Anonymous ’17 is a guest contributor to this column and a female member of the Class of 2017. All names, events and locations in this narrative have been altered in order to disguise recognizable identities.   

We all know the drill of arriving at a party. It smells like old beer and exhilaration. The designated bouncer stands in our way, a football player with an unimpressive drunken glaze, reclining against the door to stay upright. This barely legal boy will decide if we are pretty enough to be graced with the opportunity to grind our bodies against his other unremarkable team members and drink warm alcohol, hypnotized and exhausted by a throbbing black light in a dirty basement. It is just another off-campus party.

We call it the pretty test. And we take it, all girls and women, every day. Every time you can’t button your jeans, you fail. Every time you get whistled at or hit on, you pass. It just so happens that Bowdoin has a culture that makes this test prevalent and obvious. It is well known you should be prepared for the boy that decides whether you are accepted or rejected, beautiful or ugly. He’s the difference between intoxicated dancing and calling your mom while eating microwave popcorn. So you better wear a crop top in sub-zero weather and stop eating the soft serve.

The test begins far before the boy’s decision at the door. Back in my room, my friend Madison and I get ready to go out. She is an aspiring artist and a mathematician; she cannot do her own dishes yet readily and graphically discusses her sex life. All she wants to do tonight, she tells me, is curl up and watch a movie and sleep. It’s the typical pattern of the weekend: me telling her she doesn’t have to go out, her agreeing to trust her instinct, then quickly changing her mind because her newly acquired boyfriend calls. The last time we went out together was to a party during the first weeks of school, where she drank too much sorbet-flavored Smirnoff and ended up ripping off her costume before puking all over our couch.

Tonight she changes once, twice, three times. Tilting her head in front of the funhouse-esque mirror, she furrows her eyebrows. I recognize the same look in my close friends, my mother, myself. Turning to me, she asks, “Do I look okay? I swear to God I gained ten pounds this week.” There is an inevitable pause. It is the one question I could answer a thousand times correctly, the one she will always have her own answer to. I tell her she looks beautiful because she does. And as usual, I hold back the addendum that never feels appropriate to voice. I want to tell her she looks just as beautiful when we are working at the organic garden and she is covered in mud, or when we spend all Sunday in sweatpants. But, as is the pattern, I don’t, and we walk towards the party.

Her boyfriend Jacob meets us outside the entrance where the bouncer stands. They fight constantly, Jacob telling her what to do, and her passively aggressively doing it. We hear something that could be a scream and could be laughter, the soundtrack of the night. The boy at the front door is about a foot taller and wider than Jacob and glances appreciatively at the flimsiness of Madison’s shirt. He nods at her, but shakes his head at Jacob. “What? Come on, man. I’m in your psych class.” The bouncer drawls an insincere apology. 

This is often how it goes: pretty girls are let in and boys don’t even get a chance. They try to pass a different test, playing a different game all together. We are rewarded for being beautiful, given power over the very boys that hand it to us. I can see Madison smugly glancing at Jacob from the corner, poised to walk in the door, whispering, “You’re the one who told me I had to go out tonight. It’s not my fault he won’t let you in.”

As Madison conferences in harsh whispers with Jacob, I see a girl I know from one of my classes walking towards the door. She’s Katie-with-the-hair, her short dark waves a way of distinguishing from the hundreds of Katies populating the campus. She eats snacks with crinkly wrappers in class while other students are shocked into silence by either the emotion or confusion that accompanies poetry. She seems like the kind of girl who would cook herself a full meal while babysitting and who watches porn unapologetically. But I don’t really know her at all.

I’m just hoping she’s different than the rest of us and will deal with the test in a different way. I feel my own heart beat faster when she walks up to the bouncer. She is scarily cool, dressed at least semi-appropriately for the cold. He looks at her and cannot check anything off the list, no exposed cleavage, no drunken stagger, no wink or smile. All of a sudden he’s shaking his head no. And I want to scream at her so badly to please yell at him, please laugh in his face, or spit on his shoes, or at least question his decision, or at least question why you want to be here. But Katie just turns to go. She is alone and catches my eye. It is a drunken sort of understanding, one you are not quite sure if you remember right the next day. We have had few exchanges and this is only one of them, but we are both hurting for her, the denied, and I, the barely accepted.

When the bouncer allowed Madison to go in, I was given a quick nod as well, a second thought next to her cleavage. The friend. I can summarize these nights because I am on the fringe of participating. I am not beautiful in the way that attracts immediate groping. I am not loudly or messily drunk—instead when intoxicated I tend to enthusiastically bring up independent films or recycling, things which tend to thwart gropers. I am the observer, the outlier, in love and in a relationship, narrating in my head the whole time. I hold my friends’ hair above the toilets. I do not wear a crop top.

But I, like so many girls, am the one assessing my performance on this pretty test, and two years ago I would have said I was passing. I weighed much less than I do now, maintained by drinking coffee and distilling my personality into numbers. I measured heat energy because it was the only way I knew how to calculate worth. I thought I was beautiful because people told me so. I also thought I was dying.

Earlier this month I found myself discussing my past eating disorder with the doctor at the Health Center, who smiled knowingly when I said I do not like to keep “suffered from anorexia” on file. I tell her I am disturbed by how prevalent eating disorders seem on campus. For me, it is not a body type that feels so recognizable to my anorexic self, rather the fierce but empty eyes, one of a brave soldier losing a 10-year battle. And losing any battle with yourself feels unacceptable, but much worse is to be unsure of what you’re fighting for. 

I do not starve myself anymore, not even close, but I do still think about how my thighs touch, how I am no longer part of  the elite and envied club of the over-disciplined. I ask the ones I love and admire most about their experience with disordered eating and thinking, always secretly hoping they have escaped unscathed, always shocked when they tell me otherwise. Of course I want attention to be called to this issue, but I am exhausted when an article in the Orient inappropriately blames the salad bar for a problem that exists outside the dining hall. 

There is no easy explanation for this phenomenon though the staff writer bravely tries to suggest one as she summarizes results from a survey and interviews. 

It’s not that there aren’t beautiful and thoughtfully heart-wrenching elucidations on eating disorders and versions of the pretty test. There are books and memoirs, and I’ve read them all, always at first inspired by the words that are easily forgotten as I face the day and the scale. I still have the irrational uncertainty that one night I will be turned away from a party because of how much dessert I ate the night before.

And to be clear, it is not that these parties are so legendary or epic that they are worth extreme humiliation: the music is usually too loud or too soft, the alcohol always dwindling by the time people start to arrive, the basement so dark you are unable to see the face of the person you are dancing with. It is the very fact that you are there, part of something that is awful and delusional and selfish and thrilling—part of something everyone who has gotten a degree has supposedly experienced.

And it’s not just Bowdoin, although at first I was sure it was. Friends at prestigious universities and small colleges alike tell me similar stories of pretty tests on the phone. Some fraternities hand out tickets to parties based on profile pictures, some sports teams open their doors only to girls rated “10” on an unwritten but agreed-upon scale. These parties are not at clubs in downtown LA with waiting lines of sequined women, but they almost could be. We are paying $50,000 a year to be in a diverse environment conducive to learning, yet what we are being taught is that our brains are not what gets us in the door.

But it doesn’t make sense. We know that we are smart. We write scathing essays and finish problem sets quickly, we have hobbies and sports. We do service, we read the news. We are students, daughters, siblings, loyal friends. We have attended the alcohol and drug safety lecture, we understand statistics and nutrition. We are labeled some of the brightest minds in the country. We should know better than to black out or starve.

This pretty test is one we didn’t learn to study for in ACT prep class, instead researched the rules religiously in the Cosmopolitan bible under florescent airplane lighting. Our mothers and friends and favorite celebrities are our teachers. Pain is the classroom setting we work best in. The dining hall is our laboratory, the experiment of our waist size. As overachieving students, we will always go the extra mile, especially on the treadmill.

Add alcohol to the mix, an acceptable college vice, and it makes it all easier. It hurts a little less to starve yourself or to be rejected when you can’t remember it. It allows you to make rules that curb desire: drink what you want if you only eat what you allow. The pain of restriction is forgotten for a couple hours during a wild college night, the paradox of starvation and binge drinking seemingly accepted and enforced. If the pretty test were actually a multiple-choice exam, it would arrive accompanied by a bottle of vodka. This is one evaluation they do not warn you about at admissions, and we are all failing in our own way.

The pretty test results are in, at least for tonight. Madison will walk into the party, dance with a few boys and drink too much from random cups before begging me to leave with her. Later, she will call Jacob, where she will cry and apologize for leaving him behind. Next weekend he will hold tonight’s events over her head, dragging her to another party they may or may not be allowed to attend.

I don’t know what Katie will do after discovering her verdict because I don’t really know her, only from afar, only from the comments she makes in class. I hope that she is making art or reading a book or kissing someone who knows she’s as awesome as I think she seems. I can only hope she still feels beautiful tonight.