The New Happily Ever After
You know the story. Girl meets Boy. Sparks of attraction fly. Boy attends mandatory sensitivity training, obtains written consent, and they live Happily Ever After.
Wait just a minute. When did dating become such an ordeal? Like many things, dating became a convoluted ordeal once feminists got their hands on it. Here at Amherst College, which has a high concentration of feminists, the disastrous consequences may be observed in unadulterated form.
It begins with Orientation. Freshmen girls are systematically petrified into being wary of all men as potential rapists. The freshmen boys are lectured sternly on consent laws in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Eighteen-year-olds of both sexes are showered with condoms, lubricants, and dental dams; they are shown how to use them and how to dispose of them. And all of this occurs under the banner of “safety.”
I don’t know about you, but nothing kills passion or intimacy for me more than having it thrown in my face five times a day.
Amherst College went co-ed in 1976. As a result, almost every Amherst student lives on a hall with the opposite sex, and most of us are forced to use co-ed bathrooms, a fact you won’t find in the viewbook.
These co-ed living arrangements are the single greatest inhibitor to dating at Amherst. There is an unwritten law that you do not “hook up” with a floormate—that’s “floorcest.” And you’re discouraged from dating anyone in your dorm—that’s “dormcest.” But the housing office, in its infinite wisdom, has more than likely put you in a dorm with the people you’d most to want to date—all the noisy night owls in one dorm, all the offbeat neatniks in another.
In addition to sharing a hall (sometimes a suite) and a bathroom with the boys, Amherst students eat in one dining hall, on one meal plan. In short, there is nowhere to hide from a relationship gone awry.
Feminists, with their battle cry for infiltration of every aspect of male life, have removed any mystery from themselves or their opposites. That is what once made dating a special and sacred rite—you didn’t know what your girlfriend looked like in the morning, or, if you did, it was because you were very lucky. A potential Amherst boyfriend doesn’t rest easy knowing that 20 other men know what his girlfriend sings in the shower.
So we don’t date. We hook up with a host of strangers or hole up with one nice boy, fling ourselves off the precipice of self-respect or fling ourselves into the isolation of monogamous long-term dating. It seems there is no middle ground.
And yet …
And yet there is a growing awareness among women—mostly women who own the 6-part A&E Pride & Prejudice—that something is Not Right with this situation. And though they may agree with feminist rhetoric in the classrooms, they cannot support it in their bathrooms or their bedrooms, for that matter.
Some small part of them clings to everything they have been taught to despise. It’s the part that warms, slightly, when a man holds the door open; it’s the part that grows wistful looking at bridal magazines. This awareness feeds off the vulgarity of the second wave feminists, whose passionate activism and bra-burning in the 1960s gave way to tenured professorships, unkempt graying hair and frumpy clothes. Their words now ring false and hollow.
These women must be brought out from the temples of Gloria Steinem; they must be coaxed into putting down their pins and signs, which they wave to fit in.
I hope that this groundswell, once initiated, will spread like wildfire over the campuses of this country, burning out all the cancerous rot that results from feminist meddling. And, when the fires have consumed the last WAGS department, the light from the dying embers will shine on men and women. And wouldn’t it be neat if we emerged from the ashes, simply holding hands?