MEN AND WOMEN DON'T HAVE TO HAVE SEX
not even if they live in the same
apartment.
The big story on the Carnegie Mellon campus this
week was the university's decision to run a pilot housing program in which
students, sophomore-level and above, who choose to live in the Shady Oak
Apartments can also choose to room with students of the opposite sex. The
university's official name for this option is gender-neutral housing,
which no doubt pleases the lawyers and the liberal fundamentalists but which
sounds to me like a plan to put eunuchs and hermaphrodites in the same room and
not take sides when they inevitably go to war. But I digress.
The story spawned a front-page, lead-headline story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a typically droll Reg Henry column, a typically hilarious Carbolic Smoke Ball post, and a predictably hysterical, set-your-watch-and-your-moral-high-horse-by-it letter to the editor from some prissy woman in White Oak, bemoaning how the university has stooped to a moral level below excellence. Not especially typical or predictable but certainly regrettable were the public statements and justifications provided by university officials, whose abilities arrogantly to defend bad policy and ineptly to explain good policy suggest that, should they tire of work in higher education, they could always go into politics.
First came the benchmarking defense, which is the de rigeur, higher-ed equivalent of telling your parents that all your friends' parents have already given their permission. (But Mom, Swarthmore and Haverford are allowed to do it! Why can't I?) Then came the We want to find out what our students want defense, as if there is no greater nobility than letting nineteen year-olds decide university policy. (What's next? Kegs in every room and bars in every common area? If so, we could call it alcohol-positive housing.) Then came the head-scratching, brain-hurting, logic-twisting gay, lesbian, and bisexual students may not want to be forced to share a room with a same-sex student defense. This, of course, is intended to make the university seem sensitive and inclusive and progressive, but it just makes us sound sort of stupid. I'm all for making sure that everyone on campus is comfortable, but do we really think that gays and lesbians are so sensitive and/or so sex-obsessed that they can't possibly share space with a student of the gender to which they are naturally attracted? (Just to be safe, bisexuals should only be offered single rooms.) After all, isn't that the same "logic" and "reasoning" that raging homophobes use when they want to exclude gays and lesbians from sports teams and locker rooms and social organizations? (I don't want them looking at me, because, you know, they just won't be able to control themselves!) All this from administrators at one of the top academic institutions in the country. It boggles the mind.
Don't these people have anyone to teach them how to communicate? Aren't there any on-campus experts who could coach them on what to say, what not to say, and how to or not to say it? Doesn't anyone around there know and value the importance of ... oh, right. Sorry. I digress again.
What truly boggles -- but by now does not surprise -- the mind here is that everyone, from well-intentioned administrators to uptight letter writers, looks at this policy and sees only sex, sex, sex. Straight sex, gay sex, gender-neutral sex, whatever. Everyone's imagining it, assuming it, presuming it, thinking about it, worrying about, or running from it. They're like all those kids in John Cleese's classroom in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, leaping straight for the clitoris (or the penis, or both) like a bull at a gate. As if friendships and platonic relationships do not exist. As if a straight man and a straight woman are not capable of sharing the same living quarters without eventually devolving into a scene from Caligula. As if two gay men, or a gay man and a straight man, could not possibly live together without finally taking a trip to Brokeback Mountain. As if straights and gays and lesbians and bi-sexuals and all sorts of gender neutrals, positives, and negatives, even at an age when hormones do admittedly rage, see each other only in terms of genitals and orifices. As if freedom of choice with your friends and in your housing options is not a good and clear and simple and (ahem) adult enough reason to enact, to embrace, to defend, and not to attack this policy.
How surely and sadly we forget that, even when doors are closed and beds are close, men and women do not actually have to have sex. And that oftentimes, the defenses of housing directors and the grumblings of grandmothers aside, they don't even want to.
The story spawned a front-page, lead-headline story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a typically droll Reg Henry column, a typically hilarious Carbolic Smoke Ball post, and a predictably hysterical, set-your-watch-and-your-moral-high-horse-by-it letter to the editor from some prissy woman in White Oak, bemoaning how the university has stooped to a moral level below excellence. Not especially typical or predictable but certainly regrettable were the public statements and justifications provided by university officials, whose abilities arrogantly to defend bad policy and ineptly to explain good policy suggest that, should they tire of work in higher education, they could always go into politics.
First came the benchmarking defense, which is the de rigeur, higher-ed equivalent of telling your parents that all your friends' parents have already given their permission. (But Mom, Swarthmore and Haverford are allowed to do it! Why can't I?) Then came the We want to find out what our students want defense, as if there is no greater nobility than letting nineteen year-olds decide university policy. (What's next? Kegs in every room and bars in every common area? If so, we could call it alcohol-positive housing.) Then came the head-scratching, brain-hurting, logic-twisting gay, lesbian, and bisexual students may not want to be forced to share a room with a same-sex student defense. This, of course, is intended to make the university seem sensitive and inclusive and progressive, but it just makes us sound sort of stupid. I'm all for making sure that everyone on campus is comfortable, but do we really think that gays and lesbians are so sensitive and/or so sex-obsessed that they can't possibly share space with a student of the gender to which they are naturally attracted? (Just to be safe, bisexuals should only be offered single rooms.) After all, isn't that the same "logic" and "reasoning" that raging homophobes use when they want to exclude gays and lesbians from sports teams and locker rooms and social organizations? (I don't want them looking at me, because, you know, they just won't be able to control themselves!) All this from administrators at one of the top academic institutions in the country. It boggles the mind.
Don't these people have anyone to teach them how to communicate? Aren't there any on-campus experts who could coach them on what to say, what not to say, and how to or not to say it? Doesn't anyone around there know and value the importance of ... oh, right. Sorry. I digress again.
What truly boggles -- but by now does not surprise -- the mind here is that everyone, from well-intentioned administrators to uptight letter writers, looks at this policy and sees only sex, sex, sex. Straight sex, gay sex, gender-neutral sex, whatever. Everyone's imagining it, assuming it, presuming it, thinking about it, worrying about, or running from it. They're like all those kids in John Cleese's classroom in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, leaping straight for the clitoris (or the penis, or both) like a bull at a gate. As if friendships and platonic relationships do not exist. As if a straight man and a straight woman are not capable of sharing the same living quarters without eventually devolving into a scene from Caligula. As if two gay men, or a gay man and a straight man, could not possibly live together without finally taking a trip to Brokeback Mountain. As if straights and gays and lesbians and bi-sexuals and all sorts of gender neutrals, positives, and negatives, even at an age when hormones do admittedly rage, see each other only in terms of genitals and orifices. As if freedom of choice with your friends and in your housing options is not a good and clear and simple and (ahem) adult enough reason to enact, to embrace, to defend, and not to attack this policy.
How surely and sadly we forget that, even when doors are closed and beds are close, men and women do not actually have to have sex. And that oftentimes, the defenses of housing directors and the grumblings of grandmothers aside, they don't even want to.
Posted: Sat - March 3, 2007 at 10:45 AM
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Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM
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