<p>CNP55–when I was a teenager at a Philadelphia prep school, the lacrosse guys were simply boring, as were the football jocks. The interesting guys were on the cross-country team or the soccer team.</p>
<p>Of course, that was also in the early 70s, when sports, proms, and tradition were all considered too old-fashioned for words.</p>
<p>Really.</p>
<p>I admit when I was in high school- I had barely even heard of either LAX or soccer.
My boyfriend was on the gymnastics and wrestling team-
Although my H in Seattle was on the ski team and the soccer team.
I really liked the gymnastics team- they were pretty good guys.</p>
<p>From the Duke Dining Services:
[quote]
This Irish pub nestled in Duke’s newest Engineering building, CIEMAS, offers hot-out-of-the-oven breakfast pastries, made-to-order sandwiches, and fresh entr</p>
<p>Yummy! Breakfast pastry and beer. Just what you need to cure a hangover.</p>
<p>As they say: “Beer–no longer just a breakfast food.”</p>
<p>I see nothing wrong with the beer part. Beer is delicious–that is, when it’s not the cheap crap most people drink that tastes like ****. (I’m a microbrewery kind of girl.)</p>
<p>It’s not as if students are going to get s**tfaced drunk in a cafe in their Engineering building. They’ll do that at wild parties (or in anticipation of wild parties) instead.</p>
<p>See, that’s drinking the way it should be. You treat yourself to a few drinks at a pub, get together with your buddies, and talk inane drunken pseudophilosophy until the sun comes up. And you sip your beer and appreciate how delicious it is. None of this chugging business.</p>
<p>Yawp - we have Guinness, Yuengling, and Bass on tap. At an Irish pub called Twinnie’s - which is right across the engineering quad from my office. Taps don’t open 'til after 4. Still - it’s a great place to go grab a beer, sit on the porch, and hang out.</p>
<p>Moominmama - not sure what rules about alcohol on campus that refers to. There are rules about East Campus, which is where all the first year students live, being dry. West Campus is a different story for people of age, though.</p>
<p>I think many here are missing the most important point. Casual sex goes on everywhere. Religion is less likely to influence sexual mores than in the past. Those are givens. What is deeply disturbing to me is that some of the smartest women in the Country are so deeply insecure that they participate in and promote a culture that is obscene. Women accomplished enough to get into Duke judging their self worth on whether one of the 4 “hot” sororities will take them, whteher they can score with a top athlete, be invited to wear little and tease frat boys. </p>
<p>These are the same women who are expected to be equals in business and society in general. What’s the chance they are advancing the glass ceiling? What is at the root of this insecurity? I keep thinking about how much time and energy girls spend on perfecting their looks and wardrobe compared to men. No wonder they remain the CEOs of most companies, the powerful politicians and hold the keys to most everything. They have so much more time to focus on what’s important.</p>
<p>When are we going to see georgous guys on the arm of powerful but plain women (when $$$ isn’t the object)?</p>
<p>It seems women should be way past this. That achieving so much academically, in sports and overall would make them confident in themselves as people as opposed to sexual objects.</p>
<p>My mom tells a story about a friend she had freshman year at Dartmouth who was smart and wonderful. She had an unfortunate drunken night at a frat house that resulted in her leaving college her first term. All of the guys involved went on to graduate and no one mentioned her again. I sent my mom the link for this article and she wrote back that it really shook her up. With 4 daughters she was counting on things being very different 25 years later. She said that while Dartmouth certainly had elements of this stuff in her day, the women by and large, being only recently admitted, shot down efforts at male dominance. it seems to be going backwards.</p>
<p>And for all of the parents sure their daughters wouldn’t fall into this, I wonder how many are correct. Most of us want to be popular, accepted and part of the popular culture.</p>
<p>To its credit, Duke commissioned an excellent report on the status of women within the university. Its findings are quite sobering. In our limited experience, we found similar conditions at SOME other institutions, but by no means all:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.duke.edu/womens_initiative/report_report.htm#undergrad[/url]”>http://www.duke.edu/womens_initiative/report_report.htm#undergrad</a></p>
<p>I see indications (nothing definitive, but indicative), at my d’s all-women’s college. This year they had 16 Fulbright scholars; last year 14. And the majority of them are research Fulbrights (not simply teaching abroad). That’s more female female Fulbrights than AWS combined, way more than Duke, more than Yale, more than UChicago, etc. Now, by all rights it shouldn’t be that way. Fulbrights are not a test for the brightest students, but of preparation and research abilities gained at the school. Entering SAT scores at all of these schools are well higher than at my d’s school. So while I would like to applaud my d’s school’s performance (and I do), I also have a nagging suspicion that something seeps into the academic life of women at many top-flight schools that is not altogether healthy. Duke is one of the few places that, at least in theory, this is being confronted. </p>
<p>At this point, perhaps a touch of 70s-style feminism at some of these schools would be a very healthy development. (But by no means all - there are coed schools we saw where the scene described in the Rolling Stone article would be unrecognizable, and others where it would be right on target.)</p>
<p>“And for all of the parents sure their daughters wouldn’t fall into this, I wonder how many are correct. Most of us want to be popular, accepted and part of the popular culture.”</p>
<p>The thing is…the “popular culture” varies from campus to campus. Yes, I expect that my kids will drink and have sex but the pervasive attitudes or thinking and activities described in that article are not the same “culture” in every environment. This type of “scene” and thinking is not one that I think my daughters come across or are involved in at their respective schools. Drinking, yes. Sex, yes. The description in that article, no.</p>
<p>my husband and I were just having a converstation about this
not Duke per se- bu the culture that puts women as sexual objects first last and always.
Now my husband is not really a feminist- as I would describe it- even though he wouldn’t admit it- his values of worth are dependent on how much money you bring in- and even when I have brought in more than he- I was still expected to do all teh “housewifey things”</p>
<p>But still, he is disgusted by what is on television and radio, that women are encouraged to behave in a sexual fashion and then dismissed as “sluts”. THat a very narrow view of what is “beauty” dominates, and if they fall outside that viewpoint they are told that they are “pigs” etc.
I would say though that neither of my daughters have bought into this.
My oldest- is 24- very cute- dresses pretty much like she did when she was 12- no makeup as far as I can tell- jeans and tee shirts.( her attire when we went out to dinner this weekend was a pair of jeans that i had to ask her if they were a friends, because they were so baggy & a tee shirt that I bought at a garage sale last summer that I thought was cute)
She is at least clean & she promises me that she is going shopping to look for work clothes soon.
My 16 yr old is much more aware of fashion- but for its own sake- not to interest the opposite sex-and it shows but she doesn’t show her belly or her a$$ or wear obvious makeup. She likes boys I am assuming given her several year obsession in middle school with Orlando Bloom, but doesn’t date or show much interest in it. She has friends that are boys- but she has seen her friends go from euphoria to despair ( exagerating a little) just because of a boy, and really doesn’t want to deal with that right now.</p>
<p>How we managed this you ask?
I don’t know- first it is probably that my hsuband thinks I am beautiful whatever I wear and is not really too conscious of fashion-so unlike some of my friends- I don’t have him getting on me to lose a few pounds, to have my nails done or even “work done”.
He also is repulsed by attraction to anyone close to our oldest daughter age- so I would also say that his standards of beauty have aged as we have 
While no dad that I socialize with tells his daughter what to do to attract boys, I have heard dads do that- and I think the way they treat the moms also has a lot to do with the daughters self concept of what sort of woman she wants to be.</p>
<p>Mini, care to share your observations about schools in specifics? I’m taking a gap year, I still have time…</p>
<p>I already have - my alma mater being the top of the list as “questionable”. But you really have to visit (on Thursday nights) to see the big differences, and to see what works for you.</p>
<p>I’ve never been to Duke, though I have a stepnephew there, and I think he would describe the Rolling Stone article as pretty accurate.</p>
<p>I’m starting to see that the issue is you need to spend an entire week at each college to really get it. Anyone care to name top colleges they think are culturally like Duke and those that are not?</p>
<p>Suze - tried to pm you - box is full.</p>
<p>Thanks Mini, I’ve cleared.</p>
<p>I think part of the problem is that young adults always push the envelope.</p>
<p>It used to be women were expected to hold the V-Card until they got married. They thpught that was too old-fashioned and many women in the late 60’s-early 80’s had sex before marriage. They are the ones telling THEIR daughters that it’s okay not to wait until marriage but to practice serial monogamy (committed boyfriend etc). Their daughters (the young women of today) think that’s too old-fashioned and we are left with practices as described in the article.</p>
<p>The Post had an article within the last week or two describing the exact same mating rituals at the colleges in the District. A couple of months before, there was another article discussing how young men are sometimes pressured to perform and early cases of the other ED.</p>
<p>I’m sure most of the parents of the girls in the article were as clueless about this behavior as anyone here.</p>
<p>Now go back and read “Pledged” again.</p>
<p>You know, I think people are too quick to blame this on either alcohol or casual sex. </p>
<p>This situation is disgusting and toxic to all involved.</p>
<p>And yet I’ve heard of and been in situations where both alcohol and casual sex were prevalent, but that I wouldn’t call toxic. I don’t think it’s the presence of these that necessarily makes the situation bad.</p>
<p>I think, instead, it’s merely the lack of respect people have for each other and for themselves. You can have casual sex respectfully, and you can drink respectfully. But these situations are like large mobs, and no one is fully in control of what he is doing. People are not choosing to do what they do, but caving to pressure, and acting all exactly the same. That’s what strikes me as scary. And that’s always scary, whether as a mob people are having casual sex or whether they’re doing anything else.</p>
<p>People need to think and act individually. They need to know themselves and listen to themselves and not do things they don’t feel comfortable doing just because everyone else is. And they need to care about themselves and about each other. Just like you can have a really meaningful conversation on the subway with a stranger you’ll never see again, so I maintain that you can have a fantastic sexual encounter with someone you don’t intend to date and might never see again. But you have to do it caringly and respectfully.</p>
<p>And I think that’s the problem here, not the sex or the alcohol themselves. Those are just neutral actions, as far as I’m concerned. It’s the attitudes with which people approach them that scares me s**tless.</p>
<p>suze - You know, I have to take issue with your taking the content of the Rolling Stone’s article and labeling it “Duke culture.” What you’re taking about is a small subset of the student population - the article itself singled out four sororities and a few (there are generally accepted to be five) top frats. What the girls in the article do is unfortunate and certainly does seem to indicate a huge step away from what the feminist movement has tried to accomplish, but by no means are they representative of “Duke women.” Rolling Stone is an entertainment magazine - how entertaining would it be to talk to girls in long-term relationships with boyfriends who respect them, or others that are appropriately discerning when it comes to drinking, partying, and guys? And this isn’t even mentioning those who stay in with friends or study at the library on Friday night - and trust me, that’s a larger subset of the Duke student body than you’d think.</p>