The Wake

It is a beginning-of-the-year tradition for women all over campus to cut and tie their free (with season ticket purchase) Gopher Football T-shirt. Generally, this means to take an oversized shirt, cut the seams, and tie the remnants to fit a person of smaller stature. The result is a small shirt with holes in the side and a plunging neckline, crafted to strategically lure potential mates (or something) before, during and after the first football game of the season.

Reflecting on this sort of rite of passage, my friends and I have often wondered where we would be now had we chosen that path. How would my identity have been shaped, were I to have gone with the tide, and acted as a woman my age is “supposed” to?

It is widely acknowledged that the media, mainstream society and most early-childhood development programs stress gender roles as a key to defining one’s own identity. As children, girls are pushed toward dolls while boys are urged in the direction of Legos. This is widely known, but I think scarcely addressed in the context of early-adulthood.

To open up the forum, I would like to begin with saying that I feel pressure even from those close to me to hold my tongue, lose a few pounds and generally be more “pleasant” and less “confrontational.” I have also been compared to low-grade sandpaper.

While this message has never come from the important women role models in my life, I find the hints coming from outsiders and men that are close to me, even while they are positive that they are feminists. As a disclaimer, I cannot think of a time when my father has ever told me to be anything but sandpaper. But the reality of life is that many more people have access to you than family.

From here, I would like to address the highly formative and so-called, “best years of your life,” that is college. Beginning as a freshman struggling to find friends, cutting up a silly T-shirt and wandering down frat row feels like a harmless attempt to circumvent loneliness. But several hundred Miller Lites and three months later, many freshman women surface with a more blurred vision of self than before. It is hard to decipher where our former selves were abandoned, and where we picked up habits and mannerisms previously thought of as less desirable than the moldy, rotten, month-old Domino’s pizza you discovered behind the futon.

Even in this academic environment, where learning is the goal, I find myself pressured to play dumb to be more likeable. The core of the problem, I feel, is the concept that it is better to be unintelligent. When did having an opinion and knowledge become a disadvantage?

As a person who grew up learning to express my opinion and to paint “outside of the lines” as it were, moving away from home turned out to be the opposite of liberating. While staying out until dawn goes unnoticed, the freedom of self feels more restricted. In order to make friends, it was important to be a certain way. But then once I had those friends, who was it that they were spending time with?

The mixed message is that while we are at college to engage in the academic discourse, women are expected to stay silent and pretty, instead of opinionated and therefore less desirable. Especially toward senior year and during graduate school when marriage begins to be stressed as a goal, the conflict between beauty and brains sends the disheartening suggestion that we cannot be both. And given the choice, I think many women choose beauty.

We live in a community and a social structure that implicates marriage as not only a goal, but as the ultimate route to happiness. If we’re supposed to aim towards marriage, and beauty is the preferred route, then I am left wondering what I’m doing in college.

Let’s say for a moment that I have chosen to spend my college years as many of my dormmates did. It was ultimately a choice between compromising my character in exchange for friends, which should make me happy. In the end though, I don’t know what would have been gained. A few more highlights in my hair, a shorter skirt, a ripped and tied piece of University spirit, all for an end goal that I’m not even sure I want.

College is a place where we further our knowledge and train for a career, and it is more than confusing to send women the message that finding a mate is equally if not more important. It is my belief that we should stop sending women in college the message that having a romantic relationship will be the answer to their happiness. Instead, I find it crucial to instill in our academic peers that choosing your own priority will serve you better in the long run. Whether that leads to starting a family or discovering an alternative energy source doesn’t matter, what is most important is to stress that what is right for one might not be right for all.