The Bowdoin Orient

“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing” (Macbeth, 5.5).

It may have been reckless, over the past couple of years, to use this column as a public diary. Through the Orient, I’ve grappled with my body image, my gender identity and my ambivalent relationship with Christmas. I’ve written articles that pissed off people close to me and made me reassess my own biases. I also humblebragged about my GPA, attacked the entire athletic department and referred to printers as “the sphincter of the internet.” (I stand by all three of those articles.)

In David Foster Wallace’s short story “Signifying Nothing,” the narrator describes a childhood memory that re-emerges in his young adulthood. He says, “I suddenly get this memory of my father waggling his dick in my face one time when I was a little kid.” If you know me well at all, there’s probably some Freudian shit you can say about that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Point is, “Signifying Nothing” means a lot to me. I first submitted to the Orient in response to Eliot Taft '15’s article about digital maps. Since then, writing for this paper has helped me navigate the fraught topography of Bowdoin College. (Of course, these writerly travails never lack in bad puns.)

As a hardcore introvert, I will always value how this column has connected me to the Bowdoin community. I still haven’t mastered the Bowdoin Hello (try saying hi to me in H-L after 10 p.m.), but writing in the Orient has made me feel like a valued part of this college.

In tenth grade, my English teacher told me that “reading is one of the most social things a person can do.” This didn’t make any sense to me at the time, and it took me years to even understand what she was saying. But now, after a four-year-long liberal arts brainwash, I’ve come to understand the social value of written words. To quote another English teacher (who may have said this grasping a copy of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson or Moby Dick), “This is how you love people.”

So this, my final column, is dedicated to you. To my friends, who’ve graciously complimented (and held their tongues about) my writing. To my mother, who dutifully reads every one of my columns as soon as possible. To the faculty and staff who surprised me by mentioning the Orient. To the editors (s/o to Sam Chase) who let me publish pretty much whatever I want. I also dedicate this column to everyone else: those sports teams who dominate the gym basement, the anonymous transphobic Orient commenters, the center-left democrats (read: neoliberals) who care more about capitalism than social progress. All of you are as much a part of me as we are a part of Bowdoin.

Whether I like it or not, I spent four formative years in this place. (Less one semester in Bath, England, a “city” best described as “like the world’s worst cruise ship.”)

The best group I’ve joined at Bowdoin is called Radical Alternatives to Capitalism (RAC). This club valued inclusivity and diversity like no other place I’ve been, and I’ve often left our meetings with a profound love for humanity.

Right now, RAC is mostly seniors, and its future is uncertain. But that’s OK. Several years ago, Bowdoin had a “Social Democrats” club, which was guided by some of the same ideals as RAC. Now that Bernie Sanders is running for president “democratic socialism” has entered the American mainstream, but true anticapitalism remains taboo.

History tends to overlook radical thought. This is built into the structure of radicalism—“History is written by the victors,” (Walter Benjamin) and not the failed subversives. But radicalism has a precedent. From anti-Vietnam protests to apartheid boycotts and fossil fuel divestment, college students have resisted social norm to create genuine change.

During my time in college, I could have been a lot more involved in student activism. But this column has been one of my favorite ways to process my ideas and take part in conversations. Writing this has made me who I am. And, once again, this couldn’t have happened without all of you. To misquote Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” “I am vast. I contain multitudes.”

Thanks for nothing.

“Let’s get a meal!” you say, enthusiastically, to an acquaintance you’d like to know better. At Bowdoin, an invitation for a meal represents more than just food. “Getting a meal” is a common way to become familiar with people outside our immediate friend groups, or legitimize relationships with friends of friends or casual hookups. It’s also important who you don't get a meal with…maybe you don’t want that casual hookup to be part of your weekday life.

Eating with new people at Bowdoin helps us build connections to campus groups, and discover opportunities for ourselves. This is, in a word, networking. Like an “informational interview,” getting a meal with an acquaintance is performative. You want to project the best, most fitting version of yourself to a new person, while trying to appear casual and composed. Whether we like it or not, every part of the meal—from the choice of dining hall, to the way we hold our silverware—affects the impression we make on other people.

Getting a meal is a skill. As Julia Mead succinctly explained in an article last semester, the Senior Etiquette Dinner teaches Bowdoin students to perform an elite class identity. Beyond the dinner, there are plenty of subtle ways that Bowdoin teaches us to behave. Seminar-style classes teach us to participate in business meetings. College houses teach us to plan events. And getting meals teaches us to network.

When I was in high school, my junior year English teacher once began a class by playing the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey and holding a box of cookies over his head.

“Mallomars,” Mr. Baldwin said, “are perfect. The graham cracker base, marshmallow filling, and decadent chocolate coating is truly heavenly.”

He then distributed the cookies around the class.

“You know, food is love,” he told us. “Enjoy the cookies.”

My teacher then had us each write us essay about the Mallomar brand cookie, much to the chagrin (thanks for the vocab, Mr. Baldwin!) of many students in the class.

Mr. Baldwin’s teaching could fit in with the cheesiest of Lifetime movies, but I never did forget that lesson. Sharing a meal with someone is not just intimate, but sacred. Every religion that I know of follows several traditions based around food. This past Sunday, I couldn’t help remembering the pastries and pasta that my Italian family would share every Easter after gorging ourselves on chocolate all morning.

Is there anything sacred about eating with someone at Bowdoin? Meals here are often scheduled far in advance, and squeezed between various other commitments. Food can provide a rare opportunity to reflect on yourself and connect with another person. It can help alleviate the stress of countless other duties. But often, a meal becomes another social obligation, requiring the same performative self-awareness as a meeting or a class. Does that kind of self-awareness violate the sacredness of eating, making lunch sacrilegious?

Consciousness and love are not mutually exclusive. Bowdoin promotes an ideal of social leadership and financial success. But although Bowdoin’s culture socializes us to adopt bourgeois habits, we don’t need to fully accept or reject an upper class identity. If we give ourselves entirely to an elitist ideal, we’ll end up hurting the people that interfere with our self-interested goals. However, to reject the Bowdoin ideal wholesale comes with its own kind of dishonesty. It’s a privilege to learn how to refine the skills necessary for a high-power career. At Bowdoin, every one of us participates in a culture of people with immense social and economic power, and it’s worth being aware of the way that culture shapes us.

When I was growing up, my family drank a lot of diet soda. Now, I often hesitate in the dining hall, checking my impulse to drink a product as corporate, artificial and innutritious as Coke Zero. But tater tots and fried chicken have never been my comfort food. At my grandmother’s house, cans of Diet Pepsi were as ubiquitous as loaves of Italian bread. As soon as my sister and I would walk into her home, we would hug my grandmother hello and then make our way to the fridge, trusting that it would be full of shiny silver cans. Yes, Pepsi profits every time we purchase its products. But those cans came straight from my grandmother’s heart. Even though “getting a meal” may be a kind of networking, eating with others often leads to lasting connections and a strong community. After all, food is love.

The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra states: Every polynomial equation having complex coefficients and degree ≥1 has at least one complex root. A complex number has the form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers (which are numbers like 1, -½, π, 507,857, etc.) and i is the square root of -1. So, the Theorem says that, if you have a polynomial (such as 17x3 + 2x2 + 8), with complex numbers multiplying the x’s you can always find a way to write this polynomial as a product of complex numbers.

This is incredible! In my high school algebra class, we kind of glossed over complex roots, which made equations like x2 + 4 = 0 impossible to solve. But, if you throw in an i, suddenly all real polynomials have complex roots. To quote Professor Michael King, “Pretty much any number you can think of can be written as a product of complex numbers.”

i is called the “imaginary unit.” Because of this, i gets the reputation of being—in contrast to the “real” numbers—something that doesn’t actually exist. However, real numbers (and integers and natural numbers) don’t actually exist any more than complex numbers. Numbers aren’t things that we hold or see or smell, but ideas that can signify many things, and the ways that mathematicians use and understand numbers has been changing for as long as we’ve been counting.

As a liberal, it can be hard to talk about God. In the United States, we are morally determined to keep church away from state, to keep one ideology from seeping into and influencing another. This was made apparent to me in third grade, when my public elementary school stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance because they didn’t want to impose the “under God” onto little kids. We often talk about “those conservative Christians” who are trying to teach kids Creationism at the expense of our beloved Science. In the mainstream conception of America, the state government dictates social interaction, the public sphere, while religion guides people’s separate, private lives.

The “under God” bit is not the most insidious part of the Pledge of Allegiance. The blind patriotism of flag worship is creepy, and it seems delusional to claim that there is “justice for all” in an America stratified by enormous wealth inequality and violently divided by race. Today, a flag stands on Bowdoin’s main quad, that same flag that has been used to justify years of war, colonialism and systemic discrimination. The American flag towers over the campus, but we downplay any signs of religious denomination in our chapel, where religion becomes something extra-curricular, welcome at Bowdoin but not a part of mainstream life.

As our American flag testifies, institutions like Bowdoin believe and worship all kinds of things. It’s amazing how much faith and trust must go into just buying something at the C-Store. We swipe a plastic card in a machine to change the balance on a student’s account, which is connected to an account at a bank, which is connected to countless people and institutions. But for any of that to happen, we all have to agree that money has value, and the little numbers on a screen mean the same things as money. We have to feel guilt and shame when we can’t pay money we owe, and feel happy when we have a lot of money. Bowdoin has enormous power, after all, because of its huge endowment, the result of an enormous amount of financial knowledge and power. Because we can do more when we have more, money is an easy way for Bowdoin—and the people in it—to compare its worth against their peers.

There’s something interesting about complex numbers. Unlike the real numbers, the set of complex numbers is not an ordered set. While we all know that 5>2, it doesn’t even make sense to make these kinds of statements about complex numbers. To graph a complex number, you need two axes, and you can see visually that you can’t order all the numbers at once. Without even realizing it, for a long time I took it for granted that numbers had to have order. However, by thinking about i, I could understand how a more complete conception of numbers wouldn’t have an order at all.

As with mathematics, we can have a more complete and satisfying understanding of our roots by discussing the various ideologies that people have. Ignoring people’s beliefs is both counterproductive and dishonest. By accepting other people instead of casting them as religious fanatics, we can understand how our own ideologies (such as capitalism) depend on faith and worship. Maybe we can realize what we’re missing when we’re caught up by the hierarchies and orders that we take for granted.

In the United States, scarcity often manifests itself as excess. For example, Mississippi has both the highest rate of food insecurity and the third highest rate of obesity nationwide. In a food system that privileges products that are convenient, marketable and, ultimately, cheap, many can only afford to eat against their physical needs. When a burger costs one dollar but a salad costs seven dollars, calories are cheap, but nutrition is expensive.

We can apply the logic of the American obesity epidemic to wealth disparities in modern society. You may be familiar with the TV show “Hoarders.” According to the show’s description on Google, each episode “profiles two people on the verge of a personal crisis, all caused by the fact that they are unable to part with even the tiniest possessions.” The show tends to feature “average-looking” Americans, and claim that these people are afflicted by psychological conditions that constitute “hoarding,” the accumulation of excess stuff.

Bill Gates and Donald Trump have never been featured on “Hoarders.” The billions of dollars that these men possess are different from the old books, food or animals that the people on “Hoarders” cling to. Like junk food, the stuff we consider trash is readily available in America. People can accumulate piles of useless goods because it’s relatively easy to buy things. Hoarding, like obesity, demonstrates the extreme of a logic of consumption based on accessibility over quality, on what you can get over what’s good for you.

When I was in elementary school, my mother bought me a new backpack each fall. And with all the other expenses relating to a new school year, the end of August and beginning of September can be a tough time, financially. Because of this, my mom never wanted to spend more than $20 on a backpack. Inevitably, these inexpensive bags would fail before the end of the year, with broken straps or gaping holes that made these bags a hassle during spring rain. By fifth grade, I envied those kids who’d had their significantly-more-than-$20 monogrammed L.L. Bean backpacks since kindergarten. Those bags were sturdy, practical, and (most importantly) signified the longevity of an early investment. The monogrammed initials were icing on the cake, the symbol of ownership and permanence on a quality consumer good.

If you’ve read many of my columns, you know that I like to use anecdotes from elementary school. Often, childhood memories contain our most distilled—and often unarticulated—feelings of shame and exclusion. I was recently talking to my friend Julia, who mentioned having a similar experience with L.L. Bean bags, until she, like me, invested in a quality backpack that she carries to this day. Another friend, Will, mentioned his frustration with having the same sturdy but unhip bag for fifteen years of his childhood. Even small indicators of social position can have effects far into the future.

We see the paradox of consumerism far beyond elementary schools. Many low-income people in America have smart phones, expensive sneakers and other products that symbolize modern comfort or excess but are fairly easy to attain. If we expand the backpack analogy, all consumer goods are cheap throwaways compared with long-term wealth as found in mutual funds or property ownership.

Towards the end of last summer, I helped a family friend move some books out of her home. She, her partner, and her daughter were moving out of the apartment they had rented for years into a co-op that they would own. This friend shared that she was trying to make her teenage daughter understand why they were moving, why it mattered to build equity.

“This is what it all comes down to, you know?” she said while driving to the thrift store. “Economic inequality: when your parents are aging, will you inherit money or have to pay to care for them?” Two weeks ago I remembered this stark summary of systemic inequality, when reading a fellow student's insightful analysis of intersectional discrimination. He pointed out that discrimination manifests itself in ways beyond race, such as “where I live, what my parents do, what school I attend, what I study and what kind of cars my parents drive.” Though the cultural significance of these factors can vary, home location, education and car ownership are directly tied to someone’s wealth.

It can be impossible to determine a person’s wealth by how they look. Like food insecurity, there is no one way that economic disempowerment appears. Hoarding, like obesity, represents an unjust system rebelling against itself. If consumer goods are empty calories, health is wealth. However, wealth is never individualized, but constituted within a social order. And when a few people reserve economic power for themselves, the rest of us inevitably suffer. So, to quote a phrase, property is theft.

It's almost December. In or around December every year, Christian Western culture changes. The anticipation of Christmas makes many of us do funny things. We don ugly sweaters, drink an unbelievably heavy beverage made with raw eggs, and subject ourselves to the saccharinity of songs such as “Christmas Shoes.”

And, of course, there are the movies. An entire subgenre of film that both celebrates and exploits the mythology that surrounds this one important day. Some movies are classics, (“Miracle on 34th Street,” “It’s A Wonderful Life”) others are kitschy but fun (“The Santa Clause,” “Elf”) and many are downright offensive (allegedly, there’s a “Christmas Shoes” movie).

Any decent Christmas movie has some kind of magic. Whether that magic consists of ghosts, an express train or just plain-old love, Christmas challenges the rationalist way we tend to think for the rest of the year. At the best of times, I can put aside my anti-consumerist critiques and accept how Christmas magic just makes everything OK. Christmas magic is the biggest cliché on earth. Nothing could be gaudier than a children’s choir singing about angels in the background of a Lifetime movie. And yet, social rituals are the closest thing to magic that we have. It’s amazing to have a society where many people put a tree inside their house and listen to the same music for a month. It’s even more amazing that I love this shit. I enjoy seeing dogs dressed up as reindeers, looking at blinding neon lights and drinking peppermint lattes.

But I don’t know anyone who loves Christmas more than my sister. Amanda wears reindeer socks in July, and watches “Holiday in Handcuffs” and “Christmas with the Kranks” in August. Most importantly, my sister genuinely and unironically believes in Santa Claus. Several years ago, my mother and I decided to break the “truth” to Amanda. We tried, time after time, to empirically prove to Amanda that there is no man who lives at the North Pole and delivers presents across the world on every Christmas Eve. But our rationalism never took hold. She was (and is) too deep into the Christmas mythology to ever change her mind.

Religion is strange, as an academic subject. The secularization of knowledge prevents scholars from openly buying into any religious dogma. Rather, academics have to talk about religion in conditional phrases, outsider language. And there’s a funny thing that secular liberal education does to disarm radical or anti-rationalist ideology. Consider my friend, who believes in ghosts. She once told me that it isn’t that she just interprets something as a ghost which someone else interprets otherwise. She actually believes in ghosts. School will often trick us into thinking that there’s an objective reality that we each interpret and signify differently. As if one culture’s alchemy is another person’s chemistry. Of course, for our academic culture, alchemy is the wacky, outdated ancestor of legitimate science.

Unlike my sister, my thoughts have been really, really expensive. As I approach the end of my seventh semester at Bowdoin, I’ve undertaken hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of education. As I mentioned in an earlier article (“Intellectual privilege, money and harmful exclusivity at elite institutions”), Amanda could never have that privilege. As a woman with Down syndrome, she’ll never attend an institution like Bowdoin, and never develop the critical skills to investigate Truth. But despite the capital that’s been funneled into my brain, I don’t have a monopoly on saying what exists. I can speculate, but I know literally nothing about how it feels to be someone else. Instead of using my education to try to find objective truths, I should learn to accept other realities.

I’m afraid that I’m falling into a trap. By writing this article, I am using critical inquiry to justify someone else’s belief. I’m mansplaining to my own sister why her favorite cultural narrative is not just an illusion. But as long as I have the privilege of intellectual authority, I might as well give it up.

So yes, Amanda, there is a Santa Claus—but you didn’t need to be told.

For as long as I can remember, a shelf in my living room at home has proudly displayed a book called “Are Italians White?” I’ll admit, I’ve never read the book, but I always predicted the answer to be something like, “Well, you may assume they are, but it’s actually much more complicated than that!”

The complexity of Italian identity isn’t just the terrain of erudite, problematizing intellectuals. My grandmother—rest her soul—once told me how she hated to fill out forms about her race. “I’m not white!” she said. “They want to make me say that I’m white, but I’m Italian, not white!” 

I’ve often encountered a similar problem. With all the paperwork necessary for higher education, I’ve needed to fit my race into a checkbox. It doesn’t help that my father is Latino, so I’ve had to choose between categories such as “white,” “Hispanic,” “Hispanic (non-white),” “white (non-Hispanic),” “Puerto Rican,” “Hispanic (non-Puerto Rican)” etc. 

The options change depending on the form, and (as you can see) often border on the ridiculous. Recently, institutions have tried to accommodate for mixed ethnicities, but sometimes I have to choose just one option. And I usually avoid being “white.”

What’s wrong with being white? White is the default race. The white race is not an identity in itself as much as it is an absence of identity. How many times have you seen someone, shoulders shrugging, say “I’m just white,” and nothing more?

To admit that you’re white is to sacrifice ethnicity and culture. Can whiteness exist in its own right, as more than an instrument of oppression?

Whiteness is also association with power, and the derogatory language we use often classifies social and economic power as “uncool.” 

A few months ago, my friend John and I were walking to a concert in downtown Manhattan. We passed by a building with a large vertical sign: “Sohotel.” I turned to John. “Wow,” I said, “that is so…hotel.” 

Reveling in my wittiness, we decided that “hotel” would be a cool new slang word. But what did it mean? 

We arrived early to the concert with nothing to do but walk around the theater and observe the crowd. That dude’s pinstripe suit? Hotel. That woman’s Google tote bag? Hotel. Showing up an hour early to a rock concert? Hotel. 

Feeling out a meaning to this word, we decided that “hotel” meant “tackily bourgeois.” To act “hotel” is to ignorantly exude self-importance. Of course, there was already a word that meant more or less the same thing: “bougie.”

To be bougie is not just to be a part of the bourgeoisie, to own the means of production. Bougieness is aesthetic, and bougieness is not cool. 

What about “basic?” In one popular sense of the word, “basic” activities include drinking Starbucks, wearing North Face and using Instagram. Truly basic people are unaware—they don’t realize that their interests are unsophisticated and vapidly materialistic.

The basic and the bougie aren’t far apart. In a way, bougieness is basic. To value wealth and power is to conform to a dominant capitalist ideology. Being bougie is the default: we see it across television and in advertisements. The media tells us to value the aesthetic of elitism, and that conforming is not hip.

When I was a child, there was another book I often noticed. It wasn’t in my living room, but on my mother’s personal shelf. This book was Maureen Dowd’s “Are Men Necessary?” (I didn’t read this either.) Even as a 10-year-old boy, the title felt like a personal attack. If men weren’t necessary, what did that mean about me? In my childhood understanding of gender, it seemed insane to suggest that we eliminate half the population. And yet, when it came to race, I had no qualms about sacrificing my whiteness for a cooler Italian ethnicity.

When deconstructing identity, we sometimes conflate race and gender as analogous structures of power. And yet despite resisting “bougieness” and whiteness, I’ve held on to the masculine, dominant, gender. Being a man isn’t lame like being white or shallowly wealthy. 

Gender feels more substantial than wealth or whiteness. We can measure and change our wealth; whiteness is simply the absence of color. Gender, on the other hand, is something that most of us hold on to. 

Intro to Gender and Women’s Studies: A. English Renaissance Drama: A. Modernism/Modernity: A-. Intro to Math Reasoning: A-. Age of Satire: A. Literature of Adolescent Sexuality: A. Introductory Astronomy: A. Intro to Analysis: A-. Those were my grades for the 2013-14 academic year.

Bowdoin students tend to treat GPAs like salaries. We avoid asking about other people’s grades, covet good marks for ourselves and judge the less successful, all while pretending that “grades don’t really matter.”

Our entire liberal arts education teaches that grades are inconsequential, that “intellectual engagement” and “the Common Good” are the pillars of our education. Bowdoin’s culture around GPAs perfectly mirrors the upper-class culture we’re learning to occupy. We say that grades, like paychecks, “aren’t everything,” and yet they are the engine of our day-to-day lives: they get us out of bed, drive us to class, and keep us up late at night.

As with money, pursuing grades may seem innocent and personal unless you think about the broader system of value. GPAs, like the capitalist market, proliferate on inequality. What’s the point of getting an A if other students don’t? 

The Sarah and James Bowdoin Scholar list isolates a group of “successful” students. By doing so, the list embeds and celebrates academic inequality.

With its extensive resources and reputation, Bowdoin should set an example to those developing their educational institutions. I spent last summer in Kathmandu, Nepal, where every student—from kindergarten through college—is ranked according to performance on standardized exams. 

The tests are generally in English and students prepare by memorizing answers from poorly written textbooks. At the end of 10th grade, each student must take a test called the “School Leaving Certificate,” and scores becomes public knowledge. The idea is that only the very best, the cream of the crop, succeed in the difficult Nepali economy.

We often lament the “brain drain” from the developing world. But by applauding the “high achievers” in our own institutions, we propagate a system of stratification that inhibits progress and encourages cultural abandonment. 

Many of us fund organizations to supply developing countries with school supplies and insist that “anyone can succeed” with the right resources. Yet within our academic institutions, we pass off internalized discrimination as encouraging intellectual achievement. We maintain the illusion that grades are objective standards rather than indications of inequality.

Where do academic standards come from, anyway? Why am I a Sarah and James Bowdoin Scholar? Maybe I’m just better than most at convincing my professors to value my labor. The dean’s list isn’t so much an award for intelligence as one for cooperation and conformity. Grades are a pretty silly measure of intellect. They’re symbols several degrees removed from the student they claim to represent. 

A GPA is the end result of academic labor filtered through the judgments of various professors and affected by countless uncontrollable factors. Many Bowdoin students struggle with learning disabilities, family crises and language barriers—how can we measure every intellect the same way?

But anyway, why were my grades good? Well, I had a rough year. The sophomore slump hit me hard, and I was frequently disillusioned by Bowdoin’s social environment. I used studying to cope with unhappiness. Instead of seeking genuine satisfaction, I forced myself to do three things every day: sleep, exercise and study. My grades don’t represent a healthy and well-balanced lifestyle; they represent self-denial and seclusion.

I also did well because I like what I study. English and math thrill me. Well, great, so doesn’t the Sarah and James Bowdoin list honor my academic enthusiasm? No, it degrades it. This list brands me as a grade-producing machine, and supposes that I need a narcissistic incentive to be academically engaged. 

In painting grades as an incentive, the list acknowledges that GPAs signify nothing more than their own symbolism. 

And if becoming a Sarah and James Bowdoin Scholar is a reward for engagement rather than an incentive to work hard, why does it need to exist? Shouldn’t academia and original thought be rewards in themselves?

I have a confession. I desperately want people to think that I’m smart. Ironically, this column—like Marlon Brando’s 1973 rejection of the Academy Award—seems a more self-absorbed plea for attention than the prize of the list itself. 

Part of me hopes someone submits this to Upworthy. I can see it now: an article going viral with the title “College Student Rejects Spot on Dean’s List. Read His Bold Column.”

Sure, I want to be smart. But I know that everyone reading this—everyone at Bowdoin and anyone who cares about thinking—can have original and exciting ideas. So I’m rejecting my place on the dean’s list. 

What does it mean to have sex? How about “participate in sexual activity” or “engage in sexual intercourse”? These phrases carry meanings that you might not expect. “Having” sex suggests possession. When people physically pleasure each other, are they handling an object? Well, maybe, if that thing is a phallus. But if “sex” is in the penis, can two women not do it? If you’re “having sex,” must there always be a man?

What if a man says he “had sex with a woman”? In the construction of this sentence, sex is something the man does by himself, alongside a female. His partner might as well be a Fleshlight. It seems sex is not something you do but something you have. People can have sex with each other, but the “sex” is their own—our gender and sexuality exists regardless of who’s around. 

Maybe sex is a feeling. But if sex isn’t action, how does it start and end? Maybe we don’t understand it. “Having” is static but we use “sex” to signify motion.  “To have sex” is intransitive, but it insists on possession.

Objectifying sex makes it a tool, and tools exist for specific purposes. The noun “sex” suggests that we use “sex” for something. Sex can produce pleasure, power or babies. But couldn’t it exist for itself? Fixating on ends removes us from the present. Even if we get what we want, the intricacy of sexuality in real life differs from the ideal. 

Sexual behavior becomes a treasure hunt, with “sex” as a prize. In our society, the practice and symbols of patriarchy insist that men earn this prize and women keep it. Sex as a gendered transaction is dangerous. Because they find self-worth in possessing the sex object, many men have abused and commodified women. Language is one of many factors that cause sexual violence. Diction influences action.

In both speaking and writing, “to have sex” feels wrong or inadequate. Sometimes, it’s the most acceptable phrase. But “having sex” makes awkward writing. Sometimes, only “fucking” works. 

“Fuck” is a beautiful word. It’s mildly shocking and taboo, but still comforting and familiar. “Fuck,” like what it signifies, is universal, even if it doesn’t belong in polite conversation. “Sex” ends on an “x.” The word constricts its speakers, cuts short. “Fuck” is an expression. It can be the sudden outburst of a stumbling pedestrian or the drawn-out sigh of a student remembering an assignment. According to Woody Allen, “Sex releases tension; love causes it.” Let’s revise that: “sex” makes you inhale; “fuck” lets you exhale.

Linguistic and semantic details may seem insignificant, but words structure our societies and define our identities. The most common words often hit the hardest. When writing, I struggle with third-person pronouns. “He,” “she,” “s/he” or “they” can affect an entire paper. Language is identity. Words let us find and express ourselves. No intercourse is isolated—language and sexuality are related processes of self-discovery—social context creates meaning, and words create context. 

“Fuck” is egalitarian. “He” can fuck “her,” “she” can fuck “her” or “we” can just fuck. Even if we can’t define “sex,” we intuitively understand “fucking.” It’s the label that we need, and it defines itself. So forget about having sex. Control the language that controls you. Relish the verb, not the noun, the action, not the object and the fucking, not the sex. In the words of Afroman: “Fuck on the bed, fuck on the floor. Fuck so long you grow a fucking Afro.”

A few weeks ago my roommate and I invented a new drinking game. He would read out a headline from Twitter, and I had to guess the source of the tweet. The idea was that I’d drink when I was wrong, and he’d drink when I was right. In the end, we just drank whenever we felt like it, and cracked ourselves up imitating the tones of NPR, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and The Onion. 

As we kept playing, it seemed like we were on to something. Each news source had its own stylistic trademarks, and it was possible to pick up on these subtle differences. In this game, media outlets no longer said anything important but merely became caricatures. Recognizing the distinctions between BuzzFeed, Gawker and The New Yorker was funny because it was so easy. It quickly became hilariously and painfully obvious that these publications aren’t broadcasting news—they are broadcasting a voice.

The Internet seems like a Great Equalizer. On Twitter, every tweet suffers the same limitations and appears in the same place. All you need to open an account is an email address—after that, it’s up to your own merit or desperation to get as many followers as you can. But how do you stand out from the crowd? When you’re scrolling through Twitter, Lena Dunham, LeBron James, and your older sister may all be competing for your attention. To be heard in a Twitter feed’s cacophony of information, a profile needs its own sound. 

This isn’t limited to the news publications that my roommate and I ridiculed. Everyone’s Twitter handle is competing for favorites, for retweets—and ultimately, for recognition. Tweets are constantly moving, so there is only a little time to make a lasting impression.The best way to do this is to be funny. I’ve impulsively favorited countless tweets just because they made me laugh. Because Twitter thrives off humor, its natural mode of communication is irony. What other medium could juxtapose The White House, Lil B and Disney and produce a homogenous stream of information? 

Every Twitter profile is producer, consumer and product, all rolled into one. Where else can an individual person have a two-way conversation with Toyota or Quaker Oats? And here’s where it really gets weird—does a company’s Twitter represent the entire business, certain employees, or the product itself? In embracing this hodgepodge of consumer roles,  one might think that Twitter can’t be anything other than ironic. But what happens when we take it seriously?

Entire revolutions have sprung out of online social networks, and yet mainstream American culture treats them as little more than a comedic stage. Most “serious” moments on social media seem trite and offensive. (“Share this picture 1000 times to save a terminally-ill child.”) Irony and wit are competition—we point out the contradictions all around us, attempting to get as  many laughs as we can.

The ironic nature of Twitter suggests that Twitter itself is absurd—a waste of time. So why do we play along? Do we just want the opportunity to prove we’re better than other people? Is self-objectification irresistible? Do we want others to acknowledge our value by consuming us? Because we idolize our objects of consumption, we want to turn ourselves into those objects of admiration and worship. We try to make our tweets funny so everyone stays on Twitter to justify our presence on the medium, and our delusions of importance. But how can we sustain this illusion when the mode of communication revolves around Twitter’s unimportance?

I recently heard a professor ask if careers in journalism would soon die. I’m not sure what this question was meant to suggest, but today journalism seems more alive than ever. I’ve never been able to follow so many different news outlets at once, or read so many different opinions. Online platforms give everyone the tools to create and disseminate information. But, with so many sources, how can I believe anything that I read? 

I can go on Twitter and write the same thing as the New York Times and the only thing separating our tweets is that little blue and white check mark next to “The New York Times.” This check is a subtle reminder that, no matter what we tweet, we’re all still part of the same system—which someone, somewhere, controls. After all, as long as we continue to tweet, however ironic we may be, Twitter Inc.’s profits are nothing to laugh at.

A few weeks before winter break, I realized that I rarely upload my photos to Facebook. Every Sunday my friends clutter my news feed with images of pregames, parties and other debauchery, but my weekends never seem unique or interesting enough to share. So, one Friday, I decided to overcome my insecurities and pretentions, and photograph my night. I called it a social experiment. All evening I went around demanding that people look like they were having fun so I could take pictures of them. 

The other day, I mentioned to my friend that in retrospect, those pictures made that Friday seem particularly fun. His response was, “Yeah, but it was a great night anyway.” 

Well, what made it any better than a typical Friday night at Bowdoin? Did its presence in social media change our memory of the event? And even if sharing those pictures did impact my memory of the night, my real experience was undeniably improved by the evening’s depiction.

Historically, cartographers have faced an interesting problem: how to represent the three-dimensional globe in the two-dimensional space of a map. This challenge has resulted in various projection types (Mercator, Robinson and Goode Homolosine, to name a few) but no map can be truly perfect. Glossing over the mathematical explanations, any two-dimensional map of a three-dimensional space will be somewhat distorted.

Okay, no map can be truly objective—so what? Maps are often charged with political and cultural significance, acting as a source of knowledge that surpasses simple topography. In the “West Wing” episode “Big Block of Cheese Day,” Press Secretary C.J. Cregg meets with the (fictitious) Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality. This group lobbies against the Mercator map projection, saying it has “fostered European imperialist attitudes for centuries and created an ethnic bias against the third world.” This seems like a rash claim, but the cartographical activists point out that despite the image on the Mercator map, “Africa is in reality fourteen times larger than Greenland.” Later in the episode, the cartographers flip the image of the world map, situating the Northern hemisphere on the bottom. C.J. tells them: “You can’t do that,” and they respond with “Why not?” To this, C.J. can only say, “Because it’s freaking me out.”

C.J.’s reaction is funny, but it highlights an important point about mapping—there are biases at work in every single map projection and therefore in many pictoral representations of our world. These orientational biases (North is on top, Africa is the size of Greenland, etc.) are so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that we don’t even consider how dominant social forces can shape our conception of the space around us.