Yesterday, a friend of mine leaned over to hug her friend. She ended up half in his lap. She giggled. She and the friend started to talk.
"Wow," interjected some guy, sitting next to them. "That totally just gave me wood."
My friend giggled and, after a minute, walked away. She had wanted to say, What's your problem? That's disgusting. Why would you say that?
But she didn't. She laughed and walked away. Not that I blame her. I would probably have done the same thing, afraid to be seen as some enraged feminazi. I would have stuck to the script, laughed, maybe thrown in a light-hearted "Eeeeew," but nothing more, because that's how conversations go at Duke.
Duke is a very pleasant island. It is pretty. We are relatively safe. We have food and alcohol. Many of us lead a mostly untroubled existence and we have learned to speak as though we're untroubled and entitled. Once we step outside of class or study groups, or get off the phone with parents, we slip into a language that ranges from dumb to grotesquely graphic. There is a script that we seem to follow, a series of responses that we must supply if we want to fit in and not be categorized as dull or humorless.
When someone tells me that they had a rough night, drank a lot and that they have a wicked hangover, I react with sympathy and amusement. I never roll my eyes or tell them I don't care. At Duke, the appropriate response is to laugh and give them a verbal pat on the back for being such a badass. Never mind if you aren't that impressed.
My friends and some of the guys I hang out with call me a "whore." Sometimes. And it's fine, because I'm not a whore, and they know that and I know that.
But the word, and others like it, has still slipped into our vocabulary and passes back and forth without notice. My brother, aged twenty-two, came to visit Duke last year. In a moment of brilliance I took him to a frat party called "Secs and Execs." A few of the guys there, over the course of the night, referred to me in less than flattering terms. My brother is a remarkably level-headed guy and ignored them.
But the next morning, as he relished Marketplace waffles, I was embarrassed. I realized that my "nickname" just didn't work in the real world; it didn't work with the people I loved, those I had left to go to college and those I would eventually return to. I saw, not for the first time, that I was leading a double life. I was a good girl, a girl who got into Duke and who went home during breaks to be with her family. And then I was the girl who lived at Duke who sometimes seemed to speak another language. The disparity between here and home still bothers me, but I haven't changed much; I usually give as good as I get when it comes to this kind of language.
More recently, I was walking home from a party with a couple of guys who were, to be fair, a little drunk. These two boys, one a pledge and the other an older member of the frat, began to talk about the girls they had had sex with and potential hook-ups, one of which was a frat brother's sister. I wasn't really offended by their verbal pissing contest, but it was boring and annoying. Their conversation was fake and postured in such an odd way, like they were trying to see who could come across as the biggest amoral tool. I began to wish that I'd been stupid and wandered home alone in the middle of the night.
All of these conversations, these names we call each other, have become part of our everyday life at Duke. You hear them on buses and benches, from girls and guys, sober and drunk. And it probably won't stop any time soon. But bragging about drunkenness and throwing sexual slang around places us in an unreal world, one in which there is no embarrassment in crossing verbal boundaries because everybody's too scared to look lame.
We need to step out of line and realize that these habits we form pull us out of touch with where we came from and where we will go. I'm not saying we should all elevate our conversation to a higher echelon. Why not make fun of each other's drunken behavior or a much-regretted hook-up? If we don't, we may end up taking ourselves far too seriously. But we need to find a middle ground, a language both engaging and irreverent.
Lindsay White is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
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