By Amanda Auerbach

When Ada Gregory, the director of the Duke University Women’s Center claimed in the Chronicle article on the new rape policy that the Duke sex offenders are the “crème of the crop” due the high intelligence of Duke students and their consequent “cunning” and “manipulative” powers, she assumes that the female victims of sexual offenses have been out-smarted by their male offenders.  She has since apologized for the implications of her claim, but she did offer statistics to back her claim up in the same article.  For this reason, I would like to explore the implications of her comments without necessarily pinning them to her.  Aren’t Duke women also the crème of the crop?  Should it be taken for granted that the leading cause of rape is women being led into danger unawares by superiorly equipped men?

The young men I met at the last party I attended (it was a prep school themed party à la Gossip Girl) may have been bright, or even calculating in the light of day, but the artfulness of their pick-up lines could hardly delude me as to their intentions or their levels of intoxication.  As I danced with them (if it can really be called dancing anymore), both of these dashing young gents asked where I lived and how far that was from the party before they remembered to ask for my name.  As I had my wits about me, I told them that I lived so far away, that chances were, they would get lost before they ever found their way to my dorm.  After these men had finally got my not-so-subtle hints, they decided to move onto less prepared prep school girls, preferably freshmen in short pleated skirts and fishnets.

Like most of the girls at the party, I was dressed in a way that might have suggested intentions I didn’t have, and I started to wonder why.  For my own part, I dressed up for fun and because I was going with my friends, who know my intentions.  While the majority of girls probably dressed up for similar reasons, I couldn’t help but wonder after my experience dancing with those men, who seemed nice, but that I didn’t know.  I realized it was highly possible that many of these girls didn’t dress up solely in the spirit of camaraderie and fun, but perhaps because they wanted to be asked to their dance partners’ room for the night.  As I considered this possibility, I started to feel sick.  I felt not only sick, but also angry, not at these drunken boys, but at the fact that these women felt like they had to be the victims of the Duke party scene. While it is undeniable that the freshman orientation presentation sponsored by Duke Student Health (now called True Blue) depicts the manifest reality of the Duke dating scene, does the presentation promote the ideal lifestyle of most Duke students?  According to the Duke Women’s Initiative, the answer is no.  Even though many students participate in a party scene that reinforces the campus hook-up culture, both men and women regret Duke’s lack of a more traditional dating scene.  Although the presentation may attempt to be student-friendly in its refusal to dog the Duke party culture that many of its viewers have already become immersed in, the premise of the presentation is to “[equip] students with the information and proper resources they need to guide good decision-making” (Lindsay Bickers Block, a Duke sexual health educator).  If the university’s goal is to guide freshmen and help them to lead more successful personal lives, then it seems that these programs should focus on the shared goals of the student body, as opposed to catering to a normative culture that makes many “uninitiated” students feel uncomfortable.

When I was a freshman, the orientation presentation then called the Real Deal bombarded me with renditions of the sexual scenes and party scenes that I had striven for the rest of orientation to avoid in real life.  On watching the vulgar skits that were supposed to represent typical Duke experiences, I could feel my expectations sink as the crowd laughed.  To amend the program, the women’s center decided that they should eliminate party boy Chad, who represented a humorous party boy, who walked around a party trying to get girls drunk (in other words, Party Boy Chad represented a humorous potential date rapist).  The women’s center decided to eliminate him because according to reports, Duke’s men were emulating Party Boy Chad humorously or otherwise.  According to Sheila Broderick, the sexual assault services coordinator for the Women’s Center, Duke’s young men weren’t the only ones that took to Party Boy Chad.  She states in the Chronicle article that she has had “victims come to [her] crying and say, ‘I went to The Real Deal, they told me about Party Boy Chad and I fell for it anyway. I should have known better.’”

Frankly, I believe that these women are selling themselves short if they genuinely believe that they fell for Party Boy Chad.  More likely, I believe that they might not have thought they could do better than the intoxicated, sexually opportunistic partygoer that Party Boy Chad represents.  When I watched the Real Deal presentation, I remember being more struck by the women in the skit than by its star.  Were Duke women really supposed to act so stupid?  Now, I realize that the women in the skit weren’t actually stupid if they should be taken to represent their real-life counterparts; they were probably only jaded and afraid to expect more from a culture that they had been told had nothing more to offer them.  Although Student Health tried to arm Duke students with realistic expectations and strategies to avoid the common party pitfalls, I remember being afraid, even during my first week of freshman year, that my standards for romantic relationships would drop soon after my expectations.

To people who hold the view that Duke rapists typically operate by manipulating clueless women who are looking for true love, I would say that all too often, Duke’s sexual offenders are not masterminds that lure women unawares into dangerous situations.  For the most part, Duke women are perfectly aware of the dangers accompanying Duke parties, alcohol, and the catastrophic misunderstandings that often come after.  The drunken men I danced with the party sidled up to the women in fishnets and garters after I had shaken them off not because they wanted to rape them, but because they felt themselves immune from the possibility of rejection by these girls that looked impossible to violate.  Sometimes, whether the night ends in sexual assault depends on when these women realize that they are capable of being violated: before or after the events of the night unfolded.