http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3012
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2385
Image: Stripper Crystal Mangum falsely accused Duke players of rape.
Ruth Sheehan, Staff Writer
Two years ago, the infamous Duke lacrosse case started with a group of lacrosse players hiring a pair of strippers to dance and otherwise “perform” at a rowdy house party.
Fast forward two years, to Sunday night. While the rest of the world watched the Giants defeat the Patriots in the Super Bowl, about 300 students and others attended the Sex Workers Art Show, in which strippers and prostitutes were hired to dance and otherwise “perform.”
This time, though, the show was sponsored by an alliance of Duke University campus groups devoted to sexual health. Acronym: DELISH. I am not making this up.
The event was paid for by the Student Health Center, the University Fund, the Women’s Center, Sexual Assault Support Services, the Women’s Studies Department, Baldwin Scholars and Students for Choice. At $3,500 it was a steal.Since some faculty in the Women’s Studies Department were part of the Gang of 88 so thoroughly outraged at the beginning of the lacrosse case, I wondered what they thought of the Sex Workers Art Show. My calls were not returned.
My guess is that it’s one thing when the strippers are hired by academics challenging bourgeois sexual mores and another thing when they’re hired by student athletes with demeaning motives.
“It’s hypocrisy!” cried Kenneth Larrey, with the group Duke Students for an Ethical Duke, who invited Jay Schalin of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy to attend. Schalin’s commentary about the show has been widely circulated on the Web.
Let me say right here that I do not view the world through the same lens as Larrey or Schalin (who described all members of the Women’s Studies faculty as male bashers.) At another school, my general reaction would have been, big deal. But Schalin raised a good point: How could a school so thoroughly thrashed and embarrassed in the course of the lacrosse affair be so tone deaf as to bring in a sex worker show?
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