In my life thus far as a college-age feminist, I find myself on almost a daily basis confronted with the moral dilemma of having to decipher if whether a simple behavior, mindset, or action is distinctly reflective of the liberated feminist I strive to be, or whether it is indicative more of a manacled-by-a-chauvinistic-society female. Surprisingly, these two polar opposites can be impossible to differentiate. If I go out on a Friday night to a party and wear my short, tight, low-cut black dress, does it mean that I am catering to an ignoble male expectation? Or is it possible that I am embracing my sensual female being and that I am not afraid to enjoy feeling sexy? In high school my mother and I were always at odds on this perspective. The summer before my senior year, my sister found out that I had made out with a boy...

I met an out LGBTQ person for the first time about two weeks before my 17th birthday. Jacob Tobia and I both went to North Carolina Governor’s School, a program that gave self-identified “nerds, geeks, and artsy freaks” something to do with their summer. And let’s face it: he was about 9000 times more popular than I was. I like to say it’s because I was on crutches all summer and was therefore in a piss-poor mood, but really, it’s probably because of how awesome he is. We ended up both going to Duke through the same scholarship. Through this program, Jacob, twelve other students and I got an amazing summer together in Marion, South Carolina. Life in the house was great, if sometimes not unlike The Real World: Marion. But no matter how his day had been, Jacob was always there for everybody with kind words, demonstrations of his...

By: Anonymous Duke is one of those places where everyone is trying to get ahead. We go through our time here thinking that if we get the next best thing, we will be happy. If we just get an A on this exam, we can get that job in the most successful company in the country, and all of our worries will go away. If we do this and do that and get this and get that, we will be successful and happy and live out the American Dream. The only thing that this student body endorses is perfectionism and success. And understandably, given that the majority of us spent our entire lives working our assess off just to get into the most prestigious colleges to put us ahead in life. We have ignored the small things, ignored the undying love from our families, the support from our friends, and...

By Kinnari Bhojani I recently read a New York Times article about the number of people who are or were once part of the Peace Corps “coming out” about their stories of sexual assault. These women spoke about these heinous crimes but moreover, they talked about how they felt doubly victimized by the agency that sent them out to serve in the first place. They cited scenarios in which their counselors upon hearing that they had been raped, coerced them into testifying that they may have encouraged their attackers. Some were even blamed outright by these counselors for having placed themselves in a vulnerable position. It was clear that these women did not receive the psychological or medical attention they needed, let alone the respect they deserved. Today, many ex-Peace Corps members and sexual assault survivors have spearheaded a movement to change this “blame the victim” culture. On our campus,...

By Anonymous A couple of nights ago, I was sitting in my dorm common room when a fellow RA (who we will call David) walked in. We had also been RAs together last year, so we know each other fairly well. Though I don’t see eye-to-eye with David on many issues, Ihave had a couple of good personal conversations with him in the past, particularly regarding our dating lives. We exchanged pleasantries when we saw each other. After a couple minutes of that, David asked me if I had chosen someone “to hook up with on LDOC” yet. Now, this remark has a bit of a back-story. On LDOC last year, I talked late into the night with a friend I had always had a crush on. He was so drunk that he was hardly able to form complete sentences, but I was enjoying our chat anyway. After about an...

By Anna Territo A new movement has begun on this campus. A class of 16 women here at Duke started a “Who Needs Feminism?” campaign. The outreach project launched three days ago, and saw immediate success. It also saw immediate desecration. It started a conversation so loud and long overdue that if you haven’t heard about it, you’ve probably been living under a rock (or cramming for the FE). The campaign features advertisements of various Duke men and women holding a white board explaining why they need feminism. The Facebook Page and tumblr launched encouraging people to submit their own images and comments regarding why they need feminism. I love this campaign. It’s drawing attention to the little issues, not just the giant ones. When many people think feminist, they immediately think extreme. This campaign is trying to show that we are all feminist – it’s not an insult, and...

By Anonymous Sex is wonderful, terrible, beautiful, complicated, and messy. And right now, I’m gonna talk about the messy, the messy that you don’t even have to be sexually active to encounter, but to which sexual activity adds a whole different level of awkwardness. There’s a lot that can go wrong down there, is the lesson I’ve learned as adult woman. The vagina is a delicate and temperamental organ; the chemistry can get messed up unpredictably and uncomfortably. Let’s start with yeast infections. That was freshman year; no one knew but my mother. That includes the guy I was hooking up with. Being young and embarrassed, I kept refusing offers of oral sex on the grounds that it made me uncomfortable. Really, it would have made me very comfortable, but I was worried that what smelled like fresh-baked bread would taste like stale beer. I tried the pharmaceuticals—the Monistat, Gyne-Lotrimin,...

By Anonymous I love my boyfriend. I love his attention, I love his company, and I love his affection. But there are moments that make me really unhappy. Uncomfortable, unsettled, and sometimes disappointed. Things he may say or do—typically unintentionally—that rub me the wrong way. Things that cannot be fixed with mere apologies or kisses. Moments when I feel as though I’m compromising some personal standard that a former self would have set for me—a self that I was before this relationship. And I think this notion of selves is important—for both men and women—in understanding how we may change when we introduce partners to our lives. In the compromises we make in relationships, we become different iterations of ourselves, adopting standards that may not be entirely our own, but work to accommodate our significant others. However, this begs an important question, one which often precedes many of the conflicts...

By Anonymous On LDOC 2012, I tried to give myself alcohol poisoning. On LDOC 2012 I almost wanted to kill myself, and probably came pretty close to fulfilling that wish. On what should have been one of the happiest days of the year–my finals over early, ready to start a fun filled summer in Durham–I reached what was probably the darkest moment of my life. Just a few days ago. And already I’m lying about it. At lunch today, a friend asked what happened to me. I quietly said that I had not felt well and had decided to go to bed. A few hours later, I was having tea with another friend, who asked why he hadn’t seen me later in the evening. I told him that I’d had a bad run in with some food and had gotten sick. Which wasn’t too far from the truth, I guess,...

By Anonymous We all just want to be cool. I have watched enough How I Met Your Mother to know that preventing a guy from getting some is a direct violation of the bro code. We have all heard at some point, “Ughh she was totally going to go home with me, but then I got totally cock blocked by her friend who found her vomiting in the bathroom.” Our follow up is “damn that sucks man” rather than “it sounds like she was too drunk to give consent – good thing her friend prevented a possible rape situation.” Girls struggle deciding whether to let their friend get it on with the rando at the bar or drag her home. As a campus culture, we denigrate cock blocking. We use it to elicit sympathy and explain an “unsuccessful” night out. But in reality, cock blocking is an incredibly powerful anti-rape...

By Danica Liu I keep having this conversation with people: There is no such thing as sexism against men. There is no such thing as racism against white people. Racism, sexism, and classism are INSTITUTIONAL and SYSTEMATIC forms of discrimination on the basis of race, gender and class. People of color, women, and the lower class do not have the power to institutionally and systematically discriminate against you. If you are slighted, I promise you, 100%, that it is not because you are a white male. That being said, we had an interesting discussion in my feminist theory class today about whether sexism against men was possible. One of my classmates argued that sexism is based on gender stereotypes, and there are indeed certain expectations of masculinity that we impose on men, and these can be just as restricting as those imposed on women. We expect them to be macho,...

By Neha Sharma “I was six months too late. I never thought someone would be able to look me in the eye after hearing this and just tell me that his hands were tied and it was just too late. I asked him if just because I was so afraid of accepting this reality – that it took until I became clinically depressed, borderline suicidal, and my best friend got raped, to convince me I had to do this (a process that took over a year) – that I could now no longer hold my rapist accountable. His answer was a simple ‘Yes, but we care about you and want to help you.’” During the summer of 2011, Duke administration decided to decrease the statute of limitations for student-affiliated sexual misconduct. Duke students now have only a year in which to understand their own assault, seek help, and thus recover...

“Develle Dish, Duke University’s feminist blog, is proud to present this gallery as part of a sexual assault awareness campaign initiated this March. The campaign is a deliberate student response to Duke’s new sexual misconduct policy, which reduces the statute of limitations for sexual assault on campus from two years...