Anything you can do I can do better. I can do anyone better than you.
At Duke, there's more to a pre-game than the first shot of the night; and it takes little more than a dry hump on the dance floor to announce to sorority sisters or flat mates, "Let the games begin."
More dangerous than the games we play with alcohol, the socially competitive games we play with each other leave devastating effects. Men at Duke don't need to try to win a woman's affection, because many women, in an attempt to prove themselves to each other, throw themselves so ardently at men.
In the real world, behind every successful man is a woman rolling her eyes; but at Duke, beneath every successful man is a woman who didn't speak up, and not for fear of the Undergraduate Judicial Board, but because to her, it was worth it. In the minds of many Duke women, the social capital gain of a successfully executed hookup with a "big man on campus" far outweighs the psychological hurt of a hookup gone wrong.
As freshman women, we learn quickly that we must make a choice: We must choose between the social lives (and status) that we want and the respect from men to which we became accustomed pre-Duke. And if the price we pay for climbing the social ladder is one night of sexual exploitation, so be it.
At an off-campus dinner party last weekend, a friend-a bouncer at Parizade-said that he asks every inebriated Duke woman who leaves his club if she knows the men she's leaving with. Each time, the woman responds: "Yes. I know them. They're my friends." Surely,the Duke woman knows that a man who buys her drinks is not necessarily her friend. At best, he is her drinking buddy; but more likely, he is the person who will provide her with the social capital for which she's searching. Despite her drunken stupor, the man that a Duke woman leaves with at the end of the night is meticulously handpicked, as is the time of exit, to maximize how many of the "right" people will see her leave, Delta Sig or Lacrosse Player in tow.
It is no secret that Duke, a school that President Richard Brodhead called in his last mass e-mail, a "great university, one of the greatest in the world," is more socially competitive than academically competitive. What are secrets are the lengths that many women go through to up their social status-and that the social games they play are not only gendered, but also raced.
No hookup initiated as part of social gain is without racial undertones. The recent hoopla about "white privilege" at Duke is much more than just a hoopla-it's real, and it's epitomized in the sexual capital of white men. Duke women (at least many of them) do not lust after famous black basketball players for social status. Rather, they lust after white preps with celebrity status on campus, but not off. I guess that when it comes to social power, some things, even at a school like Duke, never change, no matter how impressive your jump shot.
Perhaps the only positive outcome of the lacrosse scandal is that Duke officials have revisited campus gender and race concerns. The initial uproar revealed an assumption that many white Duke men, and not just members of the lacrosse team, have made a habit of sexually abusing women without so much as a hint of remorse, or punishment. This assumption, sadly but surely, is not far from the truth. but Duke women are partially responsible for "feeding the beast" of sexual assault culture on campus.
Rolling Stone, in its shocking expose of Duke, forgot something. The truth about the Duke social scene, à la "The Duke 500," is this: For Duke women, the social capital gain of spending one night with a prominent fraternity man or athlete-even if that means going further than intended-outweighs the value of bodily integrity. It also means that our hookups are raced and largely predetermined before we ever step foot into a club or bar.
Shadee Malaklou is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other week.
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