She intersperses personal stories with musings on successful women writers, like Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir, and how they long maintained submissive and abusive relationships of their own. The 70-some chapters, written in a muddled stream-of-consciousness style, deal primarily with Roiphe’s relationships with a series of toxic men. In The Power Notebooks, a new series of essays that blend memoir and biography, to be published on March 3, Roiphe comes dangerously close to admitting she was wrong about the power dynamics between men and women. Before it was published, that piece stirred up rumors of plans to out the creator of a document where women in media listed allegations against their male colleagues (which Roiphe denies intending to do), and challenged women’s descriptions of hostile workplace cultures: “The idea of this ubiquitous, overwhelming fear is repeatedly conjured and dramatized by Twitter feminists.” She sealed her fate as persona non grata in feminist corners of the internet in 2018 when she called the #MeToo movement into question in a controversial essay for Harper’s. Roiphe has repeatedly asserted women’s agency - even to the point of casting the stories of college students who said they were raped as fantasies born from regret. The writer’s philosophical argument with mainstream feminism, articulated in books like The Morning After (1993) and dozens of essays, boils down to this: If we admit that men have physical and structural power over women, then women must be powerless.

Katie Roiphe has long been an easy target for feminists, despite claiming the mantle herself.

The power notebooks by katie roiphe