New York Times She Can Play That Game, Too

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/fashion/sex-on-campus-she-can-play-that-game-too.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Two extraordinary articles appear, almost side by side, in The New York Times Sunday Styles section today. One is called, "She Can Play That Game, Too," and the other,  "Every Teenager Should have a Summer of 65."

They are remarkable because they both report the thinking and attitudes of American women about the place they think they ought to assign to men, sex and planning in their lives. 

The Phantom was stunned because he had, when he was in college, thought women ought to think like this, but 50 years ago if any did, nobody would admit to it.

The implications of what these women say are broad ranging, from the reality of what the meaning of "career woman" has for the life and for the sources of happiness and satisfaction in lives of American women, and for the meaning of "date rape" and for the meaning of "romance" and for the role elite universities play in the lives and thinking and class values of those who strive.

The link to the article is posted above, and may work. Apparently, it first appeared in some form, 2 days ago and has already attracted many comments.

Susan Patton, a 1977 graduate of Princeton, has argued women at elite institutions should look for husbands on these campuses, because, "You will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you."

Of course, this sounds very Princeton, to the Phantom, who has heard at least one Princeton woman who said she would never marry a man who had not graduated from Princeton. This woman, who is Jewish, does not seek a Jewish male, as Jewish women once did. For her, the necessary qualification is Princeton.

There is a certain echo here--of the efforts during the late 1930's to breed a master race by creating camps where blond, blue eyed young women would mate with blond blued eyed SS men to create a master race.

Today's co-eds are "Keenly attuned to what might give them a competitive edge..many of them approach college as a race to acquire credentials: top grades, leadership positions in student organizations, sought after internships."
One is quoted, "Ten years from now, no one will remember--I will not remember--who I have slept with. But I will remember, like, my transcript, because it's still there. I will remember what I did. I will remember my accomplishments and places my name is hung on campus."

The Phantom has news for this young lady: It's actually just the opposite.  (Of course, she may not recall whom she slept with because, apparently, in the hook up culture, getting blindingly drunk is part of the ritual, so sex may not be all that memorable.

One Penn co-ed described "the night to her friends as though it were a funny story: I was so drunk, I fell asleep while I was having sex! She played up the moment in the middle of the night when the guy's roommate poked his head in the room and asked, 'Yo, did you score?' Only later did Haley begin to think of what happened as rape."

For the coeds who have a life plan which includes business school, a corporate job in New York "lugging a relationship through all those transitions was hard for many to imagine." 

As one said, "I've always hear this phrase, 'Oh, marriage is great--you get to go on this journey of change together.' That sounds terrible. I don't want to go through these changes with you. I want you to have changed and become enough of your own person so that when you meet me, we can have a stable life and be very happy."

This coed is happy with finishing her studying at midnight, calling up her "hook up buddy" and having un-freighted sex. "Instead she enjoyed casual sex on her terms--often late at night, after a few drinks and never at her place because then she would have to wash the sheets."

The phantom smiles to see today's 18 year old women reach this place, but, on the other hand, there is the story (Summer of 65) of the woman who had a semi-affair with a man early in her college career who turned out to be the best man she ever met, but she was not ready to appreciate him. She does now.  And she wonders whether any of what she ultimately got--career, New York digs--was better than him.

For the Phantom, the big red flag in these stories is the idea that becoming phenomenally successful in college, having your name hung in honor (where?) having been summa cum laude, president of the sorority, head of the model UN, leader of the Greek counsel, acceptance at Wharton or Oxford, whether any of those merit badges in college mean much in the greater world. Maybe they get you in the front door at Goldman Sacks, or Chase or a bank in Hong Kong, but what is that worth?

Which is to ask, simply: If you could, on day one of your college,  write your own resume and have the most dazzlingly successful college career you can imagine--would that actually set you on the path to a wonderful life? 

What is it, exactly, college can do for you? The hyper-competitive women whose words ring throughout this story may be disappointed when they eventually cash in the glittering prize that is Princeton or Penn.

For the Phantom--who got his name from living in the library during college, and thus his dormitory brethren dubbed him "The Phantom" as one who is never seen--the rewards of college turned out to be the actual learning, oddly enough. He actually learned how to think, how to ask the right questions, how to doubt and he acquired a wide range of new friends--Camus, Sartre, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw--and a host of others, who became life long friends.
  For the Phantom, observing life histories, the model for women who "succeed" is his high school senior prom date, who could not get into the Ivy League out of high school.  She had something to prove.After her freshman year, she transferred from Carnegie Mellon to Barnard, and from there, burning with ambition, she attained Columbia Law and from there to a succession of more and more high profile jobs at more and more glamorous companies, from movie studios to financial behemoths.  She has the life all those Penn coeds would love to be looking back on, fifty years from now.

Or  has she?