If you’ve had any sort of online presence within the past week, chances are you’ve come across the whole ‘Duke Fuck List’ shenanigan. For those who haven’t, allow me to break it down for you. Karen Owen – an alum from Duke University – created a “Senior Honors Thesis” in the form of a 41-page Power Point presentation. The title? An Education Beyond the Classroom: Excelling in the Realm of Horizontal Academics. In it, she goes into detail about the thirteen men she had sex with over the course of her studies. Not leaving much to the imagination, each lay was presented by their full names and a clarifying picture.
Each of her encounters were described – in detail – from the moment they met, to the point where they had sex. The evaluation was based on a variety of different factors. These included: sexual performance (aggressiveness, penis size and creativity) and status (looks and athleticism). On a slide titled “Background”, Owen states, “In this Duke study, we used data from four years at Duke University to create evaluation materials for such encounters and applied these criteria to the evaluated Subjects hopefully allowing for future maximization of enjoyment of such procedures.” In a nutshell, she means that the only reason she described her sexual experiences was in order to provide a point of reference for future girls looking to hook up with said men.
Owen claims to not have planned for the document to be made public. Despite only sending it out to three of her friends, once one decided to pass it on, the rest came as a sort of domino effect. Since its wide-spread release, many of the men featured on her report have spoken out in frustration. Some have even asked that websites remove their name and picture from the web. Surely, lawsuits should follow (though none have been filed as of yet). In an interview with the website Jezebel, Owen said, “I regret it with all my heart. I would never intentionally hurt the people that are mentioned on that.” Since the incident, she has also cancelled all of her social media profiles, thus leaving angry men and media outlets alike out in a man hunt.
