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On Monday, freshman Iulia Neagu contributed an opinion column in The Daily Princetonian entitled “The real ‘Sex on a Saturday Night.’” It’s sparked a nationwide controversy and the story has been picked up by popular news site Gawker and its sister site, Jezebel. The piece has blogs and their commenters foaming at the mouth with accusations of upholding patriarchy, mysogyny, and untrammeled conservatism at Princeton.

Jezebel, a self-proclaimed feminist blog in the Gawker network, has seen their coverage blow up with user feedback, having more than 15,000 views and 713 comments on their story at the time of this posting. Gawker has 296 comments and more than 14,000 views.

Blogs aren’t the only interested parties. Amelia Thomson-Deveaux ‘11, co-editor of the feminist blog EqualWrites.org, tells us that a Fox News reporter sent an email on the subject to the EqualWrites address earlier today. At this point she doesn’t “know what their plan is.”

The Daily Princetonian has not issued a response to the controversy. Mendy Fisch ‘11, executive editor for opinion, declined to comment for this post on Princetonian standards for vetting potentially inflammatory opinion pieces or the process of editing and approving opinion pieces. He also declined to comment on the Prince’s rationale for running this particular piece by an aspiring regular columnist.

Jack Ackerman ‘11, editor-in-chief of and spokesperson for the Daily Princetonian, has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

What’s the hubbub about? At the risk of reducing Neagu’s argument, the gist of the piece is this:

She knew what would happen if she started drinking. We all know that the more people drink, the less likely they are to make wise decisions. It is common sense.

Therefore, the girl willingly got herself into a state in which she could not act rationally. This, in my opinion, is equivalent to agreeing to anything that might happen to her while in this state. In the case of our girl, this happened to be sex with a stranger.

The Princetonian’s own website has a current 231 comments at the time of this posting, and the paper printed a response to the opinion from members of SHARE and SpeakOut on Tuesday.

from blog.nielsen.com

Sure, you might read a copy of the Prince while eating your cornflakes, or grab a Nassau Weekly off the table when you head out of the dining hall–but campus media is headed to the Internet.

Princeton’s newest publications–Equal Writes, American Education Review, which launches in December, and this blog–have all been web-only, and will likely stay that way. 127-year-old Tiger Magazine recently relaunched its website, adding consistently updated content, and American Foreign Policy has done the same.

The Prince is also shifting toward a more web-oriented model, says editor-in-chief Matt Westmoreland ‘10.

“Not only is there so much more we can do on our Web site that we can’t do in print, but there will come a time in the future when The Daily Princetonian is an online-only publication,” Westmoreland said. “We need to make sure that we’re making as much progress as we can, so that when that time comes … we’ve built a new media infrastructure that will have the opportunity to grow even more.”

To read more, check out the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

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Daily Princetonian opinion piece has media up in arms

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