Word: socialize
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...Schuyler aptly put it, "second-class citizenship" in the final club nation. A world of male hosts and female guests creates a fundamental asymmetry in gender relations. Women can’t return the hospitality that is constantly bestowed upon them. Since they don’t have social space of their own to give or withhold, they’re simply expected to, as one female student put it, "smile and look pretty...
...recent years, as the movement to integrate final clubs has sputtered out, efforts to remedy these problems have come to focus on creating all-female social space to serve as a counterweight to the male clubs. The trend began in 1991, when the Bee was founded with the help of Porcellian grads who wanted to grant their daughters something resembling the social experience they had enjoyed in college. By the late 1990s, the Seneca (not technically a final club, but founded with the express purpose of changing Harvard gender dynamics) had joined the mix. With the new millennium came...
Moreover, even if the pipe dream of equal resources were attainable, creating more single-sex social space still wouldn’t address all aspects of the problem. One of the most unfortunate consequences of the current system is that it institutionalizes gender divisions, reinforcing the idea that men and women are fundamentally different. This promotes a culture in which men are friends with men, and women are friends with women. Neither group is encouraged to interact with the other as equals. The consequences of this are far-reaching. "It’s not surprising that men feel more comfortable...
...male clubs to do what they should have done a long time ago: accept women. The problem is that many club members don’t think this is a very good idea. When confronted with the fact that half of the student body is automatically excluded from their social institutions, most final club members don’t share my lack for words; instead, they respond with a number of justifications for the status quo, some with more merit than others...
...primary defense offered up by single-sex advocates, however, is that there is something important about all-male social space—something that would be lost in a world of co-ed clubs. One final club president told me that he enjoys "having a space on campus where you can interact with just your own sex," and that he finds a "value in male camaraderie." Variations of this theme surface again and again in conversations with club members. Many express concern that with the introduction of women, cohesion, tight membership bonds, and institutional respect would all vanish. They often...