The Adventures of a Sexual Nihilist
October 8, 2010
JEFF W. writes:
I have been thinking quite a bit about Karen Owen of Duke University lately, after reading her thesis. I thought that perhaps you could answer some questions that have been on my mind.
Do you think that she is a coldly uncaring about the young men in her thesis as she seems? Is it possible for a woman to be that cold? After luring all these men into having sex with her, does she view them all just as objects? Or is that the pose she puts on in her thesis?
Also what is to become of Karen Owen? Can a woman like this ever be a wife and mother? The thought has entered my mind that it is a good thing that she will probably not reproduce.
Her thesis was very depressing to read. St. Paul said that the Spirit wars against the flesh. Karen Owen is one where the flesh is completely victorious, and no humane spirit, much less Holy Spirit, is anywhere to be found. Hers is the spirit of a porn magazine.
Laura writes:
You have penetrated to the heart of this issue. Thank you for writing.
I found it very difficult to read Karen Owen’s “thesis.” I found it difficult not just because of the crudity of it, but because it was too sad. As you say, the humanity is gone. Only by some inner revolution will this woman ever be able to be a wife and mother. Her femininity is all but destroyed. A woman cannot be a woman without empathy and without a conviction that the physical matters anymore than a fish can swim without gills. Where were the adults in her life? What happened to her childhood? What a miscarriage of authority. She was groomed for this.
Here’s what I predict for her. She will marry in five to seven years. Her extravagant wedding (perhaps at an 18th-century inn in Charleston or Savannah with a virtuously vegetarian menu, five bridesmaids in satin brown, plenty of step-parents, a great jazz band, and lots of Duke friends in attendance, ironic and bemused by the obligatory trappings of marriage) will be followed by a period of frenzied nesting and the birth of two children. Then she and her husband will divorce. She may marry again and she may not. She will be successful at her job. Barring some inner revolution, she will not exhibit the signs of full-blown personal catastrophe until her late thirties or early forties. Then she will not be able to hide her disappointment and bitterness. There will be tantrums and outbursts. Her children will be miserable and strange, perhaps diagnosed as “learning disabled.” Her ex-husband will be angry. Her new husband will be weird, but all this will be overlooked by friends and family provided she is reasonably successful, has managed to pave her kitchen counters with granite and send her children to good schools. She will look back on her college years with confusion. She will be mystified by its moments of rapture and by the simplicity of impulse. She will obscure her disappointment with the raw, uninhibited, workaholic energy of a 21st century nihilist. Let’s hope her children get in to Duke, or some place just as good.
But maybe all this publicity will precipitate a major change. It would take extraordinary effort on her part to retreat, so much effort that it would prevent her from meeting the normal standards of a post-Duke life, but it is definitely possible.
As to why she became this way in the first place, perhaps she was not always so coldly uncaring. I like to think that her predatory sadism was motivated by massive disappointment. So few women are innately this way. Sex filled the void, the void that her upbringing left in her soul. She’s a fish without gills. Long, long ago, they used to banish wanton women to convents. Perhaps it made sense. Maybe only in the silence and austerity of a nunnery can a woman truly recover the loss of all that is sacred.
— Comments —
Jeff writes:
Thank you for your good answers to my questions. It is very sad that Karen Owen was groomed to be the monster she has become. Those who did the grooming are also monsters.
Another thought I have had has to do with women and civilization. Edmund Burke had the insight to know that a nation or a civilization is held together by love. “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections,” he wrote.
It is the primary job of women, through their love, to hold those little platoons together. When women love their men, love their children, love their friends, it makes everyone healthy and strong. When women stop loving, everyone becomes unwell.
There is no amount of money that a woman can earn in a career that can compensate for the damage she causes through lovelessness. When women stop loving. families fall apart and civilization dies.
Karen Owen is causing damage today to her own family, to the men she wrote about in her thesis, to Duke University, and to American universities in general. I expect that she will continue to do more damage as time goes on.
Thanks for all the good work you do. I am a fan.
Laura writes:
Yes, what you say is absolutely true. I agree a hundred times over. Feminism has damaged the love women naturally feel for others. This was what it was about from the very beginning: freeing women to be selfish. Society is damaged by this lack of love. And the pleasure and rewards of loving, which are the highest satisfactions of existence, are lost. Sexual freedom and economic independence do not compensate for this loss. Instead, they have made women into the “foul contending rebels” that Katharina of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew decried:
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms! (Taming of the Shrew, Act V)
Hurricane Betsy writes:
Maybe you could now find someone to submit an essay on men who “lure” countless women and then discuss them in a sexual sense. It shouldn’t be too difficult; this happens every day. Whether the discussing and analysis is done among friends over beer or in a Karen Owen-style thesis presentation is irrelevant. And neither you nor writer “Jeff W” ask if a promiscuous, shameless, gossipy, two-faced man might become a good husband and father. I knew a man who has had sex with 127 women and he, indeed, turned out to be a piss-poor husband and father.
Second, that is bizarre that you attribute Ms. Owen’s attitudes and behaviour to her upbringing. How do you know that there was something unusually bad about it? I’m asking because I don’t know anything about her background and have never seen the infamous video, but you appear to believe that her background must have been horrible. This is the same old/same old: blame the parents! Laura, do you blame your parents for everything that is “wrong” with you? I have my share of shortcomings, a few rather serious, but I don’t blame my parents, and mature people don’t do that in any case.
Laura writes:
The issue of Karen Owen is in the news and we were responding to her and that event. Men who act this way make lousy spouses too. There are voluminous dissections in feminist literature of the “objectification” of women by men and some balance is desperately needed.
When I referred to Miss Owen’s background, I did not mention her parents. She was raised by her family, her schools and her culture. That is what groomed her for this. Our culture turns women into callous and heartless sluts. I was raised by that culture too.
John E. writes:
Your answer to Jeff W. is certainly not an egalitarian one. This is probably a good thing, but I’d like to understand a little better why it is a good thing. As Brendan noted in the previous entry, if a male college student had done the same thing that Karen Owen did, there would be an outcry about his insensitivity and wanton objectification of women, and the matter would conclude there without much further explanation. It is unlikely that anyone would ponder what kind of an upbringing he had that would have brought him to the point of treating women in such a way. We wouldn’t question whether such actions are representative of his full intention or desire. We would most likely conclude that the grave action was committed with his full consent and full knowledge, and we would be satisfied to assign the fault to him without concern about where any other fault may lie for what occurred.
If it is safe to take my hypothetical situation as realistic, should we conclude that it is fair?
Laura writes:
I do not believe Miss Owen herself is fault-less. I think I made that clear in my initial description of what she had done. Even given the cultural context, her callousness and hedonism were extraordinary and outrageous. Not that long ago, a woman in Miss Owen’s shoes would not be permitted to indulge her sexual appetite and selfishness to the extent Miss Owen has. But that doesn’t mean heartless girls didn’t exist and didn’t have other, less harmful ways to express themselves.
And, yes, there are different standards and expectations for men and women. I also believe if this mock thesis was written by a man it really wouldn’t have gotten that much attention. This contradicts what I said in an earlier post, comparing Miss Owen to Roissy. But Roissy writes regularly and that’s why he gets attention; a one-time incident like this would not have attracted attention if Miss Owens was a man. Face it, there are many more men at that age who rate the anatomy of women and who talk about sex as if it were just, well, sex.
Natassia writes:
Speaking from experience as a feminist barracuda in college, there is something that can knock your well-articulated, and quite likely, prediction of Miss Owen’s future: humility. One day she may realize that she was wrong. One hard fall — and she may completely reverse in her tracks. Her entire outlook on life might change. And perhaps she may develop some principles (it is highly unlikely that she has any real ones now, as most college students simply have a “go with the flow”, pragmatist sort of attitude.)
Laura writes:
I agree. As I said, an inner revolution is possible, but that would require her to admit how wrong she was and feel sorrow for what she did and for treating sex as if it was mere sport.
That reminds me that a couple of years ago I saw a prominently displayed article in a college newspaper (at a tony, private liberal arts college) about sex and physical fitness. The article explained how sex is a good work-out and discussed how many calories are burned.
John E. writes:
I do not believe Miss Owen herself is fault-less.
I didn’t suppose that you believe her to be fault-less, but you did explore other possibilities for where some of the fault may lie. I don’t see the same possibilities being explored for Roissy. I sense that such differing treatment ought to be considered fair, but I’m not sure why.
Laura writes:
Roissy is not criticized because he describes private sexual exploits but for his systematizing of sexual hedonism and advocating a systematic approach in others. Miss Owens does not even go that far. If Roissy simply wrote of his adventures and of his ratings of female anatomy, he would have to be very, very clever (much more than he is) to earn the sort of attention Miss Owen’s has received. So while men may not receive the benefit of being seen as cultural victims, they also do not win this sort of attention for describing their exploits.
Fred writes:
“The Adventures of a Sexual Nihilist” is nothing new. She’s the Whore of Babylon come back in a different disguise.
In a way, this reminds me that, like the poor who are always with us, the morally downfallen will always be with us.
We could stone this woman, unless we remember what Jesus said.
Brittany writes:
It’s very pathetic. Anyway I am in college now and sadly I know some people see girls who have been to college as sluts because of girls like this. You can go to MarkyMark’s blog and see the two posts he wrote on this girl.
Robin writes:
Jeff writes: When women stop loving. families fall apart and civilization dies.
Yes, this is a true statement, but I believe there is more. When women stop honoring men, families fall apart and civilization dies.
It is true that a woman is called to love: her husband, her children, her home. However, I believe it to be an even higher truth that women are called to honor (respect) men, and when they cease honoring their fathers, their grandfathers, and most importantly, their husbands, the direct result is the death of the foundation of society: the traditional, God-ordained family.
Now, I know that we are trying to steer clear of speculation about this woman’s upbringing by her particular set of parents (or perhaps multiple sets, who knows), and really it is quite irrelevant. Laura is right: this society raised her; this terrible anti-man culture which is bent upon making “men” out of young girls as early as possible and robbing them of any and all empathy and compassion with which they were endowed by their Creator. This culture desires to turn them against men at every juncture, as we well know. Had this young woman learned that men are worthy of honor and respect, would she have pursued these trysts and documented them in such a way?
I find it quite pathetic that Jezebel is the name of one of the websites publishing her filth. I attempted to read it, but it was too harsh for even my reformed-feminist eyes, and I made it through subject number three and closed the page. In any event, I think we all know who Jezebel was; this is exactly the spirit in operation in this young woman and so many others across the nation right now. A spirit that wants to annihilate honor of men at any cost, even great personal shame.
Laura writes:
Well said.
Brandon B. writes:
On the Karen Owen spectacle, it’s just another instance of how far the decline of manhood and strong men as role models has come. Men should not accept women like Karen Owen. I intend to instruct my future sons to not accept promiscuous women. If this means going without sex, so be it. Going without sex and mastering the sex drive truly separates the men from the boys. Contrary to those who believe that having sex with many women makes a man. How does this make a man? Promiscuous sex is just as sterile as none at all. To hell with it. Real men can master the sex drive and and only accept quality women.
Van Wijk writes:
Brandon is correct. A male dog will attempt to copulate with as many female dogs as possible. Is the dog then a man? If not, why not? The dog’s nature and the Gamer’s definition of manhood are identical.
Of course, many liberals believe that man is in fact just another animal, not radically different from any other species, and so they embrace “natural” sexuality. My response is that if you believe yourself an animal, you shouldn’t mind being treated like an animal.
Daniel Gruberg writes:
I am utterly horrified by the actions of Karen Owen. Any individual, man or woman, who treats their fellow human beings in such an objectifying, cruel, exploitative manner deserves to be banned from normal society. I do not agree with everything that is on your blog but this person and her ‘thesis’ are an abomination to basic human kindness.
Laura writes:
It was cruel to speak openly of her private encounters, to rank her partners and make snide comments about them. But the men she slept with liked impersonal sex too.
Eric writes:
On reading her “report”, I was left with the impression that it’s author was regretting what her personal life had become. It was a retrospective on her time at Duke, and her failure to find a lasting mate. I think more than anything it was a way for her to deal with the fact that her search for love had turned into a series of one-night stands. To focus on the humor (and condemn the author as unfeeling) misses the point.
Laura writes:
I did not get the impression that she felt regret though she did make some passing ironic comments about how devoid of emotion it all was. She was humiliated that she had bled on the sheets of one of her partners. This upset her and violated the spirit of the encounters, as if bleeding was a revelation of something intensely private in what were essentially impersonal interactions. Obviously her point that this was all just “research,” was ironic, but there was also some annoyance that it hadn’t all been even more pleasurable. Perhaps you could point out what gave you this impression.
James N. writes:
I thought your reply to Jeff W. predicting Karen Owen’s future was brilliant – one of the best things I have read by you (and there’s a lot of competition). One of my current themes with my older children is, “Yeah, that’s all great, but where’s the joy?” I was born in 1950 so I had the chance to interact with many grownups who grew up 1929-1945. I was trained by physicians who worked 36 hours on, 12 hours off, for years at a stretch.
Somehow, most of those sexually repressed and overworked people found it within themselves to possess happiness and even joy – an achievement which Lady Gaga and Karen Owen, along with millions of others, will never know. I see these wrecked people in my clinics all the time. And if you ask them, they say, “Of course I’m happy. I have XYZ – I did XYZ – I bought XYZ – My kid got into Duke. Isn’t that what happy is?”
We really need a word to describe this simulacrum of happiness that our children are being trained to desire. Not happiness. Not joy. Something else.
Laura writes:
Thank you.
They are being trained to Vitalism, the meaningless passion for movement and raw life that Father Seraphim Rose described in his reflections on the Nihilist society. Activity and sexual hedonism are an escape from emptiness and boredom. The average Duke student is a Vitalist par excellence, having spent his childhood in the ceaseless pursuit of grades, athletic accomplisments and resumé boosters. “Vitalism … reduces everything to subjective experience and sensation,” Father Rose wrote. “The world that seemed so solid, the truth that seemed so secure to the Realist, dissolve in the Vitalist view of things; the mind has no more place to rest, everything is swallowed up in movement and action.”
The Vitalist exults in originality and excitement. Karen Owen was still a child at Duke. She looks back and sees sexual excitement, and not much more.
Kilroy M. writes:
Re: “Men have no power? No, I don’t see that. These Duke men don’t strike me as victims. They were having a blast and were heartless as well.”
This is certainly a valid point, but not what I was referring to. When I say that men have no power, I mean that hedonist female culture now sets the rules. It’s easy to test this proposition: who gets shut down in a contest of competing opinions over feminist inspired sexual liberalism (irrespective of whether male cads/alphas benefit from the mess)? It is men, of course. If a woman dissents, she may be criticised or shouted down, but a dissenting opinion per a man is stigmatised in a liberal society. Schlafly cops a lot of flack, but for a man to say what she is saying will rouse a somewhat more vitriolic response. Consider also my example of sexual harassment laws – they aim at literally criminalising the natural responses of men to female animalism. The responses are animalistic too, no doubt about that, and you are right, the Duke men absolutely played their part in this circus, but if one looks at who has the last say in all of this, it is not the men. Any one of those idiot men could have had a false rape accusation hurled at them. The women on the other hand, are seen as being “in control of” and “asserting” their sexuality. There is a difference between the two, there is definitely a shift in power.
Re: “Similarly, without patriarchy men go wild and yet women still see them as prospective marriage partners and thus keep getting fleeced/used when marriage does not materialize. Both statements are true. There are losers on both sides.”
True, there are indeed losers on both sides today. I will disagree about women getting fleeced however. I think you’ll find that men spend a lot more on women in courtship and married life than vise versa. Perhaps that’s a stereotype, but that’s my strong feeling – heaven knows that the women I’ve known (all of them) have always expected that I fork out on most if not all occasions. When it comes to divorce settlement, I doubt that women as a group can be accused of being financially fleeced either. Another point I’d like to express a reservation about is how you’ve suggested that men going wild without Patriarchy is contemporaneous to the similar trend among females. I’m not sure that this is the case. Men have always pursued women, it is women who set the parameters of courtship since men respond to female cues. What you’re seeing now in society is the same sociological phenomena of men following a new set of rules established by the subjects of their desire. Patriarchy was well and truly undermined/deconstructed when the Duke men partook in the prostitution of their female co-students. That’s why I believe that the dismantling of Patriarchy hurts women more immediately and more profoundly than it hurts men.
Laura writes:
I don’t understand what false rape accusations and sexual harrasment complaints have to do with Karen Owen’s experiences at Duke. If men are terrorized by the possibility of being falsely accused of rape, as you plainly suggest, then the men at Duke have a funny way of showing it. Our courts, by the way, are not completely dysfunctional. While it is true that any woman in Karen Owen’s shoes, who acted the way she acted, can hurl a false rape allegation at a man, our courts do not honor all such accusations and convict all such men. Sexual harrassment laws do stifle and stigmatize the natural reactions of men, but they do not seem to have stifled or suppressed the reactions of the men at Duke who publicly fondled and groped Karen Owen, threw her around in the back seat of a car, or enjoined her to perform oral sex in a library stairwell.
Until I see large numbers of men resisting casual sex, and that includes fathers actively resisting the degradation of their daughters, I will never agree with your statements that “hedonist female culture sets the rules” or that men are “following a new set of rules established by the subjects of their desire,” no matter how much feminist rhetoric controls the airwaves. Men know what conditions their daughters are living in in modern dormitories. They don’t give a damn, at least judging from their actions. They don’t give a damn as long as their daughters are bringing in the degrees and the impressive jobs that relieve their fathers of all financial worry. Now please don’t tell me that these men are under the reign of terror imposed by feminism. Yes, I realize they often intend good and sincerely believe in the benefits of female liberation. Yes, I realize they feel impelled to speak feminist propaganda because they are afraid of being silenced. Yes, I know their wives can divorce them. But all these things do not explain the widespread assent to these conditions that I see. These men generally still have control over their daughters and can refuse to subsidize their education in liberal institutions. So please do not tell me this all can be reduced to female sexual avarice. Female sexual freedom is a necessary counterpart to female economic independence, and the latter is something that both men and women have earnestly fought for and supported.
Men have always pursued women, it is women who set the parameters of courtship since men respond to female cues.’
That is an extreme statement. Women do not simply initiate cues to which men passively respond. Many women have found that men do not respond to their cues or only respond to certain cues. I think you are saying that men were always sexually greedy, but culture only became hedonistic when women became sexually greedy too. But that is also a simplification because female sexual license was unleashed by both men and women, by the assent of fathers and mothers to release their daughters from sexual authority so it wasn’t pure female sexual hedonism that got us here but a pervasive assault on all authority. By the way, your comment that men are “fleeced” by the women they take out on dates is strange to me. Feminists say women are fleeced by men when they perform unpaid labor at home. That is strange to me too. There is a give-and-take dynamic in traditional sex roles that cannot be reduced to who pays what.
Ian writes:
My question is, what kind of man, if any, is likely to marry Karen F Owen? Even if she were to truly repent before God on her hands and knees tomorrow, I’d never even consider it.
It’s not just the bad behavior and use of sex as a sport. I could forgive past infractions in a woman who has truly repented. But try to imagine what would be going through the mind of any normal, well-adjusted potential male suitor reading about what she likes in a sex partner from her “thesis”: The worship of huge penises and stamina, the denigration of men with normal endowments.
To be quite honest, as a man with normal anatomy, I have to say that the thought of marrying even a genuinely reformed Karen Owen terrifies me. I’m fairly sure I’d spend the rest of my life suffering performance anxiety from it. Even if she tried to reassure her partner that she no longer considered enormous endowments better for sex, that it had all been vapidity on her part, and that he could satisfy her with his own genitalia just as well as those athletes she wrote about, very few men would be able to be totally convinced by it after reading her college opinions on the matter. Even if she repented of her sins and regretted them, could that really erase the psychological association she has formed between sexual pleasure and oversized genitalia? And, of course, most men would (and do) worry that, on some level, it’s not just psychological, but also physical – that they truly lack the physical capacity to satisfy a woman that a man with a huge member possesses. To be a normal guy married to Karen Owen would be to deal with lifelong fears of sexual inadequacy. Why would anyone put themselves through that for a woman who is quite frankly rather plain-looking? And that’s before you get to the fears that your future children might find the thesis and come away with either their own inadequacies or encouragement to repeat their mother’s footsteps.
On the other hand, why would a man with supreme sexual confidence marry her either? Surely most such guys have better options than Karen Owen. The Duke lacrosse players sure weren’t interested in more than a night with her.
And, of course, this is all assuming repentance on her part. If she keeps her current mindset, she’s in even worse shape, and it would be surprising if she could hold down a relationship more than a couple months – long enough to get impregnated once perhaps, by a sufficiently stupid guy.
It really seems to me that, regardless of the future state of her soul, she has ruined herself permanently for wifehood.
Laura writes:
Good points all. I hadn’t thought about the fear of having one’s children someday read it.
Karen Owen’s fixation on the size of men’s genitalia is a symptom of real obliviousness. I have never met a woman who talks this way. That’s not to say that women don’t, I just never met one.
