'Ugh, What's Up With All These Feminists Being Funny?' Says Chronically Unfunny Woman

The implicit attitude of this kind of writing is: “Can you believe these bozos are still acting like this?” The tacit assumption is that we all take for granted a certain set of shared beliefs, and we should mock those few retrograde Neanderthals who do not agree with us. The tone is less urgent and more queenly. It contains the idea that feminism is cool, and that it will mock you like a cool and impressive girl at the lunch table if you are in violation of its principles. The idea is to make fun of your enemies, not preach at them. (This is not, I should add, a wholly new thing. There are historical iterations of this type of feminism in the work of Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy, and Germaine Greer, among others.)

Queenly as fuck, you guys. Like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and Caitlin Moran and pretty much every other hilarious lady being hilarious nowadays. What’s up with them?

Anyway, I’m sure Katie Roiphe is a nice person, and I can’t say too many bad things about her as a person because we live in the same neighborhood and I see her walking around sometimes. In fact, once while moseying past my favorite book store, I noticed a sandwich board outside proclaiming that Roiphe was doing a reading there that very night. Maybe she’s going to blow my mind with some retro-contrarianism!, I thought. Maybe she’ll try to make serious inferences about how feminism is awful because something something Honey Boo Boo!

I wandered in just in time to catch her reading a piece from her latest anthology, a piece she wrote several years after someone wrote something mean about her on the internet (she must have finally Googled herself), called “Gawker is a Big Immature Baby.”

I miss the days of earnest Katie Roiphe.

[Slate]