I’ve got a friend named Eliza* whose parents don’t know that she’s still a freshman (she’s supposed to be a sophomore). They also don’t know that she’s only taking three classes this semester, and that these classes are Cello, Poetry and Tap Dance. When Eliza runs into trouble, which happens frequently, she manages to manipulate the authorities around her by convincing them that it is the pressure of college, and not her, that is the problem. This typically winds up in her being prescribed a new drug, which she then goes on to sell, providing her with a generous and steady income. Eliza could out-drink most fraternity brothers I know. She’s a lesbian whose interests on Friendster are “tits and ass.” She’s lazy, loud, rude and crude, unapologetically un-PC, and, in my opinion, a true crusader for the advancement of women.
I know a description of such a person probably makes many recoil in disgust and disapproval. How could someone conduct herself with such flagrant disregard to an institution that lavishes unwavering faith in her? How disrespectful, to exploit the concern of kind professionals and to capitalize on second chances, making a mockery out of secondary education? How dare she objectify women like this? If this is your reaction, I ask you to consider that there have always been such individuals on college campuses. In fact, we celebrate their behavior with such cult classics as “Animal House.” We revere as sacred those reclusive, brooding individuals who check out of school altogether, like Holden Caufield. These roles are as old as the institution of college itself; the thing is, they are usually played by boys.
I, too, was once a student like Eliza. I was only in sixth grade, but my philosophy was the same. I could give a flying fuck about grades. School, as far as I was concerned, was about having fun. I went to a traditional all-girls school called Chapin. Chapin had a uniform, a morning assembly called “Prayers”, and a very strict set of rules. When we traveled as a class, whether to the library or to the park, we marched there in two straight lines. The script of Chapin was silly and old fashioned: it begged to be tampered with-and it was. As a class clown, I made sure of this; I knew exactly what buttons to push, and I pushed them every day. I used to make my English teacher so red and angry he’d slam his fist into the desk, sending a pile of paper fluttering to the floor—and the class into a fit of hysterical laughter. I frequently found myself in the headmistress’s office, biting my cuticles and trying to remember the time my dog died to keep from exploding in giggles.
When I left Chapin for a co-ed school in seventh grade, however, I quickly shed my role of class clown. These antics were no longer my domain; they belonged to a set of quick-mouthed boys, who wore their jeans as low as we used to wear our skirts high at Chapin. I was now part of the audience, a cheerleader at best. I think I realized that, had I continued to behave the way I had at Chapin at this new school, I wouldn’t be celebrated the way these boys were. I wouldn’t be the star of my own National Lampoon movie; I would be a chapter in “Reviving Ophelia.”
Nearly a decade later, I still mourn the part of me that passed on when I entered a co-ed environment. We don’t really have class clowns in college, but we do have kids who basically bumble-fuck their way along, in constant pursuit of fun and distraction. And these, too, tend to be boys.
My mother loves to recall the crazy lifestyles and destructive habits of the boys she knew in college with an unharnessed amusement that does not extend to what little she gleans about my drinking habits in college. I have little doubt that the discrepancy in her attitude is as much because I am her child as it is because I am a girl. When I inquire about wild behavior she engaged in during college, she tells me about this one time she and her roommate brought lots of pillows and blankets into the elevator of their dorm. They made little beds and then they rode up and down the shaft all night. (She went to Wellesley College in the sixties, whose motto was, “Girls Gone Mild.”)
My favorite female characters in children’s books were the bad ones, the girls who said pooh-pooh to authority and who got themselves into trouble because of their inability to practice restraint and their casual oblivion to the rules. Eloise and Madeline are at the top of that list, which is why I think I admire girls in college who conduct themselves in a similar manner.
Perhaps it is because girls have only recently arrived on the collegiate scene that makes us more together and responsible. Maybe it is the awareness that college is a privilege, rather than a playground, that makes us reluctant and disinclined to abuse it. Perhaps we feel as female students that we have something to prove. Which is exactly what I think my friend is doing.
*Name changed.
Leave a Reply