The Senior Etiquette Dinner teaches cultural capital, table manners

Left of lipstick: The DFMO is a symptom of patriarchy

Have you ever thought about what exactly a dance floor make out (DFMO) is? Well, I hadn’t until a few weeks ago, because every time I thought about it sober in the light of day, it made me feel yucky. But now I have thought about it, beautiful readers, and I hope you’ll stick with me. I think the DFMO is a microcosm of a traditional marriage narrative, and thus, embedded in patriarchy.
Let’s be anthropological about this. The DFMO develops in six discrete steps:
1. A circle of women dance.
2. A man (“guy”) approaches one of the women from behind.
3. Depending on his civility and level of intoxication, he will either get her attention and ask her to dance or grab her hips without verbal communication. They will “grind” (dancing which involves rubbing the woman’s butt against the man’s crotch to the rhythm of the music).
4. In the latter case, the woman is often unsure who her partner is, as it is dark, loud, she is drunk and she has her back to him. If this happens, she will consult her friends, whom she is facing and who can see the face of her partner. She communicates with them either by raising an inquisitive eyebrow or signaling thumbs up/thumbs down. If the friends disapprove of the partner, they will give her a thumbs down or simply pull her away. If they approve, they’ll give a thumbs up or a permissive shrug.
5. The crucial moment comes after several minutes of peer-sanctioned grinding. The male, still holding his partner’s hips, will twist her toward him (requiring her to literally turn her back to her friends) and they will proceed to make out.
6. At the end of the song the couple will likely part, or they may leave the party together for the privacy of one their bedrooms.
Two things about this ritual stand out: its deep heteronormativity and the fact that it's so overtly public.
With the possible exception of parties hosted by and for the queer community, DFMOs are dominated by straight couples, with each member performing a clearly prescribed gender role. Men are in the apparently active role, controlling the progression at every stage—selecting a partner, issuing the invitation to dance, deciding when to transition from dancing to making out and suggesting to leave the party together.
This does not mean women are mere pawns. They exert agency, albeit within the confines of a patriarchal system. Women can signify interest in a dance floor partner by making repeated eye contact with him or accidently-on-purpose brushing against him. These actions are small enough to go unnoticed by a casual observer, but significant enough that they could precipitate a DFMO where one might not otherwise happen.
DFMOs follow an intuitive social script even for the uninitiated because they resemble a stale though undeniably appealing narrative: the heterosexual romance.
It is the marriage arc. Man sees woman, initiates contact, contact is reciprocated, acquaintance is made and both participants renounce their other non-romantic relationships and elevate the romantic one. You can see this when the woman turns her back on her friends, with whom she came to the party, to make out with a man whose name she may not even know. However, the friends do not see this as a betrayal. They helped her get to this capitulation by signaling thumbs up or slightly shifting their arrangement so that the woman could be near enough to her future partner to accidentally-on-purpose brush against him. It is not unlike the many pre-wedding bridal celebrations—the bachelorette party, the wedding shower—they are all about women celebrating one of their number moving from their ranks to romantic bliss.
The heterosexual romantic narrative is distilled, perhaps, in its purest form in children’s stories. Recall the scene at the end of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” in which Ariel weds Prince Eric on the ship and sails away from every other meaningful relationship in her life—her father, her sisters, Sebastian the crab guardian, Flounder her fish friend. It is not that different from leaving a party full of close friends and admired acquaintances to fumble with the buttons on a barely known lover’s shirt.
The obvious difference between the DFMO and the traditional heterosexual marriage arc is that the DFMO is quick and nonbinding while marriage is long-term and tightly binding. The DFMO heterosexual romance happens on a micro-scale because of the liberating forces of darkness, alcohol, contraception and alleged sexual emancipation (though the extreme heteronormativity seems less than emancipated).
So let’s just remember, patriarchy is bad for everyone. Dance floor make outs are embedded in patriarchy. Might as well just go to Super Snack.

Left of lipstick: No girl guns: firearms are anti-feminist to the core

My cousin brought a gun to Thanksgiving dinner.
OK—he’s a cousin by marriage, but here’s what happened: he has a small pistol that he keeps in his pocket at all times. This is legal; he has a concealed carry license. We were all sitting around chatting after dinner, enjoying the post-meal lull, when he pulled it out and showed it to my brother. The idea here, I guess, is self-defense. After all, suburbia is a dangerous place for white, straight, tall men.
His wife, my cousin by blood, wants to get a gun too. Again, the idea is self-defense, but now it makes a little more sense. She’s a woman and sells real estate in the south, so she often goes to unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people by herself. This is a quasi-feminist rationale for gun ownership, and I almost get it. Almost.
My dad has a gun. It’s a 22-caliber pistol that he inherited from his father. It slumbers, useless in the basement, and the bullets are locked away upstairs. He has used it before, though, and so have I.
Last winter I went to a gun show in Kentucky, where I grew up, with my dad and a family friend.
The gun show sprawled through the convention center, and I wandered from booth to booth picking up the guns and weighing them in my hand. They had a satisfying heft. More often than not, the proprietor of the booth would address me, “Hey there, I’ve got something I think you’ll like, look over here.” He (the sellers, like the buyers, skewed heavily male) would gesture to the far end of his stand at two or three “girl guns.” Functionally, they were the same as the black and silver ones I was trying, but they were painted pink or leopard print. A few were bedazzled. You know, the way that women are.
“The only thing that can make a woman as strong as a man,” read a t-shirt on display, “is a gun.”
Can gun ownership be feminist? Guns grant women the same power to kill as they do men. They equalize our capacity for destruction.
Since the sexual assault on November 10 and the incident on Potter Street on November 17, women on campus have felt less safe. Consequentially, we are taking measures to make ourselves more powerful. We are taking self-defense classes and avoiding walking alone at night. I thought about buying pepper spray. I’ve begun to make my nightly trek from the library to my house clutching my keys between my fingers, brass knuckle style.
What is the endpoint of this logic? Armed self-defense. Guns. If it is my responsibility to keep myself safe, I will do it as well as I can. There is an organization built around the idea that women should have guns for self-defense called The Women’s Gun Zone.
But that logic is rotten to the core, and we have proof of it almost every day. The more people who own guns, women or not, the more people die by guns. Two weeks ago a gunman killed three people in a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs and shooters killed fourteen people and injured twenty-one in San Bernardino, California. I saw a Washington Post article on mass shootings a dozen times. Everywhere I read news was abuzz with condemnations and despair, again.
We are heartbroken and weary, but not shocked. Tragic murder by gun is not anomalous in the United States. How could anybody argue that now? It is built into the gun-loving system.
I have seen guns, I have touched them, I have fired them. Many people I love own guns. Many women I know own guns. This is my dream for the guns in the United States:
I want to take them all away. I want to knock on the door of every gun owning home in America, including those of my family and friends, and confiscate their firearms.
We will toss them all in a big pile. We will set it on fire.
I want us all to hold hands around this massive flaming pit and chant: No more guns. No more guns. No more guns.
This is unconstitutional, Julia, you say. This is too simple. You can’t do this.
You’re right. I’m telling you my fantasy, not my policy proposal.
If my choice is between unfettered government tyranny and rampant, toxic murder, give me tyranny. But that’s not a real option. Here are some real options: end gun shows, require gun licensing akin to driver’s licensing, undertake more thorough background checks, ban the sale of assault weapons, and extend the 24-hour waiting period and make it universal.
Although the world is doubtless an unsafe place for women, I do not buy the “feminist” spin on gun ownership: that it is the strongest, best form of self-defense. The culture that tells women to defend ourselves with guns is the same culture that gives rise to mass shootings.

Left of lipstick

The Senior Etiquette Dinner teaches cultural capital, table manners

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Julia Mead

Columnist

November 20, 2015

I am the slowest eater you know. I think this is because I use good etiquette; I never speak while I’m chewing, I take small bites and I swallow one bite before I begin another.
“I have mastered etiquette,” I thought. “No you haven’t,” the Senior Etiquette Dinner told me.
The Senior Etiquette Dinner has been a Career Planning fixture for a long time and was, for many years, hosted by Karen Mills, whose attendance at many White House state dinners qualified her for the job. This year it was hosted by Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster, who is quite polite.

Our evening of etiquette began with a mock reception and forced mingling. Although I knew most of the people in the room from living, studying and socializing with them for three and a half years, the ordeal felt stilted. Maybe it was because we were wearing business casual. Maybe it was because we were wearing name tags. I borrowed a friend’s blazer hoping that it would make me look assertive, or at least professorial. It did neither, but it did help me blend in with my post-adolescent, pre-professional peers.

After our mock reception, we sat down to learn dinner etiquette. Some of the etiquette rules seemed entirely arbitrary. For example, I learned the proper way to butter a roll. It is not, as I have always done, to saw the roll in half and make a butter sandwich, but rather to pull off bite-sized pieces and butter them individually. The only reason I can imagine for this is that it disguises how much butter you’re eating. I suppose this is meant to help people, who, like me, eat a lot of butter.

Sometimes I push bits of food onto my fork with my finger. I realize it sounds gross, but I bet you do it too. I did this once at the dinner, unthinkingly. I was sure nobody would notice, but one of my housemates saw me from across the room and shamed me later. Touching your food with your fingers (except for rolls I guess?) is bad etiquette. Don’t do it.
Also, turns out you’re supposed to hold a glass of red wine by the “chalice” to warm it and a glass of white wine by the stem to keep it cool (I wonder how this applies to Solo cups and Mason jars).

Dean Foster emphasized that contemporary business etiquette is “genderless,” which I appreciated. It is no longer cool for all the men at the table to stand when a woman excuses herself. I tried to think of other things that are genderless: garbage bags? hand soap? funerals?
To finish our meal, we had Bowdoin Logs (a special dessert composed of a tube of vanilla ice cream encrusted in chocolate cookie crumbs and smothered in hot fudge sauce—it is bliss).
Now I will analyze. Warm up your thumbs, Yakkers.

The Senior Etiquette Dinner is a Career Planning event, and its professed intent is to prepare Bowdoin students for job interviews that involve fancy dinners. We accept this because the sort of job that would require a fancy dinner interview is a good job. It means you have worked hard and are successful.

Notably, there are many of us who are not seeking these types of jobs, including myself. However, despite its lack of immediate usefulness in my job search, the Senior Etiquette Dinner gave me something that will be with me throughout my life. It is also something that is deeply unjust: cultural capital.

“Cultural capital,” is an idea coined by the social theorist Pierre Bourdieu in 1986 and refers to the things besides money that indicate class. Some examples: dialect, posture, speech volume, tastes, types of clothing and forms of education. Etiquette is absolutely a part of this. The rules are all about “not sticking out,” but the question arises: not sticking out among whom? I answer: not sticking out among the upper class. “Good manners,” are not an arbitrary set of rules Emily Post dreamed up; they are class indicative.

So, if I am particular about using “who” and “whom” correctly, sit up straight and know the difference between a latte and a cappuccino, I have more cultural capital than if I slouched, ate fast food often and said, “ain’t.”

Conceivably, I could have either set of cultural traits outlined above and have the same amount of money. But probably not. This is where the play between cultural capital and economic capital comes in; they are not identical, but the accumulation of cultural capital makes it easier to accumulate economic capital.

It is no secret that our country is deeply unequal. If you have had your finger on the pulse of national politics at all, you have heard Bernie Sanders rail against income and wealth inequality. The one percent and 99 percent are old news. Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” was a bestseller.

You get it.

Let’s come back to the etiquette dinner. I am not arguing that by teaching us which fork is for salad and which is for the entrée that Dean Foster is disenfranchising the 99 percent. This is what I am arguing: class exists in America.

A Bowdoin education is elite not just because of our 15 percent acceptance rate. It is elite because it gives us the tools to enter into, or remain in, elite spheres of society. The Senior Etiquette Dinner is the most visible, salient example of how.

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