Jonathan Zimmerman: Hester Prynne in the Internet Age
[Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Yale University Press).]
So here's a quick thought experiment about America's latest sex scandal: What if Karen Owen was pulling an Easy A?
If you've been on the Internet recently, you already know that Owen—a 2010 graduate of Duke University—described her sexual relationships with 13 male student-athletes at Duke in a mock Power Point presentation, which went viral on the Net....
In the 1950s, the Indiana University zoologist Alfred Kinsey revealed that men continued to indulge their passions outside of marriage. More shockingly, though, women did the same. In Kinsey's sample of nearly 6,000 married females, more than half admitted to having sex before their wedding. Even more, one quarter, admitted having had an extramarital affair.
Stung by the news, educators shifted their focus away from male sexual misbehavior and back to young women, particularly those attending universities. To a psychiatrist at Harvard's health service, writing in 1963, female sexual assertiveness reflected women's drive for "equality with men in all areas." And the only way to control it would be to reinstate, yes, the sexual double standard....
Just ask Karen Owen. However crude her mock Power Point presentation—and however foolhardy it was for her to e-mail it to a friend, who forwarded it on to others—she did nothing in her sexual life that would be considered untoward if she were a man....
Read entire article at CHE
So here's a quick thought experiment about America's latest sex scandal: What if Karen Owen was pulling an Easy A?
If you've been on the Internet recently, you already know that Owen—a 2010 graduate of Duke University—described her sexual relationships with 13 male student-athletes at Duke in a mock Power Point presentation, which went viral on the Net....
In the 1950s, the Indiana University zoologist Alfred Kinsey revealed that men continued to indulge their passions outside of marriage. More shockingly, though, women did the same. In Kinsey's sample of nearly 6,000 married females, more than half admitted to having sex before their wedding. Even more, one quarter, admitted having had an extramarital affair.
Stung by the news, educators shifted their focus away from male sexual misbehavior and back to young women, particularly those attending universities. To a psychiatrist at Harvard's health service, writing in 1963, female sexual assertiveness reflected women's drive for "equality with men in all areas." And the only way to control it would be to reinstate, yes, the sexual double standard....
Just ask Karen Owen. However crude her mock Power Point presentation—and however foolhardy it was for her to e-mail it to a friend, who forwarded it on to others—she did nothing in her sexual life that would be considered untoward if she were a man....