The proportional rise of women in US colleges and universities (according to NPR, the student population has skewed toward
women 57/43 for the better part of the last decade) is a celebrated victory for feminists, but there may an uglier side to this achievement for young, smart, ambitious women: heterosexual dating.
A
story this week in the
New York Times Style section might have you thinking that the rising number of women pursuing higher education comes from the pursuit of an educated husband before graduation. The
Times story attributes gendered dating woes to the imbalanced ratio: women move faster sexually than they want to, hoping to seal the deal with a hook-up; women must tolerate cheating; women must be willing to date men who have slept with their friends. Otherwise, "thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is 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 pizza box."
Feministing wrote that the
Times story paints "a portrait of college life that basically offends everyone," playing into stereotypes of men and women. And, to view women's academic success as a handicap (only when it comes to a traditional model of dating and marriage, that is) is to undermine and misrepresent women's goals.
Jezebel gets it right in stepping back to say that "instead of worrying about the ratios, we should focus more on the way people treat each other: numbers in one gender's favor shouldn't give men the right to be total douchebags, and it shouldn't mean that women have to sell themselves short to find someone." Going to college certainly shouldn't reduce opportunity for women, in any area of their lives. -TLF
1 comments:
I like Feministe's analysis of the NYTimes article, here.
A few of the good points they bring up:
It seems to be a problem of perception more than statistics — if there are roughly equal numbers of men and women in a room, or if there are a few more women than men, we perceive the situation as thoroughly female-dominated. The same phenomenon happens with race. We’re used to seeing men (and white men in particular) as the standard; we’re used to them dominating higher education and the workforce. When we up the numbers of non-men in a situation where men have traditionally made up large majorities, the perception is that no more men exist – even though men are nearly half of the room.
and
And instead of just bemoaning how a 56 percent female population means that we don’t get as many dates as we would like, perhaps it’s worth looking at the fact that women go to college in larger numbers in part because men have more options if college doesn’t suit them. Jobs in construction, the military, factories, the fishing industry… they are all technically open to women, but are often not exactly welcoming. They also don’t require a college degree, but often pay significantly more than minimum wage. Similar pink-collar jobs — jobs that are disporportionately female and don’t usually require higher education — are largely care-related, and pay very little.
It's worth reading the whole post, if only for the criticism of the phrase "provocatively dressed."
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