duke sex thesis

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Duke student's 'sex thesis' goes viral.

DIRTY LAUNDRY

It’s usually not a good idea to kiss and tell—especially in the Internet age. For two weeks, Duke University has had to deal with the fallout from a recent grad’s graphic chronicle of her sexual exploits with 13 Duke student-athletes. Written as a 42-page Power Point presentation, 22-year-old Karen Owen evaluated the sexual performance of 13 of the most coveted male student-athletes during her years at the school, complete with pictures of the men. Since seven of the men played—or still play—for the Duke lacrosse team, sports website Deadspin decided to print the entire “F--k List,” including the names of the subjects. It later redacted them following complains from Owen. “It makes me ashamed that the Duke name is attached to what she’s done,” said one senior. “And it’s the age-old double standard: people are more critical of what she did because she’s a girl.”

Duke grad Karen Owen's "sex thesis" goes viral

• Published: Oct. 08, 2010, 7:18 p.m.
• S.J. Velasquez, syracuse.com

A saucy joke ended up becoming the latest Internet sensation when Duke University alumna Karen Owen published a PowerPoint document outlining three year's worth of sexual activity on campus.

Owen, who graduated from the university this year, pulled together photos of 13 sexual partners, along with detailed information about each intimate tryst -- including bits of dirty dialogue, and physical descriptions and brutally candid evaluations of each man's performance in bed -- and created a mock senior honors thesis, "An education beyond the classroom: excelling in the realm of horizontal academics."

The 42-page PowerPoint document, according to Time.com , was meant for eyes of just three of Owen's friends. But those few friends forwarded the inside joke to other friends, and it eventually landed on Deadspin.com and other popular websites. From there, a viral Internet sensation was born.

Back at Owen's alma mater, fellow Blue Devils are embarrassed by the 22-year-old alumna's antics and the public attention drawn to the campus, which is all too familiar with sexual scandal after a group of lacrosse players in 2006 were accused of assaulting a stripper. They were later found to be innocent . Many of the 13 men listed in Owen's document played for school's lacrosse team.

"It makes me ashamed that the Duke name is attached to what she's done," Duke senior Nicole Queathem told The New York Times . "And it's the age-old double standard: people are more critical of what she did because she's a girl."

Administrators at Duke have expressed concern over the male students identified in Owen's faux thesis, even though many websites that have published the document have distorted students' photos and blurred names.

"On a personal basis, I'm saddened by the behavior," Duke University Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta told The Chronicle , the university's student-run paper. "Many of the circumstances that are referenced in it continue to make me really concerned about some of the judgments and some of the norms that persist."

Owen's sudden infamy has pushed her into virtual hiding. She's deleted social network accounts, and she's publicly apologized for her lapse of judgment. "I regret it with all my heart," she told Jezebel.com . "I would never intentionally hurt the people that are mentioned on that."

Did Owen go to far? Would you send friends privacy-sensitive, personal information without intending for it to spread on the Internet? Leave your comments below.

» The New York Times: Duke Winces as a Private Joke Slips Out of Control » The Chronicle: Sex list draws media to Duke » Telegraph.co.uk: Karen Owen: Duke student's sex 'powerpoint presentation' goes viral » CBS News: Duke Student Powerpoint: The New Exhibitionism? » Time.com: Duke Student's Sex-Rating 'Thesis' Goes Viral

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Duke Winces as a Private Joke Slips Out of Control

By Katharine Q. Seelye and Liz Robbins

• Oct. 7, 2010

DURHAM, N.C. — For nearly two weeks, many here on the Duke University campus had been aware of a certain senior “thesis” that a recent graduate wrote, apparently as a private joke, about her sexual exploits with 13 student-athletes.

Then the Internet seized on it. The thesis, written as a 42-page Power Point presentation, went viral. And students here again found their school in the middle of a sex-related scandal and annoyed at the power of the murky, borderless world of the Internet to wreak havoc and tarnish images.

“It makes me ashamed that the Duke name is attached to what she’s done,” Nicole Queathem, 22, a senior from St. Louis, said as she sat in the student union. “And it’s the age-old double standard: people are more critical of what she did because she’s a girl.”

The woman in question, Karen Owen, 22, who graduated this year from Duke, evaluated what she said were her sexual liaisons with 13 student-athletes during her years at the school, and she prepared a slide presentation, complete with pictures of her subjects and graphs ranking their performance.

She forwarded this mock thesis in “horizontal academics” to a few friends, who forwarded it to their friends. After percolating within the Duke community for nearly a week, with e-mails reaching alumni overseas and message boards buzzing, the report was published online by two related Web sites, Jezebel and Deadspin . From there, it exploded onto the blogosphere, where as of Thursday it was still being shared via Twitter with the frenzied speed of the Indianapolis 500.

The fake thesis made its splash just as concern was raised anew about the power of the Internet to invade privacy and, sometimes, destroy lives. Last month, at Rutgers University, a student surreptitiously recorded his male roommate’s encounter with another man; days later, the roommate killed himself, unleashing a national fury about cyberbullying.

“All the world’s a stage in the Internet age,” said Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “This is just the latest of a long list of examples of how things that are often meant for small, private audiences have innumerable opportunities to become public events, because once they have left the creators’ screen, they can be shared, forwarded and posted.”

Ms. Owen did not respond to repeated calls to explain what happened. A man who said he was her father answered the phone in Connecticut and said that his daughter did not want to comment.

On campus, students were abashed, if not a bit fatigued by the notoriety.

Just four years ago, the Duke men’s lacrosse team was embroiled in scandal when a woman falsely accused three Blue Devils players of having raped her at a party where she was to perform as a stripper. One year later, the charges against the players were dropped and the prosecutor in the case, Michael B. Nifong, was disbarred.

Seven of the 13 athletes Ms. Owen wrote about were — or still are — on the lacrosse team. This incident has angered many of those who are already sensitive to their image, according to students and alumni who know them. The lacrosse players contacted would not comment.

On campus, other students had plenty to say.

Kishan Shah, 18, a pre-med student from Carmel, Ind., said the university should not revoke Ms. Owen’s degree, but “they should let her know that she has disgraced the school.”

Mike Lefevre, a 21-year-old senior and the president of the student body, said that people were not sure whom to be more concerned about. “Should we be more worried about the young woman’s privacy or worry about the individuals who were named?” he said. “It’s not so clear to us who was the victim, and who we should reach out to.”

Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations, said that the education of students about their online presence was continuing, and that it was part of the orientation process for student athletes. “One wonders in the Duke situation if the individuals were not athletes, would it have attracted as much attention?” Mr. Schoenfeld said.

It was precisely because the 13 “subjects” in Ms. Owen’s report were athletes that Deadspin decided at first to publish the report with the names. But later it did black them out. A. J. Daulerio, Deadspin’s editor, explained in an e-mail: “We are a sports site and running the names seemed pertinent to the story. Plus, it had been forwarded so many times and shown up on so many message boards that it seemed silly not to run them.

“Then I had a change of heart.”

Jezebel, a Web site oriented to women, published the list as well. It also published queries from an editor at HarperCollins, meant to be a private e-mail, about contacting Ms. Owen, possibly for a book. Deadspin published queries it got from an agent at William Morris and a movie producer.

In 1977, two women at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a similar “research,” rating the sexual methodology of 36 male undergraduates.

That report appeared in an alternative campus newspaper under the title “Consumer Guide to M.I.T. Men.” The intent was to “turn the tables” on men and show how it feels for women to be objectified. Instead, the two women were put on probation with a notation on their academic record for 10 months.

Information, of course, has warped to a new dimension since then.

Lukas Zidella, 25, an exchange student from Berlin, said he was amazed by Americans who seem not to think twice about publishing details of their personal lives online.

 “We were shocked by the disregard for the private sphere,” Mr. Zidella said.

Having grown up in the Internet age, students said they were well aware of the dangers.

“Everyone knows how the Internet works,” Ms. Queathem said as she closed her laptop in the student union. “I’ve always been worried about what I put on Facebook. I’m very conscious of future employers looking at it. It’s easy to forget, but important to remember.”

A picture caption accompanying an article on Friday about a former Duke University student who wrote a mock thesis about her sexual experiences incorrectly paraphrased comments from Lukas Zidella, a German exchange student. Mr. Zidella said he was amazed that Americans so casually publish very personal details about themselves on the Web; he did not say that such an incident would have been no big deal in his own country.

How we handle corrections

Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Durham, and Liz Robbins from New York. Janie Lorber contributed reporting from Washington.

Duke University student's PowerPoint sex 'thesis' goes viral

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critiquing the men she’s slept with to her nearest, dearest friends?

Oh, you can imagine.

,” and complete with pictures of the men she slept with — has gone viral online. It’s attracting

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and possibly even a

(in this day and age, of course it will).

In the extraordinary sexual dossier, Miss Owen, from Connecticut, graphically describes her lovers, how they met in bars and what they did after their binge drinking sessions. Each of her 13 lovers are named and pictured – sometimes partially naked – while intimate details are also revealed. She details their “pros” and “cons” and ranks their sexual prowess out of 10 in coloured charts and an “official f—” list.

a few years ago.

, frames the Karen Owen story as the

once and for all:

…unlike the senescent suffragettes of collectible coin fame, Karen Owen didn’t just achieve equality; she actually managed to demean the opposite sex to the point where one must ask if the term “weaker sex” shouldn’t be replaced with “freakier sex.” Can anybody really argue that gender inequality still exists when a seemingly innocent and fairly generic Duke girl can bring down the reputations of more than a dozen varsity athletes with a simple .pptx file, and the only comeuppance she receives is a rumor of a book deal? I’m telling you, the glass ceiling is in a million little pieces, and Palin and Hilldog had nothing to do with it. So instead of throwing around words like “slut” and “whore,” why not celebrate this achievement as the Seneca Falls Convention of the Internet age?

“I regret it with all my heart. I would never intentionally hurt the people that are mentioned on that.”

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Karen Owen PowerPoint: Duke University Student's Sex Thesis Poses Question Of Double Standard

Duke University alum Karen Owen's graphic sex PowerPoint thesis -- in which she analyzes and critiques her college-era conquests -- has entertained some and infuriated others. The Today Show takes the temperature at Duke and has experts weigh in on Owen's situation.

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2010 Duke University faux sex thesis controversy

From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The 2010 Duke University faux sex thesis controversy arose from a private 42-page PowerPoint document written by a Duke University senior, Karen Owen, in the format of a thesis about her sexual experiences during her time attending the university.

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The privacy landmine that is duke graduate karen owen's 'senior thesis'.

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Duke's reputation takes a hit. Again.

My alma mater has a habit of getting into the news, especially for stories that involve Duke athletes and sex. The latest story is jaw-dropping even for the Blue Devils.

Karen Owen, a 2010 graduate, kept detailed notes on her sexual adventures with 13 members of Duke's lacrosse, baseball and tennis teams over the last four years.  She then put those notes, along with the athletes' names and photos into a PowerPoint presentation, that concludes with a ranking of the 13 on what she calls her "F*** list." (Congratulations, I suppose, to this guy for topping the list.)

According to Jezebel , Owen sent the "unofficial senior thesis" titled "An education beyond the classroom: excelling in the realm of horizontal academics" to three friends and did not intend for it to go further than that. But one of those friends forwarded it on and it went viral, going out on listservs and eventually winding up on Gawker sites, Jezebel (for women) and Deadspin (for sports addicts).

Interestingly, Jezebel redacted the names of all those involved and blurred out the athletes' faces. Deadspin , on the other hand, did not.

When something like this goes viral, it's hard to keep people's identities under wraps. Mainstream blogs often deliberate on whether to reveal people's identities at the risk of being sued for defamation and invasion of privacy. It's strange that the bloggers at Gawker came to two different conclusions on how to handle it. ( Update : 24 hours and 300,000 page views later, Deadspin went back and redacted those names .)

I'll leave you to check out the PowerPoint at Gawker if you're interested in seeing what I am Charlotte Simmons could have been if Charlotte Simmons was a hot, sexually-aggressive sorority girl. Meanwhile, here's some advice for those involved...

When Owen realized that this list was going to go viral, she deleted all of her social network profiles, reports Irin Carmon at Jezebel. That's unwise. Now the stories on her "senior thesis" are going to take over the Google search result hits on her name. If this ever happens to you, it's best to keep your LinkedIn profile and Facebook page up, just make sure to lock down the privacy settings so that nosy journalists like me can't come looking.

Thanks to the friend that forwarded this on, Owen will never be able to escape this incident (unless she changes her name), so she may as well embrace it. The text in her PowerPoint attests to her writing abilities -- a book deal could certainly be in her future, or at least a part-time gig as a sex columnist.

There's no going back now, but maybe Owen should have written out her thesis with pen on real paper, or printed out just one copy that she shared with her friends in person. By putting it in an electronic format and sending it out by email, she practically invited it to go viral.

(If you just must keep track of your sexy times electronically and share it with your friends by email, you may want to look into the James-Bond-self-destruct-upon-reading mechanism for documents that companies like TigerText are working on. And it's always kind not to include your partners' real names -- especially when they're unaware they're being included in your sexual memoirs.)

What about the male athletes whose names, photos, and tales of sexual prowess (or lack thereof) are now tabloid fodder? I suspect there are going to be invasion of privacy lawsuits in the near future; I imagine their lawyers are already working hard to get Gawker to take the PowerPoints down.

The good news for them is that Google doesn't appear to be picking up their names from the PowerPoint because the slides are uploaded as photo files. Their Google results are safe for now. Their offline reputations -- especially those at the bottom of the rankings -- are not.

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Duke Student Karen Owen Details Her Sexcapades with Blue Devil Athletes

Duke University students and officials have found themselves under an assault of media attention for the wrong reason once again — kind of.  At the moment, it doesn’t appear any of the Blue Devils that were listed in Karen Owen’s phony senior thesis , which outlines sexual encounters she had over her college career with Duke student athletes , actually did anything wrong.

Yes, you read that correctly.  A young woman from Duke University actually chronicled — in detail — sexual experiences she had with 13 different student athletes.  In the full thesis, which can be read at Deadspin in its entirety with the “subjects” names, Owen gives each partner a raw score out of 10 based on various grading criteria such as the size of their hardware, how attractive they are, how aggressive they were, how creative they were, how entertaining they were, and their athletic ability.

The Duke lacrosse team was acquitted of any charges that were brought against them in the alleged rape case that took place a few years back and the University’s president eventually apologized to the athletes involved .  Still, no one has forgotten the incident and this isn’t the type of publicity the team or any other athletic program at Duke needs.  Turns out it isn’t what Owen wanted either, as she shared with Jezebel on Thursday.

The people that are named in it are the kinds of people that everyone wants to be or be with . I regret it with all my heart. I would never intentionally hurt the people that are mentioned on that.”

Owen’s biggest mistake was making this thing into a PowerPoint and sending it out to a select few people, no matter how much she thought she could trust them.  In this the age of digital media, she was asking for trouble by going digital with such a sensitive piece of literature.  As far as we can see everything was consensual and her so called “subjects” shouldn’t be getting into any kind of legal trouble.  However, they now have to answer unnecessary questions and get ripped apart by the media over something that should have never gone public in the first place.

Aside from all that, what is wrong with this girl?  I know this just came out and we haven’t even heard half the criticism she’s certain to receive, but I guarantee it won’t be as bad as it would have been if a male student had written something like it.  Who goes out and does a bunch of dudes and actually creates a “F**k List?”  Her words, not mine.

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Our Inevitable Culture: Skipping Ahead to the Duke-Sex-Thesis Television Show

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy Today’s New York Times contains an exposition of what many less patrician publications are calling the Duke University “Fuck List,” a 2010 graduate’s prolix PowerPoint presentation that details the bedside manner of 13 student-athletes. For 42 pages, paramours are scored on such subjects as attractiveness, size, and talent. On September 30, the document was posted on Jezebel , and it has since been tweeted “with the frenzied speed of the Indianapolis 500,” according to the Times, which gamely stuck to athletic metaphors. The Duke student newspaper published a wry editorial about the scandal , drolly suggesting the dossier’s author, Karen Owen, achieved a type of feminist victory. “Can anybody really argue that gender inequality still exists when a seemingly innocent and fairly generic Duke girl can bring down the reputations of more than a dozen varsity athletes with a simple .pptx file, and the only comeuppance she receives is a rumor of a book deal?” the piece asked. Yesterday morning, the Today show sent a correspondent to Duke’s Durham, North Carolina, campus on a fact-finding mission. “People gossip with their friends all the time about sex … I’ve been told,” a diffident Jeff Rossen reported, “but this is something entirely different.” Sociologically speaking, perhaps, but the Fuck List, a, um, viral sensation, has all the trappings of various successful computer-screen-to-silver-screen ventures, such as $h*! My Dad Says , Shh! Don’t Tell Steve , and Awkward Family Photos . The document has already attracted the attention of literary agents , so it should be only a matter of months until The F$ k List leads into $h ! My Dad Says on CBS’s lineup. It will then once again return to its Internet origins, this time in the form of weekly re-caps.

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Duke Contacting Those Affected by Sex "Thesis"

October 9, 2010 / 9:41 AM EDT / CBS

A recent Duke University graduate has a lot of explaining to do, after what began as a private joke is spinning out of control since her 42-page sex diary went viral on the Internet.

CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann reported on "The Early Show on Saturday Morning" that Karen Owen's mock thesis about "horizontal academics" - liaisons with 13 Duke athletes. Also, a 42-page PowerPoint presentation that named names, published photos, and included details about drunken make-out sessions, such as hooking up on the stairs of the packed library. A quote: "I felt like a prostitute hooking up with a roommate."

Strassman reported that in her e-mail to three friends, Owen even ranked them all as sexual athletes.

Her friends shared the PowerPoint presentation with their friends, and the whole thing became an Internet sensation - and a cautionary tale of "think before you hit 'send.'"

Duke Student Powerpoint: The New Exhibitionism? What Does Mock Duke Thesis Say about Female Sexuality?

Steve Wiley, associate professor of communication at North Carolina State University, told CBS News , "Best to assume that we're under surveillance of one form or another most of the time."

Duke is embarrassed, Strassmann said.

Administrators said in a statement, "We've been reaching out to those affected by this incident and will continue to support them."

Strassmann pointed out that the athletes named are furious. And Karen Owen, a 22-year-old Duke alum, may be in for some interesting questions in future job interviews.

On "The Early Show," "Early Show" contributor Dr. Jennifer Hartstein , a child and adolescent psychologist, and Dr. Jeff Gardere, a psychologist, offered their opinions on the situation.

Hartstein said, "We've heard stuff like this from men a long time - the frat chats, they talk to each other behind closed doors - but the point she didn't think about, what I'm struck with, this young woman grew up in a digital era and broadcast this in such a brazen way. While I admire her to talk about it openly, to send it out without thinking about what the consequences of that might be, is dangerous and potentially destructive."

Gardere added, "This young woman, first of all, I don't want to put her down, I think this is really tragic what happened to her and the young men involved. A lot of her trysts involved alcohol, poor judgment. She talks about humiliation. But she sent this, from what we know, initially to three friends. And then from there, it went viral, no pun intended.

"I think it speaks about when you are talking about intimacy: it should be between you and that other person. For you to even share it with three other people, I think, is really wrong."

Hartstein said this instance is addressing a larger issue at colleges.

"There is this excessive everything - excessive drinking, excessive sex, there's excessive, you know, discussion. While I think, on one hand, it's nice [that] girls are catching up to boys and I support that, the fact it is happening indiscriminately -- she blacks out at one point -- that worries me because that happens more than not, and why aren't we addressing underlying issues."

Gardere did disagree with Hartstein on one point.

"This is not empowering women," he said. "Two wrongs do not make a right. Certainly guys have been doing this in college a long time, they brag about their exploits, and so on, and that was plain wrong. Now that women are being acknowledged being equal members of society, 'Women, please don't repeat the same stupid mistakes that men have made when it comes to sexual intimacy.'"

Hartstein responded, "I think what is empowering to women [is] they can be as assertive and aggressive in wanting to have sex. I think that, in part, women really were kind of taught to sit back and let men take charge. I think one of the things we're noticing here, she didn't necessary do that. She got involved, she was intimate. She made things happen."

Gardere replied, "And she was humiliated and talks about that and says, you know, 'What if I had to do this over? I would never do this again.' I think the bottom line is this is an 'Obama teachable moment.' When it comes to intimacy, keep it between you and that other person."

He added, "I can feel bad with her for the simple fact she will probably end up with a reality show. This is like 'Sex and the City': she really didn't do anything so bad, but poor judgment doesn't help her. Women don't look at her as a role model because she's not and she needs help."

More from CBS News

The Hazards of Duke

A now infamous PowerPoint presentation exposes a lot about men, women, sex, and alcohol—and about how universities are letting their female students down.

N o matter what your opinion of the now notorious online “ thesis ” of the recent Duke graduate Karen Owen—a comprehensive and often pornographic report on her sexual encounters with 13 athletes, most of them lacrosse players—you have to admit that it was a terrible PowerPoint . That program is intended for creating a visual accompaniment to a lecture, keeping audience and speaker on track by reducing the essential ideas of a complex presentation to a series of bullet-pointed phrases and concepts, the irreducible takeaway. But the 42 slides of Owen’s report on her “horizontal academics” are so dense with narrative detail, bits of dialogue, descriptions of people and places, and reproduced text-message conversations that they are a chore to read. It’s as though two impulses are at war with one another: the desire to recount her sexual experiences in a hyper-masculine way—marked by locker-room crudeness and PowerPoint efficiency—fighting against the womanly desire to luxuriate in the story of it all.

Clearly the very last thing Karen Owen would want is for a reader of her thesis to perceive her as a vulnerable creature whose desire for sex with campus big shots was at least partly motivated by a powerful and unmet desire for affection. But in the sheer amount of anecdotal detail, and in particular in her relentless descriptions of the anatomical shortcomings of various partners, she reveals that the thesis is motivated by the same force that has prompted women through the ages to describe with savage precision their liaisons with men who discarded them: revenge.

In 2009, GQ magazine named Duke America’s second-douchiest college, a distinction that came with a caveat: “They’re probably number one. But we’d rather not rank Duke number one at anything.” It’s difficult to argue with GQ ’s thinking on either score; something ugly is going on at the university—a mercenary intensity that has been gathering strength for the past two decades, as the institution made the calculated decision to wrench itself into elite status by dint of its fortune in tobacco money and its sheer ambition. It lured academic luminaries—many of them longer on star power than on intellectual substance—built a fearsome sports program, and turned its admissions department into the collegiate version of a head-hunting firm. (I was a college counselor at a prep school in the ’90s, and the zeal with which Duke gunned for our top students was unseemly.)

In some respects Duke has never moved on from the values of the 1980s, when droves of ambitious college students felt no moral ambivalence about preparing themselves for a life centered largely on the getting and spending of money. With a social scene dominated by fraternities and sororities (a way of life consisting of ardent partying and hooking up, offset by spurts of busywork composing angry letters to campus newspapers and taking online alcohol-education classes), with its large share of rich students displaying their money in the form of expensive cars and clothing, and with an attitude toward campus athletics that is at once deeply southern (this is a part of the world where even high-school athletes can be treated with awestruck deference by adults) and profoundly anti-intellectual, it’s a university whose thoughtful students are overshadowed by its voraciously self-centered ones.

It was from both within this world and outside it that Karen Owen emanated. She reports that she had spent her freshman year gazing at “frat stars” ( frat star and sorostitute are terms of art at Duke and at other similarly composed schools), but the predictable angry letter to the school newspaper about the episode, written by a group of “female Greek leaders on campus,” was quick to point out that Owen was not herself a member of any sorority. It was not only an attempt to distance sorority life from the antics of someone like Karen Owen, it served to underscore the disdain that the actual Karen Owen seems to have engendered in her fellow students, whose closed social system offered her no safe harbor.

One of the many implausible aspects of the entire incident is the notion, which Owen has forcefully asserted in her brief communications with the press, that she sent the PowerPoint to only three friends, and then was shocked when it was sent onward, ultimately reaching a huge audience, including the men whom she describes. It’s absurd to believe that she was innocent enough to think that such an incendiary document, transmitted by email, would not quickly enjoy a large audience. But it’s not at all hard to believe that Owen had only three friends in college. The overwhelming sense one gets from the thesis is of a young woman who was desperate for human connection, and who had no idea how to obtain it.

The thesis, which was prompted into being when one of Owen’s partners asked her where he stood on her “Fuck List,” includes a section for each of the 13 athletes, containing a slide of flattering photographs of the young man, and then an evaluation of each sexual encounter she had with him. She rates each of these experiences on several criteria, among them physical attractiveness, penis size, sexual talent, and—tellingly—aggressiveness. For all the attention Owen has received as a boundary-breaking, sexually empowered new woman, there has been almost no discussion of the fact that the kind of sex she most enjoyed was rough to the point of brutalizing. One encounter that occurred during an alcoholic blackout was still, as Karen Owen would say, “baller,” because in the shower the next day she found bruises on her body; another was great because it was so “violent”—and she means that “in a good way.” He was “throwing me around like I weighed nothing.” Her modus operandi for initiating these assignations seems to have been hanging out at bars frequented by Duke athletes, getting hammered, letting a “subject” know she was open for business, and then grabbing a cab back to his apartment; she seems to have been willing to do absolutely anything to please the men, which often meant hanging out with their boorish roommates until it was her time to perform.

What a glittering social world came along with these athletes. With their king-size beds, their huge television sets, their love of porn and Mario Kart, their apparent unconcern for matters cerebral (one of the 13 was suspended from play for academic violations; another dropped out when he got drafted into a Major League Baseball team), their eagerness to whip out their genitals on almost any occasion, and their casual racism, they offer any parent ample reason to think twice before sending a beloved child to Duke. These louts did not operate on the fringes of polite society at the university, but existed—were lionized—at its epicenter.

We have been invited , by both Karen Owen’s supporters and her detractors, to view her as the arrival of something new: either as the embodiment of women’s complete victory over the old double standard, or as proof positive that our culture has finally run aground. She is a puzzling character, because she seems on the one hand to have been invented by a committee of frat boys. In a way, she more closely resembles them than she does the sorority girls who spurn her. She’s like a fraternity’s ideal pledge: she races around to deliver hot breakfasts to the brothers, drives them to practices, hangs out loyally on cold streets while they work out potential DUI hassles with the cops, listens to them chew over their buddies’ girlfriend problems, tells them—with apparent sincerity—that they’re awesome at spitting Biggie raps, never demands her own turn at Mario Kart. Even her attitude toward (and during) sex seems to have been dreamed up during a Sigma Nu smoker: she’s certainly not the first young woman to perform fellatio in a crowded college library, but surely there aren’t many others who in the middle of this act earned an appreciative—and robustly returned—high five.

If what we are seeing in Karen Owen is the realization of female sexual power, then we must at least admit that the first pancake off the griddle is a bit of a flop. What rotten luck that the first true daughter of sex-positive feminism would have an erotic proclivity for serving every kind of male need, no matter how mundane or humiliating, that she would so eagerly turn herself from sex mate to soccer mom, depending on what was wanted from her. There is every reason, in fact, to believe that Owen’s sense of herself, both as a sexual being and as a raconteur of outrageous sexual exploits, was shaped not by her own desires but by a particular male sensibility, in fact by a particular male: Tucker Max, whom she specifically mentions as a rival in the art of the scandalous and ridiculous hookup. The notion of becoming his female counterpart is clearly not far from her mind in each of her lurid descriptions and ratings of her sexual encounters.

Max, a brainy and reasonably attractive kid from a troubled family, attended the University of Chicago, graduating in three years and earning a scholarship to Duke law school, where his life changed. He ascertained quickly that sexual aggression—not just in the act of sex, but in the way a man can choose to treat women, verbally and emotionally—is a force to which a huge number of educated, liberated young women are deeply attracted. Combining this aggression with a Howard Stern–style vulgarity, he quickly became the unofficial king of Duke. He published his exploits in an unbelievably nasty little book called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell , a compendium of anecdotes that was a best seller for several years; it has made him a legendary figure to fraternity members across the country, who treat him—and his simple system of playing directly on women’s insecurities to get them in bed immediately—as a messiah.

Crucial to his technique is the titanic amount of alcohol he and his potential partners consume before the hookup, a transaction that often includes not just having sex, but also vomiting copiously and then passing out near or sometimes in the effulgence. Today’s typical middle-aged man (the father of a teenage daughter, perhaps) may hear about college drinking and shrug his shoulders: he remembers similar antics from his own days. But the best book about the current state of girls and young women in America, Girls on the Edge , by a physician and psychologist named Leonard Sax, offers astonishing and troubling new insight into the role and consequences of binge drinking in so many girls’ lives. While the rate at which boys abuse alcohol has remained relatively constant over the past 40 years, for girls the rate has “roughly quadrupled.” Among college students who meet the clinical criteria for alcohol abuse, women now outnumber men, and drinking affects the women in a different and more pernicious way than it does men. Sax writes,

Drink per drink, alcohol is more dangerous to young women than it is to young men, even after adjusting for differences in height and weight. Alcohol abuse appears to damage girls’ brains differently and more severely than the same degree of alcohol abuse affects same-age boys.

If you’ve been on a college campus recently—or merely followed a college newspaper online—you know the toll that this kind of drinking is taking on students, particularly on young women. The institutions have it within their power to change the situation, but only by exerting the long-dead patriarchal approach, with parietals and curfews—something that no elite institution will touch, because the old system was inherently sexist. Instead, many university presidents—including Duke’s own president, Richard Brodhead—have signed on to something called the Amethyst Initiative, a perplexing document that essentially absolves them of any responsibility for what is taking place. Apparently, the current legal drinking age of 21 is bad for young people because the need for fake IDs forces students to “make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.” How much would you have to hate yourself to sign a document that made that assertion?

A positive spin on the current state of young women and alcohol was offered two years ago in a New York magazine story that asked “Should Gender Equality Extend to Drinking?” Reporting on the number of young professional women who drink regularly and in great quantity, the article suggested that

a woman exerting her power by making herself incapacitated does not read as a disjunction Control over her life—and the decision of when and how to lose that control—seems to be the point.

Two young women who were interviewed described the role that getting drunk played in their sexual conquesting:

“Drinking gives you an excuse to do something you wouldn’t want to believe you would normally do,” one young woman told me. “You can be on a mission because you’re not self-conscious.” “For me, it’s not about getting up the guts to seduce someone,” added her friend, “It’s about getting up the guts to allow myself to be seduced.”

That female sexual desire is deeply enmeshed in the desire to be seduced, taken, treated—as Karen Owen herself puts it so forthrightly—with a measure of aggression is one reason there will never really be a female Tucker Max. We know from far greater figures than these two that many women’s sexual appetites include (even center on) men who are in most ways beneath them, in terms of intellect, sensibility, social refinement. Mary McCarthy, in her brilliant and clearly autobiographical short story “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” describes a young woman traveling across country by train. She is sitting in the club car when a well-dressed man enters, a kind of man who is entirely “Out of the Question”—“He looked, she decided, like a middle-aged baby, like a young pig, like something in a seed catalogue.” How like the Duke lacrosse boys, with their porn and their Mario Kart, is this description. The two talk, and he makes a bold move, inviting her into his compartment to drink some whiskey with him, and she feels the old self-loathing begin to rise:

She felt bitterly angry with the man for having exposed her—so early—to this supreme test of femininity, a test she was bound to fail, since she would either go into the compartment, not wanting to (and he would know this and feel contempt for her malleability), or she would stay out of the compartment, wanting to have gone in (and he would know this, too, and feel contempt for her timidity).

But she goes with him, alone, into the compartment, and they drink together.

She liked him. Why, it was impossible to say. The attraction was not sexual, for, as the whisky went down in the bottle, his face took on a more and more porcine look that became so distasteful to her that she could hardly meet his gaze.

They talk, and she feels a desperate need to explain herself, to atone for how many lovers she has had in her past, to lay the blame for her promiscuity on them, not her: “It was as if she had been a prosecuting attorney drawing up a brief against each of her lovers.” In other words, she presents to him her own 42-slide PowerPoint of rejection and disappointment, but it doesn’t really make her feel better; it just marks the time until the whiskey has gone down enough in the bottle for her to do the thing she wants to do. When she wakes up, she thinks for a moment that she has not allowed herself to be seduced, but then the memory of the fulfilling, humiliating encounter comes back to her: “Oh my God,” she says, finding herself lying next to the naked pig: “get me out of this and I will do anything you want.”

Penelope Trunk, the author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success , wrote on a CBS business Web site that she just loves Karen Owen:

I, for one, am fascinated that Owen has so much self-knowledge. I wish I had had Owen’s self-confidence, pluck, and earning power when I was her age. I wish I had been taking control of male tools when I was that young. I wish I had been so good at getting the guy. I am twenty years older than Owen, but she inspires me to be brave, take risks, and let my creativity get the best of me.

A young female student at Duke told a reporter for the Today show who asked her about the PowerPoint: “I guess, like, the inner feminist in me was pretty excited when I saw it. I was like, ‘Yeah, good for her—this is awesome.’”

The notion that Karen Owen is good at getting the guy, that she represents something awesome for the future of feminism, is an assertion that cannot withstand a careful reading of the actual PowerPoint, a package that—far more than Owen could ever have intended—constitutes a story, one with a beginning, middle, and very sad end, and reveals her to be one of the most pitiable women to emerge on the cultural scene in quite a while. Her assignations are arranged chronologically in the thesis, and in the arc of experience that led her from Subject 1 to Subject 13, there is a very old story about women, desire, expectation, dashed hope, and (to use the old, apt, word) ruin.

After a freshman year spent in the thrall of the school’s handsome white athletes, something exciting happened: on the night of her 19th birthday, in September of her junior year, one handsome lacrosse player, recently broken up from his girlfriend of three years, bought her “many, many beers” at a Durham club called Shooters, and then asked her to go back to his house to “hang out.” The invitation was thrilling; it’s easy to imagine that the prospect of becoming his next years-long girlfriend was enticing, and even if the night began with some strange twists and turns—such as the man inviting his pals to admire her breasts outside the bar—wasn’t that the way it had probably begun for the last girlfriend? But once they went to his house, and then to his bed, things weren’t quite what she had hoped for: “It was over too quickly. I was probably a little awkward and didn’t really know how to move or what to do. And it was a tad bit painful …”

She never slept with him again—apparently he had no interest in seeing her again—and she was chastened enough by the events not to risk a repeat of them for several months. It’s not difficult to imagine what the days and weeks following the encounter were like: the expectation that he would call again, the anxious and depressing realization that he was done with her. But the following March, she was ready to try again. After many “long looks” exchanged with a campus tennis star on her way to and from the gym, the young man approached her at Shooters and asked her to dance; on the dance floor, he asked her to go home with him. What followed was the kind of one-night stand that changes a woman. He was rude to her in the cab, and things only got worse once they were in bed: “He was terrible, did not even bother to kiss me more than a few seconds, and finished in about five minutes, after which he simply walked out of the room and did not return.” She reports that “absolutely everything,” except for the fact that he was a successful athlete, was terrible about him, that the whole situation was terrible: “I accidentally left my favorite pair of earrings from South Africa. When I texted him this fact, he responded with ‘I will leave them outside of the building for you.’”

The story of Karen Owen is the story of those forgotten earrings. Imagine the moment in which she paused to take them off—her favorite earrings, the ones that came all the way from South Africa and that she took care to remove before going to bed, because that’s what you do if you’re a responsible girl with a nice pair of earrings. You keep them safe. At the very least, she must have imagined that Subject 2 was inviting her to do what Subject 1 had done—not just to have sex with him, but to hang out with him. And then to be turfed out so rudely, so quickly, to be treated with such ugliness afterward. Imagine having been so young and so hopeful, being used sexually and then held in such contempt that rather than see you again, a young man leaves your jewelry outside his building, where anyone could come along and take it.

Subject 2, who was rated a 1 out of a possible 10, is the impetus for the entire thesis. In fact, at the very end of the whole ugly mess of it, after she has become so good at oral sex that she is repeatedly praised for having no gag reflex, after she has learned to crave sex so rough that she’s left battered, after she’s been cast aside over and over again, the final line of the thesis—before her jaunty “Acknowledgements” slide— is another angry remark about Subject 2. Being rejected by Subject 1 was hurtful and embarrassing, but being treated like a whore by Subject 2 is what broke her heart and her spirit, and if you are the kind of person whose heart and spirit can be broken by a one-night stand, then you may not be the brave new face of anything at all.

When everything went to hell, when the thesis was splashed across the Internet, there weren’t any young men by her side to protect or defend Karen Owen. It was a man’s job, though, and the man it fell to (goodbye, bold new face of feminism) was her father. He’s the one who told the New York Times reporter who called the house looking for Karen that his daughter did not have anything to say about the situation. What a moment that must have been at the Owen family home, how much it recalls the ending of “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” In that story, years after the affair on the train, the narrator’s father dies; the seducer reads the obituary, and he sends her a telegram: YOU’VE LOST THE BEST FRIEND YOU WILL EVER HAVE.

In the week after the scandal broke, a very pretty, golden-haired Fox News anchor named Megyn Kelly interviewed a couple of equally beautiful female attorneys about the incident, and ended the segment warning other young women not to follow in Owen’s footsteps. She had special knowledge on this subject, she told the audience, because she herself had “dated the captain of the lacrosse team at Syracuse.”

What a fantastic little nugget of information this was, about the person and character of Megyn Kelly! Syracuse University, whose famous department of television communications had clearly set her on the path to the golden hair and the job at Fox; the fact that all these years later she was still proud of the boy’s having been not just a member of the team, but its captain; the clear authority that she derived from having actually dated him, having been his girlfriend, not his Karen Owen. “Men do not respect women who do this,” she said. “You may sleep with half the lacrosse team—they don’t think that’s a great thing.”

She became more adamant, the words tumbling out faster and faster. “They don’t talk about how great you are,” she said, and now she was actually looking angry. I realized she was no longer warning young women away from unwise behavior. She was now defending the righteous tradition of Division I Men’s Lacrosse and all of the excellent guys who play it, and she was punishing the woman who had dared to come forward and make the sport and its players look bad. “They don’t talk about how great you are,” she said scornfully; “they talk about what a joke you are.”

It’s impossible to read Karen Owen’s encomium to the “glorious, alpha-male dominated world of Duke lacrosse hookups” without thinking back to the events of 2006, when the Duke lacrosse team threw a private party that became infamous. Three of the teammates were eventually accused of raping a stripper, and although the charges proved false and the investigation a travesty, few people would suggest the night represented any kind of high-water mark for the team or the university that it represented. Hiring strippers—two desperately poor women, one of them a mother of two, both with lives shaped around more sorrow and misery than the average Duke lacrosse player could begin to imagine—becoming angry when they turned out not to be white, suggesting the women use a broomstick as a sex toy, and then hurling racial slurs at them as they stumbled back into their car falls so far outside the realm of what anyone can call decent behavior that the accused players’ improbable turn as victimized solid citizens was the most unpleasant result of the D.A.’s bungled case.

In fact, the man identified as Subject 1 in Owen’s PowerPoint was a member of that very team, present and accounted for at the ugly party and named in several of the police reports garnered about the night. Player Dan Flannery said that when he “tried to apologize and reason with” one of the strippers in a bedroom of the house, Subject 1 may have been with him, and David Evans told police that Subject 1 at one point followed the women out into the street.

Ironically, it was his role in that awful scene that put Subject 1 in Durham in time to spend his ill-fated night with Karen Owen. Although he had already graduated with his bachelor’s degree, the NCAA had offered him a rare extra year of eligibility as a compensation for the season he’d lost to the scandal. All he’d had to do was enroll in graduate school, and before you knew it he was back on the field, as an M.B.A. student.

How many college athletes, especially those on successful teams, would dream of one more year of glory? But Subject 1’s experiences off the field prove that you really can stay too long at the fair, especially if you’re a sexually voracious white male on an American college campus. The poor bastard caught the tail end of Take Back the Night and then the first draft of Sexual Empowerment Through PowerPoint. In the space of two and a half years, his blandly handsome face and powerfully built body had taken on the cast of a thug rapist and then of a hapless sex partner who couldn’t even keep it up long enough to satisfy an inexperienced co-ed.

This past fall, just a couple of weeks before the students and administration at Duke were faced with the chagrin and bad press of the Karen Owen situation, an unrelated but—to my mind—far more significant occurrence was reported, albeit far more briefly, in the student newspaper. A sophomore returning to campus for the new term was arrested and charged with two very serious crimes: the kidnapping and second-degree rape of a fellow student. He’d been freed from jail on a $75,000 bond, had withdrawn from school, and was awaiting trial. This astonishing bit of news seemed to be of relatively little interest to the readers and editors of The Chronicle an interesting fact all on its own.

Apparently one night last spring, according to the statement she gave campus police, a young woman started drinking with some friends, beginning at around five o’clock and continuing into the night. At 11 o’clock they went to a party at a crowded on-campus apartment, where she continued drinking, and where a young man introduced himself to her. They talked, and then, she told the police, he put a hand on the small of her back, led her to a bathroom, locked the door, and “sexually assaulted her.” Later, a friend found her passed out and took her home. When she woke up, the details of the experience in the bathroom came swimming back to her, and she decided to report it. The young man admitted to having had sexual contact with her, but denied that the contact had been in the form of vaginal intercourse—a critical distinction, legally, as in North Carolina only that act can lead to a rape charge. He requested to have a DNA test to prove his innocence but for some reason the police refused. And the case lay fallow through the summer, but in September, with the return of classes, he was charged with the crimes. The police then collected DNA samples from the young man.

Reading the woman’s statement, what struck me was how adamant she was about the extent of her drunkenness, how central this fact was to the narrative she gave the police. She had been “very intoxicated,” she told them; she’d had “a few more drinks” when she got to the party. “Witnesses” had corroborated her level of intoxication, and it’s not difficult to imagine these witnesses including the friends who’d been partying with her and were eager to attest to just how wasted she had been.

From a legal standpoint, the case will rest on the evolving notions of “consent,” and on the fact that intoxication can render null even a verbal consent to sex. It also falls into the body of case law that has emerged from the once revolutionary but now increasingly meaningless concept of date rape; reasonable people can disagree as to whether this encounter constituted a rape, but surely no one would suggest it was a date.

As I read the woman’s report, and imagined the tones of outrage and hurt and violation in which it was surely given, and as I lingered on her account of how drunk she’d been, a very old-fashioned phrase suddenly floated through my mind. It was a phrase I hadn’t thought of in years, a simple formulation that carried within it a world of assumptions and beliefs. “She’s angry,” I thought to myself, “because he took advantage of her .”

It was a phrase that they taught you to keep you safe, and it was predicated on the facts of the double standard: men were always after you for sex; you had to be on your guard against them; and at the very least, you had to make sure you kept your wits about you whenever you were in mixed company. It was built on the premise that the dubious pleasures of what is today called the drunken hookup were not for you to sample. A man who had done what the accused admits to having done—made a beeline to a really drunk girl and then led her somewhere private for sex—probably wouldn’t have faced legal consequences, but would at the very least have been considered a cad. Such a thing was known not to be the right, or the proper, or the gentlemanly thing to do.

In those days, we relied on our own good judgment to keep us safe, but also—and this is the terrible, unchanging fact about being female—on the mercy of the men around us. So, too, the young women of today, including this Duke student. She may have a world of legal recourse that my friends and I didn’t have a quarter century ago, but when it came to that moment in that bathroom, how much did that recourse really help her? Not at all.

We’ve made a culture for our college women in which they have been liberated from the curfews and parietals that were once the bane of co-eds, but one in which they have also shaken off the general suspicion of male sexuality that was the hallmark of Andrea Dworkin–style campus activism; they prefer bikini waxes and spray tans to overalls and invective. So they have ended up with the protections of neither the patriarchy nor those old-school, man-hating radical feminists.

Maybe they’re all the better for it. Or maybe an awful lot of these young women at our very best colleges are being traumatized by what takes place during so much of this mindless, drunken partying when they’re steeped in alcohol, which brings out the least engaging aspects of their young selves.

Inebriate of air—am I— And debauchee of dew —Emily Dickinson I was but a shot away from what is referred to as a “black-out state”. —Karen Owen

There’s every reason to believe the latter. Take a look, for instance, at the stories collected in the three-volume campus publication Saturday Night: Untold Stories of Sexual Assault at Duke . Even in the words of Karen Owen herself, we can find evidence that the balls-out composer of the Fuck List may have a very different, if little-explored, side of her personality, one that befits less the bard of the blow job than the heartbroken heroine of a Jane Austen novel. Asked by a reporter from Jezebel for her thoughts on everything that had happened, she responded with a fully human and entirely feminine sentiment. “I regret it,” she said, “with all my heart.”

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Duke University Graduate Karen Owen Pens Sex Life Thesis

Duke graduate Karen Owen saw her so-called thesis on sex go viral.

Oct. 8, 2010 — -- If Internet users were grading Duke University graduate Karen Owen's thesis on her active sex life, she'd likely get an 'A' for attention to detail.

Owen has become a much-discussed topic on blogs, Web sites and even morning shows after her so-called thesis, chronicling her sexual escapades during her undergraduate years at Duke, went public.

The 42-page PowerPoint presentation titled, "An Education Beyond the Classroom: Excelling in the Realm of Horizontal Academics," ranked 13 men Owen was sexually involved with during college, according to their physical attractiveness, athletic ability and talent -- in the bedroom.

The thesis was reportedly e-mailed by Owen to only a few of her close friends. But after one of those friends forwarded the document, and then that recipient did the same, the document soon went viral, first appearing on the blog Deadspin.com.

Now, Owen is an Internet legacy for her description of picking up student athletes at Durham, N.C., bars, and what happened behind closed doors.

According to the PowerPoint that was obtained by ABCNews.com in full, Owen gave bonus points to sexual partners who had an "Australian accent and/or professional surfing skills." Points were deducted for rudeness, she wrote.

Owen wrote that her project was spurred, after one of the men included in her project, texted her to ask how "he ranked on her f**k list." What followed was a detailed list of everything from memorable moments to the pros and cons of each of her conquests.

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