Elite Daily, an online journalistic venture site for Generation-Y, promotes itself as providing its users with articles that paint “a reliable portrait of the world.” The site claims that its content is delivered to an audience that is driven by the pursuit of success, and provides this audience with everything that is relevant to their life, or the lifestyles of the upwardly mobile youth.
One of these very relevant (but a bit dated) articles, published in May 2012, was titled, “The Most DTF Colleges.” Amidst the other featured colleges, such as Syracuse, Arizona State, Rutgers and University of Miami, Mount Holyoke took the fourth spot. You can find the complete list here: http://elitedaily.com/life/culture/dtf-colleges/
The author, “Preston Watters” (which actually happens to be the pseudonym for David Arabov, the founder of the site) introduces the article with the methodology that he, and Elite, utilized for determining the F-ability of college campuses:
We here at Elite compiled extensive informal data on the most popular schools in the country in order to determine which schools enjoy the most wanton women. The schools detailed below present the most desirous women who are not afraid to spend a night in your bed the same way you want to spend your night hers.
Not only is there a very-obvious grammatical error (can you spot it?!), but there is also the notion that this very “extensively” complied list is based in nothing more than subjective speculation rather than factual data.
With this in consideration, the rationale Watters used to rank Mount Holyoke as the fourth most DTF college, was the following:
This school was long considered the Harvard of women’s colleges, boasting a wide array of famous female graduates. Holyoke is also known for its hot, intelligent, curious women. They were one of the forefront colleges to dictate the feminist movement, including their right to independent needs in relationships. Namely, sex. However, the school is one of the last bastion holdouts of female-only campuses; on Sunday nights they enjoy cookies and milk. These women are begging for a night out on the town with some guys in the back seat of their Corvette. One male explained that one visit to the campus would produce 2-3 sexual encounters with women per night. Supply and demand men, visit Holyoke and you will be the rare commodity every women would kill to sleep with.
Vegas Night, Credits: Hannah Cohen Photography
Watters’ logic appears to be muddled by generalizations, primarily those of one single man and the idea that the sexual repression of Mount Holyoke can be likened to that of a nunnery. His comparison of students’ sexual activities to the economy is ill-informed as well. In this comparison, Watters is neglecting to analyze hookup culture and the sexual ventures of students within their cultural and social contexts, which, BTW, are fluid and therefore, impossible to ever truly comprehend. Ultimately, Watters manages to reduce culture and social behavior to being an inevitable “economy” of things that can be calculated and manipulated. His claim about MHC students’ sexual activity being similar to “supply and demand” is based in nothing more than a fantasy, where people lack individual agency in their social interactions.
Now, do be fair, there are easily numerous students on campus who are down to hookup. Case and point- any Chapin party ever. However, all students, whether they are or aren’t more inclined to hookup, have the ability to exercise their individual agency when it comes to finding a suitable sexual partner. As junior Tashi Shuler-Drakes argues, “Mount Holyoke promotes all different types of freedoms in terms of sexuality. Some girls here do take particular liberties when it comes to being sexual, whether it’s with a guy or with another girl, and they are very open with being sexual with a lot of people. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”
Meara Algama (’15) agrees, stating “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with multiple sexual encounters. At Chapin you can go and choose to sleep with multiple guys, and if you enjoy it then so what? Sex can be a numbers game for women too.”
Chapin Party, Credits: The Network
There is a process to figuring out who will be best to take to bed and, as being a part of the campus culture myself, I can imagine that most students don’t settle for less inside the bedroom, just as they don’t settle for less outside it. The physical presence of a man on campus will not simply get them into a student’s bed, because 1) there’s this thing called choice, and each individual has their own criteria that goes along with it and 2) not everyone on campus is heterosexual.
Senior Elizabeth McManus’s issue with the article has nothing to do with the notion that students are liberated in their sexual ventures, and is all about its misogynistic undertones. The article alludes to the idea that “a woman’s sexuality only exists for men, and that even women who are interested in other women are only interested in them because there are no men on campus. (Also) it’s an entire appropriation of this campus’s culture- we do not exist in this free and safe place just for the sake of whatever dude shows up. That also really devalues the safe queer space that exists on campus, and all the women on campus who don’t have any interest in men.”
Probably most shocking about this article, is that, as McManus mentioned, MHC has one of the most largest and diverse campuses regarding the gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, pansexual, etc. community. Considering the wide representation of sexual identifications on campus, Catie Walczak (’14) insists that “it’s very likely that many students are too busy sleeping with each other to care about any of the guys that come to campus for a weekend.”
Overall, the central critique of “The Most DTF Colleges” is the justification (well, lack there of) for the listed colleges. Watters’ biggest blunder is that a majority of his arguments are based on generalizations. When making any of the claims that the article made, it’s necessary to ground college hookups in their proper political, historical, cultural, economic, etc. contexts. While there are many MoHos who are interested in having more “meaningless” sex, it’s naïve to believe that the entire student body is just aching for “The D” simply because it belongs to an all women’s college. What “The Most DTF Colleges” does, then, is further socialize people into thinking that the values of men, women, people, are inherently tied to their sexuality.