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When my parents and I pulled up to Towers North for move-in day at the University of Denver, I felt primarily nervous. So many unknowns: what would college classes be like? What would my roommate be like? Would I make many (any) friends?
I needn’t have worried. The four years I spent at DU were some of my life’s best. I loved my classes, I loved my roommate, I loved my (decent amount of) friends.
But there were a few disappointing surprises, and one of them was witnessing what happened to most freshmen on the weekends. I’ll focus here on the boys.
Senior year of high school was awful and great at the same time. Awful column: the stress of college applications and choosing a school. This is the biggest decision most 18 year olds have ever made, and many likely felt as I did, that the repercussions of this choice could never be undone. Oh the pressure! The weight!
Great column: academic life was easy (sort of). I knew how to navigate my time, and I knew who all the teachers are, which meant I knew which classes to prioritize and which I didn’t need to invest quite so much time in.
I also knew I’d be leaving soon, and that puts social life into perspective. Pettiness sort of floats away sometime during the middle of that final year. At least, it did for me. I wanted to talk to everyone, to end on a good note. Little grievances suddenly looked like what they were: little.
And so I went into college with this understanding of 18-year-olds as friendly, kind, highly organized and driven people, who flung a wide-spread net of respect out upon all who wandered into their purview.
Then I went to my first frat party.
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The culture on college campuses can be pernicious for all students, particularly certain elements of the party scene. And it is certainly far more dangerous for female students, who are the primary victims of sexual assault.
But I wonder if male students don’t feel more peer pressure to engage in dangerous levels of drinking and emotionless sexual “conquests.”
During a session at this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, recent Middlebury College graduate Leah Fessler discussed her senior thesis “Can She Really Play that Game Too?” The title is a response to Kate Taylor’s much-discussed article for New York Time Magazine, “She Can Play That Game Too.” In Taylor’s view, college women are both capable of engaging in no-strings-attached sex, while simultaneously garnering as much satisfaction coupled with as little shame as male students. It’s a coup for third-wave feminism, an occasionTaylor finds celebratory.
Fessler disagrees. Her widely-researched thesis includes interview responses from over 200 Middlebury students, and a vast majority of females she interviewed reported a deep dissatisfaction with what Fessler dubs “Middlebury Hookup Culture.” At the end of the day, progressive or not, young women want emotional support and commitment from the men they are romantically and sexually involved with.
What stood out most was Fessler’s report that male students seemed wholly lost when it came to processing their sexual experiences.
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But what stood out most to me was Fessler’s report that male students seemed wholly lost when it came to processing their sexual experiences. Many came to college with little or no sexual experience, and felt tremendous pressure to “man up,” to get out there and get laid. Thinking this was an important part of their masculine identity, most male students did just that.
And when they finally stopped to talk with Fessler, they said the truth: these were not the sorts of sexual experiences they wanted to be having either.
A comment from one of the audience members at this panel really prompted this post. An elderly gentleman who professed to being a therapist himself said that “we” don’t do a very good job of raising the “male animal” in this country.
If young men go to college under the impression that getting wasted and hooking up with as many women as possible is the best way to express their masculinity, then who could disagree with him?
And that’s what I saw when I arrived at DU. Young men getting so drunk that they wet themselves. That they passed out in the middle of a room, snoring on the floor. That they ended up in the hospital for alcohol poisoning.
And that’s just the issues with alcohol.
So I think it would behoove us to address these pressures that male students will face, and preferably before they get to college.
I’m picturing some kind of outdoor boot camp, where young men readying to head off to college are forced to confront some questions:
- How important is “fitting in?” What if doing what the crowd does makes you feel horrible about yourself?
- What does it mean to be a “good man?” Does using someone for sex only get included in your definition?
- Do you see young women as humans too? How do you go about caring for their well-being, as well as your own?
- What are the best ways of expressing your identity?
- What are the best ways to bond with friends?
- At the end of college, what do you hope to have achieved? What do you hope to have avoided?
These are just a brainstorm start.
But I think we should offer something to young men entering a wholly new culture, and one that often promotes destructive behaviors. Some kind of preparation might very well go a long way in helping to change what has become a predatory landscape for countless young people.
Photo: Flickr/Andrew Ratto