Outside the Beltway

Karen F. Owen and Screwing Your Way to the Top

Ken Levine has some advice for aspiring writers: Forget about slaving over plots and character development. Instead, sleep your way around campus and write about it.

James Joyner · Monday, October 4, 2010 · 4 comments

Ken Levine has some advice for aspiring writers:   Forget about slaving over plots and character development.  Instead, sleep your way around campus and write about it.

Karen F. Owen was a student at Duke University. For four years she went to the local bar and slept with just about everyone in the athletic department except the Volleyball equipment manager. Sometimes in stairwells, sometimes she was so drunk she didn’t remember, sometimes two teammates in one night. Now you know what the F. stands for.

For grins and giggles she wrote out a thesis detailing her conquests in intimate and revealing detail, naming names and sizing sizes. She sent this tome to a few close friends and big surprise, it wound up on the internet and went viral in less time than that it took Subject #12 to complete.

[…]

The merit of writing this unauthorized thesis is certainly up for debate. On the one hand it’s an egregious invasion of privacy. On the other, this has to be great for Duke recruiting.

But now the Morris office is coming after her and already there are book and movie offers on the table. If this had come out a month ago Karen would probably be one of the AMERICAN IDOL judges today.

It’s been done before, of course.   Jessica Cutler comes to mind as do a handful of high priced call girls who became infamous.

Meanwhile, an InstaPundit reader wonders if we’d think this was as cute if a male student had written this “thesis” about the women he’d bedded.