Karen Owen’s PowerPoint as an Online-Dating Site

The author told us this morn­ing that she never intended for the pre­sen­ta­tion to go beyond the three friends she sent it to in May, but that recently one friend (who has since admit­ted to it) for­warded it to another, and it went viral. It has since been sent to mul­ti­ple list­servs, includ­ing fra­ter­nity listservs.

She pointed out, as did our orig­i­nal tip­ster, that frats make lists like this all the time. Still, she said repeat­edly, “I regret it with all my heart. I would never inten­tion­ally hurt the peo­ple that are men­tioned on that.”

Cry me a dig­i­tal river. Yes, young men and women have always dis­cussed their sex­ual expe­ri­ences with their close friends, but this is some­thing new. Any­one as young as Owen — who has always known the Inter­net and has likely used social media since high school — knows that any­thing pro­duced and then sent in dig­i­tal for­mat will even­tu­ally become pub­lic. I would not doubt if part of Owen’s brain was think­ing about the future pub­lic­ity — after all, she is now get­ting inquiries from agents.

Still, there are greater issues at play. The descrip­tions were not mere ban­ter inside the locker room or hair salon. Not only was the Pow­er­Point orga­nized and pre­sented well — it was also dis­sem­i­nated in a man­ner that vir­tu­ally ensured that it would become pub­lic knowl­edge. The result not only made Owen look like har­lot — it also invaded the pri­vacy of the men. (Well, as much as an inva­sion can occur in the Infor­ma­tion Age.) Do not be fooled by the pseudo-witty title that makes the joke seem like an intel­lec­tual exercise:

An edu­ca­tion beyond the class­room: excelling in the realm of hor­i­zon­tal academics

While I usu­ally admire the writ­ings of Brazen Careerist founder Pene­lope Trunk, I must dis­agree with some of her views on this issue:

The work­place has women every­where. Even a place like Google, known for their tech guys, is also known for hav­ing a sales force full of very hot women. So middle-aged men are often alone, day after day, with sin­gle, hot young women. When has this hap­pened in his­tory? At this point, there is a cul­ture of men being smit­ten with young women, and young women feel­ing empow­ered enough to lever­age that with­out actu­ally giv­ing in.

And, when it comes to young men, they are not earn­ing as much as the women (the Wall Street Jour­nal reports that in Atlanta young women earn an incred­i­ble 21% more than their male coun­ter­parts). Men are not as in high demand com­pared to women and since young women are sexy, and young men do not have power that can make them sexy, that’s not likely to change. So twen­tysome­thing women are run­ning cir­cles around men of all ages. These slides do a good deal to con­firm that.

I would not describe this as some­thing pos­i­tive for women. When I was a news­pa­per reporter and edi­tor in Boston, it was always inter­est­ing to see that nearly all of the low-level public-relations flunkies in gov­ern­ment and busi­ness — those who inter­act on a day-to-day basis with reporters — were attrac­tive, twen­tysome­thing women.

Of course, this is not sur­pris­ing. Mar­ket­ing and PR is all about sales — whether it is pitch­ing a prod­uct or view­point — and women are gen­er­ally more adept at this process because they are bet­ter than men at read­ing non-verbal cues specif­i­cally and peo­ple generally.

Still, a friend of mine from col­lege once remarked that her boss — a woman — insti­tuted a pol­icy that man­dated that every day a male, prospec­tive client would come to the office would be “short-skirt day.” In addi­tion, I was once cov­er­ing an urban-development event held by the Boston Rede­vel­op­ment Author­ity, and a spokesper­son there — who was mar­ried — pulled me aside to look at her mouth and ask whether she had any­thing in her teeth. After all, a woman’s mouth cov­eys sex­ual con­no­ta­tions. I could go on.

Still, it would be unfair to write that com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ments are inten­tion­ally hir­ing attrac­tive, young women solely for their sex appeal. The nature of the exist­ing labor force also comes into play. More women than men gen­er­ally go into fields like mar­ket­ing, pub­lic rela­tions, and human resources because they like work­ing with peo­ple whereas men tend to enjoy work­ing with things like com­puter servers, stock port­fo­lios, and bal­ance sheets.

But here is the point that relates to Trunk’s post. At what point does using sex­ual power in the busi­ness realm become societal-approved pros­ti­tu­tion? I always sup­port indi­vid­u­als and busi­nesses max­i­miz­ing their assets and min­i­miz­ing their lia­bil­i­ties — which is com­pletely log­i­cal — but a philo­soph­i­cal, or even moral, line must be drawn somewhere.

After all, here is the cen­tral ques­tion: is a woman’s prac­ti­cal use of her sex­ual allure ulti­mately empow­er­ing or demean­ing? (See a prior post on a Cana­dian girl in Hal­i­fax who, I am ashamed to admit, got me to buy her a drink even though she had a boyfriend a few feet away.) I would argue the latter.

The orig­i­nal point of fem­i­nism was that women should be equal to men — and rightly so — in terms of the right to vote, the right to inherit prop­erty, the right to have careers, and so on. But a later wave of sex-positive fem­i­nism, born in the 1970s, sought to con­vince women that they could be fur­ther empow­ered through their sex­u­al­ity. In the terms of the day, choos­ing to be a slut was empow­er­ing because a woman mak­ing the choice to act in that man­ner could thereby use that power (over men).

Which was a crock. The sex-positive school of fem­i­nism con­fused the means with the ends. Women who seem­ingly choose to use their sex­ual power may indeed be mak­ing a choice, but they are mak­ing a choice that proves that their “power” stems from that which is between their legs rather than that which in their heads and hearts. And this reduces women — just like before fem­i­nism orig­i­nated — to sex objects.

Owen’s exploit was in no way an empow­er­ing action. They revealed her only to be either a slutty har­lot at best or an marketing-oriented manip­u­la­tor at worst. And the con­se­quences, as I dis­cuss fur­ther below, will only be bad for her.

As Trunk continues:

These slides are fas­ci­nat­ing because they pre­sup­pose that the rules of the world have changed, in favor of a woman like Owen.  For exam­ple, the rules of pri­vacy are new. Instead of result­ing in a Scar­let A, or fam­ily embar­rass­ment, Owen reveals she is smart, funny, and a great writer.

Despite all appear­ances, the world has not, in fact, changed — it only seems that way to the casual observer. Owen may be “smart, funny, and a great writer” — but she is still a slut who even recorded her behav­ior in a way that ensured that the entire world would see. The old rule of social media applies: Do not put any­thing on the Inter­net that you would not want your grand­mother to see. (And I am sure that Owen’s grand­mother would be mor­ti­fied by her exploits.) As long as her Pow­er­Point exists in human mem­ory and some­where on the Inter­net, her mar­riage pos­si­bil­i­ties will be severely hampered.

Not only are fewer young peo­ple get­ting mar­ried, divorces are also more com­mon when the wife has a lengthy pre­mar­i­tal sex­ual his­tory. But this will become increas­ingly com­mon among the cul­ture of mod­ern youth:

Women are slut­ting it up because they fear com­pe­ti­tion from other women tak­ing their men. This is another con­fir­ma­tion of my analy­sis of mod­ern soci­ety: as the sex­ual rev­o­lu­tion freed women and men to act on their desires out­side of a mar­i­tal frame­work, women’s sex­u­al­ity became their pri­mary, in fact their only, bar­gain­ing chip to secure atten­tion and com­mit­ment from attrac­tive (read: alpha) men.

In a related essay, I described a sim­i­lar effect: Young women like Owen are act­ing in a hyper­sex­ual man­ner both as a result of the influ­ence of sex-positive fem­i­nism and as a result of the increas­ing con­sump­tion of free, Inter­net pornog­ra­phy among young men. Even an Ortho­dox Jew like Esther Petrack on “America’s Next Top Model” is not immune. But the evo­lu­tion­ary fact is that men do not want to marry women who act (or have acted) like sluts (while women are attracted to men who are “suc­cess­ful” with women). The “Scar­let A” does still exist; it is just more subtle.

Essen­tially, young women are essen­tially becom­ing mod­ern con­cu­bines and the new real­ity is destroy­ing the inher­ent soci­etal advan­tages of monogamy. It is the newest phase of the Cri­tiques of Fem­i­nism: Argu­ments Against Fem­i­nism Essay. Duke’s stu­dent news­pa­per ran an edi­to­r­ial call­ing Owen an “average-looking sororsti­tute fem­i­nist.” I can­not think of a descrip­tion that is more accurate.

Else­where: Roissy and Vox Day opine — very accurately.