Karen Owen and the Duke F#%k List

Enquiring minds want to know….

They do not merely want to know what makes Karen Owen f#%k, but they want to understand why she wrote it all up in a mock thesis that mimics the pages of the National Enquirer.

I have offered some of my own analysis here and here, but, for now I want to examine the brilliant essay that Caitlyn Flanagan just wrote for the Atlantic. Link here.

Given that sex-positive feminists have made Karen Owen into something of a heroine, it is worthwhile to study Flanagan’s analysis of the situation. As opposed to the zealots who write in the name of feminism, Flanagan is perfectly attuned to the real-life experience of Karen Owen.

Caitlin Flanagan is the bane of feminists. We should not be surprised that her article has already provoked a counterattack.

Read what Hanna Rosin writes: “But her [Owen’s] sexual exploits are a fact the culture has to accommodate in its understanding of women,….A woman who loves sex – even one who describes her sexual exploits as pleasantly violent – is not in a state of 'ruin.' She is in control.

“What Flanagan’s analysis leaves out about Owen’s Power Point is how funny and subversive it was, how it takes male porn conventions and turns them on its head.” Link here.

At a time when every mother of a teenaged daughter is horrified at the prospect that her daughter will turn into a Karen Owen, Rosin’s remarks are reprehensible.

The culture does not have to accommodate anything, certainly not the ideological zeal of feminists.

Rosin and her like provide us with even more evidence-- if it had been needed-- of the fact that feminists are responsible for creating a culture in which a young woman like Karen Owen might imagine that her behavior is liberated.

As it happens, Flanagan does not have any psycho credentials to her name. Therefore, she has a decided advantage over those of us who do.

Better yet, Flanagan has read and reread the content of Karen Owen’s foray into sensationalist journalism, thereby sparing the rest of us the pain. I confess that when I wrote about Owen before, I did not read every last word in her thesis.

Why? Because they are painful to read. And because there is no great virtue to feeling someone else's pain. It is painful to watch a young woman (or anyone, for that matter) humiliate herself and a series of other people.

Here is how Flanagan analyzes Owen’s behavior and motivation: “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.”

When you turn your life into a story, you take the risk that someone place it in a literary genre. Here, revenge narrative.

If we want to know what made Karen Owen chronicle her exploits and subject herself to inevitable humiliation, Flanagan tells us that it was clear and simple: revenge.

More than that, hers was a special subgenre of the revenge narrative, one where the avenger willingly sacrifices herself in order to hurt others.

Owen sacrificed her own reputation and her good name to humiliate the men who had hurt her. Perhaps, she felt that she had very little dignity left, so why not sacrifice it to reveal the damage that lay in being the Hookup Queen.

Whatever she thought, and whatever the feminists think, Owen’s story is cautionary.

Flanagan sees Owen as a lost soul, a girl who lived outside of the sorority culture, who had few friends, but who discovered that she could use her sexuality to gain a small taste of popularity, and even notoriety.

In Flanagan’s words: “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 hookup culture provided what Owen sought. Also, as you read her entries, as Flanagan has, you get the impression that the more she did it the better she became at it.

Sex can be a skill like another. Experience can be an excellent teacher. Owen was an apt pupil.

One of the reasons why women continue to hookup, regardless of the shame they feel, is simply that they get better at it.

Should we consider Karen Owen a feminist hero? Flanagan says No.

In her words: “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.”

Clearly, Flanagan disdains Karen Owen and her ilk. Disdains her for acting out a male fantasy, for compromising her femininity in a misguided attempted to feel equal to men.

Flanagan is correct to see Owen as: “… one of the most pitiable women to emerge on the cultural scene in quite a while.”

Better than that, she identifies the moment when Owen was launched into her career as Hookup Queen. It occurred after her hookup with Subject 2.

Before having sex with him Owen had taken off her earrings. Afterwards, she forgot them at his place. When she noticed, she called him to ask if she could recover them. He replied by offering to leave them outside of his building.

In Flanagan’s words: “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.

“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.”

So, the Duke F#%k list is the aftershock of a trauma. Hopefully, young women will grant more credence to Caitlin Flanagan than they are prone to grant to her feminist detractors.

If you have to choose between a woman who is sensitive to the experience of another woman and a group of women who care more about disseminating their ideology than about what happens to you, do the right thing and choose the former.

What Makes Karen Owen #&*$?

Alexandra Petri's comments on Karen Owen, stand out for doing a great job analyzing the issue of public exposure. Link here.

As you may  know, I believe that the thoroughly modern tendency to expose your private life is deeply problematical. Many of those who are involved in sexting and other forms of internet self-exposure do not really understand the consequences of their actions. My comments here.

Note how Petri frames the issues: "The universal human impulse to autobiography stems, in large part, from the desire to be the protagonists of our own lives."

She continues:  "Karen Owen's wry, often witty, self-deprecating, self-aware voice takes control of her 'raucous life.'"

And also: "By recounting the story, you claim agency! You craft your own narrative and become the wry, ironic storyteller, rather than the drunk girl doing shots in the corner with Name Redacted, ignoring the whispers as she walks out of Shooters with another guy."

And finally: " Karen is single-handedly giving that girl stumbling down the steps of your dormitory at noon with someone else's socks on a better name."

I hope I have allowed Petri's argument a full presentation, because I am going to take some slight exception to it.

I believe that its brilliance lies in the fact that it  uncovers a connection between what students learn in college classrooms and how they conduct their lives.

If you take a few courses in women's studies or in critical theory or deconstruction or even in some forms of therapy, you will learn exactly the lessons that Petri articulates so clearly and so accurately.

I can think of a serious psychoanalyst, named Roy Schafer,who once argued that therapy should be about becoming the author of the narrative of your own life. See his: A New Language for Psychoanalysis.

If you have been taught that there is, as Petri suggests, a universal human impulse toward autobiography, you can expose your life and feel that you are standing tall with St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Of course, there is no such universal human impulse. There is, in fact, a universal human impulse toward modesty, toward covering up your private parts and functions.

Today's professoriat does not accept it, and Karen Owen is suffering the consequences.

Surely, it is possible that Karen Owen also learned at Duke that she should take ownership of her own experience by writing her own narrative, by becoming the protagonist in her own story. After all, Duke used to be the world epicenter for postmodernist criticism.

I hope that Petri is being ironic when she says that Owen has taken control of her own experience. In fact, her life has just spun completely out of her control. Whatever her prior ambitions, the only path that seems open to her now is to make a career of celebrity.

As for her final point, the implication that Owen has single-handedly given that coed on the walk of shame a better name, I also hope she is being ironic.

You may not like it, and you might not consider it to be theoretically correct, but Karen Owen has just dragged her name through the mud. Do you think that her parents are proud of her? Do you think that the parents of a prospective husband would be happy to welcome her into their family? Do you think her siblings are proclaiming their pride in her college achievements?

Just some thoughts for a Friday morning.

Karen Owen: Hookup Queen

What the hookup culture really needed was a face. Now it has one. Her name is Karen Owen. She recently graduated from Duke University.

In the past she would have been called a groupie, a woman who specializes in seducing athletes. Given her status as college student, and given her great track record of bedding jocks, Owen should now be called the Hookup Queen.

To commemorate her achievements Owen put together a mock-thesis, fully documented, with names and pictures, describing in detail the men she seduced, with the how, when, where, and how good. Link here.

Much of it is charming and amusing. Owen makes it sound as though she went to Duke to learn about hooking up and that she succeeded beyond her dreams.

She writes that she feels no shame, but rather pride in her conquests. Truth be told, she makes Jaclyn Friedman look like a rank amateur.

By now, however, I believe that she is receiving a lesson in shame. One regrets that her professors and advisers did not offer any guidance in the matter.

Despite what Owen says were her intentions, her splendid work, her great achievement, did not remain within her close circle of friends. The thesis went viral, and she is now learning a few brand new lessons in shame.

When she says that she intended to keep her work a secret among friends, she is protesting far too much. The thesis is too well-crafted, contains far too much work, to expect such limited exposure. It cries out for public exposure.

If Owen is looking for a book contract, she might have done herself some good. According to Jezebel, editors and agents are already looking for her. Link here.

If she is looking for celebrity and for a heartfelt crying session on Oprah, she has probably advanced her cause. If she wants to learn how tort law works, from within the legal system, she is well on the way.

But if she wants to be married and have a family, this exercise in indiscretion has not advanced her cause. And, how many men are now going to consider her even for a random hookup?

As for the larger lesson, a lesson that we are all seeing played out every day in tragic circumstances, one has to wonder why no one seems to have taught today's youth the virtue of discretion.

People do strange things in college. They do stranger things when they are young adults first out of college. They might live to regret what they have done, to the point where they might not want their future lovers and children to read about it.

If so, they need but practice discretion. After all, no one really cares about Karen Owen's sexual exploits. Thanks to her indiscretion, and especially thanks to the fact that someone, somewhere taught her to be proud of what she did, we all know a lot more about them than we ever wanted to know.

Beginning with Karen Owen, we are all a lot poorer for it.

Body Language

Their education over, most young men set forth to conquer the world. Among the males in today’s cohort of emerging adults, another likely scenario has them setting forth to pick up girls in bars.

Some young men are hard at work honing their skills as market participants. Others are attending seminars on how to become pick up artists.

For those who care about such things, I will tell you the deep, dark truth about pickups. If she doesn’t want you to pick her up, you won’t. And if she does, she will not only allow you to sweep her off her feet and out of her clothes, but she will let you feel like you are the ultimate dude.

Think about all of those Duke athletes who picked up the famous Hookup Queen, Karen Owen. When they read her thesis, extensively analyzed here and elsewhere, they will come away with the sense that they were not doing the choosing; they were chosen. They might have felt that they were in charge, but, when push came to shove, she was in control of the situation.

This does not mean that publishing it all, or even doing it all, was a good thing for her, but it would be a mistake to think that she was not running the show.

Men make a mistake then they base their manly pride on their ability to pick up girls.

Because if they think that they are the ultimate dudes, then one day some girl is going to let them know that they are really not as cool or as manly as they think.

The ego boost that a man gets from thinking of himself as a great seducer or pickup artist is a mirage.

Over the years I have known men who are masters at the art of picking up girls in bars. Some of them do not even need a bar to ply their talents.

Not a one of them learned how to do it by attending a seminar. In all cases they learned it from women because they have been willing to allow women to teach them.

Also, true masters of the game can walk into a party and know within minutes which woman is available for a hookup and which one is not. No seminar is going to teach you that.

A true pickup artist is an instinctive economist. He will calculate how much time and effort it will take to seduce her, and he will avoid women who require too much time, effort, or money.

One more thing to keep in mind: the great pickup artists are never world beaters. If a man's mind is pondering his last or next female conquest, he is going to be less focused on his work.

The more time he spends working on his pickup technique the less he is spending on his business project. This may be one reason why married men are generally more successful than single men.

When I read that women are complaining about not being approached in bars, as they do in a column by Meghan Casserly, I want to know whether they are there to be picked up or to meet a man and develop a relationship. Link here.

I applaud the effort to teach young women how certain kinds of body language make them appear to be unapproachable, but without further information we cannot really judge whether they are self-sabotaging or are simply looking for the right thing in the wrong place.

A woman who crosses her arms and leans against a bar is going to appear standoffish, but it might well be that she understands instinctively what the young man wants from her and she does not want to play his game.

I recall one young woman who explained what happened when a young man tried to pick her up at a bar. She answered him: “If you want a pickup, buy a truck!”

Not very approachable, you will say, but not inappropriate under the circumstances either.

In my opinion Casserly and her experts place too much of the onus on young women. That can only make them more self-conscious and less self-confident.

For my part, I suspect that most women, left to their own devices, know how to get picked up in bars.

I am sure I am going to be corrected, but there are no seminars and workshops that teach women these skills. Call me old fashioned, but it does not feel like a very great challenge. Witness Karen Owen.

We need also to take account of the fact that in a hookup culture, in a culture where dating has gone out of fashion, the signals are going to get mixed, especially when young women are confused about what they should even expect a relationship.

The real question for young women today is how to find a durable relationship when the cultural climate, to say nothing of the economic climate, is militating against it.

While I agree that people should learn the kind of body language that makes them more approachable and less standoffish, I do not think that the best use of such skills is in teaching girls how to get picked up in bars.

But what if the issue is more about making friends and less about getting laid? What if the lessons are more about how to connect with people and less about how to have more cheap sex?

If you want to make friends and influence people, it is useful to understand some elementary body language.

Casserly’s article defines the two wrong ways to make friends and influence people.

First, if you cross your arms and evince disinterest and boredom your posture will denote defensiveness. You will be saying that you feel threatened.

Most of us will not approach someone who is withdrawn and scared. It would simply be impolite.

And if you are scared of me without knowing whether I am a threat, then you are likely taking me for someone I am not. In itself, this is rude and offputting.

The opposite is not an improvement. Some people are so anxious to make a connection, not just a casual encounter, but a deep and meaningful connection that they share too much information too soon.

They pour out their heart and soul to strangers. They treat them as intimates even before they exchange names.

When confronted with such a person you are going to turn away, because the person is not relating to you. He or she is relating to an image, a phantasmatic being that seems to fulfill a wish that does not concern you.

Whatever you believe about love at first sight, making a meaningful connection with another human being takes time. Rush it, and it will disappear.

You are not going to connect with people who do not know who you are and do not care to find out.

The wrong body language can involve the closed fist of defiance, the closed off posture of fear, or the excessively intimate hug.

What is the right body language? The open hand that offers friendship. In Zen it's the sound of one hand clapping