News Flash: "The New Math on Campus" Explains Nothing

The current hookup trend on the nation’s college campuses is no secret. The dating scene has been replaced by drunken men and women hooking up with mere acquaintances with no emotional connection or intent of ever seeing each other again. The New York Times took a stab at explaining these trends in an article titled, “The New Math on Campus” by Alex Williams. Williams explores the situation at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and attributes “a culture that fostered hook-ups over relationships” to the uneven proportion of men to women. According to the article, North Carolina is almost 60% female. Other colleges that are mentioned in the article as having a gender imbalance include private schools such as New York University and Lewis & Clark, as well as publics such as College of Charleston, which is 66% female.

“Colleges mirror retirement communities, where women often find that the reward for outliving their husbands is competing with other widows for the attentions of the few surviving bachelors,” Williams writes. This is an interesting, although seemingly exaggerated, comparison. However, as Williams points out, the gender gap does not plague colleges nationwide. The Ivy League schools, for example, “are largely equal in gender, and some still tilt male.” Colgate, according to admissions information at www.colgate.edu, falls under this category at 52% female, almost as close to equal as a school can get.

A recent Maroon-News article, “Sexploitation at Colgate” by Thomas Hedges, provides evidence that this hookup culture in which men determine that rules is certainly not a problem that is derived from gender ratios. “Colgate’s social atmosphere, in and even out of fraternities, has reduced many relationships between men and women to one devoid of human tenderness, commitment and compassion. This social scene where women and men are little more than bodies, reinforces rigid gender roles. It feeds a cult of masculinity. Men become predators. Women become the prey,” Hedges writes. He goes on to say, “Colgate is an inhospitable place to women and men who refuse to conform to these defined roles.”

This description is exactly what Williams is referring to, but he attributes it “to simple laws of supply and demand.” Kathleen A. Bogle, who wrote Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, is quotes in the article saying, “On college campuses where there are far more women than men, men have all the power to control the intensity of sexual and romantic relationships.” Why, then, is this an issue at Colgate and other universities where there is not a significantly larger female population?

Perhaps this male-dominated hookup culture has something to do with our patriarchal society, rather than a surplus of women on some college campuses. In his article, “Partriarchy, the System: An It, not a He, a Them, or an Us,” Allan G. Johnson explains patriarchy.

“Patriarchy’s defining elements are its male-dominated, male-identified, male-centered and control-obsessed character, but this is just the beginning. At its core, patriarchy is based in part of a set of symbols and ideas that make up a culture embodied by everything from the content of everyday conversation to literature…It’s about how social life is and how it’s supposed to be, about what’s expected of people and about how they feel. It’s about standards of feminine beauty and masculine toughness, images of feminine vulnerability and masculine protectiveness, of older men coupled with younger women, of elderly women alone. It’s about…the “naturalness” of male aggression, competition, and dominance and of female caring, cooperation, and subordination…It’s about the social acceptability of anger, rage, and toughness in men but not in women, and of caring tenderness and vulnerability in women but not in men. Above all, patriarchal is about the core value of control and domination in almost every area of human existence.”

Men set relationship standards because men set most other standards in today’s world. As Johnson points out, our society has been structured in a way such that men are supposed to be aggressive, competitive, and dominant. This can easily be translated to the college hookup scene. Young men have a few drinks at their fraternity house before they go out, find the best looking girl they can find and diligently pursue her in hopes that they can get her to come home with them so that they can later brag to their friends about their latest win in the competition to see who can have the most sex. They then refuse to give their latest “score” any attention because that would be showing some sort of emotion and thus, relinquishing their dominance.

As Johnson also points out, however, everyone is a participant in this patriarchal society. It is not just men. Women have allowed this to happen by taking the “path of least resistance.” This is incredibly obvious in the Williams article. Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina, is quoted speaking about cheating. “That’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to. If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.” Apparently, having a boyfriend is more important to some girls than upholding their own moral standards. This has nothing to do with having more women than men on a college campus as the article suggests, however.

Women allow men to cheat because they fear being alone. This is just another aspect of this patriarchal society. Ironically, evidence of how society sees the single woman appears in Williams’ article. “It’s often the women who must assert themselves romantically, or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty box,” Williams writes. Single women are pitied. They are seen as vulnerable and emotional. Single men, on the other hand, are seen as independent and strong.

Patrick Hooper, a male Georgia senior, suggests that many men actually do desire a romantic, committed relationship. “Even though there’s this huge imbalance between the sexes, it still doesn’t change the fact of guys sitting around, bemoaning their single status.” The desire for such a relationship is seen as a feminine trait, and thus it takes choosing the path of greater resistance to tell your fraternity brother that you might actually want to see the girl you drunkenly brought home again some time. Hedges’ quotes an anonymous Colgate sorority girl in his article, saying essentially the same thing. “I’ve known plenty of guys that hook-up with a girl and their friends ask ‘oooh, is she your girlfriend?’ I think that the other kids are a little jealous, and look to make their friends feel embarrassed about it.”

Williams brings a very important issue to the forefront in his article. However, his article is flawed in that this is a problem that does not exist only on campuses where the women outnumber the men, and it certainly is not a problem that stems from this gender gap. It is simply another unfortunate outcome of the patriarchal system that defines today’s society. The status quo will remain until both men and women choose a path other than that of least resistance.