The Bowdoin Orient

Yesterday I went to Fat Boy with my coven of SWUGs. Five of us piled in my car after class. It was chilly. My toes were damp from rain that had seeped in the crack of my boots. As we dipped our fries in our milkshakes, it occurred to me—this is the best thing in the world.

This is my last column, and I’m sad about it. I doubt I’ll ever have a platform with this leniency again. I’ve been able to write about Marxism and Miller High Life, pubic hair and gun control and etiquette and Plan B. 

There have been some public growing pains. That one time when my column was quoted out of context in Cosmo (OK, I actually got off on that). When I was asked if I “had ever heard of sex positivity” after I condemned dance floor make outs (DFMO) as symptoms of the patriarchy. Somehow, the DFMO piece is still my most widely read column. For the record, it’s my least favorite too. 

But on the whole, I’m proud of my takes. Trader Joe’s and the minimum wage and crisis pregnancy centers.—they matter. Writing my thoughts has helped me develop my politics. I’ve been touched when people—friends, professors, the two sophomore women at my Snow Pants or No Pants party, Linda in the recital hall, an alum who added me on LinkedIn the other day—have mentioned my columns. It is heartening to know that the things I’ve written haven’t entered the void.

 So thanks, y’all, for reading (or skimming or whatever). Thanks to my dad for being my first and best reader and to my brother for not tuning me out when I talk about the patriarchy and capitalism. Thanks to my SWUGs. Thanks to the faculty and staff of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program. Thanks to my radical brain trust. Thanks to my mom, who never got to read my column but shaped it more than anyone else.

 Fuck you to whoever stole my denim jacket at Ivies.

 Since my first year, the Orient opinion section has gone from the boring domain of a few white guys (sorry—it’s true) to a vibrant space where all kinds of Bowdoin students discuss ideas. I’m proud to have been a part of that, and I know it will continue.

 I hope the College continues to become an institution that I’m proud to have attended. Divesting from fossil fuels would help, as would increasing wages for staff. But I think we’re headed in the right direction.

So bye, Bowdoin. There are a few weeks left before you recede in my rear view mirror. I think they’ll be good weeks. Lots of champagne. Maybe a few tears. Let’s try not to miss each other too much.

Can you believe it? Consent Week is almost here! I plan my year around this! This is when we leverage the power of the Bowdoin marketing machine for the cause of healthy sexuality. First, I’d like to thank the organizers for renaming the festivities. “Consent is Key” kicks “Consent is Sexy” to the curb. I’m sure a lot of us have experienced that robust communication about sex is sometimes awkward. And hard. And deeply unsexy.

 And that’s OK! We’ve spent the first twenty-odd years of our lives in a society that is at once hyper-sexualized and sex-phobic. For example, I had me some of that good ol’ abstinence-only sex education in my Kentucky public high school. (“The only way to never get syphilis is by wearing a promise ring till you’re thirty.”) I also knew every word to Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” when I was eight years old.

 One of the things, I’ve found, that makes communicating during sex hard is the stupid words themselves. Why are so many of them so awful? Well, I don’t know, but in an effort to facilitate ~communication~, I’ve come up with some alternatives. Dig in. 

Friendly Butt Stuff  OK, I didn’t come up with this. One of my friends was having a talk about sex with her significant other. He asked her how she felt about “a little friendly butt stuff. Like, not anal or anything, just a little friendly butt stuff.” Very silly—but they talked about it! 

Doggy Style This same friend has thought for a long time that “doggy style” refers to a person having sex with a dog. She was wrong. It’s about two dogs having sex with each other. But it’s still unpalatable to a lot of people. I’ve searched high and low for a good alternative, and it’s hard. I thought maybe “table and chair” in the spirit of spooning, but sources tell me that’s weirder. Someone suggested “fun spooning.” That could work, but I wouldn’t want y’all to think regular spooning isn’t fun. I asked a friend who is French. Apparently, in French they say “levrette” which is the name for a female greyhound. No progress there. The Australopithecus, Wikipedia tells me, was the first genus of hominins to have sex face-to-face… so you could say pre-Australopithecus?

 Obviously, I’m still working on this. If you have any suggestions, please send them to jmead@bowdoin.edu.

 Miscellaneous I have also had some requests for things to not say. Of course, these are not rules or universal opinions, but out of deference to those who asked that their voices be included in this column, I will make note of them. “Pussy” came up frequently. Certainly divisive. Maybe check with your partner before referring to her vagina as a “pussy.” A lot of people aren’t into it. Same goes for “tits.” Referring to oral sex as “eating out” always makes me think of going to a restaurant. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not think about The Cheesecake Factory during sexy time. I much prefer the gender-neutral alternative, “go down on.” If you’re feeling a little bold, there’s “Australian kissing,” which is “French kissing, but down under.”

“Do you want this?” And when in doubt, questions like “Do you want this?” and “Is this OK?” go a long way. Also, I’ll plug, “Do you want to have sex?” That’s an important thing to not beat around the bush about. (Get it, bush?) 

If y’all are feeling like I’m being all language police-y, think of it as an invitation. Maybe you think everything I’ve said is silly and you’re totally comfortable with “doggy style.” That’s great! Maybe not, but you think my alternatives are goofy (they are), and then you can talk and think and come up with new ones. Talking about talking about sex is important, but if we’re going to do it, let’s fill in the gaps. 

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about my column title. I don’t very often, but I did choose it for a reason. “Left” means Left politics: redistribution of wealth and privileging the interests of labor over those of capital. Basically, I’m a socialist. “Lipstick” is about femininity. To be left of it is to critique it from a feminist perspective. This has turned into a lot of writing about reproduction and patriarchy.   

So, given this two-pronged ideology and the fact that the primary is right around the corner (March 6!), who am I voting for? 

I’m voting for Bernie. Are you surprised? Didn’t think so.

 Who young women are voting for (or should be voting for) has been the subject of much chatter from public figures and think pieces recently. Some of it is insightful. Most of it is silly. There was Gloria Steinem’s much decontextualized comment on Bill Maher’s (insufferable, misogynistic) show about young women supporting Bernie because “that’s where the boys are” and Madeleine Albright’s comment that there is a “special place in hell for women who don’t support women.” Neither of these bothers me much. Both are far less antagonistic than the sound bites make them seem.

 Also, it’s not really how I’m thinking about the election. What issues keep me up at night? Reproductive rights, definitely. The loss of access to abortion is happening right now for women across the country, and Hillary does have a stellar record on women’s health. But here’s what else keeps me up: climate change. If we don’t have a president who will push on climate, we’re—to put it delicately—fucked. Climate change is not an “opportunity to revamp American innovation” or some such nonsense, it’s a lethal catastrophe and a moral failing, most strongly affecting people of color. It is caused by the fossil fuel industry and is unfolding in real time. Bernie knows this, but Hillary has had to be pushed into a reasonable climate policy by hardworking organizers. On racial justice, too, Bernie is stronger. And on taxation, on campaign finance reform and funding education. These are issues that affect young people, and generational solidarity matters. For a while we were amped up about Bernie Bros. (Is that fading? I hope that’s fading.) The Bernie Bro is a fictive creature. Yes, sexism within the Left is real and long standing. The radical women’s movement of the late ’60s and ’70s was born out of the misogyny in the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements. But our weary fixation on the Bernie Bro overshadows the real reasons young people of all genders support Sanders. Unlike so many alleged “pragmatists,” we, young Sanders supporters, have internalized that deregulated capitalism leads to inequality that is unjust and unstable. A financial collapse like the one that happened in 2008 can, and probably will, happen again. We’re looking at our future seriously, and we’re scared.

 I don’t think Bernie is starting a revolution. Running for office within an existing political structure is by definition not a revolution. I think Bernie’s claim, or more likely, his staff’s claim, of starting a revolution is goofy. I don’t need a revolution; I need a functioning, active government that will exercise its power for the good of its citizenry. Democratic socialism isn’t sexy, but it’s just.   If Hillary wins the primary—and I’m realistic enough to realize she probably will—I will eagerly vote for her. I’ll phone bank for her. I’ll canvas for her. Maybe I’ll even get a bumper sticker. Because, as Distinguished Lecturer Susan Faludi pointed out in her recent New York Times op-ed, were a Republican to be elected—any of them—the policies that are so important for women (not to mention people of color, immigrants and anyone outside of the highest tax brackets) would be eviscerated. We can’t afford that. But in the primary, I’m going to vote my conscience. I’m voting for Bernie. 

“Girls mature sooner than boys.” I’ve got a twin brother, so I heard this even more than most kids, and most kids hear it a lot. It’s the explanation for why girls paint each other’s toenails at slumber parties and boys try to burp the alphabet. It’s the reason parents trust 14-year-old girls to babysit their five-year-old kid. It’s why we’re not creeped out when an 18-year-old girl dates a 25-year-old guy. They may be seven years apart in experience, but emotionally they’re equally mature. 

What constitutes maturity? I matured dentally very early. I got my wisdom teeth out when I was 15, which I think is interesting, but you probably don’t. Nobody cares how fast people lose their baby teeth. The maturity we’re talking about is the ability to handle responsibility. It’s doing what you say you’re going to do. It’s judging social situations and behaving appropriately in the context. It’s adhering to social norms. It’s not finding fart jokes funny. We talk about social constructs a lot here. Social construction might be in the drawer of things you’re tired of hearing about, nestled between “problematic” and “appropriation.” Sorry! Often we call something a social construct in order to dismiss it. “What are job applications, anyway? Employment is a social construct. Hahaha!” 

This is silly because understanding social construction is really important. Calling gender a social construct means that it is something that we as a society make collectively, not something that “just is.” One of the ways we make gender is by telling and believing myths about how it “just is” that “girls just mature faster than boys.” From a constructivist perspective, it’s wrong because it relates maturity to biological characteristics. That’s enough. But that’s not enough for the world outside of academic feminism. It matters for the rest of us because it’s a myth that serves patriarchy (I know, again with the patriarchy!). To be clear, I mean something specific by patriarchy. It’s a system in which men, particularly old men, have economic and political power over everyone else. 

The myth that girls mature faster than boys serves patriarchy in (at least) two ways. First, it justifies romantic relationships between older men and younger women in which there is a substantial power gap (see my column on relationships between upper- and underclass students). And second, it excuses hurtful or irresponsible behavior in men but not in women. The flipside of the first consequence is that we expect behavior of girls that we don’t expect of boys. Believing that girls become women earlier than boys become men is a way of justifying how much we ask of them. Emotional labor, or all of the “feelings” work that women do and men don’t (remembering birthdays, sending get-well-soon cards, giving emotional support), is an idea that’s gotten a lot of traction in the pop-feminist community recently. The teacher’s pets, the helpful daughters, the obliging sisters, they’re all doing work. Labor. And after a lifetime—or just an adolescence—it’s draining.

 Somehow this maturity difference is still a thing that otherwise progressive people believe about gender. All too often I find myself nodding along, not sure how to suggest that I see things a little differently. So here it is: the belief that girls mature faster than boys is untrue, sexist and harmful.

 My twin brother is more mature than I am by many counts. He works full-time, has bills and rent to pay and cooks all his meals. He thinks about health insurance and helping our dad around the house. Just because he’s a boy doesn’t mean he’s any less mature than I am—in fact, in some ways, he’s more mature. This goes to show, our maturity is developed by our social world, not determined by our gender—even though I did get my wisdom teeth out when I was 15.

It’s late. You’ve had a drink (or four). You’re in your room with a sexy someone going at it. Suddenly he stops and makes a face of horror. “I think the condom broke.”*

 “Fuck,” you say.

 “That’s the problem,” he says.

 “Shit,” you say.

 “Yeah, shit.”

 After a debate about the impregnating power of precum (answer: it has none, but it can contain sperm from previous ejaculations) you decide on a course of action. It’s not ideal, since it’s the middle of the night, may cost some money and will probably feel embarrassing. But, given the circumstances, it’s the best you’ve got. It’s time for Plan B.

 (Or more accurately, it’s time for emergency contraception. There are a few types.) If you, like me, binge-watched “Master of None” over break, this scene is familiar to you. Dev (Aziz Ansari), the main character, mitigates the embarrassment by buying Martinelli’s apple juice, which seems like a great idea to me. But y’all should know that there’s nothing embarrassing about avoiding unplanned pregnancy.

 There are many reasons why a person might take the morning-after pill, and I’m not here to enumerate or judge them. Plenty of us have been in this situation and plenty more will be. I’ve been there (during my first year fall, incidentally), and it was fine. However, there are a few things I wish I had known. 

Q: What exactly is emergency contraception?** A: There are a few types: “ella” (ulipristal acetate), Plan B One-Step (what people are referring to when they say “Plan B” and also the most available option for Bowdoin students) and Next Choice One Dose (both levonorgestrel). Three years ago when I took Plan B it was two-step, meaning there were two pills that you had to take twelve hours apart. Now it’s just one. Wow, science!

 Q: How does the morning after pill work?A: It prevents the ovaries from releasing an egg. It takes up to six days after sex for this to happen, and if the egg stays out of the uterus it can’t hook up with the sperm. Boom! No babies.

 Q: Is using emergency contraception bad for you? A: Nope. No serious side effects have been reported. Some people have minor side effects, like nausea and breast tenderness. I had none, except for anxiety about where to throw the box away.

 Q: Is the morning-after pill an abortion pill?A: No, neither type of morning-after pill will end an existing pregnancy. The “abortion pill” refers to mifepristone and misoprostol, and you have a right to that too.

Q: How can I get emergency contraception at Bowdoin?A: LISTEN UP, THIS IS IMPORTANT.

You can get FREE Plan B at the Bowdoin Health Center (they don’t prescribe ella). You call, make an appointment and pick it up. This is a little different from how it used to work. Peer Health used to do “Plan B Day,” where they gave away Plan B for students to have on hand. Now, you have to go to the Health Center to talk about “Plan A,” in order to get your Plan B. I know, the extra step sounds tedious. But it’s free, which is nice.

But the Health Center isn’t open on the weekends, I hear you thinking. When else would I need Plan B??

You’re right! LUCKILY, Bowdoin has this great deal where you can buy Plan B at Rite Aid and they will REIMBURSE YOU, as long as you bring your receipt back to the Health Center. Granted, it costs $49.99, which is an upfront chunk of change. If you ever go this route, I recommend you go Dutch.

 Q: Who can buy the morning-after pill? A: Anyone, any age, can buy Plan B over the counter without a prescription. However, you do need a prescription for ella. The politics of this are messy, but the trend is that emergency contraception is becoming more accessible in the United States.

 Q: How long after unprotected sex is emergency contraception effective? A: Five days, but Plan B is less effective the longer you wait. Ella is equally effective for all five days.

If you’ve got more questions you should probably holler at someone in the Health Center. I’m just a woman trying to de-stigmatize reproductive justice in print, not a medical professional. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention STIs (sexually transmitted infections), and I want to stay in Julie Gray’s good book. Taking emergency contraception won’t protect against STIs, and STIs are a concern for people of all genders and sexualities, so let’s all get tested regularly. Thankfully, the most common STIs in our demographic—gonorrhea and chlamydia—respond easily to antibiotics.

So go forth, UBears, and tackle your sexcapades with your brains turned on. Emergency contraception is an option, and we’ve all got the judgment to know when it’s the best one. 

*I’m assuming a heterosexual couple and a female subject. Just writing from my experience here, folks. 

**All the information in this column that seems to be researched is. I’ve relied heavily on the Planned Parenthood website and the expertise of Julie Gray, P.A. at the Health Center.

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.

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.

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.

The best decision I made my first year of college was getting a piece of plastic shoved up my vagina.

I was the first person I knew to get an intrauterine device (IUD), a form of long acting reversible contraception. I had been on the pill since I was 16 and I was terrible at it. For those of you who have never been on the pill, the tricky thing is that with most kinds you have to take it at the same time every day for it to be effective, and effectiveness really matters.

I tried all the tricks. I set an alarm on my phone to remind me to take it, I carried my little cardboard pack around in my backpack. I tried taking it in the morning and I tried at night, but my schedule was so constantly variable that I regularly slipped up and took it too late or skipped days all together. Sometimes I’d forget to call in my prescription refill to Hannaford until it was too late.

I flipped out. I took Plan B. I tried to find a place to buy a pregnancy test in the middle of the night in Brunswick so I could quiet my baby-anxious mind and sleep (there are none).

I was the poster child for “user error.”

Going home for spring break was eye-opening. I remembered that I had not always lived a hectic life where some days I wake up at 7 a.m. and some days I wake up at noon. My user error wasn’t because I was a bad, irresponsible person; it was because I was a college student.

I needed to change my method of birth control, not my habits.

I started by scouring the Planned Parenthood website, where there is a helpful overview of all the types of contraceptives available. My criteria were simple, I needed something easy and effective. I was curious about IUDs because they seemed to fit my criteria more closely than any other method; they have a tiny failure rate and are effective for five years with no maintenance. 

But getting an IUD also involved going to a doctor to get a small piece of plastic stuck up my vaginal canal, wiggled through my dilated cervix and inserted into my uterus. And that didn’t sound fun.

So I turned to Physician Assistant Julie Gray of the health center to get the guidance of a medical professional. Will it hurt? I asked her. How will I know if it comes out? Isn’t it just for women who have already had children? Will it wreck my uterus so I can’t have children in 10 years? Her answers: no, trust me you will, no and no.

Convinced and heartened, I called the Planned Parenthood in Topsham to make an appointment. The whole ordeal was quick and professional. Then I went home, put on sweatpants, took an ibuprofen and went to bed early. There was some intense cramping that night, but it went away the next day.

Friends often ask me questions:

Q: Can you feel it?

A: Nope, not even a little bit.

Q: What about the strings? Can you feel those? (There are fishing wire-like strings that extend down to aid removal).

A: When I first got it I could more easily. Now the ends of them have curled up and I’ve really got to go digging to feel them.

Q: What about your partners? Can they feel the IUD?

A: No, god bless the cervix. I had one partner who one time said he could feel the strings during intercourse. This was soon after I had it put in.

Q: Did it hurt to get it put in?

A: It was a little uncomfortable.

Q: Do you still have periods?

A: No and it’s great.

Q: If you don’t have periods, how will you know if you’re pregnant?

A: IUDs are damn near 100% effective. I’m not worried about it.

Q: How much did it cost?

A: I have Bowdoin health insurance, which covered the full cost. It was free for me.

Notably, everybody is different, and contraceptive needs vary wildly. Do your research, talk to your doctor. I’m not telling you all to go out and get IUDs tomorrow, but I am suggesting you think about it as a serious option.

Controlling fertility is hard. People have come up with some wackadoodle stuff to keep from having babies in the past (tying weasel testicles to their legs, shoving crocodile poop up their vaginas prior to intercourse, taking shots of mercury after intercourse). Unpleasant and ineffective! We twenty-first century, insured, American college students have the good fortune to have an array of ever easier, and ever more effective options, at our disposal.

By getting an IUD, I was finally able to control my fertility, and the less energy I spend controlling my fertility, the more time I have for other things, like writing columns about controlling fertility.

Yesterday I called my dad. “Daddy, I’m a SWUG,” I told him.

“Did you know that Joshua Chamberlain taught every class at Bowdoin besides math?” he asked. “Wait, you’re a slug?”

“No, not a slug. A SWUG. It stands for Senior Washed-Up Girl.”

“Oh, ok. Have you called IKEA yet about your missing bed?”

I had, in fact. Because that’s part of being a SWUG—you no longer have small distractions like trying to find someone to buy you Smirnoff or pretending to enjoy the elliptical—you do your tasks like a grown up.

You probably know what a SWUG is (and if not, I recommend you read Raisa Bruner’s 2013 Yale Daily News column on the topic). The term has been around for a while. Long enough, I would argue, that it no longer counts as a trend. It clearly has some cultural stickiness, some enduring cachet. Enough, perhaps, that it merits a closer look.

Since returning to campus from our respective corners of the world, SWUGdom has come up in every conversation I’ve had with my senior female friends. The question is not if we’re SWUGs, but who can out-SWUG the rest.

Some contenders:

“I just need to be naked and doing homework in my room. Alone.”

“I wonder if I can get {insert significant other} to come over and massage my shins. Then leave.”

“I’m doing physics homework and watching 'The Prince and Me' downstairs if anyone’s tryna.”

Going to dinner in clogs, Carhartts and a sweater you knitted yourself.

Going to dinner by yourself, making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then leaving.

Going to the Trader Joes in Portland to buy $25 worth of Two Buck Chuck.

Is this what being a SWUG is really about? Disregard for one’s physical appearance along with an increased interest in couches, wine, baked goods and fiber crafts?

Are all senior women SWUGs? Is it some beautiful, Zen-like state you reach just by getting old enough and sticking around Bowdoin long enough? Two years ago, when I was at the zenith of my Franzia-chugging, college house-dwelling, all nighter-pulling existence, Emma Johnson ’14, published a touching op-ed on the inevitability and the joy of SWUG life.

She sang of the Promised Land, and what a paradise it is. As one of my friends, and a self-proclaimed SWUG, pointed out, “washed-up” also means, “arrived.”

But bear with me—I think there’s something more than “not caring anymore” going on here. It seems to me, that more than wine or oversized outerwear, SWUGdom is about women (only “girl” for the sake of the acronym—try pronouncing SWUW), spending time with women, in spaces controlled by women.

We’ve shuffled through enough male-dominated social spaces in the last three years, and now we say no more. From the infamous after parties at a certain now-defunct off-campus sports house, to bong rips with (many genuinely kind-hearted) alt bros, we are through.

There is a simple satisfaction in spending a Friday night in my own living room, and not a room whose floor is mysteriously covered in beer and something that smells like death. It feels good to control the music (a task, it seems, that almost always falls to guys at big co-ed parties). And, of course, your friends don’t instantly scatter like they do upon arrival at a big, sweaty party.

You can call SWUG life self-preservation if you want, or, you can call it reclusiveness—but I don’t think that’s right. I would call it a hard-won liberation.

Anyways, excuse me. It’s time to pop open a bottle of wine, drink two maybe three glasses, and laugh with the women I love best. 

Dear Class of 2019,

 Welcome to Bowdoin! We would like to tell you something we wish someone had told us. Three years ago, as freshly matriculated Polar Bears, we cried when our parents left, salivated over our first Thorne dinner, crushed on our Pre-O leaders, crushed our first beers. Juniors and seniors asked us to dance at our first campus wide. This was cool, we thought. So we dated them.

 If you date an upperclassman, he might sneak you into the WBOR basement and let you play Beyoncé at midnight or she could take you on a beautiful run in the Commons when the first leaves are turning red. These things will make you feel like Bowdoin has room for you. But Bowdoin has room for you no matter what. 

Rest assured, you don’t need a guide. Everyone finds his or her own Bowdoin. You might find you study best at the big table in Mass Hall or that Mac is better than Quinby or that you have passion for gender and women’s studies when you thought you wanted to do chemistry. You will find friends.

 When the Beyoncé song cycled out of the top 40 and the leaves crinkled and fell, we realized that we hadn’t had brunch with our friends since the toga party in September. That there was another great run in Topsham that we’d never tried. That we’d never been in Appleton or West because we spent so much time in Brunswick Apartments. We realized that we always missed the Indian food station in Moulton because they said Thorne was better. That we’d missed all kinds of things. 

It hit us that we would have liked to join the hip-hop dance group but they thought that group was weird. We’d been so worried about what the junior girls thought of us that we hardly knew anyone in our first year seminar. We couldn’t do the econ problem set without their help. We realized that maybe we should have found our own Bowdoin before we found theirs.

Both of our first year relationships ended with the school year and we began sophomore year feeling a few steps behind. We caught up, but it wasn’t always pretty. Our romances as seasoned Bowdoin students have been more fulfilling and equal. There’s a time for dating in college, and we feel that the first year isn’t it.

 Welcome to the place that has become our home. The Indian food station in Moulton is delicious, the hip-hop show in the fall is amazing, and the quantitative tutors can help you with your econ problem set. But don’t take our word for it, or anyone else’s. Go find your own Bowdoin.

Much love,Katherine and Julia

I love Trader Joe’s. I probably went  there every other day this summer. The sliding doors would open to the kind of music my dad and I like, maybe James Taylor or Emmylou Harris, and a Hawaiian shirt-clad kid I went to high school with. He would greet me by name.

We got a Trader Joe’s down the street the summer before I left for college, and it almost made me want to stay. Why go to Maine when you could buy cookie butter at whim? The closest one used to be in Cincinnati, so whenever my family went up to go to the art museum or a concert or a professional sporting event (you can’t really do these things in Kentucky), we would stop by and get oatmeal cranberry dunkers. It was fucking special.

“Man, Trader Joe’s is the shit,” I sighed, spraying crumbs of blue corn chips across my brother’s dash on our way home from a TJ’s stop.

“Julia, people don’t say that anymore. You’re so lame,” he said, swigging French berry lemonade from the curvy, glass bottle. “Also I thought you were a communist now.”

“Yeah, but those little fancy-ass pigs-in-a-blanket are so good.”

“Aren’t you a vegetarian now too?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make the pigs-in-a-blanket less good.”

Clearly he didn’t get it. I like Trader Joe’s because I’m a communist. He was probably worried that I was going to put a Lenin statue on my desk or drop out of college to move “off the grid.” But what anti-capitalism (or communism if you like) means to me is to look at our economic system, see who it’s hurting and how, and figure out how we can do it better.

A few weeks ago, I was in the Portland Trader Joe’s with my roommate Olivia. We strolled through the aisles and felt our type-A minds unwind.

“Liv, I feel…relaxed.”

“Me too. It’s weird. Do we need more tea?”  

“Yeah, let’s get some ginger pear. And possibly some mint?”

Trader Joe’s is great because there’s only one kind of anything. We didn’t have to choose between ten brands of mint tea, ultimately deciding on the one with the most appealing packaging but wondering if maybe we should have gone with Tazo or Celestial Seasonings.We escaped what Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice. It’s a quirk of consumer capitalism we’ve all experienced. You’re standing in the shampoo aisle at the drug store where there are so many options it makes it difficult to choose. You pace down the aisle, double back, pace some more as variables tumble through your head: price, scent, packaging aesthetics, your past experience, what your roommate uses, advertisements you’ve seen, until you glance at the time and realize you’ve been stuck for five minutes—paralysis.

The shampoo aisle scenario provides a preponderance of choice. Does A, B, or C suit my needs better? In reality, there is negligible difference between the dozens of options. The whole shampoo aisle is owned by Unilever, Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson (seriously, look it up). And let’s face it: how much do these consumer choices—Dove vs. Secret, Patagonia vs. Mountain Hardware, PBR vs. Rolling Rock—matter to the cores of our lives?

The ideology of choice preaches that people can make themselves happy by making the right choices, consumer and otherwise. You have the power to choose your own path: college, career, life partner. This logic works in reverse as well. If you’re unhappy, you must have made the wrong choices.

But no choices exist in a vacuum. Social pressure, explicit or internalized, affects every choice. Despite the myriad and disparate factors influencing choice, we strive to make an ideal one. But when you’re choosing laundry detergent, there is no best choice.

So that’s why this baby Marxist (shoutout to Professor Gouda for the label) loves her some TJ’s. We live in a world with too many kinds of shampoo, and critical ideology can help us understand it. I guess a full-grown Marxist wouldn’t want corporations at all, but that shining, elusive, ever-distant vision doesn’t do much for me. I am thankful for a quick decision made confidently and without regrets. I am thankful for the respite from paralysis. I love Trader Joe’s.  

My friend Jillian is passionate about sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing. Around our third or fourth glass of wine something set her off. “Anyone who is at risk should get tested. I don’t care if you think you’re OK. I don’t care if you think you’re probably fine because you used a condom with that rando. I don’t care if you’ve only ever slept with one person. Get tested.” 

I sipped in shame, trying to remember if I had ever been tested. Maybe I got tested the last time I went to the doctor? Maybe I’m telling myself that so I feel less guilty when I see the health center’s “get yourself tested” signs?

I made an appointment for a few days later. I pulled into the parking lot of Planned Parenthood and hesitated. Maybe I should have just waited to get back to Bowdoin where everyone else in the waiting room would be 18-22 and well-educated and nobody would give me a once-over trying to guess if I was there to have an abortion. But I could hear Jillian in my head (“Just get tested!”) and I wanted to get it out of the way over the summer—so into the real world I went.  

The thing about the Planned Parenthood waiting room is that you can make no assumptions. I looked around trying to guess who was there for the Big Day and who was there for routine maintenance. 

My list of criteria: Is the woman alone with or with a partner? What’s her apparent age? Does she look nervous? 

But as I thought about all the scenarios in which a woman would get an abortion, my criteria seemed inappropriate.

I probably fit one mold. I’m young, career-bound and unmarried. Were the other people in the waiting room looking around and sizing me up? My palms began to sweat and a moment later the bottoms of my feet joined the party. 

Judging by their body language, most people in the room were not there for abortions—unless you have a loud conversation about who’s going to pick up the kids from day care before you have an abortion. Or maybe that’s exactly what you would do. Like I said, you can’t make assumptions—it’s a lesson I wish my congressman, Representative Andy Barr, would learn. 

Earlier in the summer he publicly denounced Planned Parenthood as an “abortion factory.” 

The minutes trickled by in the waiting room. My back got sore; I scrolled through Twitter. I guess they were understaffed. 

Finally the nurse called my name. After a moment of confusion with a woman named Juleighah, which sounds an awful lot like Julia to the untrained ear, I followed the nurse into a small, windowless room. 

“How many partners have you had in the last year?”

“Uhhhh,” I counted on my fingers. “I know it shouldn’t be this hard...X!” 

“Have you had unprotected sex?” 

“...yes.” (It’s OK—I have an IUD!)

“Have you ever had unprotected oral sex?” 

“...yes.” (Who uses condoms for oral sex anyways? Maybe I would know to do that if I had ever had an actual sex education class.)

Text to Katherine: “Nothing like talking about your sex life with a health care professional to make you feel like a slut.”

The nurse and I finished in the windowless room, and she promised to call me if the results were positive: no news was good news. 

I left the clinic, exhaled and felt my shoulders slide back down from up by my ears. My thoughts raced as I drove home. 

The stigma around abortion is part of a general stigma around sexual health and can prevent people from seeking any care at all. Many people just don’t know that clinics offer a wide spectrum of health services and serve everyone, regardless of age, gender or sexuality. 

Additionally, abortion is a medical procedure and should be treated as such. The decision to end a pregnancy is a complicated and difficult one, but it should not be looked upon differently than any other medical decision. 

My relatively mundane experience was almost prohibitively stressful, and I experienced the milder end of abortion-suspicion stigma. 

The anxiety would have been hugely magnified had there been protesters. A friend who worked at a Planned Parenthood this summer told me that the staff there is trained to mitigate the trauma inflicted by protesters before addressing patients’ needs. 

The work of removing the stigma from abortion goes beyond identifying as pro-choice. We need to have conversations with each other and with our mothers and with their friends. 

One in three American women will have an abortion in her lifetime. Not only does the taboo surrounding abortion isolate and silence these women, but it also creates a barrier to accessing sexual health services. 

I got home and shoved a pamphlet on healthy sexual relationships into my purse as I walked up the back steps. 

“Hi honey, you’re home late— where were you?” my dad asked. 

“Oh, I was just out running some errands.” Like hell I was going to tell my dad I had been at Planned Parenthood—what would he think?

Last Sunday I took part in the nude “Celebrating Women, Celebrating Bodies” photo shoot sponsored by the Women’s Resource Center. I showed up with nine of my friends. The building is tiny and we were packed in with members of the women’s lacrosse team, who were posing with their sticks and toting them around on their shoulders. I had to duck a few times. We were asked to fill out a survey: what were our initial thoughts and feeling? My thoughts and feelings… I was thinking about the macaroni & cheese I just ate in Moulton Dining Hall. I was thinking about the chaos and the people running around. I wondered if I remembered to shave my armpits and then wondered if in this space having unshaved armpits would actually be the more popular choice.

The ten of us went into a side room, stripped down to our underwear, stood side-by-side, laughed nervously, sweated under the bright lights, and click click click. We put our bras back on and then the rest of our clothes. 

I grabbed a Dove chocolate on the way out. It advised me to “Do what feels right.” 

The feminist conversation at Bowdoin is hyper-focused on body image and emotional and sexual empowerment. We’re told by the Women’s Resource Center to “explore how we experience being women,” and I don’t mean to trivialize these issues. Many of them are vitally important, especially activism to end sexual violence and the discussion around the intersection of body image, food, and eating disorders. But they are not the sole issues of feminism (and, as Jesse Ortiz ’16 pointed out in his recent column, are not even exclusive to women). 

We seem to believe that the only feminist issues that concern us are the ones that apply to us (well-educated, privileged women) right now (age 18-22, single, unemployed, and not parents). This navel-gazing, repetitive rhetoric (Don’t use “fat” language! We don’t have an obligation to men to shave our legs, armpits or pubic hair!) absorbs so much of our attention and energy that it distracts from broader socio-political problems that we should care about regardless of whether we will ever individually face them.

The so-called solutions of “self-improvement” and “empowerment” are, in fact, disempowering. It is a goal without a concrete end. When do you say, “OK, now I’m empowered, let’s get to some other stuff”? You can spin your wheels forever in search of empowerment. 

American parental leave policy is a national embarrassment: 12 unpaid work weeks is all that is legally required of employers to give expecting mothers. There is virtually no systemic support for single mothers. The U.S. provides the least government aid to single parents of any economically comparable nation, according to a recent study conducted by the women’s rights group, Legal Momentum. Child care is expensive and often inconvenient, and school schedules are often incompatible with work schedules. Many professional career trajectories are totally at odds with female fertility. And let’s remember: women are still not constitutionally equal to men, because the Equal Rights Amendment did not pass. Anne-Marie Slaughter does an elegant and compelling job of identifying these systemic problems and suggesting how they could change in her Atlantic magazine article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.”

None of these things will be fixed if we only look within. We have to engage with our government and take action in the public sphere, and not just as individuals, but collectively.Do we think that we will escape this tension? That the system will change before we get there? We’re only five or ten years away. 

Do we think we don’t have any power? We are adults, registered voters, and somebody’s constituents. Additionally, our status as single, unemployed, non-providers gives us tremendous power as advocates. We don’t need to worry about losing our jobs. We have free time during the work day. If we, with all our privileges, resources and time for leisure, can’t take action, then who can?

Visiting Professor Susan Faludi made the point at her recent talk about the contemporary American women’s movement that it is publicized as a movement that is all about what rich women can do for themselves. The CEO has no empathy for the Wal-Mart cashier. But we’re even narrower. We don’t even have empathy for our future selves. We’re stuck looking in the mirror.

Julia Mead is a member of the class of 2016.

Not all nudity is sexual. We’re born naked (duh); we give birth naked; we bathe naked; we have to get naked (or semi-naked) at the doctor’s office. And there is also an elusive subculture of nudity at Bowdoin. We all know about naked laps: you lose too hard at beer pong and you have to run around the building naked. There is the tradition of streaking the quad because this is a college. Balls to Mass Hall (i.e. sprinting from Hubbard to Mass Hall) is a trek. When I did it, three quarters of the way through an unbidden complaint popped into my head: “When is this gonna be over?" But I didn’t confess that I found streaking boring.

Then there are the naked parties. I wound up at one last year. I remember being struck by how visible everything was. It was in the Tower and the space had that stark, stale Tower feeling. The fluorescent lights concealed nothing and I was amazed by the range of bodies. Fat bodies and skinny bodies. Boobs of all different sizes. Bodies with tattoos and piercings (I drunkenly read aloud Bible verses off my physics tutor’s back). They were, to my memory, all white bodies, but that’s a different conversation. 

Different levels of nudity were accepted—I decided to keep my underwear on. Most people were entirely naked, though. In describing it later I remembered how many drunk, cold, flaccid penises there were. So hats off to all those dudes who were brave enough to let it fly. After about half an hour, my friend and I put our clothes back on (they had been stored in trash bags graciously provided by the host) and left feeling good about our bodies and the accepting nature of our peers.