Politically prurient readers will enjoy Katie Roiphe's account of a Department of Health and Human Services press conference at which health czar Donna Shalala announces a growing and "promising" movement among young Americans toward "secondary virginity." AIDS awareness is the focus of Katie Roiphe's second book, Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End. A few years ago, I received a call from a friend in Canada who had been asked to finance his former lover's surgery. His ex-girlfriend was a first-generation Canadian of Mediterranean descent. "Her parents have found a husband for her back home," he explained, "and a doctor who can replace her virginity for $4,000." Having your hymen surgically restored is more common than many Americans would imagine. Roiphe has it almost figured out when she writes: "Only in America would people believe that they could reinvent themselves as virgins." Actually, only in a society where we reinvent ourselves so cheaply could a gal reclaim her virginity without even having the operation. In the book's most interesting chapter, The Girl From Park Avenue, Roiphe marshals us past the sentimental politics that too often surround AIDS-related deaths. Feminists writing about AIDS have charged that HIV-positive women are seen as "vectors" or transmitters of the virus. Roiphe shows that Cort Brown was easily reduced to this role, too. Unlike Gertz, she notes, he died alone: "Even his mother wouldn't claim his body." Roiphe's ironic take on the sadness of human experience is not for the faint of heart. Her thoughtful approach to tough social issues goes right over the heads of some women -- readers of the New York Times Book Review may have noticed this -- because she doesn't indulge partisan impulses by dwelling on the female experience. Her refusal to side with women simply for sisterhood's sake has evoked much feminist wrath. If you're looking for comforting solutions to current sexual questions, don't turn to Last Night in Paradise. |
Roiphe intrepidly journeys into virgin territory, investigating the new chastity movement in America and revealing that the sexual revolution of the '60s has created its own snobberies. A 26-year-old Washington, D.C. virgin -- who works for a well-known conservative lobbying group -- takes her decaf with a "childish puff" of whipped cream, Roiphe tells us, and we're pretty sure it's one of those canned synthetics, like Dreamwhip. To the jaded urbanite, other parts of the world -- where women don veils, devout Muslims of either sex cover their legs, and shrewd newlyweds display bloodied sheets -- are steeped in mystique. Sexually virtuous Americans, on the other hand, might as well be ignorant hillbillies having it off with their siblings -- chastity American-style is such a tacky affair.
A PWA (Princess With AIDS), Alison Gertz was raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and contracted AIDS during a one-night fling with a Studio 54 bartender named Cort Brown. Before she died, Gertz had a short career lecturing students about AIDS and HIV. As Roiphe tells it, Gertz was well equipped for the job: never able to fully mature, Gertz cultivated her Popular Teen persona, and used it to convince young audiences that abstinence "is cool." Roiphe hints gently at the absurdity of this young woman's situation, juxtaposing Gertz's bright-eyed narcissism with her sex partner's burgeoning reputation in the media as "the young man who infected Alison Gertz."