The Atlantic Weeps For The Sad, Slutty Drunk Girls
LatestDid someone try to talk about young women’s sexual politics without getting Caitlin Flanagan on board to showily weep for their bruised morality? Worry not, here she is concern-trolling Karen Owen — and distorting my interview with her.
Blame the monthly magazine’s publication schedule for the fact that it has taken this long for Flanagan, fearless guardian of women’s valor, to pronounce the author of the Duke Fuck List “one of the most pitiable women to emerge on the cultural scene in quite a while.” Flanagan’s several-thousand-word piece in the Atlantic is so breathtakingly offensive and condescending that it arguably sets a new bar for the genre.
Some choice passages rife with unproven gender essentialism and barely-disguised contempt for a woman with whom she purports to be empathizing:
- On the PowerPoint itself: “It’s as though two impulses are at war with one another: the desire to recount her sexual experiences in a hyper-masculine way—marked by locker-room crudeness and PowerPoint efficiency—fighting against the womanly desire to luxuriate in the story of it all.” Clearly, the business vernacular of PowerPoints is most unfeminine, and Karen Owen should have chosen the more appropriate Harlequin format.
- Owen told me she sent the “thesis” to three friends, which Flanagan takes to mean she had only three friends in the world. “It’s not at all hard to believe that Owen had only three friends in college. The overwhelming sense one gets from the thesis is of a young woman who was desperate for human connection, and who had no idea how to obtain it.” Had Owen really attained that human connection Flanagan believes her to be so desperately seeking, she undoubtedly would have sent the thesis to the whole school in the first place.
- “There has been almost no discussion of the fact that the kind of sex she most enjoyed was rough to the point of brutalizing.” Let’s not miss this opportunity to extrapolate that anyone who might enjoy rough sex with a consensual partner has low self-esteem and has been led astray by Do Me feminism (sorry).
- There is some disdain reserved here for the gentlemen — they are “louts” who play video games, watch porn, and display an “eagerness to whip out their genitals on almost any occasion.” But somehow they never merit the judgey alarm Flanagan and her ilk reserve for the delicate female flowers.
There’s more — the apparently unironic use of “those old-school, man-hating radical feminists,” the bizarre conflation of a sexual assault case with Owen’s chronicle of consensual sex — but we can’t go on forever. Let’s get to the most glaring misconception, fundamental to the article.
The central thesis of Flanagan’s piece is that Karen Owen really wanted to love and affection, like all women do, but she was confused by the alleged feminist mandate to get wasted and have random sex with callous dudes. (I think I missed that memo.) The fact that there is practically no evidence for this doesn’t stop Flanagan in her pursuit of the real truth. You can tell how rock solid her case is by all the proof she offers: “It’s easy to imagine that the prospect of becoming his next years-long girlfriend was enticing…” and “Imagine having been so young and so hopeful, being used sexually and then held in such contempt” and “It’s not difficult to imagine what the days and weeks following the encounter were like: the expectation that he would call again, the anxious and depressing realization that he was done with her.” (Emphasis added.)