There’s another hand-wringing piece, this time in the Atlantic, disparaging Duke University grad Karen Owen’s so-called “Fuck List“ (technically called “An education beyond the classroom: excelling in the realm of horizontal academics”) as decidedly anti-female empowerment, anti-new woman, and anti-new face of feminism. The piece was written by someone named Caitlin Flanagan, who declares that the Fuck List’s author is not ”a boundary-breaking, sexually empowered new woman” but someone who “seems . . . to have been invented by a committee of frat boys” because she enjoys rough sex “to the point of brutalizing” and seems to be ”willing to do absolutely anything to please the men . . . .”
Flanagan harrumphs: “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.”
Even Owen’s taste in sex partners were decidedly not “new woman”: Owen had the audacity to be in thrall of “handsome white athletes.”
To Flanagan, Owen is nothing more than “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 she “had no idea how to obtain it.” The Fuck List, Flanagan concludes, “reveals [Owen] to be one of the most pitiable women to emerge on the cultural scene in quite a while.”
And that’s not even the most condescending thing in the piece. Flanagan has absolutely nothing good to say about men. The ones she writes about here do nothing but take advantage of women to satisfy their sexual desires. Based on nothing more than Owen’s descriptions of her various sexual hook-ups, Flanagan labels the athletes featured in the list as ”louts” who were “eager[ ] to whip out their genitals on almost any occasion,” and who “offer[ed] any parent ample reason to think twice before sending a beloved child to Duke.”
The fact that a fair reading of the Fuck List doesn’t support that condemnation is beside the point. It is true that the young men were eager to have sex. If that’s a revelation to Flanagan, she’s been living in a convent all her life. But if the young men were eager to get it on — surprise! — so was Ms. Owen. Almost all of the young men were respectful of Owen and appear to have acted only in accordance with her choices. But, hey, why let little things like evidence get in the way of a good feminist rant?
Flanagan takes her cheapest shot (and that’s saying a lot) at the Fuck List’s unnamed Subject # 1 who was one of the Duke lacrosse players on the team when the infamous false rape claim was made, and whose identity is easily discovered: “. . . his blandly handsome face and powerfully built body had taken on the cast of a thug rapist and then of a hapless sex partner who couldn’t even keep it up long enough to satisfy an inexperienced co-ed.” That the Atlantic published this unwarranted hatchet job on an unsuspecting kid, who never dreamed his hook-up would be chronicled in a PowerPoint presentation gone viral, tells us all we need to know about that once great magazine.
Flanagan ends the piece by bemoaning drunken women’s vulnerability to men. She hates the fact women must rely “on the mercy of the men around us.”
Flanagan’s horse dung is more of the same old, same old that regards women like Karen Owen – who seem to genuinely enjoy men – as anything but free moral agents capable of making rational choices for themselves.
How dare Karen Owen lust after handsome white athletes! How dare she enjoy not just fellatio but, heaven forbid, rough sex! How dare she wants to please the men she beds! The fact that Owen genuinely seems to have had at least a good time, and sometimes a great time, with virtually all of these guys is something Flanagan ignores, because that doesn’t fit the narrative. To someone like Flanagan, women like Owen are either too dense, or too subservient to the “patriarchy,” to realize they are being taken advantage of by men. Thank goodness Owen has women like Flanagan around to tell her what a miserable time she really had with these “louts.”
Seething just under the surface of Flanagan’s piece, unstated but present, is the thing that might just be the most galling to her about the Fuck List: Karen Owen likes dick. A lot. Pardon the crudeness, but that’s the overriding theme of the Fuck List, and Flanagan can’t help but have noticed it. The Fuck List is replete with references to the male organ of copulation, the quintessential symbol of patriarchy. Under her “Physical Attractiveness” criteria, she includes, among other things, “penile structures.” Another criteria is size: “Points were determined based on the length and girth of the Subject’s hardware.” Indeed, every subject is rated, in part, on his appendage: ”He is enormous,” she gushes about one subject. About another: ”I was actually rendered speechless. . . . I wasn’t even sure what to do with the situation at hand (erm, mouth?).” Another guy was “huge”; another was “very well equipped”; and another was “packing some decently sized hardware.” But of another guy she writes, “Wait. . . . Was that his dick? No, it couldn’t be.”
Another of Owen’s criteria is “Aggressiveness: points were given if the Subject displayed aggressive behavior and an alpha-male mentality of assuming control of the given situation.”
Is it any wonder feminists have no use for the Fuck List? Masculinity, they assert, needs to be rebuilt from the ground up to make it less dominant, less virile, less aggressive. Yet here’s a woman touting the virtues of rough sex? Come again?
As for penises, feminist extraordinaire Germaine Greer attacked the Fuck List by insisting women aren’t interested in that: “It’s a website where you talk about what it’s like to get off with someone in terms of the size of his tackle. That’s not what women are interested in.” This from a woman who once did TV special about the beauty of boys in which an 18-year-old male model posed in the nude while Greer waxed poetic about young male sperm: “There are many ways in which a boy is an ideal fantasy partner for a woman,” she clucked. “Any woman of taste would have a boy for a lover rather than a man. He’s easier to manage. His sperm flows like tap water, which happens to be a biological fact. And quicker recovery time and all that kind of thing. More rewarding in all sorts of ways. Conversation might be a bit lacking, but then, who does it for conversation?”
The Fuck List does raise some troubling issues, about the hook-up culture, and about the recklessness of making very public some very private and very personal matters.
But what scares Caitlin Flanagan is that there are women out there like Karen Owen who have the audacity to actually like men for what they are, instead of for what some enlightened feminists insist they should be.
