Women-friendly campuses

JHS
Thu, 03 Aug 2006 18:10:37 +0000

Celloguy: I don’t think there’s much substance beyond tradition in not assigning men and women to the same room involuntarily. “Tradition” is still pretty strong though, and lots of people (and their parents) have modesty concerns vis a vis the other gender. I don’t think the practice is actually about sexuality at all. To the extent there is any other substance to the practice, I think it can be summarized as “I wouldn’t hand a drunken straight boy a key to my daughter’s bedroom.” I think you would have a hard time finding any evidence to support concern about women raping male peers, gay women not taking no for an answer, or rape between male peers (other than in traditional settings like prison, the Royal Navy, and certain exclusive boarding schools).

But really, it’s mainly just tradition. Men and women have always been separated in roommate assignments. Gays and straights have always NOT been separated in roommate assignments. Probably that’s because of a (traditional) reluctance to acknowledge that there ARE gays, or because kids arriving at college out of the closet is a phenomenon that can’t be more than 10-15 years old, and is still far from universal. (Growing up, I knew substantial numbers of people who eventually decided they were gay, but only one of them was publicly gay in high school.) Tradition doesn’t need a reason, though: It just is.

As for intrusiveness: For better or worse, for most people their gender is something they voluntarily put on display to the world in hundreds of ways. It is public information to anyone who has any significant degree of contact with you. But sexual orientation is not like that at all. It need not be displayed all the time, it is easy to fake, it is sometimes easy to be mistaken about, even to yourself. It is not even necessarily a black/white, yes/no polar thing. And declaring yourself gay at 18 still has negative social consequences in many settings. So, generally, it’s considered private information.

Finally, I think housing offices would generally think it’s a mistake to take any minority group and place them only with each other. Not only does that limit the interactions between different types of students, but it exposes the minority to a risk that there will be an insufficient population to permit further matches based on characteristics that are much more related to successful cohabitation: sleep schedules, messiness, smoking, and party style. And if you ARE in fact worried about sexuality, where do you put gay kids? I would think gay boy A is substantially more likely to have romantic complications with gay boy B than with straight boy C.