Harper’s Writer Katie Roiphe May Reveal ‘Shitty Men In Media’ List Creator

After rumors started flying on social media that Harper’s Magazine was planning to publish the name of the woman who started the “Shitty Media Men” list in their March issue, the publication started facing heavy criticism from Twitter users, who questioned its journalistic ethics.

The list in question was drawn up by an anonymous woman in October 2017, providing a safe space for women to expose men in media who sexually harassed or abused them. It was a crowd-sourced and open access document; the knowledge of its existence was limited, Splinter News reported.

However, as soon as the possibility of its creator being revealed was juggled on social platforms, the list went viral. Harper’s Magazine started facing immense backlash for their alleged decision to print the name of the woman who started the list, though the publication neither confirmed nor denied the rumors.

“ We don’t discuss the content of our pieces until they are published. I can confirm that Katie Roiphe is writing a piece for our March issue, nothing more,” a spokesperson for the publication said in a statement.

Roiphe, 49, is an American author and journalist, who is known to be a controversy-stirrer since the 1990s. In 1991, she wrote an article for The New York Times called “Date Rape Hysteria,” where she ridiculed the idea of date rape.

After managing to turn heads with her piece, she decided to capitalize on its success and went on to write an entire book in 1993, titled “The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus.”

In the book, which was heavily promoted by The Times, Roiphe called the “rape crisis movement,” sweeping college campuses at the time, a fraud. She also scoffed at the claim that one in four college women were raped, poking fun at young feminists for wallowing in their own “victimization.”

There was also the time when Roiphe started questioning the issue of wage gap after realizing she was getting paid less than her male collagues.

Roiphe, a Harvard degree-holder, went on to write books like “Still She Haunts Me” and “In Praise Of Messy Lives.” Her latest book — “The Violet Hour – Great Writers At The End,” published in 2016, delved into what the last moments of writers like Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James ­Salter, must have looked like.

According to a book review by The Times, “The Violet Hour” was inspired by Roiphe’s own experience of dealing with Pneumonia at the age of 12. Besides The Times, Roiphe also wrote for other publications. One of her most recent pieces, published in the Financial Times, was titled “Should People Over 30 Ever Use Emojis?”

In the wake of an impending scandal revolving Harper’s Magazine, journalist Nicole Cliffe — one of the women heading the social meida campaign against the magazine's decision — called out Roiphe on Twitter.

“I think that you can have a variety of different and valid opinions about the existence of the Shitty Men in Media list but we should all be able to agree that this is a terrible thing to do to a woman who wanted to covertly warn other people about predators,” Cliffe told Fast Company in a statement.

Following Cliffe, an array of social media users also lashed out at Roiphe for agreeing to write the reportedly damaging piece for Harper’s.