No One Ends Up on Top in Duke Hookup Scene
There is a trend among young, single women these days – primarily on college campuses – to think of each meaningless hookup as some sort of conquest. Hookups are listed and categorized in journals and on dormitory whiteboards. Boys are ranked and categorized according to their looks, status on campus, performance in bed, etc., and tallies are marked next to their names to indicate how many friends have had overlapping or repeat encounters. While I have certainly seen a substantial amount of these “lists,” none have ever come close to the detailed, PowerPoint presentation written by the recent cyber celebrity, Karen F. Owen.
To commemorate her graduation from Duke -- one of America’s top 10 universities -- Ms. Owen decided to compile a list of all of her “conquests,” detailing the circumstances under which she met the “subject” (a.k.a.: boy), what their hookup consisted of, and how they ranked overall on a scale of 1 to 10. She entitled her “senior thesis”: An education beyond the classroom: excelling in the realm of horizontal academics. Unsurprisingly, after forwarding her 42-page PowerPoint to a handful of friends, it wasn’t long before it gained internet audiences around the globe.
Owen does not shy away from describing everything she experienced in between the sheets during her numerous and diverse drunken escapades. These include hooking up in a Duke University library stairwell during finals week, having sex in an SUV and once waking up in the bed of a Duke athlete after blacking out the night before.
Once you get over the initial shock, Owen's account is weirdly impressive, aside from her ability to recall intricate details from her supposedly “blackout evaluations.” And Owen doesn't just stop at listing and evaluating each of her 13 partners… she includes pictures and pie charts. If there were a class for this subject, she would definitely get an A.
But here's maybe the (more) disturbing part: the most surprising reactions and response from many young women who not only find her presentation amusing, but somewhat … aspirational. Aspirational in so far as Owen has succeeded in using and manipulating men for her purely self-centered, uninhibited enjoyment.
That the subjects of her presentation are Duke boys understandably carries a certain schadenfreude. And her attitude is not out of line with the racier tabloid women's magazines and reality shows -- ones that urge us to take a more male conquistador approach to our sexual lives.
But I would venture too that this response among young women is a result of a prevalent “boys suck” mentality. Once we have entered a utilitarian sexual world, one in which the sexes are only to be valued for purely physical ends, the subsequent dehumanization of boys, girls and hookups is inevitable. And because the majority of us women actually, truly, really, don't want or enjoy the emotional desert that is today's hook-up scene, we have to attempt to prove to ourselves that we are in complete control and don’t need boys. So who cares about that encounter? It was meaningless. Boys suck. Time to move on. End of story.
And yet, behind Owen's façade of insensitivity and indifference, there is a girl who has allowed her self-esteem to be so pulled apart that she was left with no other recourse than to feebly attempt to make light of the situation. Karen’s feigned unemotional attachment was completely debunked on pages 34 and 35 of her “thesis,” in which she rated Subject #12 as being “the best she ever had,” emphasizing above all things, the “eye contact.” To put it simply, in between the seemingly detached talk about the “amazing sex,” Karen was most taken by the all-too-human desire to look someone in the eye and see that – maybe, just maybe – they care.
The fact of the matter is girls cannot distance themselves as effectively from sex and hooking up as boys can. In attempting to do so, we may become periodically numb and enjoy certain casual indulgences, but at the end of the day, it ultimately hurts us.