Get ‘Empowered,’ Duke-Style!

Posted on | March 9, 2014 | 75 Comments

The expression on the face of Duke University freshman Women’s Studies major Miriam Weeks (“Belle Knox”) represents . . .

A. Her disappointment that the #4-ranked Blue Devils lost to Wake Forest by 10 points on Wednesday;
B. Her disgust over recent claims that Thomas Bagby, her fellow Duke freshman who told everybody on campus about her porn career, has his own $1,000-a-month porn habit;
C. Her indignation “that the same society that consumes me is also condemning me“;
or
D. Yeah, she’s getting boned on camera again.

This may be on the final exam. Getting boned on camera is an expression of “sexual autonomy,” Miriam Weeks told Piers Morgan, who agreed to interview her using her porn pseudonym. The dwindling audience of Morgan’s soon-to-be-cancelled CNN show might be surprised to learn that “autonomy” looks an awful lot like . . . getting boned on camera.

Inevitably, dimwit feminists have adopted Miriam Weeks as a cause cèlébre, with Ayesha Adamo at the progressive site AlterNet calling the Duke freshman “the hero I was waiting for”:

According to an interview clip of Belle on the Duke Chronicle Soundcloud page, even Knox’s father is still paying for his own medical school education over twenty years after the fact, which really says it all: that we’ve entered an era of multi-generational student debt, an era in which parents and children are both simultaneously paying for the education that their keen minds entitled them to, but that their empty wallets knew was out of the question. This is what we do to our best and brightest, who make the cut at top universities by virtue of their merits (and not by their wealth): we saddle them with the burden of overwhelming debt. Even with the help of financial aid packages that include both government aid and aid from the university itself, middle class students still need to cover tens of thousands of dollars in tuition costs on their own. . . .

(This is a false dilemma: College students must either take on massive debt, or work as porn stars. But not every university has $40,000-plus annual tuition, and it is only the snooty elitism of Miriam Weeks — who evidently thinks she is too good to attend a state university, and who turned down a full scholarship to Vanderbilt — that put her in the financial predicament by which she justifies her porn career.)

Knox asserts that, “If Duke had given me the proper financial resources, I wouldn’t have done porn.” Naturally, a statement like this has everybody who isn’t Belle claiming that surely she could have done something else, found some more “respectable” job if she’d wanted to. And sure enough, during high school, Knox had a “real job” in which she attempted the delicate balance of waiting tables while completing her schoolwork. She recounts the experience to the Duke Chronicle saying this . . .
“For people to tell me that doing porn and having sex, which I love, is more degrading than being a waitress and being somebody’s servant and picking up after somebody and being treated like a lesser, second-class citizen, that literally makes no sense. To be perfectly honest, I felt more degraded in a minimum wage, blue-collar, low paying, service job than I do doing porn.”
Degradation is in the eye of the beholder, and if you think that Belle’s accounts of being treated like a second-class servant are an exaggeration, then you probably don’t know many waitresses, nannies, maids, or personal assistants. . . .

(This is an outrageous insult to every service-industry worker in the country. My own daughter, by the way, graduated high school with honors when she was only 16 and, although she was recruited by several private liberal arts colleges, she attended community college and then a state university. She worked her way through school waiting tables at Pizza Hut and working at a daycare center, and graduated summa cum laude — debt-free. Oh, but Miriam Weeks is too good to wait tables, and Miriam Weeks is too good to attend a state college. Miriam Weeks is so much better than everybody else that she simply must attend Duke University . . . and get boned on camera to pay the bills.)

In my eyes, Belle Knox is already a hero simply for fearlessly bringing these types of issues into the spotlight for public discussion. Here she stands, with great strength and intelligence, owning her life and her story, saying all the things that no one wants to talk about in the face of such threatening adversity.

“Threatening adversity”? My 21-year-old Army son has been through basic training, infantry training, airborne training and Special Forces selection, aspiring to obtain the coveted Green Beret so that he might have the honor of facing our nation’s enemies in armed combat. Does Ayesha Adamo expect me to admire a Duke freshman as a “hero” — overcoming “threatening adversity” — for doing porn to pay her elite university tuition? A hero is, by definition, someone who exemplifies virtues that we wish to encourage others to emulate. If hiring out her vagina for commercial display makes Miriam Weeks a “hero,” doesn’t that term imply that we wish more 18-year-old girls would do the same?

Behold the bankruptcy of our intellectual class, who will celebrate even the most despicable depravity, if it can be used as an excuse to lecture us, to display their alleged superiority to normal people who consider pornography inherently shameful.

Is it any wonder that no one at Duke University — no student, no professor, no administrator — seems capable of articulating a coherent argument against pornographic “empowerment”? Why would anyone pay money to be taught by these people?

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Category: Education, Feminism, Intellectuals, Sex

Comments

75 Responses to “Get ‘Empowered,’ Duke-Style!”

Hagbard F Celine
March 9th, 2014 @ 6:56 pm

Exactly…and the problem with all Nihilists is that want to drag all of us down with them in the Gotterdammerung.
Hagbard F Celine
March 9th, 2014 @ 6:57 pm

She is only hot to those men and women who like either their girls to look [and hopefully be] underage or look like teenage boys,
WarEagle82
March 9th, 2014 @ 7:08 pm

Actually, in a quote from RealClearEducation she did mention USC which is a state school. A left-wing, progressive, wing-nut school, but a state school.
rmnixondeceased
March 9th, 2014 @ 7:12 pm

Dimwits the bunch of them. “Multi-generational student debt” is not what they think it is. Multi-generational debt, student or not, is a very specific term for inherited debt, where the children inherit the debt of the parents, grandparents, and so on farther back in the generations. This is the crushing debt of most 3rd world nations and the bane of many Indians, Pakistanis, Sri-Lankans, Ugandans, etc. This debt results in debt servitude. This form of debt is illegal in the western world and is much of the reason human trafficking exists. To pay off a debt.
Now is this deluded and over-sexualized snowflake were legally obligated to pay her fathers student loan debt, she would be shrieking from the housetops. Poor her.
Another example of a lie used to over-dramatize liberal talking points.
WarEagle82
March 9th, 2014 @ 7:12 pm

Yes, and reputable therapists the world over advocate narcotics and alcohol to treat substance abuse problems.

But I am sure your fantasy ex-girlfriend is much better off without the likes of you. I only hope she survived the “treatments” of your imagined therapist who was most likely stripped of a license to practice in “Never-Never Land” at this very moment…
Quartermaster
March 9th, 2014 @ 7:18 pm

She has chosen prostitution to pay her way through Duke. She could have had a free ride at Vanderbilt, a school in the same academic class as Duke, and with a Law School as well, but she chose the world’s oldest profession instead.

If you really want to an arrogant prig, look in the mirror.
rmnixondeceased
March 9th, 2014 @ 7:20 pm

You kiss yo momma wif dat mouf?
Quartermaster
March 9th, 2014 @ 7:21 pm

UCLA is state, USC is private.
rmnixondeceased
March 9th, 2014 @ 7:21 pm

Who look underage.
rmnixondeceased
March 9th, 2014 @ 7:28 pm

Ce ressemble étrangement Schmalfeldt dans son “paume moite endroit heureux” et c’est vraiment quelque chose qu’il ferait pour perturber la section des commentaires.
Zohydro
March 9th, 2014 @ 7:30 pm

Z…O…M…G… I really regret looking that up!
RichFader
March 9th, 2014 @ 8:26 pm

E. “I should have used Preparation H!”
RichFader
March 9th, 2014 @ 8:28 pm

Trojans are private, Gamecocks are public.
Dave R
March 9th, 2014 @ 9:50 pm

Duke football actually made the ACC title game last year, and was quite competitive with Johnny Football and A&M in their bowl game. Vandy isn’t bad these days either (though the coach that got them there just left for Penn State).
WareEagle82
March 9th, 2014 @ 10:33 pm

Is there some irony in those mascot names here or what?
ShlomoShunn
March 9th, 2014 @ 10:43 pm

> ” hiring out her vagina for commercial display”

Still laughing about that one.
cmdr358
March 9th, 2014 @ 10:43 pm

Does this mean that of your parents fell on extremely hard times that you be okay with your mother doing porn?
If so, then I salute you for being more open-minded than I.
RKae
March 10th, 2014 @ 12:47 am

“If Duke had given me the proper financial resources, I wouldn’t have done porn.”

Really? Why? Because it’s shameful and degrading?
K-Bob
March 10th, 2014 @ 3:10 am

HR departments look at their list of applicants, and have to choose between the guy with the snake tattoo on his forehead, or her.

Used to be, people showed up looking like they wanted to work.
K-Bob
March 10th, 2014 @ 3:14 am

I’m guessing it involves a lot of “live” pr0n.
Da Tech Guy On DaRadio Blog » Blog Archive » Field Guide to CPAC 2014 The many facets of Robert Stacy McCain
March 10th, 2014 @ 4:34 am

[…] Epilogue: While I did not get his words concerning Miriam Weeks on camera that day, Sunday he added to his work on the topic with another piece exposing the nature of the cultural left’s idolatry: […]
RS
March 10th, 2014 @ 7:11 am

Even you can’t be that stupid. When one deliberately forgoes a free education at a top 20 university in order to attend a different top 20 university which costs $40,000 a year, it is not “heroic” to finance that education through self-destructive behavior. It’s imbecility, which Ms. Weeks is attempting to camouflage with appeals to Leftist tropes. Those of us who worked our way through college thanks to blue collar, minimum wage jobs, which while difficult, didn’t require us to betray the essence of our Humanity–N.B. no reference to God here–did so without seeking any sort of adulation for simply behaving like responsible adults. Ms. Weeks is a self-indulgent, self-centered and none to bright child of privilege. I’ll celebrate the single mother who’s working her way toward a nursing degree without resorting to selling her body–all without the fawning attention of the Progressive Press, thank you.
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March 12th, 2014 @ 12:12 pm

[…] March 9: Get ‘Empowered,’ Duke-Style! […]
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March 13th, 2014 @ 6:58 am

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March 19th, 2014 @ 12:15 pm

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