Posted on 02/14/2008 8:23:28 AM PST by rface
When I applied to Harvard, my friends were ecstatic. It will be crawling with guys who will find your mind irresistible, they told me. You will be in great demand! I arrived on campus filled with excitement. So much for all those guys who were intimidated by my intellect! So much for romantic evenings ruined by careless references to Charles Martel! That surely wouldnt be a problem at Harvard.
Or would it? Lets just say that, not unlike hundreds of other Harvard women, I will be spending Valentines Day alone. With an all-male drag organization. I hope they have something romantic planned.
So whose fault is this? Everyone has an explanation to offer. Is it the demise of the dating culture? Global warming? Are we too committed to commit? Or are all Harvard men simply unprintables, as many of my female friends suggest?
Perhaps they have a case. Edward Dahlberg once observed that What men most desire is a virgin who is a whore. Harvard men seem to want a genius who is a moron. While Harvard women spent their high school careers trying not to intimidate too many men with their intellects, Harvard men spent theirs making women swoon with their massive, girthy arrays of knowledge. Arriving at Harvard demanded adjustment. For if Harvard men are not intimidated by Harvard womens intellects, Harvard women are not excessively impressed by the intellects of Harvard men. It might seem as though this would lead to interesting, balanced conversations and battles of wits. Instead, it has produced a lopsided quagmire. Harvard men want women who are impressed by their intelligence. Harvard women want men who arent intimidated by theirs. Both are disappointed.
Speaking as a man, given the choice between someone who was awed by my knowledge of the Renaissance and someone who knew as much about it as I and thought that, frankly, I was a little too short and Jewish, I would pick the former every time. This is what Harvard women are up against. While Harvard guys can take the bus to Wellesley and find themselves seized by hordes of fair-to-moderately nubile houris, the thought of Harvard women riding over to, say, Wabash College and snaring eager men seems patently absurd. Aside from the transportation costs involved in driving to Indiana.
Harvard is certainly far from the relationship Mecca my friends envisaged. Only 15% of Harvard students are in a relationship that they are willing to list on Facebook. This is low25% of Northeastern students, 27% of UMass students, 24% of Emerson students, and 22% of BU students are listed as in a relationship. So why are our area counterparts coupling up at rates almost twice ours?
Perhaps brooding on these issues has simply made Harvard women unfit for company. Instead of going on dates, even group dates, they band together to produce the Vagina Monologues. A college that can supply 30 women to perform and 100 to attend the Vagina Monologues on Valentines Day night is a college without a dating scene.
Indeed, both Harvard men and women must confront the same problem: a dating culture conspicuous by its absence. The concept of taking someone out to dinner and a movie has been replaced by the nebulous notion of the hook-up. Harvard students are getting more action on Friday nights with total strangers than many loving Victorian couples did in the course of 50-year marriages. This is not optimal. But what other options does our generation have?
The Self-Help section of Amazon.com hints at the underlying problem. Mens bestselling help books include Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed and The Layguide: How to Seduce Women More Beautiful Than You Ever Dreamed Possible No Matter What You Look Like Or How Much You Make. Womens include titles like If Im So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single? and Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. In these books, women are constantly enjoined not to settle. Settling is bad. Men, on the other hand, are constantly enjoined to settle, and often. These philosophies cannot both work. The world is either filled with discriminating women wandering around with checklists and constantly rejecting men like Mystery, or with accessible, impossibly beautiful women just dying to hop into bed. These expectations combine to produce dissatisfying results for everyone. The gap between ideals and hormones produces the hook-up culture, which is frustrating to most sane people. The difficulty about instant gratification is that it is neither. But if men dont run around like deranged rabbits, they are failing to live up to their potential. If women settle, theyre committing the ultimate crime of self-disrespect. No one wins.
So at the risk of sounding like sediment, let me announce that I have no problem with settling. Settling is what happens when you accept someone in spite of the ways in which he or she falls short of your ideal. At times, it is inappropriate. But this kind of settling is what real relationships are based on. Harvard students, adrift in the sea of misaligned expectations, need to realize this. Instead of waiting for someone who not only finds their intellectualism positively arousing but also enjoys long walks on the beach and is over 6, Harvard women should take another look at that short Jewish guy. Instead of seeking women who are impressed by them, Harvard men should try to find the ones who actually like them. And we should all leave Charles Martel out of it.
Alexandra A. Petri 10 is a joint concentrator in English and Classics in Eliot House. Her column appears on regularly.
There is no humor section at the Alternative Wymyn’s Book Store.
Yes, you should ping the list.
"Hammer me! Hammer me! Make me think you are Charles Martel!"?
LOL! Brief personal anecdote: back when I signed up here, I told my wife what I'd selected as a user name. She smiled and said "Very appropriate!"
A woman does not need to be all that "hot" if she is enjoyable company worth spending a weekend with. Conversely, somebody with a bad attitude is going to have a hard time finding long-term companionship, regardless of how "hot" she is
Perhaps this is why so many "hot" girls in the entertainment industry have lives which are train wrecks
Penn State has a good engineering school, perhaps not on a par in research with Cal Tech and MIT but...
Did you mean University of Pennsylvania? AFAIC, all of the Ivies have degraded to academic jokes at the undergraduate level, with their slavish devotion to PC-ness and diversity. There's still nothing like Harvard or Yale or Princeton on your resume though....
The closest thing to a man allowed into Harvard these days are left wing fairies and idiot Gorons in training.
Thanks for confirming my Indian friend’s thesis. I would add to it a corollary: American women worship and marry thugs, while they talk about ‘nice, romantic guys’, whom they “dump” to use the female lingo!
Thanks for the pings najida...
I think the biggest gift I could get my hubby for Valentine’s Day would be to not let the malcontents of FR in my head today. Just not in the mood ;~)
Nah, women want men who love them, not little bitty boys who hate them.
Interesting.
Men want women who love them, not bitchy little grrls who hate them.
I observe that this thread is based on an article written by someone who is biologically female.
My advice over years of experience [I was happily married long before I made these observations, so they are purely objective]:
Best place for males to meet great quality females: young adults bible study. Meet a wife with whom one may have a long, loving, God-centered marriage.
Best place for females to meet great quality males: local gun/shooting/IDPA club. Meet a husband who takes personal and family responsibility and duty seriously.
Actions speak louder than you know what, and women say one thing and do another. Check out the pitiful letters to advice columnists from “dumped” nice guys.
I have no doubt that I could find somebody at the Mayo Clinic with whom one could have a great literary discussion, versus Harvard professors who are only interested in the latest Marxist deconstructionist essay on Milton's toilet training
She sounds like a bitch.
A truism: No matter how hot a woman is, there is some guy, some where, who is tired of her crap.
I am definitely Not Guilty!
Besides that, it appears the no makeup rule applies in the PC world of Harvard and the Ivies.
Let's see the rest of the package.
she’s a blind engineer’s dream girl!
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