Sex & Scandal at Duke

Naomi and her friend Anna hang out at the Nasher Museum of Art, a modernist structure on the Duke campus. It has an outdoor cafe that serves wilted-lettuce and strawberry salads, along with endless rounds of iced coffee and Diet Coke; people sit there all day to get a tan. As a result, the Nasher is popular with Duke's young women of taste, and on the day I have lunch there with Naomi and Anna, the patio is buzzing with pretty girls in silky skirts or skinny jeans, flitting back and forth between tables as if it were their cafeteria.

Most of these women are members of one of Duke's elite sororities -- known as the ''Core Four,'' home of the university's most popular and best-looking women, Naomi and Anna say proudly.

Anna, a dramatic-looking girl, grew up in Europe, where she and her friends were part of the ''crazy'' club-hopping set. An art-history major, she is cultured, has traveled widely and speaks multiple languages. She also has great clothes -- today, she's wearing a beige Donna Karan wrap sweater and a clingy chocolate-brown shirtdress, with a colorful silk scarf tied in her wavy brown hair.

A pretty brunette, Naomi grew up in Northern California and was both athletic and a straight-A student in high school. Still on the fence about her major (though she's leaning towards pre-law, she says), she's a highly social and inquisitive girl, albeit a bit more casual than Anna -- rather than designer chic, she prefers simple cotton sundresses.

The girls light cigarettes and eye two boys who've arrived at the Nasher. They take a seat at a table close to ours and order a carafe of white wine. Both young men, one of whom talks in a suave English accent, are dressed identically in slouchy designer jeans and freshly pressed button-down shirts. ''Those guys are in the center of the social scene,'' says Anna, noting the leaner of the two, a good-looking member of a top fraternity. ''He's the kind of guy who can get laid twice in one night if he wanted to.''

Sex at Duke is a sport most students participate in, on some level or another. Boys report that it's still a little tough to get a girl to get freaky -- anal sex, for example, is still rare enough that ''any Duke guy could look at a lineup of girls and point out the one who likes it,'' notes one male student (''usually the girl who's drunk and coked out of her gourd at a party at 4 a.m.,'' he adds). But traditional intercourse is common, and oral sex nearly ubiquitous, regarded as sort of a form of elaborate kissing that doesn't really mean very much. ''Everybody gives blow jobs now,'' says Naomi. ''Before,'' she adds -- meaning a pre-Monica/pre-Britney ''before'' -- ''it used to be you'd have sex and then give one.'' But now, girls give them freely -- on their own initiative, she says. (They also tend to get as much as they give, at least according to Duke men.)

Whatever sex goes on, the girls say, is done in the context of the ''hookup,'' which describes anything from making out to full-on intercourse. Much to the disappointment of many students, female and male, there's no real dating scene at Duke -- true for a lot of colleges. ''I've never been asked out on a date in my entire life -- not once,'' says one stunning brunette. Nor has a guy ever bought her a drink. ''I think that if anybody ever did that, I would ask him if he were on drugs,'' she says. Rather, there's the casual one-night stand, usually bolstered by heavy drinking and followed the next morning by -- well, nothing, usually. ''You'll hook up with a guy, and you know that nothing will come out of it,'' says Anna. The best thing you can hope for, she says, ''is that you'll get to hook up with him again.'' Some girls they know have managed to score a regular hookup -- meaning consistent sex -- but others play the field, bouncing from one guy to the next.

The vagaries of sex on campus have created a specific ''hookup culture'' at Duke, one that Charlotte Simmons fans might quickly recognize. As one male student describes it, it ''exists in a whirlwind of drunkenness and horniness that lacks definition -- which is what everyone likes about it [because] it's just an environment of craziness and you don't have to worry about it until the next morning.''

But this culture has its downsides, say some students. ''I think the ease of hooking up has, like, made people forget what they truly want,'' says Naomi. ''People assume that there are two very distinct elements in a relationship, one emotional and one sexual, and they pretend like there are clean lines between them.''

Or at least boys do, she believes. Girls fake it. If so, they're faking well. One male student I met told me he'd ''never seen some of the catty, cougarlike behavior like I have at Duke, even in the clubs of New York City'' -- where he's from, he adds. There, he says, ''guys have to go all-out'' to get girls to go home with them. At Duke, ''there's kind of a mutual acceptance that stuff can happen in one night, on your way back from Shooters.''

Among Naomi and her friends, a certain weariness creeps in when discussing the whole scene. ''Girls reduce themselves a lot here in order to be able to have the sexual freedom that I think they don't have by doing that,'' says Naomi. She sighs. ''There's a big difference between the global values and feminist ideals we think we should be subscribing to and the behavior a lot of us exhibit -- and I do it too,'' she admits. But maybe not as much as some of her friends, she adds. ''One of my friends thinks she's the biggest feminist, but to me she is one of the biggest anti-feminists, just because of her sexual behavior'' -- which is hooking up with several guys in the course of a weekend, including one, a ''regular'' who ''really treats her like shit.''

''But, you know, she's doing it out of fear,'' says Anna, smiling a bit. ''It's like, 'Oh, yes, consistent sex -- that's great. And maybe he'll invite me to this big frat formal that's coming up that everyone wants to go to.' '' She chuckles condescendingly.

Interestingly enough, this same young woman ''got red in the face with anger,'' the girls say, when discussing a sexually graphic e-mail written by Ryan McFadyen, a six-foot-six-inch sophomore from Mendham, New Jersey, whom many students -- male and female -- consider the most undeservedly maligned member of the Duke lacrosse team. McFadyen's now-famous e-mail, posted widely on the Internet, was sent to his teammates after the party where the alleged rape occurred. In it, he wrote that he was planning on having some strippers over to his dorm the next night -- where there would be ''no nudity''; rather, he planned on ''killing the bitches'' as soon as they walked in, and then ''cutting their skin off while cumming in my Duke-issue spandex.''

''I mean, his life is over,'' says Naomi. She feels sorry for Ryan, who was suspended from Duke indefinitely -- largely ''for his own safety,'' according to school officials. Though he was hardly at risk from other students, some of whom point out that his ''killing the bitches'' and ''cutting their skin off'' references were ironic nods to American Psycho, which has been taught in Duke classes.

''He was just like this big, goofy kid -- not great with girls or anything, that's the funny part,'' says Naomi. ''He was just a kind of meathead guy.'' She looks at Anna. ''Am I some kind of stupid girl?'' she asks. ''I just saw that e-mail, as inexcusable as it was, as kind of a joke -- I got it.''

Hiring strippers is also a ''joke,'' of sorts -- though there's been a lot of fuss made over the lacrosse team having done so, which most of the students I talked to found puzzling. ''I was like, wow -- I didn't realize that there was that stigma,'' says Naomi.

What people don't get, she says, is that none of this is shocking -- to her or to anyone she knows, really. Girls, like boys, tell gross jokes. They go to strip clubs -- there's one in downtown Durham that students frequent every so often as ''a joke.'' Girls also hire strippers to dance at their birthday parties or other events -- one sorority hires a stripper ''in a tie-dyed thong and a flabby stomach'' every year as part of its annual initiation rites.

''It's totally gross, and we're all like, blech,'' Naomi says.

And afterward, says Anna, ''You're like, 'That was fun. That was a fun activity.' ''