March 30, 2008
Students of Virginity 
By RANDALL PATTERSON
There was a time when not having sex consumed a very small part of Janie Fredell’s 
  life, but that, of course, was back in Colorado Springs. It seemed to Fredell 
  that almost no one had sex in Colorado Springs. Her hometown was extremely conservative, 
  and as a good Catholic girl, she was annoyed by all the fundamentalist Christians 
  who would get in her face and demand, as she put it to me recently, “You 
  have to think all of these things that we think.” They seemed not to know 
  that she thought many of those things already. At her public high school, everyone, 
  “literally everyone,” wore chastity rings, Fredell recalled, but 
  she thought the practice ridiculous. Why was it necessary, she wondered, to 
  signify you’re not doing something that nobody is doing?

  And then Fredell arrived at Harvard. Sitting in a Cambridge restaurant not long 
  ago, she told me that people back home called it “godless, liberal Harvard.” 
  Some discouraged her from going, but Fredell went anyway, arriving in the fall 
  of 2005. She wanted to study government, she said, maybe become a lawyer, and 
  she knew that “people take you more seriously as a Harvard student.” 

From the start, she told me, she was awed by the diversity of the place, by 
  the intensity, by the constant buzz of ideas. There were so many different kinds 
  of people at Harvard, most of them trying to change the world, and everyone 
  trying to figure out what they thought of everyone else. “Harvard really 
  puts pressure on you to define who you are,” Fredell said, and she loved 
  everything about Harvard, except the sex.
Sex, as she put it, was not even “anything I’d ever thought about” 
  when, as a freshman, she was educated in safe-sex practices. What she was told 
  was the sort of thing found in a Harvard pamphlet called “Empowering You”: 
  “put the condom on before the penis touches the vagina, mouth, or anus. 
  . . . Use a new condom if you want to have sex again or if you want to have 
  a different type of sex.” 
Fredell began to understand she was in “a culture that says sex is totally 
  O.K.” When a new boyfriend came to her, expressing desire, she managed 
  to “stick to my guns,” she said, but there were “uncouth and 
  socially inept” men, as she considered them, all around, and observing 
  the rituals of her new classmates, Fredell couldn’t help being alarmed. 
  “The hookup culture is so absolutely all-encompassing,” she said. 
  “It’s shocking! It’s everywhere!” 

  She did nothing about it until her sophomore year. Then she began to read in 
  The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, about a new student group on campus 
  — a band of celibates, men and women, calling themselves True Love Revolution. 
  They were pushing, for reasons entirely secular, the cause of premarital sexual 
  abstinence, and Fredell, by this time, was utterly committed to abstinence. 
  She could hardly bear to see it ridiculed in The Crimson. An article about the 
  group’s ice cream social appeared under the headline “Not Tonight, 
  Honey, I Have a Brain Freeze.” A columnist who wrote about the group joked 
  of getting “very, very aroused” just thinking about virgins and 
  wondered if such people might be available for “dry humping.” 
“It’s an odd thing to see one’s lifestyle essentially attacked 
  in The Crimson,” Fredell said. She began to feel a need to stand up for 
  her beliefs, and what she believed in more than anything at Harvard was the 
  value of not having premarital sex. In an essay she wrote for The Crimson, she 
  asserted that “virginity is extremely alluring,” though its “mysterious 
  allure . . . is not rooted in an image of innocence and purity, but rather in 
  the notion of strength.” As she told me later, “It takes a strong 
  woman to be abstinent, and that’s the sort of woman I want to be.” 

After the essay appeared a year ago, Fredell was immediately aware of a loss 
  of privacy, of having entered “whatever it is, the public sphere.” 
  As students began responding on The Crimson Web site, she understood that she 
  had defined herself at Harvard. “Everything became very clear to me,” 
  she recalled when we met. She would join True Love Revolution. “I realized 
  it was bigger than me, more important.” 
UNTIL RECENTLY, organized efforts at abstinence have been mainly a high-school 
  thing. Christy Gardner, an assistant professor at Wheaton College who is writing 
  a book about evangelical sexual-abstinence programs, said that high-school chastity 
  clubs took off in the early 1990s as evangelical Christians got fed up first 
  with music videos, condom distributions, teen pregnancy and then with President 
  Clinton’s dalliances. It seemed to them that a hypersexualized culture 
  was instructing young people to have sex, Gardner says, and they created the 
  clubs to push from the other direction. Millions of teenagers have since pledged 
  to remain sexually abstinent until marriage, mainly on the grounds that premarital 
  sex is sin.
At the same time, Congress and the Bush administration have directed hundreds 
  of millions of dollars toward abstinence-only education in the public middle 
  schools and high schools — classes that have been roundly criticized for 
  blurring the line between science and religion. A 2004 report issued by Representative 
  Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, found that 11 of 13 abstinence curriculums 
  that his government-reform committee examined were rife with scientific errors 
  and false and misleading information about the risks of sexual activity. Many 
  states are now rejecting federal financing for such classes, on evidence that 
  they fail to limit sexual behavior or reduce teen pregnancy. 
In a follow-up study to a 1995 national survey of close to 12,000 students 
  in grades 7 through 12, two sociologists, Peter Bearman at Columbia University 
  and Hannah Brückner at Yale, found that while those who took virginity 
  pledges preserved their technical virginity about 18 months longer than teenagers 
  who didn’t pledge, they were six times more likely to engage in oral sex 
  than virgins who hadn’t taken a pledge. They were also much less likely 
  to use condoms during their first sexual experience or to be tested for sexually 
  transmitted diseases. Disease rates between those who pledged and those who 
  didn’t were actually similar. The authors, who published their findings 
  in 2005, concluded that the emphasis on premarital abstinence was insufficient 
  to fend off disease and “collides with the realities of adolescents’ 
  and young adults’ lives.” 
Many college students today, however, grew up with abstinence classes and clubs 
  in their communities, and so the movement has raised a generation of activists. 
  Among prominent abstinence activists is Wendy Shalit, who wrote “Girls 
  Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be 
  Good,” which came out last year. She says that talk of disease rates and 
  the amount of sexual activity on campuses is beside the point. A sex-saturated 
  popular culture creates certain expectations, she argues. “The key thing 
  to remember,” Shalit wrote me recently in an e-mail message, “is 
  that many young people involved in sexual activity feel pressured into it.” 
  Many are uncomfortable with “the hookup scene,” she continued, and 
  “college abstinence programs are growing out of this awareness that disconnected 
  sex is not as pleasurable as the media (and sometimes college administrators) 
  have led us to believe.” The awareness is especially acute in the highly 
  politicized environment of the elite schools, where, according to Shalit, “there 
  is just one lifestyle that doesn’t get recognition” — premarital 
  abstinence.
The Ivy League’s abstinence clubs began emerging several years ago about 
  the same time as student sex blogs, sex columns and, at Harvard and Yale, student 
  sex magazines. Those involved, however, say that the most important catalyst 
  was university-sponsored safe-sex education, which they saw as institutional 
  encouragement of promiscuity. The founders of the Princeton club, the first 
  to form in the Ivy League in 2005, wanted to offer an opposing view. Many were 
  Catholic, but seeking credibility within the university at large, they decided 
  not to present themselves as a religious organization and always to “shy 
  away from arguments with religious premises,” says Kevin Joyce, a former 
  president of the club. “Here at a university, we have to provide the intellectual 
  basis” for abstinence, he told me. “Every position we take as a 
  group can be confirmed by rational thought.”
Making a rational case against premarital sex was easier before reliable contraception. 
  But to shore things up, the club has turned to Catholic thinkers like Elizabeth 
  Anscombe, the philosopher and student of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Anscombe’s 
  arguments against premarital sex are as impressive as they are difficult to 
  summarize, and the students so admired her logic, they named their society after 
  her. Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, is one of the 
  Anscombe Society’s informal faculty advisers. Himself a Catholic thinker, 
  George says that society members employ “philosophical-ethical arguments” 
  to support their belief that promiscuity “deeply compromises human dignity,” 
  and psychological and sociological rationale to justify the claim that casual 
  sex leads to “personal unhappiness and social harm.” The students 
  are some of Princeton’s most gifted, George says, and “even people 
  who don’t accept their conclusions recognize that the arguments being 
  advanced by the Anscombe students are serious and cannot be easily dismissed.” 

The Anscombe Society at Princeton went on to embrace positions not just against 
  premarital sex but also against homosexual sex and marriage. Founders have tried 
  to spread its method to other schools, and students at the Massachusetts Institute 
  of Technology were the first to follow with another Anscombe Society. Bill Jacobs, 
  the president, says it’s a loosely organized group. “People tend 
  to be pretty busy with homework,” he says. 
The Harvard abstinence club came next, in 2006. “We wanted to take it 
  in a completely different direction,” Justin Murray, one club founder, 
  told me. Murray and other members of the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Student 
  Association admired Princeton’s effort to fit into the “intellectual 
  discourse of a top school” — but didn’t want to make people 
  at Harvard “dig deep into the philosophical catacombs,” as he puts 
  it, just to understand why they should keep their clothes on. Harvard students 
  are more emotionally involved in their causes, he told me. They’re more 
  about getting things done, “making people happier, better and making society 
  more just.” Murray didn’t think Anscombe’s “excessively 
  abstract” logic would appeal to his classmates; nor, he added, would the 
  Anscombe Society’s position against gays. “We wanted to make abstinence 
  look fun, interesting,” he said.
Murray and his girlfriend, Sarah Kinsella, decided that their club would focus 
  on the issue “most immediately relevant” to people on campus — 
  premarital sexual abstinence — and would try to persuade people toward 
  it with arguments less philosophical than scientific. “Many people on 
  our campus were deprived of information,” Murray told me, and so he says 
  he went looking through peer-reviewed journals and government sources for research 
  that supported the abstinence view. 
“We found a huge body of scholarship that suggested conclusions that 
  nobody on our campus was making,” he says. They posted the conclusions 
  on their Web site — the belief that “ ‘safe sex’ is 
  not safe”; that even the most effective methods of birth control can fail; 
  that early sexual activity is strongly associated with all manner of terrible 
  outcomes, from increased risk of depression to greater likelihood of marital 
  infidelity, divorce and maternal poverty. Premarital abstinence, on the other 
  hand, is held up by True Love Revolution as improving health, promoting better 
  relationships and, best of all, enabling “better sex in your future marriage.” 

Plenty of critics dispute at least some of these claims. Martha Kempner, a 
  spokeswoman for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United 
  States, which promotes sex education, agrees that True Love Revolution performs 
  a service in providing abstinent students a place to gather for support. “What 
  is disturbing,” she says, “is that this club is using inaccurate 
  information and distorted data to sell that message.” She strongly rejects 
  suggestions that premarital sex leads to poverty, an inability to bond or to 
  increased likelihood of divorce. “There’s no legitimate research 
  that says premarital sex has all of these harmful consequences,” she says. 
  “They’re completely baseless claims.” 
A voluntary online survey showed that students at Harvard were less sexually 
  active than undergraduates elsewhere, says Dr. David Rosenthal, director of 
  University Health Services, which conducted the survey. But perceiving a sexualized 
  culture, members of True Love Revolution went to war. The group did not require 
  an abstinence pledge, nor concern itself with drawing specific boundaries. Its 
  one stated purpose was to discourage premarital intercourse, but by declining 
  to endorse gay marriage, the group left gays, just as Princeton did, with no 
  option but to abstain forever. Since True Love Revolution did not condemn gay 
  marriage, Murray hoped no one would feel “personally attacked.” 
  “We just wanted it to be kind of humorous and lighthearted,” he 
  said.

  True Love Revolution was denounced, however, after its first big outreach effort, 
  on Valentine’s Day 2007. Members had sent out cards to the women of the 
  freshmen class that read: “Why wait? Because you’re worth it.” 
  Some interpreted the card to mean that those who didn’t wait until marriage 
  to have sex would somehow be worth less. One writer for The Crimson concluded 
  that “by targeting women with their cards and didactic message, they perpetuate 
  an age-old values system in which the worth of a young woman is measured by 
  her virginity.” 
Murray remembers that over the course of the year, True Love Revolution was 
  also assailed as “ridiculous, bogus, probably judgmental, almost certainly 
  backward and putting forth bad, irrational, pointless arguments that didn’t 
  belong in a university culture.” It was a long year. As he and Kinsella 
  left for law and medical school, they were “very, very, very happy,” 
  he said, when Fredell took the reins.
By the time I met her in December, Janie Fredell had grown used to explaining 
  to strange men why she won’t have sex. Only 21 years old, she had spoken 
  with a number of reporters and been on CNN. “It’s such an incredible 
  thing to have the power to influence people for the better,” she told 
  me over her oatmeal in the grand dining hall of Eliot House, and “so much 
  easier being affiliated with Harvard.” 
On campus, True Love Revolution was still struggling to establish itself. It 
  had a Facebook presence of some 200 presumed celibates but an active core of 
  only about a dozen, most of them Catholics. They brought in abstinence speakers, 
  and held small discussions on topics like “true love — do you think 
  it exists?” For Valentine’s Day this year, members sent out the 
  same abstinence message — “Why wait? Because you’re worth 
  it” — but this time to the men of the freshman class as well as 
  the women. People continued to accuse Fredell of being antifeminist and propagating 
  gender stereotypes, but she was determined that True Love Revolution would go 
  on “until the end of Harvard.” To bolster herself, she often thought 
  of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

  “People just don’t get it,” Fredell said. “Everyone 
  thinks we’re trying to promote this idea of the meek little virgin female.” 
  She said she was doing no such thing. “I care deeply for women’s 
  rights,” she said. Fredell was studying not just religion but also gender 
  politics — and was reading Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of 
  the Body” alongside John Stuart Mill’s “Subjection of Women.” 
  She had awakened to the wage gap, to forced sterilization and female genital 
  mutilation — to the different ways that men have, she said, of controlling 
  women. One of these was sexual. Fredell had seen it often in her own life — 
  men pushing for sex, she said, just to “have something to say in the locker 
  room,” women feeling pressured to have sex in order to maintain a relationship. 
  The more she studied and learned, the more Fredell came to realize that women 
  suffer from having premarital sex, “due to a cultural double standard,” 
  she said, “which devalues women for their sexual pasts and glorifies men 
  for theirs.” 
She said she read in Mill that women are subordinated in relationships as a 
  result of “socially constructed norms.” If men are commonly more 
  promiscuous than women, it is only because the culture allows it, she said. 
  Fredell was here to turn society around. “It’s extremely countercultural,” 
  she said, for a woman to assert control over her own body. It is, in fact, a 
  feminist notion. Conventional feminism, she explained, teaches that control 
  of your body means the freedom to have sex without consequences — sex 
  like a man. “I am an unconventional feminist,” Fredell said, in 
  the sense that she asserts control by choosing not to have sex — by telling 
  men, no, absolutely not. 
While Fredell framed her own abstinence in a feminist perspective, she was 
  careful to say that women were not the only ones to benefit. “It’s 
  not all about protecting women,” she said. “It’s about protecting 
  people.” To prove her point, she said the membership of True Love Revolution 
  was equally divided between women and men. 
One man who was committed to abstinence was her boyfriend. He wasn’t 
  talking, but I had talked to Leo Keliher, the 20-year-old co-president of True 
  Love Revolution, in another Cambridge restaurant. 

  Keliher was an earnest man in dark clothes, unwrinkled and untouched, with the 
  face of a subdued boy. Quite openly, he explained that his father was sent to 
  prison for child molestation and that Keliher’s mother later married an 
  electrician who eventually left her for a woman 20 years younger. So it was 
  not hard to understand Keliher’s point of view. “I just have a huge 
  amount of frustration with guys,” he told me. “They need to know 
  that so much hurt can come from the lack of respect for women.” 
After the departure of his stepfather, Keliher said he began shoplifting and 
  wasting his potential. Searching for an honorable role model for her son, Keliher’s 
  mother enrolled him in a Christian youth group. That’s when the shoplifting 
  abruptly ceased and he began focusing on his studies, he said, and learning 
  how to “love women out of strength and not out of need.” By the 
  time he got to Harvard on full financial aid, he had subverted an early plan 
  for wealth and power into a calming dream of priesthood. The Catholic Student 
  Association embraced him and Justin Murray took him aside and spoke to him of 
  True Love Revolution. Thus Keliher was there, in the fall of 2006, for an early 
  skirmish. By distributing fliers — “10 Reasons to Wait” — 
  outside of a freshman safe-sex seminar, he instantly gained “a public 
  image” for abstinence, he said, which has helped him to remain chaste 
  ever since.

  He proved a stalwart soldier of True Love Revolution that year, but at the end, 
  Fredell was uncertain about working with him as co-president. It was important 
  to her “that people perceive this message as secular,” she said, 
  and Keliher was even “more hard-line Catholic” than she. Over time, 
  though, even as he began considering the monastery, she could see that he was 
  just as committed to the club’s secular appearance as he was to its mission.

  The one great difference between them seemed to be in their experience of abstinence. 
  Fredell was unaware of that gap. Whenever sexual urges struck, she told me, 
  she was able to manage them by going on a long run and assumed that everyone 
  should be able to do the same. “The biological drive can be overcome,” 
  she said. “It’s not like it reaches a peak, and you have to go out 
  and have sex.” 

  “

  And you don’t go down the street thinking you’d like to have sex 
  with him, him, him and him?” I asked.

  “No!” she said, abruptly. “Is that what men do?” 

  It seemed a good time to talk with her about what else Keliher had told me. 
  He described the act he has never experienced as something “breathtakingly 
  powerful” that “lights all of your body on fire.” He spoke 
  of his lust as “this untamed beast.” 

  Fredell was incredulous: “Leo said that?” 

  He told me that he struggles constantly against “physical lustful temptation” 
  — that he can be aroused just by a woman’s touch, by even a look 
  at a woman or at a photo or sometimes by “thoughts that just come out 
  of the blue — basically pornography in my head.” They come to him 
  when he’s merely walking around campus, or even when he’s alone 
  in the library — “like a fly buzzing around.” 
To the matter of masturbation, he said, “This was really tough for me 
  . . . because when you have a habit that’s so deeply ingrained, it’s 
  hard to stop.” 

  Fredell, when asked about masturbation, just said, “Oh, God, no!” 
  

  Keliher quoted to me what an abstinence speaker said — that the real meaning 
  of masculinity is “being able to deny yourself for the sake of the woman.” 
  “To have that kind of self-control is really what it means to be a man,” 
  Keliher had told me. When he finds himself aroused these days, he endures it 
  and waits for it to pass. In this way, he said he has “matured out of 
  that more infantile need for a woman into a recognition of self-sufficiency.” 
  But some women, Keliher granted, continue to give him trouble.
One of these is a freshman — “a very gentle, caring soul,” 
  he said, who “works with little kids and stuff.” Keliher can’t 
  help thinking about her glossy hair and beautiful skin. 

  Another appears to be Janie Fredell. Keliher smiled and said he was “a 
  little bit” attracted to her — “in very superficial ways,” 
  he added. “It’s something we laugh about — if we dated.” 

But Fredell did not laugh. “No!” she erupted, and with increasing 
  volume, “No! No! No! I can’t emphasize enough that there is nothing 
  between me and Leo! It’s just that we’re not compatible in that 
  regard.” 

  PERHAPS NO ONE at Harvard represents the hookup culture better than Lena Chen, 
  a student sex blogger, and few True Love Revolution events have drawn as much 
  attention as Fredell’s debate with her last fall.

  The women themselves saw their encounter as a meeting of two feminist positions, 
  roughly encapsulated by a headline that appeared on another sex blog: “Harvard’s 
  Jezebel Takes On Campus Virgin Mary.” 
Chen and Fredell described the event to me later, when I met them separately 
  for lunch. Chen was a small Asian woman in a miniskirt and stilettos who ate 
  every crumb of everything, including a ginger cake with cream-cheese frosting 
  and raspberry compote. Fredell, when the dessert menu came, paused at the prospect 
  of a “chocolate explosion,” said, “I may as well — I 
  mean, carpe diem, right?” And then reconsidered — she really wasn’t 
  that hungry.

  Chen’s viewpoint, as she explained it to me, was not complicated. “For 
  me, being a strong woman means not being ashamed that I like to have sex,” 
  she said. And “to say that I have to care about every person I have sex 
  with is an unreasonable expectation. It feels good! It feels good!” 

  The story Fredell told me was rather more involved. I caught her at a very interesting 
  moment, she said. In making life decisions, she said she always tried to answer 
  the question, How can I be happy in the future? and two internships had lately 
  revealed that she might not be happy as a lawyer. Fredell was now considering 
  a career in psychology, perhaps specializing in early childhood development. 
  The hours were better, she thought, and would leave more time for the work she 
  also wanted to do — that of a wife and mother.
“Finding true love for me is the point of life,” she said, and 
  she went on to explain that sex would only complicate the pursuit. She began 
  talking about oxytocin, the hormone released at birth, in breast-feeding and 
  also during sex. True Love Revolution gives it the utmost significance, claiming 
  on its Web site that the hormone’s “powerful bonding” effect 
  can be “a cause of joy and marital harmony” but that outside of 
  marriage it can create “serious problems.” Released arbitrarily, 
  it can blur “the distinction between infatuation and lasting love,” 
  the Web site cautions, making rational mating decisions difficult. Fredell said 
  oxytocin could also bond people who didn’t necessarily want to be bound, 
  and “you can bond yourself to the wrong guy in the wrong situation.” 
  

  The True Love Revolution Web site warns that bonding hormones are released during 
  any “sexual activity that culminates in an orgasm.” Fredell’s 
  own relationships include a “physical component,” but she said it’s 
  difficult to give “a set list of what’s O.K. and what’s not 
  because there isn’t any.” She once told another reporter that oral 
  sex, while “disgusting and disrespectful,” is not sex, but she now 
  expresses clear approval only of kissing and hugging. 
Her girlfriends are surprised that she can maintain a relationship without 
  having sex, she said, but her boyfriend, at Georgetown, “knew from the 
  get-go what he was getting into.” Fredell does not make sexual demands 
  of him nor does he make demands of her. “So I’m free!” she 
  said. “I’m free to experience the emotional and intellectual and 
  spiritual intimacy of another person.” By closing herself off to sex, 
  she claims to have found the humanity in her boyfriend and to have opened herself 
  to an experience of love. “I’ll share this with you,” Fredell 
  confided. “He said conversations with me were more enjoyable than sex 
  would be with anyone else.” Every woman, she said, should have this “incredibly 
  moving experience” of being appreciated for who she really is.

  There’s a chance that Fredell and her boyfriend will marry, but of course, 
  she says, “it’s not for certain.” If they don’t, and 
  she never finds true love, she says she believes she could spend her life alone. 
  Fredell saw too many women compromise themselves in order to have a relationship. 
  And she also saw those women when their men walked away. The Web site warned 
  what happens then to the sexually active; that oxytocin, in such cases, can 
  cause “a palpable sense of loss, betrayed trust and unwelcome memories. 
  This is information that you will rarely hear from sexual-health groups,” 
  because, the Web site says, “there is no condom for the heart.” 

Fredell asked me, “Why bond yourself so intensely when you’re not 
  sure you’re going to spend the rest of your life with this person?” 
  She loved her boyfriend, she said, but “there’s nothing unbalanced 
  or irrational about our relationship.” After her own breakups, she has 
  always bounced right back and knows that if her boyfriend ever pushed her to 
  a decision, she could walk away.
THE DEBATE between Fredell and Chen was described on Ivygate, a blog about 
  Ivy League news and gossip. The blogger dutifully recorded that both women looked 
  their parts — Fredell “modestly dressed in jeans” and Chen 
  wearing “a miniskirt that left little to the imagination.” More 
  than a hundred students crowded into a meeting room of Winthrop House, an undergraduate 
  residence, and Fredell said that most of them just wanted “a huge cat 
  fight.” 

  She and Chen had agreed beforehand, however, to focus on finding “common 
  ground.” What they found, as Chen told me, was that both of them were 
  “out there publicly declaring” who they are. They admitted that 
  they were both, in their own ways, advertising sex appeal. The Crimson pointed 
  out that “both have come under attack for their extreme attitudes toward 
  sex,” and Fredell said they were able to bond over being attacked. 
By underscoring their similarities and demonstrating mutual respect for each 
  other, Fredell said she hoped to suggest to the audience that perhaps True Love 
  Revolution was a friendly force at Harvard — and also deserving of a little 
  respect. The Crimson, though, declared the whole event “boring!” 
  and without open disagreement, the debate seems to have been resolved almost 
  as a beauty contest. Two women sitting side by side, posing a silent question 
  to the audience: which of us do you find more appealing?
Chen knew, as she told me later, that “the culture reacts differently 
  when women make the same decisions men do.” Her own decisions were public 
  knowledge, because she revealed them on her blog. Chen’s perspective on 
  society, and Fredell’s, was borne out in the aftermath, as people wrote 
  in to Ivygate, calling Lena Chen a “slut,” a “whore,” 
  a “total whore,” a “whore whore slut.” And then someone 
  by the screen name of Sex v. Marriage wrote in to say that “most guys 
  out there would rather end up with a girl like Janie.” 
Fredell was happy that the event had drawn a large crowd. She told me later 
  that she considered it one of the revolution’s finest moments. 
Randall Patterson, who lives in Houston, has written for New York magazine, 
  Mother Jones and The Times Magazine.

  Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company