Karen Owen shatters the glass ceiling

What a twist! Wasn’t it just a few years ago that every credible news source and Nancy Grace had the whole nation thinking that the Duke lacrosse team was full of rapists? Flash forward to 2010, and it turns out that not only did they not rape anybody—they were raped!

For those of you who haven’t heard (viz., the Asians living in Perkins), 2010 Duke grad Karen Owen made headlines when her “senior thesis,” which details her sexcapades with 13 Duke athletes that she banged into submission during her four years at Duke, went viral last week.

The way in which her PowerPoint presentation (complete with pictures and sexual analyses of such things as her subjects’ stamina, performance and, of course, “equipment size”) created such a dramatic volte-face of gender norms makes Owen, in my mind, the most average-looking sororstitute feminist since Lucretia Mott and Suzy B.

But unlike the senescent suffragettes of collectible coin fame, Karen Owen didn’t just achieve equality; she actually managed to demean the opposite sex to the point where one must ask if the term “weaker sex” shouldn’t be replaced with “freakier sex.” Can anybody really argue that gender inequality still exists when a seemingly innocent and fairly generic Duke girl can bring down the reputations of more than a dozen varsity athletes with a simple .pptx file, and the only comeuppance she receives is a rumor of a book deal? I’m telling you, the glass ceiling is in a million little pieces, and Palin and Hilldog had nothing to do with it. So instead of throwing around words like “slut” and “whore,” why not celebrate this achievement as the Seneca Falls Convention of the Internet age?

Besides the fact that Owen asserted her female dominance and embraced her sexuality and all that, the most remarkable part for me was her talent in executing her research. From what the Gossip Bro research team was able to glean from the Internet, Owen herself was roughly a 6.7 on the Duke Scale, yet she was able to catch exclusively 9s and 10s with relative ease. Sure, little girls have plenty of historical role models to look up to—Eleanor Roosevelt for her human rights work, Harriet Tubman for her delicious maple syrup, etc.—but if you ask me, Karen Owen outdoes the lot of them for her ability to romp through an entire athletic roster with unmatched poise.

So what was that “special something” that allowed Owen to catapult from that girl who gives you the eye on the Shooters dance floor to the level of an Elizabeth Cady Stanton-esque American hero? The simple answer is: She owned it. Owen doesn’t come off as some low-rent harlot or like a jealous and bitter girl; she comes off as a funny, actually intelligent lady who likes to show people a good time. And she has nothing to be ashamed about.

In short, Gossip Bro admires her for being the best sort of person imaginable: a chill bro who likes to get effed up. Thank you, Miss Owen, if only for proving to the Duke community that girls like you do, in fact, go here.

Gossip Bro got his groove back.