about the Duke case and sexual politics on campus.
On a night in late April, barely a month after the rape allegations that have rocked the campus of Duke University, the brothers of Delta Tau Delta, one of the school’s top fraternities, are having a party at Shooters, a Durham, North Carolina, dive just south of the Duke campus. It’s a Saturday evening, and the men are celebrating spring: a new class of freshly initiated brothers, the imminent end of the school year, warm weather, girls in halter tops. It’s 1 a.m., and everyone’s covered in bubbles.
This is not just any fraternity party—it’s a ’’foam party,’’ a sweaty, alcohol-soaked bacchanalia that’s a little like taking an enormous bubble bath with hundreds of strangers. At Duke, where crackdowns on the previously party-hearty on-campus social environment have forced much of the scene off-campus, foam parties are promoted by frats as large, open-to-everyone events, and can either be totally fun or totally gross, depending on how drunk you are.
Tonight, just about everyone is drunk. Tiny soap bubbles that have been shot through a thick rubber hose into a mesh tent outside the bar cling to dozens of dancing kids. For Duke students, Shooters is usually the last stop on the bar-hopping circuit—the place you go when you’re almost too wasted to walk. It’s a grimy spot with an L-shaped bar, some dance platforms, video screens, a few picnic tables and a white alabaster horse that rears on its hind legs under a sign that reads WILD, WILD WEST.
Foam parties are events that beg for people to show up in clothes they don’t care about, and at Shooters everyone has come prepared: The girls, dressed in miniskirts, whip off their shirts to reveal bikini tops; the boys, who’ve come in ratty shorts, remove their shirts and leave them off. Thus attired, they fall into one another, spilling drinks. They make out. A few of them dry-hump while doing the grind. There is a metal go-go cage in which a group of Duke girls clad in tiny denim skirts and halters perform a modified pole dance, but no one seems to be watching. Bad techno-rap music pulses, the dance floor throbs. Tom Wolfe, whose novel I Am Charlotte Simmons is set in an orgiastic, booze-drenched version of Duke (given the fictional name Dupont University), couldn’t have thought up a better scene.
Away from this hedonistic stew, tucked in a corner of the bar, some of the men of the Duke University lacrosse team - the ones legally able to drink, anyway - are doing shots. There are maybe a dozen of them: big-shouldered, handsome guys in clean polo shirts, khaki shorts and baseball caps. Depending on which side of the story you believe, three members of this team - none of whom are at Shooters tonight - may or may not have raped a black twenty-seven-year-old single mother hired to strip for a frat party in March, at the start of spring break. DNA tests have been run on the team. The tests came out negative. Nevertheless, two young men have been indicted; a third would be indicted a month later.
Since the story broke in March, lacrosse parents have descended upon Durham in support of their sons, joining forces with a dozen or so lawyers representing members of the team - including Robert Bennett, who defended Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal, hired as a consultant. The national media have arrived, en masse, and have set up a permanent base camp in Durham. Worried alumni have flocked to town - this Saturday night happens to be Alumni Weekend - filling Durham’s restaurants with hushed talk of the scandal. But yet, here at Shooters, surrounded by a horde of drunken, writhing students, the objects of all this attention - the Duke lacrosse team—are trying to forget all that. They are pounding beers, exchanging high-fives and throwing their arms around one another in brotherly, inebriated affection.
’’Laxers,’’ shrugs my new friend Sarah, a Duke junior who’s taken me to this party. We’re standing a bit away from the action, on a sweltering balcony overlooking the bar. A pretty, tomboyish twenty-one-year-old wearing jeans and a T-shirt, Sarah smiles, knowingly. She’s spotted two of her friends, dressed in a shimmery halter top and a white tube dress, respectively, who have made it into the lacrosse team’s inner circle. They beam, throwing their heads back in laughter, and glom onto the players, whose focus is largely on one another.
This is a coup. ’’Laxers,’’ as lacrosse players are universally known, tend to be the most desired and most confident guys on campus. They’re fun. And they’re hot. It’s something that frustrates and often baffles other young men, particularly those who’ve had girlfriends stolen by these guys. But women understand. ’’It’s a BMOC thing,’’ Sarah says. She’s undecided about the rape charges but is much more certain about the boys. ’’They have it all—you want a part of that,’’ she says.
I’ve come to Durham, like hundreds of journalists, to report on the scandal enveloping this campus. But in talking to women at Duke, particularly those who know or run in the same social circles as the lacrosse team, I’ve begun to see the story as not a ’’he said/she said’’ tale, nor a story about sexual violence, but rather a story about sex itself. Not sex in its nitty-gritty, anatomical sense, but more in the collective sense: sex as a sport, as a way of life, as a source of constant self-scrutiny and self-analysis.
Even as the ’’Duke Lacrosse’’ story, as it is called on the CNN news crawl, has captivated a nation of cable viewers, many female students at the university don’t have much to say on the matter. They are keenly aware of the situation, of course - some might say obsessed with it - but most are ’’reserving judgment,’’ as one woman tells me. Many of the women I spoke to say they are deeply concerned for the lacrosse team, whose ’’lives have been totally ruined.’’ They are not overly concerned for the victim, who, many girls point out, was a stripper. The boys, they add, were the kinds of guys who could get any girl they wanted. ’’They don’t need to stoop to that level in order to have sex with somebody,’’ one girl, a junior, tells me.
This retro view of rape is surprising. We have come, as a culture, to see rape, or even the suspicion of rape, as a violent crime that usually elicits a huge outcry from women. In Durham, there have been a number of protests and vigils spearheaded by women—but largely women from the town itself, not Duke students. Indeed, with the exception of self-described ’’feminists,’’ and African-American women, who see the case through its racial as well as sexual dynamics, there has been barely a peep out of the mainstream girls at Duke, unless it’s to support the players.
Nona Farahnik, for example, a sophomore who lives in the Edens 2C dorm, decided to hang a huge banner reading WE SUPPORT DUKE LACROSSE: INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY out of her dorm window, after her friends and fellow dorm mates Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann were indicted on April 17th. Soon, Nona’s girlfriends and a lot of women she didn’t know followed suit, writing INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY on T-shirts, tank tops and baseball caps, which they wore across campus. It was a ’’statement,’’ says Nona, a sign of ’’student support’’—for the players.
These women, who had won admission to one of America’s most selective universities, had grown up in an age of triumphant feminism, but as they talked about the rape case - as well as their own sex lives - there seemed to be a disconnect of sorts. Feminism, which most women saw as a throwback, a ’’past social inequality,’’ as one girl phrased it, has very little relevance to their lives. It was as if the endless discussion about sexual equality these women had been subjected to growing up had resulted in an almost abstract view of the topic.
Today’s female college students are the impressionable middle-schoolers of the late 1990s - the ones who made Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera icons of sexy, powerful young-womanhood. Now, these girls, too, can have sex - with whomever they choose and whenever they might want it, in a number of ways, without even thinking about what it all means. And they do, says a sophomore I’ll call Naomi (like several of the other women interviewed for the story, she asked that her real name not be used). ’’Sometimes, girls will be like, ‘I’m just horny and I want to have sex,’ ’’ she says. ’’I think you’d be a lot more pressed to find that attitude a little longer ago.’‘
Naomi isn’t 100 percent sure what things were like ’’a little longer ago’’ - a period she defines as vaguely pre-Bill Clinton - but she’s certain there was less ’’sexual equality.’’ Today, that topic really isn’t up for debate. That men and women play on an even sexual playing field is a given?or should be. As Naomi sees it, ’’It’s our decision if we’re going to allow ourselves to be subjected to negative treatment. It’s all framed by the way girls behave.’‘
