Why Karen Owen's Horizontal Studies Thesis Is Good for Women

Earlier this week, the Journal of Sexual Medicine published a study giving a thorough report on Americans' sex lives, and you couldn't open a newspaper, read a website or watch a news broadcast without hearing something about it. The media gleefully reported findings such as Americans have more than 40 positions in their sexual repertoires — it certainly spiced up the evening news and gave many straight news sites an SEO boost. So why, then, did recent Karen Owen's now-infamous fake honors thesis, "Excelling in the Realm of Horizontal Academics," in which she explicitly and candidly chronicled all of her sexual conquests during her time at Duke University in a PowerPoint presentation, cause such a negative stir when it went viral in the same week? We reason to believe it might actually do women good.

Owen created her presentation for private purposes only and told Jezebel that she sent it to three friends. Unfortunately, those friends were a little too liberal with the "Forward" button. In the document, she candidly describes all of her experiences with 12 sexual partners at Duke, complete with pictures, rankings and bar graphs. When Deadspin, Jezebel's brother site under the Gawker Media umbrella, first got hold of the PowerPoint, they published it without blurring out the subjects' pictures or blocking out their names, using the excuse that they were all athletes, and Deadspin is a site that reports on sports. Now that the list has become the subject of national scrutiny, the names and pictures have since been blocked.

When Jezebel asked the author about the work, she now says that she "[R]egret[s] it with all her heart. I would never intentionally hurt the people on that." But if you ask me, Karen Owen's only crime was failing to keep her subjects anonymous from the very beginning — and possibly having a little too much self-confidence. Sure, they would have figured out who they were from the descriptions of the sexual scenarios if the presentation had still gone viral and gotten the book deals that many blogs are saying will emerge from all of this ruckus, but no one would ever have to know besides the individuals and Ms. Owen.

Anonymity of subjects aside, why is the media pillorying Karen Owen? Did we not just make the movie Easy A, in which a teen girl decides to own her [fake] reputation as a "slut" in an homage to The Scarlet Letter the number two movie at the box office a few short weekends ago, and praise the film for its candor about teen sexuality and identity? And let's pause for a second to think back to the late '90s and early 2000's when a little show on HBO called Sex and the City was considered groundbreaking because of the way in which the four protagonists spoke about their sex lives to one another. Remember what the main character of that show did for a living? She wrote about her sex life. In a newspaper. That people could buy everywhere (once again, it was the late '90s). Was it only okay because it was fictional and therefore not really a valid threat?

Mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and The Today Show have gone to North Carolina to interview Duke students about the "embarrassing situation." Social media experts have stepped in to offer their two cents about the dangers of sending emails like this. But really, is what Owen did so bad? A college student chronicled her sex life. Lena Chen earned praise for doing this exact same thing on her blog, Sex and the Ivy, that she kept while at Harvard. Now, Chen writes about human sexuality and serves as an expert on the subject for a living.

Men have been speaking frankly about their sexual exploits to their friends for ages. In movies, frat boys take Polaroids of women as they try to creep out of their houses the morning after parties, and then post them on a "Wall of Shame" board. (Why, in today's modern hook-up culture, is it still a Wall and Walk of Shame? I thought we'd moved beyond repression.) In the musical A Chorus Line, a character sings about an audition where she earned "Dance: 10, Looks: 3." Here are two things humans love to do: rate each other and talk about sex. Owen just took it to the next level, putting her Duke education to good use.

Dr. Ian Kerner, a sex therapist, agrees that maybe Karen Owen's thesis is just what men might need to see. "Now here is a woman who feels empowered to rate and rank men in much the same way. It's giving men a dose of their own medicine." Unfortunately, Kerner doesn't see the double standard as disappearing anytime soon, and sees the list as becoming more of a precautionary tale about the coarsening of sexual mores and the perils of social media. He does see a silver lining; however, he thinks the list will serve as "[A] wake-up call for men and women to treat each other respectfully." One small step for mankind...

Photo by istock.