ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, October 14 2010

Exhibitionist student is no feminist heroine
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

In the late 1800s, suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton personified the push for women's advancement. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem grabbed that mantle. In 2008, depending on your partisan loyalties, politicians Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin embodied female empowerment.

Now we have Karen Owen, a recent Duke University graduate hailed by some as the new face of women's liberation. And what is the accomplishment that has made Owen an Internet sensation, topic of national talk shows and target of publishers eager to offer her lucrative book deals? Why, her online sex diary, of course.

Owen wrote a 42-page fake senior thesis about her drunken couplings with 13 Duke athletes. She sent the thesis — complete with a PowerPoint presentation, graphics, photos and the real names of her 'subjects" — to a gaggle of girlfriends, who then forwarded it to others. Soon the obscenity-laced report went viral, making national headlines as pundits debated whether Owen should be condemned or congratulated for her exhibitionism.

Not surprisingly in our bare-it-all culture, the verdict was mixed. Many chided Owen for naming names but defended her proud promiscuity as a sign of how far women have come since the bad old days of sexual reticence. As Irin Carmon, a reporter with the women's blog that published the thesis, told the "Today" show: "I think she has changed the stereotype of what women want. Plenty of women want just what men want, which is to have fun."

As in the case of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers University student who committed suicide last month after classmates Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei secretly streamed video of his homosexual encounter over the Internet, the Owen case has been branded a "teachable moment" for young people. The lesson common to both: Beware sharing too much information online or using technology to violate another's privacy.

That moral is good as far as it goes. Yet calls for better Internet etiquette hardly seem an adequate response to such appalling breaches of modesty and decency. And ignoring the anything-goes campus sexual ethos that fuels such breaches only ensures that we will see more of them.

The same university administrators who publicly lament these incidents help shape a campus culture in which casual sex in dorm rooms is not merely tolerated but expected and celebrated, while students seeking to live chastely find little support. Universities today routinely sponsor X-rated freshman orientation programs, fund porn-saturated "Sex Week" festivities and sanction sexual anarchy in co-ed campus dorms by refusing to institute even the most bare-bones rules to help students regulate their behavior. It's tough to convince students to respect their privacy and integrity and that of others when both official campus programming and the campus culture teach them to see sex as a contact sport best played between strangers for the benefit of onlookers.

What Clementi's classmates did to him was unconscionable, but it was not done in a vacuum. It happened in a culture that boasts a $13-billion-a-year pornography habit and features in its multiplexes such films as "The Virginity Hit," a new teen-marketed comedy that celebrates a boy's decision to secretly film his first sexual encounter with his girlfriend so his buddies can watch. Similarly, Owen's "thesis" was written against the backdrop of an American campus scene that has seen an explosion of student-run pornographic magazines, tell-all student sex columns and sexually themed campus clubs in recent years, even as fewer graduates today leave campus prepared to live independent of their parents.

We live in the age of the sex-crazed, exhibitionist, perpetual adolescent. Our vices are old, but the technology used to amplify them and the feminist rationale used to justify them are new.

It's a change for the worse, particularly for women. Feminine modesty and sexual self-restraint historically have protected women's interests and encouraged men to maintain similar standards. The fact that so many college women now aspire to little more than a slavish imitation of boys behaving badly is not cause for feminist rejoicing, any more than Karen Owen's hi-tech, bathroom-wall scrawl makes her a feminist heroine.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.