When I was a junior in high school, a group of senior boys started passing around a list of the top 25 hottest girls in school. Despite ample use of mathematics skills ' the boys used a complex point system to rank the girls', um, assets ' they got in a substantial amount of trouble for the nasty things they wrote. Once word got out, the list stained our school's reputation, not to mention those of the girls whose sexual endeavors were out in the open.
Lately, I've been getting flashbacks of this debacle thanks to JuicyCampus.com, a site that has recently added Ohio University to its network of over 500 campuses nationwide.
For those unfamiliar with the site, Juicy Campus is an open forum on which students can anonymously post entries about gossip and rumors at their respective universities. The site gets so juicy that it actually has a disclaimer pop up upon first entry and asks the user to confirm that they are 18 before they enter. I'll let you think about what other kinds of sites have similar policies.
Regardless, I'll be the first to admit that I got hooked onto Juicy Campus when I first discovered it. As a member of a sorority at OU, I found the site especially enthralling because most of the dirt involved Greek life.
It's funny, though, how not-funny the gossip became once I started seeing my own Greek letters, and even names of specific people, thrown into the mix. I was left offended, angry and, potentially worst of all, a hypocrite.
I mean, didn't the movie Mean Girls teach us anything? Juicy Campus is nothing more than OU's virtual Burn Book. Girls are accused of being sluts, boys are being accused of slipping date rape drugs into drinks and entire organizations are being degraded all so that G? well, to be honest, I can't figure out why we're doing it. Whether or not the rumors are true, the Internet is not really the place for them.
The idea of Juicy Campus has promise. I found threads with political debates and discussions about local bars, and to have that kind of anonymous outlet for free speech is a valuable tool. But it's also a powerful one, and until we can figure out how to use it without slander, we don't deserve to have it on our campus.
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Amanda Lucci
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