By Morgan Jarema
The Grand Rapids Press
name spellings verified

Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End
Katie Roiphe
Vintage Books (Random House)
1997
193 pages
$12.00

Katie Roiphe would have done well to put a sentence from the final page of "Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End" at the beginning of the book, for it hits the nail of our ambivalence toward sexuality on the proverbial head: "We are caught in the paradox of our own excesses."

Beginning with a personal reflection on her own sister's AIDS diagnosis, Roiphe takes on the gargantuan task of "the bigger picture," looking to advertising, media, sex education in schools and the recurrent theme of personal responsibility.

No matter the "cause," twenty-eight year-old Roiphe recognizes that the world's young adults are in crisis mode when it comes to contemplating, defining and acting upon our attitudes about ourselves as sexual beings. Like townsfolk lighting our torches and taking to the streets in search of evil-doers, followers point to several contemporary issues: religion, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, birth control, pornography, the breakdown of the family.

It's at least refreshing, then, to begin the book believing that Roiphe has the courage to keep her pointing finger to herself, admitting she just doesn't know who's to blame and focusing instead on either asking the right questions or finding solutions.

It doesn't take long, however, for something to shift. Whatever that "something" is, it doesn't always seem completely thought out.

Disappointing, since Roiphe, the author of the 1993 book titled "The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus," cast a critical eye on what she termed the mating rituals of a rape-sensitive community. Questioning the victimization culture now rampant in America, Roiphe bravely wondered aloud how feminism's foundation may have shifted from strength and courage to one of weakness and fear.

"Last Night in Paradise" does make some sober observations, such as the one that the present sex education debate "conceals an atmosphere of moral confusion, a profound uncertainty about what on earth we should be teaching our children."

When it comes to sex, it's the moralists versus the realists who largely get the air play. Yet, as Roiphe so expertly illustrates, the vast majority fall somewhere in between the two extremes, and finding a common ground on which to teach (or not teach) the lessons of sexuality is what's on the minds and agendas of so many.

With sports figures and movie stars contracting AIDS through promiscuous and often dangerous sexual activity, Roiphe examines just who our "heroes" really are and "how they should behave." Curiously, she calls the media "savage" for searching for a post-AIDS diagnosis epiphany from Magic Johnson, yet the term seems more accurate in describing Johnson himself, who "cheerfully admit(ted) he engaged in recklessly promiscuous behavior, endangering his wife and unborn child."

Perhaps we do, as Roiphe asserts, admire and adhere to two conflicting moral styles: admiring the vision of the virile star while trying to adhere to old-fashioned images of romance.

But the sense I got from her writing is that the public is the malleable victim of the media. Is the media to blame for choosing not to write about "(sports figures') bimbos?" Again, perhaps, but it is more perplexing that Roiphe doesn't tackle who's behind the perpetuating of the "bimbo" personae rather than who reports it. How exactly is the media to blame when a president, a vice president and a senator publicly call Johnson a "hero" and a "true gentleman," not for apologizing to his wife or the legions of youngsters who model their lives after him but simply for saying "Everything is still the same"?

Roiphe, like others who are perplexed about the benefits of sexual freedom, ends asking the question that would seemingly make a more poignant introduction to current sex ed. courses than what many school systems offer: "But what could be wrong with freedom? It's not the absence of rules exactly, the dizzying sense that we can do whatever we want, but the sudden realization that (with sexual "freedom") nothing we do matters. The decision to sleep with someone, which feels so pressing, so momentous, so absolutely crucial, means nothing."

"Last Night in Paradise" is a heady read. One almost wonders how Roiphe would answer the question of whether sex "should mean something" or not, if either way is necessarily better than the other. Some books are worthwhile for having raised more questions rather than answering them, and Roiphe certainly does just that.

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