Dumbest Thing Ever Written about Karen Owen*

Let's dig up this cat and beat it.

One. Last. Time.

In the week after the scandal broke, a very pretty, golden-haired Fox News anchor named Megyn Kelly interviewed a couple of equally beautiful female attorneys about the incident, and ended the segment warning other young women not to follow in Owen’s footsteps. She had special knowledge on this subject, she told the audience, because she herself had “dated the captain of the lacrosse team at Syracuse . . . . Men do not respect women who do this,” she said. “You may sleep with half the lacrosse team—they don’t think that’s a great thing.”

She became more adamant, the words tumbling out faster and faster. “They don’t talk about how great you are,” she said, and now she was actually looking angry. I realized she was no longer warning young women away from unwise behavior. She was now defending the righteous tradition of Division I Men’s Lacrosse and all of the excellent guys who play it, and she was punishing the woman who had dared to come forward and make the sport and its players look bad. “They don’t talk about how great you are,” she said scornfully; “they talk about what a joke you are.”

Um . . . sorry, but nothing about this can be construed as "defending the righteous tradition of Division I Men's Lacrosse," about which Megyn Kelly presumably has few illusions. What Megyn is doing is stating the obvious: Karen Owen was out of her league.

Don't get me wrong. Miss Owen would have made a perfectly decent girlfriend for any number of engineering students. Indeed, were attractiveness the sole metric to the exclusion of character, I myself would have been proud to have her as such. But she didn't, or wouldn't, have had me. Rather, she chose "five minutes of alpha." [Literally.]

I'm over it. The point is that only women in the Megyn Kelly class of attractiveness are likely to claim exclusive (mostly) access to Division I athletes. Megyn knows this. Karen Owen should have known it, and probably did by the end. Megyn is upset that Karen and girls like her only muddy this hierarchy, not subvert it. They'll only get what Karen got, to no good purpose for anybody, probably not even for the athletes.

More foolishness:

It’s impossible to read Karen Owen’s encomium to the “glorious, alpha-male dominated world of Duke lacrosse hookups” without thinking back to the events of 2006, when the Duke lacrosse team threw a private party that became infamous. Three of the teammates were eventually accused of raping a stripper, and although the charges proved false and the investigation a travesty, few people would suggest the night represented any kind of high-water mark for the team or the university that it represented. Hiring strippers—two desperately poor women, one of them a mother of two, both with lives shaped around more sorrow and misery than the average Duke lacrosse player could begin to imagine—becoming angry when they turned out not to be white, suggesting the women use a broomstick as a sex toy, and then hurling racial slurs at them as they stumbled back into their car falls so far outside the realm of what anyone can call decent behavior that the accused players’ improbable turn as victimized solid citizens was the most unpleasant result of the D.A.’s bungled case.

Prior to this paragraph, I would have been prepared to say that Caitlin and I had more to agree on than disagree: that the college hookup scene is a moral disgrace. But here the mask slips, and she shows herself to be yet another cultural Marxist for whom the most important question is: whose ox is gored. She needs to be told that if you falsely accuse someone of a crime, then that very falseness vastly outweighs any subsequent accusations of mere boorishness. Ask the falsely accused, their friends and family about the sorrow and misery when public officials sworn to uphold the law, not to mention the university and media, turn on you for no other reason than the color of your skin; ask them whether their ultimate vindication is really "the most unpleasant result."

* I lied. There were a lot dumber things written about Karen Owen, some of which Caitlin Flannagan herself holds up to ridicule.