Word: sassi
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Walking into the sun-bleached heart of Matera is like getting a direct line into southern Italy's past. Without any warning, the city's modern apartment buildings and piazzas give way to the Sassi (or the Stones), a dramatic enclave of Paleolithic cave dwellings and medieval houses dug into the rock. They were inhabited until the 1950s - when the government evacuated the last impoverished tenants who still shared cramped, unventilated quarters with farm animals - and the Sassi's labyrinthine staircases and alleys fell into decline. (See TIME's Global Adviser for exotic, beautiful and interesting getaways...
...Last year, I came back to school ready to take action. During a drunken discussion of the lamer points of final clubs, a group of friends and I decided to start SASSI-WOOF Clubs (Students Against Super Sexist Institutions-We Oppose Oppressive Final Clubs). Our basic mission was to create a campus free of final clubs...
...During that fall, SASSI received a lot of support. We held campus-wide discussions, leafleted outside the clubs, contacted campus media, did research on the clubs at City Hall, met with club presidents, and spoke with the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response. But as we faced the task of trying to deconstruct a system that has existed for over a century (including a time during which the clubs received financial support from the University), it became clear that, since we had no money of our own, the only way we to get rid of the clubs...
Even after all these years of controversy, the debate over allowing women to attain final club membership remains lively and contentious. The recent development of the Students Against Super Sexist Institutions-We Oppose Oppressive Final Clubs (SASSI-WOOF) and last Friday night’s packed forum lead by Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes on the history of final clubs both attest to the large number of undergraduates who believe that the current all-male Final Club scene is both insulting and out-dated...
...while activist groups such as SASSI-WOOF might help to raise exposure to Harvard’s discriminatory social scene this year, their effort will likely be in vain. Like Stop Withholding Access Today in the 1980s and the Radcliffe Women’s Action Coalition in the 1990s, SASSI-WOOF will likely find that it is really impossible for an outside group to change the system—no matter how vehemently female undergraduates protest...