Vagina Monologue - Where are the men I was promised?

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 wouldn’t be a problem at Harvard.

Or would it? Let’s just say that, not unlike hundreds of other Harvard women, I will be spending Valentine’s 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 women’s 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 aren’t 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 low—25% 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 Valentine’s 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. Men’s 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. Women’s include titles like If I’m 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 don’t run around like deranged rabbits, they are failing to live up to their potential. If women “settle,” they’re 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.

Let’s just say that, not unlike hundreds of other Harvard women, I will be spending Valentine’s Day alone. With an all-male drag organization.

And therein lies the problem. Sounds like this young woman is of the type which is often categorized as a "f@g hag". Few things are less enticing to young men than this type of girl.

I learned in my late 20s that it's always better to find God before you find a woman. Once you have God sincerely in your life, good, religious women are suddenly very interested in you. And finding the right one can set you on the path to a lifetime of joy.

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.

Oh, and I suppose those families with 8, 9, 10, 12 children that flourished in the Victorian times were all conceived via immaculate conception? How stupid.

This is not optimal. But what other options does our generation have?

How pathetic. This from a member of our academic elite youth with TONS of options. I recommend celibacy until marriage and membership in a chuch youth group. But that's only if you want to be happily married and have kids at the requisite age. If you want a series of abusive relationships, STDs, "emergency contraception", and visits to a shrink later in life, by all means, go the "hook up" route.

So all your Ex’s live in Texas...LOL!

The thing of it is, this girl may be dynamite in person, but being a English “Co-concentrator” her words should be given a bit more weight then just the average writers’ should be, and her words betray her nature.

The really funny thing is, I posted that bit about “frumpy” before I ever saw her picture, I just sort of knew what was coming next, “Emma Simple and Plain” indeed.

And going to see the Vagina Monologues, wherein the main female character is raped by a woman at the end and the dialog includes how that makes her a “real woman” and the picture becomes even clearer...sadly...

I’m sure she will hook up eventually, but she also could be spending nights with a bottle of Chardonnay and Mr Whiskers and Dianna the poodle...

...Where are the men I was promised?

Silly me, you were "promised" men in college? What college promises that? I thought you went to college to get a degree, not a man.

So, the feminists are revealing the truth about themselves - they really want men, (oh, horrors!) but they demean them and then expect them to adore them, take them out to dinner, and marry them? They want an active sex life, will "do it" with almost anyone because they feel women should satisfy their urges - because they are "free" to do so, but they want some guy to treat them with respect and as if they were virtuous enough to become his "one and only?" They say men treat women as "sex objects," yet it is not beyond most women today to expose their breasts, go pantiless, pose nude, get "sloppy" drunk, engage in public in sexually stimulating behavior to entice men, because they believe that is proving they are not inhibited - and then they expect not to be treated as "sex objects?" They say they are "independent" and don't need men; that all men want is to trick a girl into bed for a one night stand, but these same women enjoy teasing and doing just that to men (and happily brag about it!). Yet these same women will openly lament sitting home on Valentine's Day.

Come on, girls, which DO you want? And why do you believe that any college should promise to provide you with men? A college only has to provide you with an education. That is why your mommy and daddy sent you there, not to whine that you don't have a date!

When feminists figure out how to be a real woman - one with virtue and who does not behave like a party-girl in public, who can be trusted as a confidant and partner, who has learned to appreciate men and not to try and beat them down and continually berate them for being a man, who is truly an intelligent and successful woman in her own right and also brings comfort and love to a relationship, not competition...then maybe these women will find the pleasure of having a caring partner, and a box of chocolates on Valentine's day!

When today's so-called "smart" women are smart enough to openly support and cherish a man without trying to outsmart him, or change him into a dumbed-down version of a man at every turn, maybe they will get dates - or even one who fills their true dreams (which, according to the writer of this article, she and her friends do want).

No wonder men are confused, and unwilling to take a chance or even commit to a woman. They have no idea how to deal with the conflicting signs women are sending out today, so they don't venture into this land of contradictions that women have created. Men don’t want to be hurt either, or continually made to feel unnecessary – as women have claimed men do to them. Yet today women have created a paradox - where they say: I am a woman, I am so smart that I don't need you (men)...but I am a woman and I want a man, I am "promised" a man, I deserve a man - and if I get a man, he better respect and admire me (no matter how I have behaved and flaunted my sexuality while proclaiming that I should not be thought of in a sexual context). Yep, these women believe they should have a man's total adoration, for their mind alone, even if they don't respect men at all. It sure appears that these very “smart,” strong, feminist-type women say one thing, and really want another. They believe they are entitled to every girls’ dream, while they have become every mans’ nightmare.

The pity is, that the women who do not uphold the belief that men are useless (as the feminists proclaim), are being tainted by what has become a mantra for the minority of women. There are few women who are willing to openly oppose this negative outlook against manhood, so men just figure all women support this movement. It’s a movement that alienates men and leaves them apprehensive. It makes men unwilling to be involved with women and risk falling in love. The author's obvious situation she has lamented is the result of the dilemma women have created for themselves today.

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