The Bowdoin Orient

The women’s rugby team won  its sixth game of the season on October 18, defeating Williams so thoroughly that the two-digit scoreboard couldn’t display the 111-0 score. They remain undefeated.

A “try,” the highest-scoring maneuver in rugby, is worth five points, meaning the team scored relentlessly throughout the 80 minutes of play.

Elena Schaef ’16 described the festive atmosphere as one factor that contributed to the win.

 “It was Homecoming Weekend, and we were also having a big celebration for our coach Mary Beth’s 20th year of coaching at Bowdoin,” said Schaef. “We probably had 50 alums on the sideline cheering us, so that was really inspirational for the girls on the field.”

The team also credits some of the incredible play that led to the final score to the success it has already had this season.

“We played Colby the weekend before and they were supposed to be one of the more challenging teams we played and we played against them extremely well,” said Katie Craighill’17. “We knew the Williams game was not going to be as much of a challenge so we knew we were going to have to challenge ourselves to play our best game.”

 Schaef emphasized the team’s work ethic as well.

“Mary Beth has been talking about pushing us really hard in practice, so we don’t get overconfident or sloppy before our tougher matches,” she said.

With its eye on the upcoming New England Small College Rugby Conference (NESCRC) tournament in November, the team has had to focus on goals beyond winning its regular season games.

The team’s last regular season game is on October 25 at Middlebury.

The NESCRC tournament is the only remaining event of the fall season, unless the team qualifies for the American Collegiate Rugby Association’s annual tournament.

On Saturday at the first Bowdoin Invitational of the year the men’s cross-country team won its first race of the year, beating Tufts, Johnson & Wales University, Maine Maritime and the University of Maine at Farmington. 

The women’s cross-country team came in second to Tufts but beat the three other schools competing in the invitational.

In the women’s race, Tufts dominated, claiming the first seven individual finishers; Lucy Skinner ’16 led the Polar Bears with an eighth place finish  after spending the majority of the race in 15th.

Head Coach Peter Slovenski praised Skinner’s performance. He wrote in an email to the Orient, that Lucy had been injured over the summer while rock-climbing and is impressed by how far along she is in her recovery.

“Still, [Skinner] ran a very smart race,” wrote Slovenski. “She has been careful about her comeback. She’ll be up with some of the top Tufts runners by the end of the season.”

Tufts has the dominant women’s cross-country team in the NESCAC. 

“Tufts is a very fast team that finished 13th in the NCAA last year,” wrote Slovenski. “They are currently ranked No. 14 in the nation.”

In the men’s race, Tufts had the first place individual finisher, but the Polar Bears took second through sixth places, with Kevin Hoose ’15 finishing as the fastest of the Bowdoin’s runners.

Camille Wasinger ’15 had a particularly dramatic performance. In the final few hundred yards of the race Wasinger narrowly surpassed two Tufts runners to improve her final position.

Both teams will attempt to repeat their impressive performances tomorrow at the second Bowdoin Invitational.

I visited the “Celebrating Women, Celebrating Bodies” exhibit in Smith Union. Though I believe Julia Mead made some strong points in her March 27 op-ed, I still found the exhibit to be clever, funny, provocative and empowering. Intrigued, I went on to read Laurel Varnell’s and Emma Johnson’s responses to Mead’s article. I came to the conclusion that Mead’s attitude is too often overlooked, but that the exhibit did good for the Bowdoin community. Then I revisited Jesse Ortiz’s February 20 op-ed on male body image. 

When I stood in the Lamarche Gallery, I felt vicariously happy for the women in the pictures. I thought it was beautiful that they could feel as confident in their bodies as they appeared. I also felt excluded. 

On the one hand, I don’t consider myself a terribly masculine guy. Like Ortiz, I’ve felt that the male forms presented by heteronormative, patriarchal culture often limit what men can be, just as its female forms do. Of course, I still acknowledge that patriarchy privileges male roles. On the other hand, within the gender binary, I’m male. No one offered me the chance to participate in a photo shoot to enhance my body image.

My point is not to whine about the purported evils of reverse sexism. Instead, I’d like to ask that the next time a similar exhibit is planned, everyone gets invited to the photo shoot, even if multiple shoots become necessary. After getting her photo taken, Johnson writes, “I found myself fully nude in front of my roommates for the first time.” Like Ortiz’s argument, I’d suggest that such body awkwardness is not a female-specific issue. Moreover, I’d like to suggest that awkwardness around group male nudity stems from different sources than awkwardness around group female nudity. 

I perceive heteronormative discomfort to be a more significant issue surrounding male nudity than female nudity. Conversely, anxiety around group nudity for women may have more to do with perceived promiscuity than it does for men. I also believe idealized physical forms play a role in anxiety around nudity for people of all genders.

To put it another way, participants in the “Celebrating Women, Celebrating Bodies” exhibit confront two primary questions: “Am I fat?” and “Am I a slut?” Instead of answering those questions, however, it undermines the meaningfulness of both questions as gauges of a woman’s worth. 

Anxieties, by their nature, diminish in the face of rational consideration and public dialogue. The two anxieties mentioned above—negative associations with weight and promiscuity—are a case in point. Participating in a nude photo exhibit doesn’t alter one’s weight or promiscuity; rather, it lessens one’s anxiety over those issues. I believe participants in a nude male photo shoot would confront different questions—namely, “Am I weak?” and “Am I gay?”—but such an exhibit would similarly lessen its participants’ anxiety surrounding those questions.

If men at Bowdoin become more comfortable in their bodies, regardless of their musculature and regardless of where they fall on the spectrum of sexualities, our entire community will benefit. As men spend time being photographed with other men in various states of undress, they will become more comfortable with their physical forms and sexualities. The wider variety of men who are photographed, the more successful the exhibit would be.

Considering people who don’t subscribe to the gender binary further complicates the picture. Perhaps the best route would be to hold photo shoots open to all, not both, genders. I don’t want to pass judgments on which sources or manifestations of body awkwardness are more problematic than others. I would just like to note that any movement toward social change should try to incorporate as many people as possible. Everyone has a body worth celebrating. 

Woody Winmill is a member of the Class of 2016

This year, Bowdoin students participated in Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trips to Guatemala, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Maine. Bowdoin offerred six trips this year, down from the last spring’s eight.

The McKeen Center for the Common Good began running ASB trips in 2003. Andrew Lardie, associate director for service and leadership at the McKeen Center, emphasized the importance of their role in these service experiences.

“What makes our program somewhat distinctive is the degree to which students lead them,” Lardie said. “Many other institutions can’t or don’t trust their students as much.”

In addition to the actual service students do, Lardie went on to the note that the trips provide an important chance for leaders and participants to grow.

“My favorite part is how much those trips leaders learn and step up to the plate,” Lardie said.

Each trip had two leaders who were required to provide the McKeen Center with plans and an explanation of why the destination—particularly if it was far from Brunswick—is important to the trip’s success. From tracking expenses to maintaining group camaraderie, the trips are largely in their hands.

According to Lardie, the trips cost between $425 and $1,250, excluding the free ASB in Maine. Students who attend can apply for need-based grants, covering up to 80 percent of the cost. Each ASB has space for 12 students, which is more than Alternative Winter Break (AWB) can support.

Georgia Whitaker ’14 and Tracie Goldsmith ’14 led a trip with Safe Passage, a non-profit in the Guatemala City area, to work with low-income children and families.

The trip is one that Bowdoin has participated in for the past several years. 

“One of the reasons the Guatemala trip keeps happening is that people go on it and then want to lead it,” Lardie explained.

Whitaker, a Latin American Studies major explained that Guatemala also appealed to her in particular because it aligns with her academic interests.

“I decided to lead this trip primarily based on my interest in bilingual education and recent Guatemalan history,” she wrote in an email to the Orient. “Slightly under two decades ago, Guatemala ended its 36-year civil war (1960-96) and I was interested to see how the legacies of this conflict—in particular, the displacement and forced relocation—continue to impact the urban education system today.”

Though trips to faraway places under the auspices of relief are sometimes criticized as “voluntourism”—tourism justified by service—the ASB trip to Guatemala gave students access to an experience not available in Maine.

“My favorite part of the trip was talking with the mothers and grandmothers of [the] children,” Whitaker wrote. “Safe Passage has recently founded an adult literacy and social entrepreneurship program to help parents, many of whom grew up speaking a Mayan dialect, learn to read and write in Spanish.” 

For Whitaker, who has previously volunteered in other Latin American countries, this experience was a highlight.

“It was pretty inspiring to see how motivated these adults were to begin their classroom education again, often at a first or second grade level,” she added.

The classes also encourage social entrepreneurship, which Goldsmith explained this included “making jewelry out of a paper. It’s a steady job for them, and they’re able to do it from home.”

Safe Passage does work near the Guatemala City’s city dump, where some Guatemalans go to look for refuse that can be deposited for recycling. 

Goldsmith commented that one of the most memorable experiences of the trip was visiting a cemetery that overlooked the dump. She realized many mourners had to walk more than a mile in the hot weather just to get to its gates.

The trip also mixes Bowdoin students together who might not otherwise have common ground.“The students came from a mix of social groups—all kinds of people,” Goldsmith said. 

Applications to lead an AWB or ASB trip for the 2014-2015 academic year are now available from the McKeen Center.

A new course offered this semester, Gateway to the Digital Humanities, is the College’s first foray into the interdisciplinary Digital and Computational Studies Initiative (DCSI). Taught by Eric Chown and Pamela Fletcher, the heads of the computer science and art history departments respectively, the class was developed as a way to introduce humanitites students to the big data and computation that are becoming more prevalent every day.

Chown and Fletcher are the DCSI’s co-directors, while Director of the Quantitative Reasoning Program  and Lecturer in Mathematics Eric Gaze, New Media and Data Visualization Specialist Jack Gieseking, and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Crystal Hall will teach DCSI courses next semester.

According to Gateway’s syllabus, the course “will explore the possibilities, limitations, and implications of using computation to study the humanities. What sorts of questions can be asked and answered using computational methods? How do these methods complement and sometimes challenge traditional methodologies in the humanities? What are the primary tools and methods currently being used in the digital humanities?”

This week, the Orient spoke with owners of Campus Food Trucks, Steve Borukhin ’14 and Monty Barker ’16, about changes within the company this fall.

Are you the new owners this year?

SB: No, I’m one of the original founders, and then we bought out one of the three original guys who graduated last year and sold the shares to two sophomores.

The Bowling Bowl, Brunswick’s only venue for candlepin bowling, now offers free bowling for Bowdoin students on Thursday nights.

The Office of Student Activities has decided to stop funding traditional bowling on Thursday nights at SpareTime and switch to the Bowling Bowl, in part to save money.

Candlepin bowling differs from traditional bowling in several keys way. Whereas traditional, 10-pin balls usually weigh between 10 and 16 pounds, candlepin balls weigh only two. 

As Hurricane Sandy made its way up the eastern seaboard on Monday, Bowdoin braced for impact. In the end, the storm brought only heavy rain and high winds, which caused some power outages, but spared the region the devastation felt further south. At 11 a.m. on Monday morning Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster sent a school-wide email announcing early closures of the C-Store, Jack Magee’s Pub and the Café, warning community members that high winds could cause power losses and advising everyone to charge their electronics.

Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, a Democrat, and Republican challenger Jon Courtney met in the first debate in the race for Maine’s First District seat in the House of Representatives last night in Studzinski Recital Hall. Pingree, who is running for her third term, is heavily favored in the race. The last time a Republican held the seat was 1996. According to a poll conducted between September 24 and 28 by Pan Atlantic SMS, Pingree holds a 33 percentage point lead over Courtney. In an hour-long debate organized by the Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN), the candidates touched on a variety of issues, highlighting their ideological divides.

The Yellow Bike Club (YBC) launched a new maintenance program this year in a departure from its previous mission. Until this year, the club’s primary function had been renting bikes to students for a fee of $25 annually.