We didn't start the fire

We didn’t start the fire

Last weekend, The New York Times published the article “After Class, Skimpy Equality” written by Lisa Belkin. The article begins with an anecdote about a Duke University fraternity’s inappropriate party invitations and the response of the Duke student body, particularly the establishment of the Greek Women’s Initiative.

I am the President and co-founder of the Greek Women’s Initiative. While I applaud Ms. Belkin for her frank, insightful look into the sexual underbelly of today’s college life, I believe that she missed some of the context and complexity of the issue at hand, particularly when it comes to Duke.

Ms. Belkin asks in her article why sexualization has once again become acceptable in college. She writes as though sexualization went into remission. From the perspective of a current college student, it seems that the college culture of debauchery and objectification never went away. My generation has grown up watching movies that glorify these social problems. From “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1978), to “Revenge of the Nerds” (1984), to “American Pie 2” (2001) and “Van Wilder” (2002), media has consistently shown a college world where women are the sexy sluts and men are the drunken guys trying to score with them. Women walk onto a college campus with pornographic labels already stuck to them: “hot young co-ed” or “freshmeat.” We are caricatures before we even say our names. Everyone knows about these stereotypes when they come to college, and there is a pressure to conform to them. The main priority of incoming freshmen arriving in an unfamiliar environment is to fit in as quickly as possible. As a result, some men and women succumb to the pressure.

Many of us, however, are not going along with it. In recent years, men and women have been making a serious effort to change campus culture.

The Duke Greek Women’s Initiative was founded and is run completely by students. It boasts members from almost every greek chapter on Duke’s campus, both male and female, and each member devotes time and energy to understanding and ameliorating gender problems at Duke. The email incident was not the first or even the most egregious degrading invitation sent by a fraternity during my two years at Duke. However, following the uproar over the emails, the fraternity responsible for them sent two members to work with the GWI to help effect positive change. Furthermore, the Duke Panhellenic Association has been working for the past year to better sorority recruitment, housing and social circumstances for a more empowering sorority experience.

Yes, the college gender culture is a problem, and yes, students often perpetuate that problem. However, we did not create this culture; we inherited it. More importantly, we are committed to changing it.