How many people have you known, at Duke, who have come anywhere close to being in love with someone else at Duke, while they were both at Duke?
I can hardly think of one.
That fact has become so mundane that I rarely think about how strange it is anymore. Only now, as I try to figure out how I'm going to write a column about rape, eating disorders, suicide and abortion, do I remember that it is probably something that is both unusual and unhealthy. Most of the time, I just take it for granted that men and women at Duke, or at least most of the ones that I know, simply aren't going to end up caring about each other all that much. In my general, jaded malaise, it no longer leaps out at me as a sign that something around here is seriously wrong. As a senior, I've become so used to the fact that so many things about Duke feel wrong so much of the time, that I've given up trying to sort through all of them. I usually find it best to try not to think about them too much.
Over the past few weeks, though, the publication of "Saturday Night" and "Effortless Perfection?" and the numerous letters and columns in response to both, have made the realities of this place fresh and unmistakable again. For many women, life at Duke is a truly miserable experience. Alienation, insecurity and self-loathing still pervade--among women especially but among everyone. Really. People probably still aren't falling in love, or enjoying conversations, or smiling real smiles or laughing real laughs. Something around here is still seriously wrong.
Now that I'm tuned in to it again, I can hear it straining under people's voices in class discussion, hiding behind their eyes as they walk past one another on the quad. That general tension, indescribable but undeniable, that comes from something greater than stress or anxiety. That unasked question that presses away at the edges of all of our minds. What the hell is really going on at this place?
Since the publication of "Effortless Perfection?," something of a call to arms has arisen, mostly in staff editorials, challenging us--students, professors, everyone--to confront that very question. To acknowledge the seriousness of campus problems, and to take it upon ourselves to help solve them. To realize that problems like rape, depression, bulimia, and suicide are "everyone's problems." To foster dialogue.
But is that going to work? Are we ready to make the leap that's required to realize that rape and depression are really only symptoms of something a greater sickness that is really all of our problem? Are we ready to let things that we'd rather just call bad get close enough to us to try to wrap our minds around them? Are we willing to try to understand ourselves and our community in the context of that problem?
The very language that this call to arms has come in--the language of problems and solutions, familiar to all of us since childhood--makes me think that we aren't. For it betrays something very real about the limits of these practical, problem-solving minds of ours, honed by these pre-professional educations. We know how to diagnose, to troubleshoot, to analyze and to label. We know how to purge or exile things that we have called problematic. We know how to pursue perfection. But many of us don't know how to live without it. Maybe that's why nobody here falls in love.
Even President Keohane's well-meaning and sincere editorial last February, which was reprinted in "Saturday Night," seems to have missed the point. It echoed the same call that we're hearing now--we should realize that sexual assault is a problem for everyone, because it "poisons" the community. Is that really the way that it works, though? Don't rapes only happen in communities that are already poisoned? The sheer absurdity of rape makes it, in a sense, the ultimate symptom of an ultimately sick society--especially when it is condoned. It is, after all, the act of sex--something that might be thought of as the ultimate act of life and joy--twisted into an act of war. For such a thing to even be possible, sex and joy and life and war must operate within the rest of us, as social beings, in very scary ways. Is that something that we're ready to admit?
If we're going to make that necessary final leap, then it has to be--we can't stop at fear, outrage or diagnosis. If we do, then we give up our only chance to understand how sex, death and violence are really everybody's problems--to understand them in a way that we're not going to be comfortable with. We have to try to understand that they are part of a problem that is bigger than Duke, bigger than ideology, bigger than America--but as small as the way that we look at each other on the quad everyday.
We have to entertain the possibility that the author of "Effortless Perfection?"--starving herself, at war with her body, dreaming of death--might have a better grip on reality than all of the rest of us. And that maybe we're the ones who could use a trip to CAPS.
I wonder if that kind of perspective is the sort of thing you can learn at a university.
Matt Stevenson is a Trinity senior. His column appears every third Friday.
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