Sex columnist oversimplifies
Dear Eve: As it is clearly not your strong suit, please don’t speak for all women as you did in your recent column, “We’re going to hook-up like it’s 1955,” (Nov. 13, p. 7). You may have been hurt by a “physical encounter” not resulting in a reaffirmation of your personal value, but your rampant generalization merely enforces the sexual objectification of women as provocative bodies whose only meaning ensues from male recognition of their “earth-shattering beauty.”
Your essentialist position regarding feminine identity reinforces the strict male-female dichotomy. A woman is more than just her long hair and vagina, and likewise a man is more than just an individual who can “pee anywhere [he] want(s)” with his “power-wielding” penis that you so deeply covet. Not every woman feels inadequate after leaving her man’s bed, especially not after a fulfilling orgasm, just as not every man forces his girl out of his bed after he comes.
I personally would appreciate it if you wouldn’t box me in as a “textbook woman.” Women, just as men, are individuals with different attitudes and lives such that the categorization of one as a “textbook woman” dehumanizes her and denigrates her identity.
So the next time you want to oversimplify what it is to be woman, I suggest you hit up Barnes and Noble for something by a “braless wonder” like Eve Ensler or Gail Weiss, two GW professors. Maybe then you’d be able to love your vagina, embrace your clit and shed your penis envy. Sincerely: a concerned, bra-clad, orgasm-loving, feminist, unique woman.
-Dorlyn Catron, Junior
Old school streaking
I enjoyed Andrew Siddons’ column on his streaking weekend at the University of Virginia (“The college tradition we lack,” Nov. 16, p. 4). This activity is a new type of land use for me – we had other uses for the UVA lawn during my time there in the late 1950s and early 1960s. During the “Openings Weekend” event of 1962, I returned for partying, but walking the lawn amid the moonlight and rustling leaves I proposed to the young woman who would become my bride.
Streaking came afterward, in the 1970s. One winter night, a local photographer in Missoula, Mont., came home with some friends to his rental apartment in our basement, where they made a great deal of racket about a picture he had just taken. The cause of the noise was revealed on the front page of the local newspaper the next day. That famous photo of a naked skier made it around the country through wire services. We did things differently in Montana, and it is fun connecting the dots after being brought back by Siddons’ column.
-Tom Foggin, Geography professor