The expression on the face of Duke University freshman Women’s Studies major Miriam Weeks (“Belle Knox”) represents . . .
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?
PREVIOUSLY:
and I was suddenly glad to be an old married fart, and spared the need to be any more than Platonically respectful of a truly gracious lady.
