Becca Rothfeld
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  • About
  • BOOK
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    • Essays
    • Mostly Literary But Some Art Criticism
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Hi, I'm Becca. I am the non-fiction book critic of the Washington Post, an editor at The Point, and a contributing editor at The Boston Review . My essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, was published Metropolitan Books in the US and Virago in the UK in April 2024. The New York Times called it "splendidly immodest" and "exhilarating" and The Guardian called it "bracing and brilliant." It was a New York Times editors' pick and a New Yorker weekly recommendation. It was also one of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, one of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024, one of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2024, one of Mother Jones's Best Books We Read This Year, one of the Prospect's Books of the Year, and one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Non-Fiction from 2024. Finally, I am also a PhD candidate (on indefinite hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard, but i remain perhaps delusionally convinced that someday I will finish my dissertation. These days I live in Washington, DC, with this person, whom I love. Here you can find all of my Washington Post pieces, which will come out each week, generally speaking.
To keep up with my writing/rantings, subscribe to my substack here. 

As a writer: 
I have contributed essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum, Art in America, The Yale Review, The Baffler, and more. These days, I write mostly for the Washington Post about non-fiction, but occasionally I write essays on fiction and whatever else for other venues. I am the winner of the first annual Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism (see more here) and the 2023 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing (see more here).
 In 2017, I was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category. A few authors I especially love are Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, Henry James, Henry Green, Heinrich von Kleist, Marie de France, and Norman Rush. My agent is Anna Sproul-Latimer of Neon Literary.

As a (lapsed?) philosopher:
I am primarily interested in aesthetics (especially aesthetic value and its relationship to other types of value), the philosophy of love and sex, and the history of German philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger, although I have increasingly consuming secondary interests in political philosophy. In "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," published in The British Journal of Aesthetics, I defend aestheticism, the view that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. I describe aestheticism in more detail in a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art. If I ever get around to completing it, my dissertation will be about some combination of the following: what it is to be a beautiful person, why evolutionary psychologists are wrong about human beauty, the ethics of exclusionary romantic/sexual/aesthetic preferences, and what role the state should play in ameliorating inequitable distributions of intimate "goods." I hold a first-class MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a B.A., summa cum laude with high honors, from Dartmouth College, where I studied philosophy & German (and cultivated an enduring distaste for fraternities).

​I receive many emails asking for advice about graduate school applications. I have answered some frequently asked questions on this page.  As I note there, I do not consider myself an expert in how to write a successful graduate school application, and I urge all prospective grad students to consult resources online, as well as supervisors who have served on admissions committees, rather than me! 

Before the pandemic, I followed Hegel in regarding nature as geistlos, but now, like any good Heideggerian, I am a big fan of hiking. Here I am in the Berkshires, which I love
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I wrote about sex for the Boston Review

9/21/2021

17 Comments

 
One of the least interesting things a woman can do vis-à-vis sex is consent to it—yet lately, we seem to have less to say about female erotics than we do about male abuses.
On the one hand, it is not hard to understand why consent and its absence are at the forefront of mainstream conversation. A focus on rape and assault is warranted in a culture where sexual crimes are so tragically common: one in every six women in the United States is the victim of rape or attempted rape, and 81 percent of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment. In the public imagination, sexual agency is mostly reserved for male philanders and predators; female pleasure is alien at best.
Still, hollow consent, unaccompanied by inner aching, is at least as ubiquitous as sexual coercion. Sex that is merely consensual is about as rousing as food that is merely edible, as drab as a cake without icing. Even in our era of ostensible liberation, women face emotional and social pressures, both externally imposed and uneasily internalized, to appease men at the cost of their own enjoyment. Heterosexual women are forever licensing liaisons that don’t excite them—perhaps because they have despaired of discovering anything as exotic as an exciting man, or because it no longer even occurs to them to insist on their own excitement, or because capitulation to unexciting men is so exhaustingly expected of them and so universally glorified in popular depictions of romance. As the formidable Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes in her debut essay collection, The Right to Sex, her female students regularly report that they regard their erotic lives as “at once inevitable and insufficient.” In short, the young women in Srinivasan’s classes are resigned to sex that is consensual but underwhelming. Read more here.
17 Comments
Thomas Plazibat
6/11/2022 11:51:30 pm

Wait! there are many men who are interested in female desire, and the satisfaction of that desire. I think you're giving a lot of men short shrift. But when you think about desire overcoming either man or woman it can be like an archetypal force visiting one's being- not unlike the reference to Plato. It's a force we have only a limited control over, we can be swept away, and then we lose our selves- so that's part of the package of love, desire, and sex.

Desire is a dynamic between two people, and within a body social, and along a continuum... and in society, are we really separate beings? We like to have this sense of ourselves as an isolated node of social being, but we're actually constantly caught up in a social web of relations.

The other important thing is love, and I think perhaps this is a modern conceit to think that sex should be something separate from love. Maybe there needs to be a sincere return to love and the merging of sex with love, and the cultivation of a romantic sensibility, instead of placing desire always within the realm of the pick-up culture, where sex is commodified- especially today with the prevalence of internet dating.

And another important thing, why don't women take more initiative, and exhibit agency, and leap out of the box and pursue more men? I don't think its men who are inhibiting that move.

It's not that all men aren't exciting, it's more likely that women aren't seeing or appreciating the excitement of many men. Also, the way you portray women, presents them as inhibited by some undefined, and possibly, self-imposed social restraints. And actually, not all men find all women inspiringly exciting.to the point of inciting desire.

It seems to me from my time in France that French women, have an entirely different feeling or understanding for sex and romance than American women.
And it's not hard to see how our New England Puritan roots have left a persistent imprint on our sexual culture in America.

Really, American women, particularly those educated in advance educational institutions have bought into a series of strongly inhibiting ideas about romance, sex, and pleasure. The current legal and political climate re-enforces the chill surrounding pleasure and desire. There is this sense that the effort to define oneself as independent and somehow removed from biological realities, is actually stifling the free flow of sexuality and pleasure.

Reply
Jeff Bergner
4/15/2024 08:30:42 am

Dear Becca(if I may), I read your July 20, 2023 book review on liberalism with great interest. I have just published a book titled American Materialism: Why Our Domestic Policies, Our Foreign Policies and Our Intelligence Policies Often Fail. It touches on many of the issues you raised. I would be pleased to send you a copy. If you are interested, please send me a good address and I will send a copy along. All best. Jeff Bergner

Reply
Danielle Bartsch link
5/2/2025 10:03:02 pm

Many men, maybe most in the US have been infected with stoic dogma or the subconscious habits thereof, from dominating military empires. The minimalistic speech of stoicism is boring and unexciting. and leaves one wondering, "who is this person actually". It feels like they are a shell even if they claim to have some interest in the feelings of a woman then how does one know what his stoically blocked feelings are? it is not an inspiring or safe feeling to be with them.

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Saw you on tv mit McCreesh und Morten blank Jensen

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I have written an autobiography

Would you be interested in reading it. I have a PDF

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Neha Sharma link
2/7/2025 05:32:26 am

📚🎭 A powerhouse in literary criticism! Becca dives deep into non-fiction, philosophy, and aesthetics, shaping the literary conversation. 🖊️✨ From The Washington Post to The New Yorker, her sharp insights and award-winning critiques make waves. Still (maybe?) finishing that PhD—stay tuned! 🤯📖💡







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