WestCoaster
Master Don Juan
- Joined
- May 8, 2003
- Messages
- 2,028
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- 31
... interesting article, wonder what the quotes from women would be if the tables were turned?
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A Tough Time to Be a Girl: Gender Imbalance on Campuses
By RICHARD WHITMIRE
Casual sex. The mere words give parents the jitters, which is partly why the college pickup culture has received so much attention. News-media coverage ranges from checkout-aisle magazine stories serving up titillating details of alcohol-fueled encounters to full-scale reports like the delightfully titled "Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right," released by the Institute for American Values, a family-values think tank.
Last year, the writer Laura Sessions Stepp created a stir with her book Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, which described what the author says is lost as young men and women move away from traditional romantic relationships and toward fleeting sexual encounters. Not only are women gambling with their health, argues Stepp, but they are making decisions they will regret in future years. The hookup culture could leave them bereft of the skills to build real relationships later in life. Whether Stepp is "retro," as some of her critics charged, may be less important than the fact that the hookup culture shows no signs of reversal.
One key element to the pickup culture, however, remains unreported: American colleges are undergoing a striking gender shift. In 2015 the average college graduating class will be 60-percent female, according to the U.S. Education Department. Some colleges have already reached or passed that threshold, which allows anecdotal insights into how those imbalances affect the pickup culture. What can be seen so far is not encouraging: Stark gender imbalances appear to act as an accelerant on the hookup culture.
Biologists and social scientists can't be surprised by that observation. In the animal kingdom, it is well known that whichever sex is in short supply has the upper hand.
College campuses are not immune to such laws of nature, something I glimpsed while doing research into why boys are lagging in literacy skills and college attendance. In 2006 I visited James Madison University, a public university with 17,000 students. At the time, women made up 61 percent of the campus population.
I chose James Madison because the president had just announced he would eliminate seven men's sports, a move necessary to comply with Title IX. In doing so, the university would bring its sports program back into alignment with its overall gender ratio. Many male athletes appeared shocked by the announcement, as though they had barely noticed the gender imbalances. Female students differed: While they protested the loss of the men's sports teams, they were very aware of those imbalances and saw them as involving far more than sports.
A junior whom I spoke with saw the sports controversy as an opening to expose problems she saw arising from the imbalances. Her first clue that something was different about the university came when she checked out the roughly 30 other students from her high school who attended: All but five were women. Her dorm assignment was the next revelation: Her "coed" dorm of 76 students included only 12 men. She realized that she was seeing a phenomenon unheard of at her high school, where the gender mix was about even. Women at the university would wear anything, and many would do anything, to win the competition to get a guy's attention. A striking brunette, she had no trouble competing, but she soon lost her taste for playing the game at a university where the gender imbalances changed the rules.
"My second semester freshman year I dated a guy, but it only lasted three weeks. I realized he was dabbling, if you will, with every other woman in his dorm. This was completely unacceptable to my standards," she said. However, her fellow female students were putting up with similar behavior. Many women there endure what she called a "mind shift," tolerating things they would never put up with in another setting where the male-female ratios were even.
The party scene was worse: "You'll walk into a room and there will be three boys and 10 girls. The girls are all competing to see who goes home with the boys. The guys have their pick." Another female junior agreed, noting that the phenomenon influences friendships, too: "I have a lot fewer guy friends in college than I did in high school. It's almost a trust issue, because I feel disposable. If he doesn't think I'm a good friend he can go elsewhere. A lot of women here don't invest as much in their guy relationships as they do in their relationships with other women."
A senior added: "The guys see that there are a lot more girls, and they're not interested in having a relationship longer than the next girl to come along. Men know how to take advantage of that competition. They'll set things up at parties to get girls to do stuff, such as having a slip and slide contest," in which girls strip to their underwear and get wet sliding through water on a plastic sheet.
As a result of the rising gender imbalances, the university has become "female centric." But while women may run the clubs, dominate in classes, and generally define the character of the university, the law of supply and demand rules the social scene. That's why the women are both competitive in seeking men and submissive in lowering their standards.
Men at the university don't dispute what the women say. "Since there's such an overwhelming number of girls, they have such competition between each other to get a guy," a male junior admitted. "The guys here aren't stupid. They're plenty aware of that and know that girls have to get into a fight over them, instead of what's normal with guys courting girls."
At James Madison and other colleges I visited with severe gender imbalances, the men appeared to pay an eventual price by failing to develop relationship skills and losing the trust of the women. When guys abuse the women, the women eventually get mad and take it out on all the guys, not just the abusers, the male student acknowledged: "It makes it more difficult for a guy to have a girl at the university come to trust him. A lot of times they think you're one of the bad guys who just wants to hook up."
As a public university that refuses to give admissions preferences to men, James Madison has few options for rebalancing its campus. It is not the only college experiencing fallout from such growing gender imbalances; it just arrived early on the scene. By 2015 what women experience there may become common at hundreds of campuses.
No shortage of grist for the supermarket tabloids.
Richard Whitmire is an editorial writer at USA Today and blogs at http://www.whyboysfail.com.
*****************************************************
A Tough Time to Be a Girl: Gender Imbalance on Campuses
By RICHARD WHITMIRE
Casual sex. The mere words give parents the jitters, which is partly why the college pickup culture has received so much attention. News-media coverage ranges from checkout-aisle magazine stories serving up titillating details of alcohol-fueled encounters to full-scale reports like the delightfully titled "Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right," released by the Institute for American Values, a family-values think tank.
Last year, the writer Laura Sessions Stepp created a stir with her book Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, which described what the author says is lost as young men and women move away from traditional romantic relationships and toward fleeting sexual encounters. Not only are women gambling with their health, argues Stepp, but they are making decisions they will regret in future years. The hookup culture could leave them bereft of the skills to build real relationships later in life. Whether Stepp is "retro," as some of her critics charged, may be less important than the fact that the hookup culture shows no signs of reversal.
One key element to the pickup culture, however, remains unreported: American colleges are undergoing a striking gender shift. In 2015 the average college graduating class will be 60-percent female, according to the U.S. Education Department. Some colleges have already reached or passed that threshold, which allows anecdotal insights into how those imbalances affect the pickup culture. What can be seen so far is not encouraging: Stark gender imbalances appear to act as an accelerant on the hookup culture.
Biologists and social scientists can't be surprised by that observation. In the animal kingdom, it is well known that whichever sex is in short supply has the upper hand.
College campuses are not immune to such laws of nature, something I glimpsed while doing research into why boys are lagging in literacy skills and college attendance. In 2006 I visited James Madison University, a public university with 17,000 students. At the time, women made up 61 percent of the campus population.
I chose James Madison because the president had just announced he would eliminate seven men's sports, a move necessary to comply with Title IX. In doing so, the university would bring its sports program back into alignment with its overall gender ratio. Many male athletes appeared shocked by the announcement, as though they had barely noticed the gender imbalances. Female students differed: While they protested the loss of the men's sports teams, they were very aware of those imbalances and saw them as involving far more than sports.
A junior whom I spoke with saw the sports controversy as an opening to expose problems she saw arising from the imbalances. Her first clue that something was different about the university came when she checked out the roughly 30 other students from her high school who attended: All but five were women. Her dorm assignment was the next revelation: Her "coed" dorm of 76 students included only 12 men. She realized that she was seeing a phenomenon unheard of at her high school, where the gender mix was about even. Women at the university would wear anything, and many would do anything, to win the competition to get a guy's attention. A striking brunette, she had no trouble competing, but she soon lost her taste for playing the game at a university where the gender imbalances changed the rules.
"My second semester freshman year I dated a guy, but it only lasted three weeks. I realized he was dabbling, if you will, with every other woman in his dorm. This was completely unacceptable to my standards," she said. However, her fellow female students were putting up with similar behavior. Many women there endure what she called a "mind shift," tolerating things they would never put up with in another setting where the male-female ratios were even.
The party scene was worse: "You'll walk into a room and there will be three boys and 10 girls. The girls are all competing to see who goes home with the boys. The guys have their pick." Another female junior agreed, noting that the phenomenon influences friendships, too: "I have a lot fewer guy friends in college than I did in high school. It's almost a trust issue, because I feel disposable. If he doesn't think I'm a good friend he can go elsewhere. A lot of women here don't invest as much in their guy relationships as they do in their relationships with other women."
A senior added: "The guys see that there are a lot more girls, and they're not interested in having a relationship longer than the next girl to come along. Men know how to take advantage of that competition. They'll set things up at parties to get girls to do stuff, such as having a slip and slide contest," in which girls strip to their underwear and get wet sliding through water on a plastic sheet.
As a result of the rising gender imbalances, the university has become "female centric." But while women may run the clubs, dominate in classes, and generally define the character of the university, the law of supply and demand rules the social scene. That's why the women are both competitive in seeking men and submissive in lowering their standards.
Men at the university don't dispute what the women say. "Since there's such an overwhelming number of girls, they have such competition between each other to get a guy," a male junior admitted. "The guys here aren't stupid. They're plenty aware of that and know that girls have to get into a fight over them, instead of what's normal with guys courting girls."
At James Madison and other colleges I visited with severe gender imbalances, the men appeared to pay an eventual price by failing to develop relationship skills and losing the trust of the women. When guys abuse the women, the women eventually get mad and take it out on all the guys, not just the abusers, the male student acknowledged: "It makes it more difficult for a guy to have a girl at the university come to trust him. A lot of times they think you're one of the bad guys who just wants to hook up."
As a public university that refuses to give admissions preferences to men, James Madison has few options for rebalancing its campus. It is not the only college experiencing fallout from such growing gender imbalances; it just arrived early on the scene. By 2015 what women experience there may become common at hundreds of campuses.
No shortage of grist for the supermarket tabloids.
Richard Whitmire is an editorial writer at USA Today and blogs at http://www.whyboysfail.com.
