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 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.
You and me both!
And I agree with you, too. I had the good fortune to take a few classes at both Harvard and Tufts (Fletcher). The Harvard classes were a breeze. The Fletcher class was much tougher, but still . . . not nearly as difficult as some of the engineering classes I took as an undergrad.
yeah, I saw this earlier.
Lookit, I’ve been married four times. Don’t smirk, we’ve got a death in there and a youthful marriage at age 17.
Men were like a bus. You miss one, another one comes along.
I’m almost sixty years old so don’t go thinking I’m some hot babe here. But heterosexual women with their nose, mouth and eyes in the right place what can’t find a man...well I just don’t know.
I’ve been married to my current husband for twenty years so, understand, the dating scene and all that is long past. And I’ve had my heart broken a time or two.
But for the most part...men were like a bus.
I had them any time I wanted them. They weren’t millionaires and they weren’t Cary Grant but they were okay and even the ones I threw over the bow all had a job and supported their family.
So when I read these stories about women not able to find men I wonder...when in the last twenty years did all the men on the planet suddenly go homosexual? Cause in my day, if he was a hetero male a hetero woman sure could get one.
I knew a girl like this whom I went to school with from elementary through high school, and who went to college at Harvard after graduation.
The girl I knew was very smart, but that was about the only positive thing I could say about her. She was tall and blonde and looked like the girl here, except not at all pretty, not fat but not curvy. The fact that she was smarter than almost everyone else seemed to make her disdainful of others (though I never heard her say anything as snobbish and elitist as the author of this article). She often looked slightly unhappy or bored. She wasn’t nasty but wasn’t outwardly friendly either. She wasn’t repulsive, but simply did not look attractive or have the kind of personality that was enjoyable to be around, even if you were a smart, educated guy. Not a bad person. Maybe she was quite nice once you got to know her. But she just was not the kind of thing guys look for in a date.
As long as you only apply to places where they do not yet know what those schools have become. When skating on thin ice, speed is critical.
Because its fun to poke fun at Harvard elitist “joint concentrators” who write silly things, in the process dropping historical names such as “Martel” and use five syllable words freely?
I think the issue is deciding if you’re happier with one than not....
“Sadly, on Valentines Day, it seems to be especially nasty out there.”
The ladies can throw the insults around too.
You aren’t innocent.
(don’t take this the wrong way.I like it when the ladies get randy)
I'd guess at least half of those "Wimmins 'r Eeevul" threads are in response to some woman bemoaning in some variation that she can't attract decent men. I almost always find that her problem seems to be centered between her ears. This thread is no exception. I'll add that if "unsuccessful" men were equally inclined to write about their problems, they'd get the same harsh treatment.
Unless she's from Brooklyn and says dese and dose.
I'm glad I found a wonderful man who actually loves me not some catalog inspired male fantasy.
It is weird what some men seem to want.
She is suppose to look perfect at all times but never spend any time to get that way.
She is suppose to be warm and loving but never expect him to spend any time with her (except in bed)
Smart but never talk about anything.
When I first started in the business world, we hired some freshly minted Harvard undergrads. When I showed one new hire which cubicle he would be sitting in, he was visibly aghast, and immediately asked how long it would be before he got an office!
I've seen a few with these attitudes get canned, like my anti-cubicle example, even though they were obviously intellectually very smart. The entitlement mentality and arrogance did them in.
I think, as someone else already said, that the PC infestation has devalued the undergraduate programs of Brown, Yale, Harvard, U of Penn, etc.
Actually she seems to have fallen for the global warming hoax. Hardly rational. Maybe she should take a little more Astronomy and Chemistry, and a little less English and Classics - more guys in those classes anyway.
Nah,
the the links to them I can freepmail to you...mostly guys bitching about how women are evil and everything wrong on the planet is our fault.
Yeah,
but we ain’t gettin’ randy here (on some other board right now, yes....long discussions about S&aBJ Day)
I do think that little intellectual chip needs to be knocked off her shoulder. First Marine Sergeant she runs into with a degree in ancient history might be a revelation to her, and a healthy one. I know a bull rider who likes to quote Shakespeare. If only she considered them good enough to date her, they might.
but we ain’t gettin’ randy here (on some other board right now, yes....long discussions about S&aBJ Day)
Do tell.
Seriously, I've seen this picture before, and I am really hoping that is some serious inbreeding there, because the possibility of random genetics like that just scares me.
Who are those two, anyway?
A Real Man needs a Feminag like a Bicycle needs a Fish
Pray for W and Our Troops
You have wayyyyyyyyy too much time on your hands.
Never too busy to tweak a snob. ;-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.