favor of Dirty Jokes and Risqué Remarks."