What’s a modern SLC girl to do?

by Dana Stewart

Tuesday November 15, 2005

There is an elephant in the room. It’s something no one wants to talk about: the fact that the politics and behaviors amongst the straight community on this campus are problematic and must be examined. The way we relate to each other is twisted and often harmful. For awhile now, I have felt the need to take it upon myself to address these issues.

A few weeks after school started, my friend met a brand-new first-year straight white male at a party in Andrews Court. She was chatting, just trying to be friendly, and may have made some hints that they could be friends, hang out or something, sometime. In response to her friendliness, he responded, "Why don’t you straighten your hair and then give me a call."

My friend is black. She does not straighten her hair, because she doesn’t have to. This one stupid comment, clearly based on racist as well as sexist ideologies, does not represent all hetero males at Sarah Lawrence. It’s not useful to blame an entire population for the acts of one person. But it’s also not useful to ignore them.

I do not believe the encounter with my friend was an isolated incident. Rude, humiliating things are said about women on this campus that are ignored all the time. Girls criticize other girls, and we all too often turn back into our seventh-grade catty selves. And in many girl-boy straight encounters, there is a level of sexual complicity expected by males and reinforced by females that often feels humiliating.

There is something here, something insidious and crafty, something that is affective under the cover of silence, something that makes too many girls hate themselves. I cannot precisely define what this Something is. All I know is that it exists, and has shaped almost all my social experiences on this campus. It’s high time we talked about these things.

For reasons that are not alien to me, some straight males here have found a way of displaying their straight masculinity in an estrogen-dominated environment that can be harmful to everyone involved. And straight women respond by similarly regressing to stereotypical gender roles, using old-school coquettish tactics of "landing a man" that Sarah Lawrence girls of the 1970s would surely frown upon.

A few Sundays ago, the New York Times Magazine devoted four big pages to an article entitled "What’s A Modern Girl to Do?" by Maureen Dowd, which has remained on the nyt.com list of most e-mailed articles for an astonishingly long time. She places herself among, or in opposition to, ‘60s and ‘70s feminists who eschewed almost all remnants of femininity in the name of progress.

Her article shows the confusing place women find themselves in now, given that "the triumph of feminism…last[ed] a nanosecond while the backlash lasted over 40 years." Dowd traces the path of courtship tactics by women (and finds regression to the ‘50s-style bat-your-eyes-and-shut-up kind of flirting, as promoted by Cosmopolitan and books like The Rules). She shows that even though women are earning more than ever, it is still socially unacceptable for many of them to pay for dinner. Those same powerful boardroom women are largely childless, possibly lonely, Dowd states, and this is because real concepts of power hierarchies have not changed in the slightest.

The kind of conversation that Dowd is engaging in her article does not happen on this campus. In fact, it is hard to hear anyone talking about straight gender politics outside of the North Building with the Gerda Lerner placard out front. (If you do not know who Gerda Lerner is, please do a Google search right now. She is extremely important, and so is the SLC Women’s History Graduate program.)

Now, when I say that this conversation doesn’t happen, many of you will probably roll your eyes and say, "What are you talking about? That’s all we talk about here…sex!" But I’m not talking about gossip. I’m not talking about girls commiserating amongst themselves about how hard it is to find a boyfriend here. When I say "discussion," I mean Discussion, as in the Discussions many of us found ourselves in two years ago, when racism and race issues bubbled up to the surface for awhile and forced many of us white students to question our own privileges for just a minute.

I have felt the dire need, for awhile now, to give a sort of call to arms to the straight women on this campus, a call to question the sexual status quo here and re-examine our agency as smart, mature women. I think we are complacent in the creation of a social culture in which the comment made to my friend is deemed an acceptable and funny joke.

Am I wrong? Was Dowd wrong? Or are independent women really doomed to be lonely? At Sarah Lawrence, are we minimizing ourselves down to the flattest possible feminine identities just to be noticed by one of the maybe 150 straight males on this campus? What are the consequences of our accepted role as SLC girls, subservient, gorgeous, but above all, accommodating, straight women?