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(05/06/15 3:51pm)
The final weekend of “Gaypril,” a month devoted to creating more visibility for LGBTQ groups on campus, was celebrated by the timely premiere of Millennium Approaches, Part I of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Written by Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play explores the struggles of gay men living in New York City during the 1980s, when intolerance, shameful denial or an impending sense of doom hovered over many people’s heads. The student-produced show ran in the Hepburn Zoo from April 31 to May 2, bringing to light questions of religion, race, gender and sexual orientation that once sparked ethical scandals and continue to bear relevance in the modern era.
The burdens of everyday life become magnified and exacerbated in this dramatic tale as three groups of people grapple with different but interlinking sets of problems. Mormon chief clerk Joe, played by Max Lieblich ’18, and his agoraphobic, emotionally unstable and sex-starved wife Harper, played by Katie Mayopoulos ’18, fight to establish a sense of trust, communication and constancy in their relationship as Joe contemplates accepting a job offer in Washington and Harper wrestles with her suspicion that Joe is gay. Successful lawyer and deeply closeted homosexual Roy, portrayed by Phil Brand ’18.5, refuses to come to terms with his recent AIDS diagnosis, proclaiming that “AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer.” Meanwhile, clerical worker and gay Jewish man Louis, played by Lee Michael Garcia Jimenez ’18, is struck by the devastating news that his boyfriend, Prior, portrayed by Christian Lange ’17.5, has contracted AIDS. Throughout the play, these heavy plot points manifest themselves in intensely emotional confrontations behind closed doors, with Harper shouting impassionedly at Joe as he arrives home late, Louis and Prior discussing Prior’s prognosis whilst embracing intimately in bed and Roy confronting his medical fate within the confidential confines of his doctor’s office. Over the course of the play, the lives of these troubled characters slowly and unexpectedly begin to intersect.
Life in New York City moves at an unforgivingly breakneck speed, but amidst paperwork piles, hospital appointments and burnt dinners, the days drag on. The actors portray this existential slog with a careful mixture of exhaustion, misery, frustration and apathy, their words casting a heavy silence over the audience at some points and provoking laughter at others.
“The audience might find it strange the way the play switches between funny and deadly serious and back again very quickly,” Lange said. “It’s a weird play, and if you don’t walk into it with an open mind it has the potential to be very difficult to process.”
Within one dream sequence, Prior commiserates to his makeup-adorned face in the mirror, “I look like a corpse. A … corpsette! Oh my queen; you know you’ve hit rock-bottom when even drag is a drag.” As Prior’s condition declines, his chest marred by dark purple scars and his face increasingly pale and gaunt, Lange’s delivery of these candid moments hovered between humor and heartbreak, poetry and pain. With each broken scream and moment of bloody, writhing agony, a sense of empathy tore through the audience, bringing to light the utter torment of the times.
The AIDS crisis of the 1980s brought with it intolerance, ignorance and fear toward the gay movement, as the virus became stigmatized as “gay cancer” and “gay-related immune disorder.” Angels in America provides a cross-sampling of voices within this messy, confusing and tragic era. Roy is symbolic of all the closeted gays who refused to admit who they were for fear of being associated with the queer image, which was generally viewed as weak and insignificant. Joe, trapped in his church-sanctioned Mormon marriage, will never gain acceptance for an identity deemed wrong for religious reasons. Belize, Prior’s voodoo cream-using, magic-loving nurse and black drag queen, portrayed artfully by Rubby Paulino ’18, embodies a particular subculture of the gay image. Louis’s poor coping mechanisms in light of Prior’s tragedy are a call to those unable to face the harshness of reality – whereas Prior, in his quiet resilience, represents those who can.
In this sense, Angels in America serves as a window into the past, a stark reminder of all that society has seen and overcome.
“It connects us to a generation of gay people that lived through a part of gay history that I didn’t. I was raised with education around sex being that HIV and AIDs were an ‘everyone’ thing,” Garcia Jimenez said. “A lot of old people still see it as a ‘gay person’ thing. I didn’t grow up seeing my gay friends die of a disease that no one really understood.”
Sadly, Prior’s suffering is further compounded when the emotional strife of the situation causes Louis, his lover of four years, to abandon him. Similarly, the deterioration of Harper and Joe’s marriage pushes Harper to a state of panicked pill-popping and frequent hallucinations. Traveling on parallel paths toward destruction, the anguish within both relationships reaches a point of full, explosive expression in a joint break-up scene near the end of the play. At last, Louis confronts the limits of his own love, while Joe recognizes his homosexuality.
“Characterized by Harper’s short phrases, Louis’s apathy, Prior’s hurt and Joe’s overflowing realizations, this scene beats out a rhythm that is difficult for actors to keep up with, and splices together two stories in a challenging way for the audience,” Mayopoulos stated. “Nevertheless, watching two very different couples break apart at the same moment because of the same basic reasons – trying to save oneself and one’s identity – is emotionally overwhelming and extremely powerful.”
Ultimately, in leaving their respective relationships, Louis and Joe stumble into each other. In a moment of bittersweet clarity, their feelings culminate in an intimate, lingering kiss that left the audience in an awed sort of silence. Within this scene, Garcia Jimenez portrayed the multiple facets of Louis’s complicated, even paradoxical, personality – apathy, selfishness and above all, self-loathing – with delicate emotional precision.
“If you touch me, your hand might fall off or something,” Louis tells Joe in a sad, matter-of-fact tone. “Worse things have happened to people who have touched me.”
Some critics of the play argue that it delves far too much into a story rather than a political thesis about the approaching millennium and its implications on the gay movement. But perhaps it works better as art rather than as a political campaign speech. Angels in America is more than merely a tragic tale: beyond the harsh realism of the play lies a distinct sense of mysticism, which eventually gives way to hope. A mysterious, almost harassing voice beckons periodically to the ailing Prior, telling him to “look up” and “prepare the way.” The stunningly illuminated angel that embodies these haunting messages in the final scene, as portrayed by Nadine Nasr ’17.5, is a sign from the universe that society is on the brink of change. “Greetings, Prophet,” she announces. “The Great Work begins. The Messenger has arrived.”
“The mysticism makes it an undeniable, divine fact of fate. There’s a certain point in society where something is obviously going to happen, so we need to let it happen,” Garcia Jimenez explained. Pointing to modern times, he said, “It’s not about whether gay marriage is going to be passed; it’s about which state is going to be the last to pass it.”
This weekend’s performance of Angels in America, a work deemed by the New York Times as “the most influential American play of the last two decades,” was a momentous labor of love for the 12-member team. There were no stage hands, leaving the full responsibility of physical labor and onstage logistics to the cast and crew. Additionally, within the entirely student-run production, some actors multitasked as producer, director and assistant director. Mayopoulos, who acted brilliantly as Harper, was inspired to produce the play after performing a scene alongside Lieblich for her Acting I final.
“I went to a socially conservative high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, where doing a piece of theatre as daring, liberal and free as Angels in America would never have happened – there would literally be protests,” Mayopoulos said. “For me, this play exemplifies the tragedies that occur when a society is not accepting and the extent of the strain it puts on all members of that community, which I witnessed firsthand in my hometown.”
A tale of many faces, Angels in America touches on everything from drag queens to disillusioned wives, from fatality to potential pregnancies and from divine forces to awkward sex between strangers in the park. Through tears, laughter and moments of poignant discomfort, the actors within this production carved to life a story of momentous proportions, evoking an era marred by hatred and neglect. Handled with care, the characters’ devastating narratives became a reflection of a powerful, collective hope that perhaps the world is not coming to an end after all. As millennium approaches, a better future is surely underway.
(04/29/15 9:04pm)
In 1980, Billy Joel was established as a global superstar in the music world. He had released a string of remarkably successful albums, starting with 1976’s Turnstiles, which brought him well into the public eye with anthems such as “New York State of Mind.” This popularity exploded the next year when he released the mega-popular The Stranger, which included such Joel standards as “Only the Good Die Young” and “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” further garnering Joel with his first Grammy for Album of the Year. In 1978, he released 52nd Street, which scored him a second Album of the Year Grammy and seemingly solidified his place at the top of his game.
This success did not leave him immune to criticism. Music critics and his peers began to comment that Joel was a master of melody, but that he would become obsolete with the rise of rock and punk. Joel saw this as an enticing challenge and his response was 1980’s Glass Houses. The title of the album is itself quite a statement: those who thought it was fit to criticize him in their “glass houses” should be careful, because he can throw his stones. The reception to the album was overwhelmingly positive. The tracks acted as a bit of an exploration of the different themes present in the history of rock n’ roll, and listeners took notice. He scored his first number one single and walked away with a Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance, proving once and for all that he could rock if he wanted to.
Now, in celebrating its 25th anniversary, I will take a look at an album of remarkable work from the one and only Piano Man.
The album opens with the sound of shattering glass to introduce “You May Be Right,” a none-too-subtle stab at those who would doubt him. Joel sings “You may be right/I may be crazy/But it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for,” and one can’t help but understand that he knows he is going out on a limb but that he has a feeling that is exactly what people want. The track is quite a starting punch to the album, amplified by a steady guitar and a Joel staple in Richie Cannata’s roaring saxophone. Following it up is “Sometimes a Fantasy,” which stays directly with the drive and cheekiness of the opener: it is a song about that 1980’s wonder: phone sex. Guitars and drums dominate the track, making two in a row which are a far cry from Joel’s normally-piano-driven fare, but they both give the man a chance to let loose and have quite a bit of fun for us at the microphone.
Much of the album also plays as an exercise in tribute to the many facets of rock music that came before him, and this is most explicitly laid out on the song that would become Joel’s first-ever number one hit, “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me.” He sings “Hot funk, cool punk, even if it’s old junk/It’s still rock and roll to me,” which was undoubtedly aimed at those who were discounting his ability to rock along. He continues this rock and roll fantasy throughout the album with tracks such as the punk-tinged “All For Leyna,” “Close to the Borderline” – which is an Eagles-style reflection on the anxiety and insanity of the Vietnam years Joel grew up in – and the standard drive of “Sleeping with the Television On,” where he gives more time to the sexual frustration he started in “Sometimes a Fantasy.” While each of these tracks takes the rock and roll he sang about in a different direction, they all have the common thread of showcasing his musical abilities in different ways. He allows himself to use the piano as more of a support for his voice than as a showcase on its own, which gives us a different flavor of Joel.
Nonetheless, a Billy Joel album wouldn’t be a true Billy Joel album without its fair share of the melodic piano he became famous for. He takes the time to croon and deliver a set of more laidback tracks that stay true to his roots while incorporating the themes of the album. On “Don’t Ask Me Why,” Joel channels Paul McCartney and shows off his piano virtuosity by incorporating a solo closer to salsa than pop. A few tracks later, Joel revisits this groove on “I Don’t Want to Be Alone,” but he slows it down more to express the sexual frustration that is present on multiple tracks. It is an upbeat song, but much of this theme can be attributed to Joel’s deteriorating marriage at the time to Elizabeth Weber Small. In contrast, “Through the Long Night” is a touching song about staying around even when the dark moments outpace all others. He sings “No, I didn’t start it/You’re broken hearted/From a long, long time ago/Oh, the way you hold me/Is all that I need to know/And it’s so late/But I’ll wait/Through the long night with you with you,” and on that line, Joel seems to put all the unrest of the album to sleep with its final chords.
After almost a decade of widespread appeal, Glass Houses marks the end of Joel’s greatest stretch of albums. He would score a resounding success with An Innocent Man in 1983, but that album was made up of songs written to mimic the pop and soul he grew up on. For avid Joel fans, there was still much great music to be heard and discovered but the average listener who judged him only on his hits may have written him off as a has-been. 25 years after this album, and 34 years after the release of his first album, the continued success of his concerts and songs sings a very different tune, proving that Joel is very much still rock and roll to an ever-growing number of fans.
(04/29/15 6:05pm)
Highly-educated. Self-motivated. Hard-working. Unpaid.
These adjectives describe a growing proportion of the current national work force: the undergraduate intern.
The US Department of Labor defines an internship as “a formal program providing practical learning experience for beginners in an occupation or profession that lasts a limited amount of time.”
According to Neil Howe, author of several books of American generational trends including Millennials Rising, prior to the 1990s formal internships were rare. Yet, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) reports that from 1980s to mid-2000s, the percent of college graduates participating in at least one internship rose from 10 percent to 80 percent.
In 2013, NACE reported that only 63 percent of graduating students who had held paid internships received a job offer by graduation. As for unpaid internships, students who have them are today hardly more likely to get a job offer (37 percent) than those who have no internship at all (35 percent).
Director of the Center for Careers and Internships Peggy Burns cautions that NACE statistics rarely reflect smaller, less formal internships that students at the College are more likely to participate in. The percentage of students participating in internships, therefore, is likely to be even higher.
So what has precipitated this increased participation in internships, especially considering scanty statistical evidence that they lead to jobs? The limited journalism on this subject identifies several factors, including market forces and, as Howe describes them, the “relentlessly optimistic” millennials themselves.
As internship season comes to a close at the College, the Campus investigates how the rising trend of internships has affected students here.
Trends at the College
In 2014, the CCI estimated that 600 students, or 24 percent of the student body, interned that year. Burns estimated that about 70 percent of students had least one internship before graduation while 40 to 50 percent had two or more. This places students at the College above the NACE average in terms of rate of participation in internships.
According to applications for CCI summer internship funding, the number of students participating in unpaid internships has remained relatively constant in the last five years, averaging at around 265 students or around 11 percent of the student body.
Burns says that students at the College have traditionally interned in the finance, government, public policy and publishing industries. Now, however, she says students are increasingly expanding into more industries, including non-profit work, technology and the environment. Applications for summer internship funding in 2015 indicate that students are participating in unpaid internships most commonly in the fields of science, healthcare and the arts.
“Where I particularly see the trend increasing is in those industries that are not the usual suspects,” Burns said. “The number of opportunities available and certainly the types of internships that students are interested in pursuing are really varied now.”
Applications for summer funding and Burns confirm that the most popular locations for internships are New York City, Boston and Washington, DC.
A New Market Trend
Assistant Professor of Sociology Jamie McCallum, who studies labor and work ethic in 20th century America, identifies internships as a new market trend responding to the economy’s need for cheap domestic labor.
“Businesses seem unable to pay decent wages, or any wages, for all of the workers they allegedly need,” McCallum said. “The intern economy provides a ‘solution’ to this problem.”
According to Business Insider, unpaid internships save corporations over two billion dollars a year. But most of these unpaid internships are illegal. The Department of Labor specifies that an internship can only be unpaid if it is with a non-profit or if the student is receiving school credit.
Attorney Maurice Pianko at Intern Justice told the New School Free Press: “99 percent of all unpaid internships in the for-profit market are illegal.”
Today, the Internet means hiring managers may receive many more applications for positions than they otherwise would, increasing competition among applicants.
“Twenty five years ago, [the job application process] was more a response to a classified ad,” Burns said. “It would just happen to be if you read the New York Times that Sunday and looked at the Classified department. Now, everything is online, and it is so easy for an employer to get thousands and thousands of applications.”
Furthermore, as children of Baby Boomers, the largest generation to date, Millennials face increased competition due to sheer population size.
“With Millennials, too, there are so many of you. So the competition is stiffer,” Burns said.
Additionally, Associate Professor of Sociology Linus Owens sees a changing definition of what is a ‘good job’ contributing to competition.
“What’s changed is the narrowing of fields that one can even speak of something that could be called a ‘career,’” Owens said. “With fewer viable options for ‘good jobs or careers,’ competition for those few spots intensifies.”
Burns also recognizes the 2008 market recession as an event that looms large in the memories of students anwd their families, causing them more job-anxiety.
The free labor intern economy, as McCallum describes it, is a self-perpetuating cycle. Students describe that previous experience is now often a prerequisite for the internships that they seek.
Nitya Mankad ’16, who interned with Goldman Sachs last summer, highlighted this caveat as the reason she began to apply for internships sophomore year.
“There tends to be a catch-22 with internships in that one needs experience to get experience,” Mankad said. “Since I didn’t have a lot of experience at the time, I didn’t think I would be able to find anything. But I knew I wanted to get a leg up and start preparing as early as possible, so I figured starting sophomore year couldn’t hurt.”
The Pressure to Intern
In interviews, most students agreed that it was personal pressure, not parental pressure or pressure from the College, that made them seek out internships.
“Most of the pressure I feel is self-imposed. Nobody is telling me I have to be a doctor,” Chris Diak ’18.5, who has completed many internships doing medical research, said. “The reality I see, however, is that if I don’t seek out experiences that will help me become a good applicant to medical schools, somebody else will. There’s a strange balance I have to strike between wanting these experiences and knowing I should have them on my resume.”
Some students do think, though, that the student culture at the College contributes to the pressure to get an internship.
“I feel like the stress is created by something similar to the ‘everyone’s having sex’ phenomenon,” Erin Giles ’17 said. “The idea that everyone is doing a summer internship when in reality, that’s not true. I honestly feel like a lot of sophomores end up not having an internship.”
“The high achieving culture at Middlebury is very motivating,” added Elizabeth Zhou ’18, who is interning with Bosnia Initiatives for Local Development this summer.
Open to Everyone?
Though valuable experience, unpaid internships can often prove prohibitively expensive for students.
“The internship economy does, in fact, perpetuate economic inequality,” McCallum said. “It affords certain people that are in a certain class to get a foot in the door in a way that other people simply can’t afford to do, no matter what is on your C.V. or resume.”
The CCI has been working to address this problem through the establishment of its Summer Internship Grants four years ago and its First Year Explorer Grants, new this year.
Additionally, the CCI is working to increase the number of paid internship opportunities available on MOJO. This year approximately 60 percent of internships on MOJO were paid positions, up from about 50 percent last year.
Still, for many students, it is personal connections, not MOJO, that make all the difference in finding an internship.
“Both internships I had this year were through family connections, and for New York, it was really helpful that I have my parents and through my high school friends who live in New York City,” Nan Philip ’16.5 said. “One of my friends doesn’t have connections in the city, and it’s been difficult for her to find an internship there this summer.”
International students also face unique challenges in getting internships, outside of the cost of shouldering an unpaid internship.
“I’ve heard of international students facing various challenges [like] employers discriminating against them based on their accent,” Martin Naunov ’17, a native of Macedonia who has completed two internships in Macedonia and this summer will intern with the United Nations in New York City, said.
Additionally, visa requirements also make it difficult for international students to intern in the US. International students are only allowed to participate in a paid internship in the US by opting into an Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. This program specifies that international students can only complete a paid internship during a 12 month period of time. Furthermore, students must apply in advance for approval and pay a $380 application fee to opt in.
Many universities give credit for internships, to help international students skirt these constraints, allowing them to legally participate in many unpaid internships. However, by a decision of the faculty last year, the College does not give credit for summer internships.
While Naunov applauds certain offices at the College, especially International Student and Scholar Services, for their efforts to help international students negotiate tricky visa situations, Naunov believes that the College’s administration could be doing more.
“If we claim to be one of the most diverse institutions in the US in terms of international students, then we better be able to give the international students the same opportunities as other students,” Naunov said.
Effect on the Undergraduate Experience
Pressure to find an internship, whether self-inflicted or otherwise, has influenced the undergraduate experience in marked ways, affecting what students participate in at the College and causing some students to describe the internship search as “like a fifth class.”
“I think the pressure definitely pushed me to take more classes pertinent to what I wanted to do this summer, which probably detracted from my ‘liberal arts’ educational experience,” Mankad said. “The desire for good internships also dictates many people’s extracurricular activities. For example, people interested in finance feel pushed towards being involved in the SIC [Student Investment Club], as most alumni will ask if students are involved.”
Incorporating the search for internships into the undergraduate experience is part of the CCI mission.
“[We want to emphasize] that thinking about life after Middlebury is part of that undergraduate adventure, as [much as] your course work, your sport, a club or an organization that you belong to,” Burns said.
McCallum argues, however, that this attitude towards internships has serious consequences for a liberal arts education.
“If education is about figuring out how to get a job, then the liberal arts might be in trouble,” McCallum said. “What [job anxiety] drives people to do, i.e. to certain courses of study here, is a real problem. What you study is less important than how you study it. And I’m not sure that people realize that.”
“Now, everyone has to learn ‘practical’ skills — STEM, they tell us, and Econ, they also tell us, which is another way that undergraduate students and institutions subsidize companies who don’t want to take responsibility for training workers,” Owens said.
McCallum also sees this career-focus as influencing work ethic in problematic ways.
“I see Middlebury students as dedicated to their work in a way that past generations have not been. That’s not to say that they’re passionate about it, necessarily, but that the obsession with being busy and what seems like a compulsive necessity to fill your time with work or busy-work or preparing work is a real issue in your lives.”
Largely, McCallum observes in his studies this career-focus diminishing how much people value leisure.
“We’ve figured out how to celebrate work,” McCallum said. “But I think that a commitment to leisure as a fundamental part of a healthy life is important. How to go about doing that is a more difficult question.”
Will this Change?
Owens is not optimistic that the current intern economy, in which highly educated undergraduates are trading free labor for unquantifiable ‘experience,’ can be easily altered.
“As long as there is widespread economic inequality, in which labor of all sorts is under attack, where even ‘good jobs or careers’ for an educated elite are no longer safe, then this trend is sure to continue,” Owens said. “It will take a lot of political work to enact any kind of significant change.”
McCallum agreed that any kind of change will be long-term. For now it seems, the millennial and the internship will have to learn to be friendly co-workers.
(04/29/15 5:59pm)
Instead of publishing student stories this week, I’m using this space to write about student activism on Twitter. This column will continue to serve as a platform for your personal narratives, so please keep on sharing them! At the same time, however, I think our expectations surrounding sex in college are also the product our engagement with campus culture more broadly. I’m convinced that what happens — or does not happen — in our dorm rooms is only a small part of the story.
(04/22/15 10:46pm)
The gay best friend is not a new invention. It’s been a running bit on several sitcoms already, an excess of articles written about how to find one. There’s even been a movie on it, appropriately named GBF. Whether it’s middle school or college, female-identifying people everywhere can be found walking next to their gay best friends. And why wouldn’t they? They’re like the coolest thing ever. We’re cute, artistic, good dancers. It shows you’re not homophobic to have a gay friend. It’s so refreshing to have a guy friend who won’t hit on you. The list is endless.
But what does it actually mean to be someone’s gay best friend? Growing up, it actually felt pretty nice to be sought after by so many girls at school. I didn’t really fit in with the boys at school, and I hung out more with their girlfriends than they did. It was a sort of social status that was good in a peculiar way that let me deal with what was otherwise an undesirable situation: being gay.
The thing is, being someone’s gay best friend isn’t just being someone’s best friend who is gay. There are certain conventions that exist within the role. Engage in girl talk. Give your gal-pal sex tips for her man. Go bra shopping with her. Paint her nails. Kiss her so you can laugh about how non-sexual that was. Help her pick a cute accessory, et cetera.
But I didn’t know how to paint nails, I don’t like kissing girls and bra shopping has always sounded unappealing. And while not every friend expected me to do these things, and others were accepting of it when I didn’t want to or know how to do one of my duties, it’s happened to me several times that I’m told, “What kind of gay person are you?”
It was an ugly thing to hear, but for the most part, I was a great gay friend. I’ve always identified a lot with what gay pop-culture is and in many ways, wanted to be that friend. However, in many ways I’m not, with big aspects of myself not fitting what is the stereotypical gay identity. I’m nerdy. I love to play Pokémon. If we go shopping, I’d rather pick clothes for myself rather than you. And I can’t even twerk, although I admit I try. And for other people who don’t identify with what gay pop-culture is at all, the feeling of “not being gay enough” can quickly become a disassociation or resentment of the queer community and their own queer identities.
Even those of us who do fit the role fairly well aren’t necessarily satisfied with how things are. Gay people are people. We aren’t Chihuahuas that you can stuff in a purse to look cute and give you love. We’re fully functional beings with our own desires and needs. (And while we’re on it, so are Chihuahuas).
It is understandable that gay people, especially openly gay people, aren’t always easily accessible, especially in so many high schools. Thus it makes sense for your gay friends to be friends with a unique perspective. Meanwhile, it’s not hard for us to find a straight-cisgender friend. They might be the only access you have to gay pop-culture, which is a rich culture with a history behind it, way bigger than its caricature we see in the media. You may want to learn more about that culture and experience it.
But the idea of a gay best friend implies that the social role of gay men is to be at a woman’s side. The idea of a friendship between a man and a woman only being possible through the man being gay supports the idea that men are sex-driven and incapable of emotion or amnesty. The idea of the gay best friend erases the value of other queer identities and limits the value of gay people to sassy, well-dressed accessories. It reinforces the idea that being gay is not the standard. We are not your best friends, we are your gay best friends. And it gives people a sense of failure when we are incapable of being the kind of friend you wanted, while your other friends don’t have a set of expectations. While it’s a great refreshment to see gay people be celebrated instead of shamed, as gay people become more visible it is important to not eroticize and commodify an identity and remember that all people are individuals and we are friends with those individuals, not a collective identity.
(04/22/15 10:41pm)
A girl, the same girl that could have been sitting next to you in macroeconomics or literary theory, is now sitting in front of a camera, telling you about an experience – a couple of minutes - that transformed her life. Her face is covered with a mask that depicts another student at the College’s face. She tells you about the painstaking judicial process she had to go through and the maze of bureaucracy she had to navigate. You are left wondering how here, at the College, a sexual assault case could have lasted 146 days, and what we can do to assure that that does not happen again.
This video is Middlebury Unmasked, a ten-minute documentary that features six student survivors sharing their experience coping with sexual assault at the College. Through the survivors’ powerful narratives, student activists hope to inspire dialogue about sexual assault as well as spark a shift in campus culture. Simultaneously, they wish to systematically improve the College’s sexual assault policy.
Michelle Peng ’15, one of the student activists who produced the video, elaborated on the genesis of Middlebury Unmasked and its goals.
“Survivors were able to come together and figure out that a lot of people did not have good experiences with the judicial process,” she said. “They saw, ‘oh, my experience isn’t an outlier, this is actually a pattern.’ [The video] is a critique toward Middlebury but also Title IX judicial processes. So many people are having these bad experiences. Why? What can we do to make them better?”
Middlebury Unmasked was released during mid-March in anticipation of Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM). During the month of April, the College holds various workshops, discussions, and training sessions in order to encourage dialogue and awareness about sexual assault. SAAM is a chance for members of the College community to educate themselves about sexual assault on campus, so that they are better able to imbue policy — and their interpersonal relationships — with compassion.
Maddie Orcutt ’16, one of the video’s producers, commended the College for fostering awareness through SAAM.
“I think that the College’s commitment to using the Department Of Justice funds to honor Sexual Assault Awareness Month is a step in the right direction,” Orcutt said. “I hope that this month will create more stakeholders who are interested in promoting sexual respect.”
However, she added that there is still room for improvement regarding the breadth of awareness that should be reached:
“There are some difficult conversations that need to be had regarding how to integrate all of these services and speakers in a streamlined way. If the same people are showing up to these events time and time again, how much progress is really being made?”
While SAAM is a positive step forward, the activists behind Middlebury Unmasked hope to radically reform Middlebury’s sexual assault policy. Over the last two weeks, administrators have met with the activists behind Middlebury Unmasked in order to discuss possible changes.
The activists made several demands, one of which was to institute a feedback loop between students and administrators. This would allow survivors the opportunity to express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with sexual assault policy on paper and its implementation in reality.
In addition, students suggested numerous revisions to the judicial process, including revising the College’s definition of consent to mirror the definitions used by Amherst College or the state of California.
“In California there is affirmational consent, meaning you need to have free, voluntary, obvious actions that say ‘Yes, I am into this.’ Right now Middlebury College does not have that,” Peng said. “Most of the NESCAC colleges have affirmational consent, including Amherst. But we don’t have the same caliber of consent definition which makes this issue even more grey than it already is.”
The activists also suggested a safety policy, which would assure that students involved in an ongoing sexual assault case couldn’t prolong the judicial process or graduate.
“A perpetrator can have his lawyers drag out the process to the point where the perpetrator ends up graduating,” Peng said. “Right now we don’t have any systems in place to prevent that at our school. We can’t have lawyers dragging these things out – there should be a time limit on this.”
The weekend prior to meeting with administration, the activists behind Middlebury Unmasked travelled to Amherst College for the Amherst Step Up Summit Conference on Sexual Respect. They identified concrete ways to improve campus culture through reforming the structure of sexual assault policy. For example, Amherst has a panel of 12 to 15 students who are paid to direct sexual respect workshops and education; they have also hired a sexual respect educator. The students who attended the conference want the College to develop similar positions and resources.
The language used when discussing policy is crucial: Amherst encourages education and awareness about sexual respect rather than sexual assault. Activists at the College aim to foster a similar culture of sex positivity through reframing sexual assault as sexual respect.
Peng commented, “‘Don’t sexually assault someone’ is different rhetoric than ‘Let’s sexually respect everyone’.”
This concept is further described in the list of demands Middlebury Unmasked presented to the administration last week. The point concerning sexual respect reads as follows: “In more than just a symbolic way, moving beyond language that is focused on compliance with the letter of the law and moving towards a goal of fostering a sexually respectful campus community shows a commitment to creating positive change rather than responding to the worst parts of our sexual culture on campus.”
As groups like It Happens Here highlight, negative sexual experiences that are not sexual assault occur with some regularity on our campus. These experiences are often followed by confusion because we do not discuss what a good sexual experience looks like – we do not discuss sexual respect. We have excellent resources that one may utilize in order to understand what an example of a bad experience looks like. These resources teach one what not to do; however, they do not teach what to do – what is respectful.
While it is very necessary to understand sexual assault, it is equally as necessary to understand sexual respect. If one understands both negative (what not to do) and positive (what to do instead) aspects, the relationships students share will improve on the whole.
“A lot of people are having negative sexual experiences that aren’t necessarily defined as assault but that can definitely be improved, and that has to do with sexual respect,” Peng explained. “We don’t have any groups on campus that consider – what does a good sexual experience look like?”
After preliminary discussion between the activists of Middlebury Unmasked and the administration, SGA Junior Class Senator Josh Berlowitz ’16 and the organizers of It Happens Here drafted a bill that included several of the aforementioned reforms. The bill proposes changes to the judicial process, administrative reforms, and the creation of a new cabinet position on the SGA to help promote sexual and relationship respect.
Berlowitz added that the administration responded positively to the proposed bill.
“The administration reviews and changes policy over the summer,” Berlowitz said. “By passing this resolution with all of the recommendations, we are giving the activists support and credibility. The student body as a whole believes that these are good policy changes. The administration can incorporate them when they update policy this summer.”
Campus-wide support of SAAM and reforms to Middlebury’s sexual assault policy are two crucial steps towards reducing the number of people affected by violence on our campus. However, our approach to raising awareness about sexual assault and making Middlebury a safer place cannot be static; it must gradually evolve.
“There should never be a point where we say, okay, this is good enough, we’re doing everything right,” Peng said. “Because in my mind, fifty years ago we thought a good idea would be to have a jury and a perpetrator sitting in the same room. That was best practices at some point. From my standpoint we are fifty years from somewhere. And you don’t want to look back on this time and say, wow, we really got that wrong.”
(04/16/15 1:35am)
I had met him at the beginning of the summer and could tell very quickly that he was different. Since then, we’d worked alongside one another, hiked together and browsed western art galleries together, discovering our mutual love of the great Rocky Mountains and being in the moment. So one night a few weeks into summer, when, after an evening at the local bar, we found ourselves kissing on the couch in our dorm, I wasn’t surprised.
A week later, we were lying on a queen bed made only with a fitted sheet in a room barely big enough to fit it. The bed was located off an industrial kitchen and the main common room for the program we were working for. It was the only place we could shut the door on our students and other co-workers at night. The only room with a lock, it was appropriately nicknamed the “Personal Time” room.
We moved in closer to each other, his hands gently under the base of my shirt. They went no higher. He paused, looked me in the eyes and asked, “Can I take this off?” I’d never been asked so genuinely before by a guy to take my shirt off when clearly I wanted him to. I blushed, a little taken aback. It continued.
Every item of clothing, “Can I take this off?” Soon we were both naked and even then he asked. “Do you want to have sex?” and the line every girl wants to hear, “I have a condom.” I said yes. For the next several times after that, and even often now, almost a year later, he asks. And every time, it is still sexy.
--------------------------------------
I am lucky to say that my sexual encounters at Middlebury have been overall positive, fun experiences. Though like many things at Middlebury, my sexploits on our secluded idyllic campus haven’t prepared me for what I would encounter in the “real world.”
Case in point: my current semester abroad in Istanbul. While living in another country, I’ve realized that the customs surrounding dating, relationships and sex (not to mention the overall treatment of and outlook on women) differ greatly from what I’ve ever previously experienced.
During my first few weeks here, some American girls and I started hanging out with three Turkish guys that were friends with Middlebury students from past semesters. One night while out at a particularly expansive club, I ventured to my own area of the dance floor without my friends. Suddenly one of our Turkish acquaintances was there, and we started dancing. There wasn’t much of a discussion; he initiated, and I didn’t object. We danced and made out for a bit, but I wasn’t really into it. I also knew I wouldn’t be taking things further so early in the semester, so I slipped away to regroup with my friends.
Fast forward to the following weekend: we went to another club with the same guys. As soon as I stepped onto the dance floor, my dance partner moved into position, about a foot behind me. I wasn’t interested, so I scooted a few feet to the left; so did he. I danced my way to the other side of the circle; he followed. With that, I went to claim a spot on a narrow tabletop across the club.
After a few similar experiences, a girlfriend of mine and I took Oaths of Celibacy for the remainder of the semester. I have since mastered my line for nights of clubbing in Istanbul: “No thanks, I’m dancing with myself tonight.”
(04/08/15 10:09pm)
In Feb. 2015, the Board of Trustees announced the construction of two new residential buildings to be erected in Ridgeline and Adirondack View. Plans for the project, which at the moment still await approval from the administration, include residences targeted specifically toward upperclassmen. The new residences will differ in structure from current on-campus housing options for juniors and seniors, particularly those of the social houses that occupy Ridgeline. While an integral component of residential and social life on campus, many students know little about the history of the Ridgeline mansions.
The four large houses of Ridgeline were completed in 1998, though planning had begun years beforehand. The college struggled to obtain permits from the town allowing them to construct in the previously untouched forest. The initial application included plans for eight new houses and one multi-purpose social barn, and was denied. Though the project was eventually given the go-ahead by the town after some adjustments, controversy ensued when the college began clearing brush for construction without receiving Act 250 approval, which examines community and environmental impacts of construction projects.
In 1990, the College banned single-sex organizations because of their exclusive nature and some issues with misogyny within these organizations. This resulted in the break-up of many pre-existing fraternities and sororities. The ban, coupled with the college’s desire to expand its student population by 20 percent, led administrators to turn their eye to the Ridgeline space. With the exception of Brooker House, the homes were built with the intention of housing the fraternities that remained after the single-sex organization ban.
Like the College’s goals for new proposed residence construction, the administration in the 1990s also hoped to lure students away from town neighborhoods.
“We thought we’d build nice new houses up in Ridgeline, where they’ll draw students to the center of the campus,” said Dean of Ross Commons Ann Hanson, who was Dean of Students at the time of the houses’ construction. “That way they can continue to offer social life but not bother the neighbors.”
In the ’90s, students had limited say in the architecture of the homes, designed by alumnus Steve Nelson ’79 and his partner Jeremiah Eck, though they could offer opinions on interior matters such as furniture. Nonetheless, the student population greeted the houses warmly upon their opening.
“Students would say it was ironic that they would probably live in the nicest place they would ever live in their whole life while they were undergraduates,” said Hanson.
A Campus article from the time reports the SGA President touting the benefits of having the social houses clustered together, making party hopping easier and safer for students. In contrast, some townspeople worried about the impact of having a “fraternity row.”
Consideration of neighboring Middlebury residents has played a large role in the college’s decision to pursue additional on-campus housing. However, other goals have provided motivation as well, namely the housing crunch of recent years and determination to get rid of the mods.
The modular homes were brought to campus in the late ’90s during a housing crisis, at which time the college did not have enough rooms for students even if all of the lounges were filled. Only meant to last ten years, the homes have today become a part of campus culture.
The College hopes the new housing will continue to offer something akin to the experience of living in the mods or off-campus. Current plans are tentative, but include three connected buildings of three townhouse-style apartments, which each house about eight students. A second, large suite-style building would include units holding three to four beds with common rooms and shared bathrooms as well as large building-wide common areas, kitchens, and dining spaces. This building is meant to offer a less isolating suite experience, in contrast to the Atwater or LaForce suites, in which residents seldom run into those who do not share their immediate living space. In this way, the College hopes to create more diverse living options, to accommodate a wide array of preferences.
“Other than the mods, we’re adding to what we already have, we’re not taking away,” Associate Dean of Students for Residential and Student Life Doug Adams said.
Buildings similar to the townhouses were recently installed at Trinity College and scouted by Facilities Services project managers and other Middlebury College staff and administrators.
“The buildings we saw at Trinity are high quality, well built with nice materials,” Tom McGinn, the College’s project manager for the new residences, said. “I think they will be a good addition to the student housing mix here at Middlebury.”
“I think it’s really cool what they’re doing. Of course, I won’t be here to experience it,” Andrew DeFalco ’15.5, president of Chromatic house said.
The houses are ideally expected to be finished in time for the Fall 2016 housing draw, although those involved with the project insist this deadline is very tentative and optimistic.
Many feel that the addition of new upperclassmen housing is likely to alter social dynamics on campus.
“Atwater was the last [residential housing] addition, it really changed the way students interacted with each other,” Adams said. “It changed the flow of social life on campus.”
Tim Baeder ’16.5, vice president of Chromatic house, expressed similar sentiments: “There are going to be 24 new upperclassmen apartments with eight to 10 students living in them, there are probably going to be a lot more parties on this part of campus. This isn’t bad, it’s just different.”
Baeder also wondered how the new housing options would affect the social houses’ ability to fill beds, a mandatory stipulation of their continued existence.
“It’ll be interesting to see how the administration works to incentivize living in the social houses with all these other options.”
As the college works toward finalizing its plans, the administration hopes for as much student input as possible.
“Our hope is to have a lot of conversations with students in terms of what [the new housing] will be about, how we should be using it, and how it should add to the community,” Adams said.
Working plans will be posted on the College’s website and otherwise made public as the project progresses.
(03/18/15 5:40pm)
The discussion of abstinence in church youth group filled my mind with scenes from “Footloose,” with conservative pastors and teachers telling me that sex is the devil’s playground and invoking city council meetings to preserve my generation’s sexual purity.
As a Christian, I’ve chosen abstinence until if or when I get married. When I arrived as a freshman, I was aware of the stereotypes around social life and sex on campus and wondered if, being in a new place of vulnerability and freedom, my view on abstinence would change.
My choice is not motivated by the fear of upsetting my spiritual family, the worry of negative sex experiences or religious conservatism.
I do not think that such motivations for abstinence are bad, but they aren’t primary. Rather, I’ve chosen abstinence out of God’s love for me.
When and if I do have sex, I want it to be with someone who fully knows, sees and loves me. Someone who won’t value me just for what my body can offer or how I can satisfy him; someone whose affections for me won’t change based on my performance or attitude.
Christianity describes our relationship with God like this. In scandalous terms, the Bible depicts God as a lover – one who really sees, understands, and desires to know us intimately – not for what we can offer or how we can please Him, but simply because He loves us. Sex, a naturally good desire and act, is a representation of this intimacy with God.
For these reasons, my choice for abstinence is motivated by the faith that God’s love alone can completely satisfy me. It’s not easy and it certainly isn’t popular, but for now I am content to know that my worth or identity is not defined by sex.
I was pet sitting. The first time S came over to the house, we talked for hours. We had great chemistry, but no one made a move. I decided to cut to the chase.
“It’s late, and you’re welcome to spend the night. There’s a spare room upstairs, or you can sleep with me. The choice is yours, S. Zero pressure.”
“Your room, if that’s okay.”
We climbed under the covers, each plastered to opposite edges of the bed. I was so confused and frustrated. And horny. Uncharacteristically bold, I made another, not-so-subtle move.
“S, can I give you a kiss before we go to bed?”
“THANK GOD. I thought you’d never say anything.”
At some point in that long night, I realized that I had forgotten what I was really in this house for… pet sitting. I snuck my way out of S’s arms and headed out in the dark to let the dogs out.
SQUISH.
I stepped in a pile of dog shit. I let out a frustrated groan. I could hear S waking up and rustling in the sheets.
“You okay?”
“Please don’t come out here. I just stepped in dog shit. This is so embarrassing.”
“Can I help you?”
“No thanks. Please just go back to bed.”
I cleaned up the mess and decided to hop in the shower. A couple of minutes in, the door knob turned. This time, S made the first move.
“Mind if I join you?”
S and I hooked up for several weeks, and it was always casual. In retrospect, we were both making sense of profound pain elsewhere in our lives.
For me, stepping in dog shit was a metaphorical beginning: S and I took the shit that life had dealt us, and in that little old house, one shower at a time, we outgrew our sorrow, and eventually, each other. I regret nothing.
Here are two selections for this week. Published bi-weekly in The Campus, Great Sexpectations hopes to increase sex positive dialogue through storytelling.
Please keep sending your embarrasing, funny, positive stories about sex to greatsexpectations@aol.com. Submissions are published on a rolling basis.
(03/18/15 5:34pm)
To be very straightforward, we decided to do capoeira this week because we wanted to learn how to beat people up. As trendy girls living in a downtown world, it seemed like a necessary life skill — or at least Maddie’s worrisome mom made it seem that way. **insert sweet, southern, high-pitched voice** “You two darlin’s need to learn to defend yourselves!”
In order to set the scene for our capoeira outing, it is important to provide background on the 24 hours leading up to practice. Although Izzy fasted all week in calculation for approximately 57 servings of chili at Chili Fest, she had not planned for the surprise appearance of a hot dog stand. Along with the obvious pit-stops at Otter Creek Bakery and Sama’s on the way back to campus, let’s just say she felt sick Sunday morning. She now understands why athletes monitor their food and drink intake leading up to an important game. It must be hard to be you guys.
When Izzy went to meet Maddie at ADK before capoeira practice, Maddie was no where to be found. After a few minutes, Maddie pulled up in an RV. Maddie’s long lost friend from Nebraska had come to visit, and they drove around drinking Kool-aid. Nothing says a Midwestern reunion like a house on wheels and powdered soft drinks. In other words, driving sideways on a bouncing couch made Maddie dizzy even before the impending cartwheel drills.
As soon as we walked into the studio, we realized that this was not a typical kickboxing class. If we had managed to do our research, we would have known capoeira is a Brazilian martial arts game that incorporates dance, acrobatics, music, and singing. More specifically, four skills neither of us possess. Even more specifically, four skills no one in the world possesses together other than MAYBE Oprah. Maddie refused to let this news shake her. She stood up a little straighter and told Izzy, “Shawn Johnson is an Olympic gymnast from the state next to mine, I’m pretty sure I can do this.” Yeah.
The class included one thing that we actively avoid when choosing our NARP activity: conditioning. Two minutes into the class, Izzy whispered “I should’ve worn a sports bra!” Three minutes into the class, we were asking for the nearest water fountain. Four minutes into the class, we were standing by the propped door trying to eliminate our sweat stains. Five minutes into class, the warm-up was over.
It is very difficult for us to even begin to describe what capoeira is. In terms of its relationship to martial arts we came up with a questionably accurate SAT-style analogy — capoeira is to martial arts as tantric sex is to regular sex. Our instructor, Brennan Delattre ’16 practiced traditional capoeira when she studied abroad in Brazil. She described capoeira as a physical conversation between bodies. It is not about hurting one another (sorry Mom!), instead it is acting and reacting to your partner’s movements. After various kicking, ducking, crawling, pivoting, and squatting combinations, we were asked if we knew how to cartwheel. Apparently, living in a state next to Shawn Johnson does NOT mean acrobatic skills will rub off on you.
Halfway through the class, we stopped learning new moves, and Brennan taught all of us Brazilian songs that are sung during traditional capoeira sessions. In addition to the singing, our classmates played several Brazilian instruments in order to keep the rhythm alive. We formed a circle and two people would “play” with each other and have a conversation using the moves we had just learned. At one point, we both got into the circle with a more experienced player, and although it was far from graceful, it was incredibly therapeutic. Discovering the limits of our bodies with the meditative music completely surrounding us was honestly one of the coolest things either of us have ever done.
Although we wrote this column from our respective beds due to muscle soreness, we urge all of you to try out capoeira. If you are curious to see what experienced capoeira players can do, they will have a performance that is open to the Middlebury community on April 19th!
(03/12/15 2:44am)
It was a harsh Vermont winter in December 1963 and, in the midst of the subzero temperatures, a landmark student life initiative had also frozen over. “The ‘question of honor’ at Middlebury College seems to have plenty of support as an ideal and not so much as a working system,” read a December 5 front-page Campus article. The article, which included student concerns about a code’s implications, foreshadowed the proposed Honor Code’s defeat in a student vote for the second time that May.
Over the past year, the Campus has investigated the untold story of the creation of the Honor Code. Although the story of the origins of the Honor Code at Middlebury is often that of a system fashioned by students and for students, the historical picture is much murkier.
A lengthy search in the College Archives and interviews with those who witnessed the process firsthand reveal that the Honor Code had a slightly turbulent history from the start.
It was a story that dominated the early 1960s at the College: a group of students and administrators who saw the Honor Code as an important opportunity for students to take ownership over their education. And yet, they received surprisingly strong pushback from students on the language and specifics of the proposed code.
The code’s proponents even dropped a compulsory peer-reporting clause, a hallmark of honor systems at Princeton University and elsewhere, from the Middlebury Honor Code in order to ensure its passage via a student vote. Moreover, after two failed student referenda on the Honor Code, evidence found in the Archives shows that at least one administrator recommended enacting the Honor Code without a student vote of support. However, in March 1965 the Code received sufficient support in a student vote to pass. Faculty opted for a streamlined approval process to avoid sending the Honor Code back with revisions to be subject to another student referendum, which they thought could be tantamount to its defeat.
The question of student votes on the Honor Code has renewed relevance of late. On Sunday, the Student Government Association (SGA) Senate voted in favor of amending the Honor System’s Constitution to put the code to a biennial student referendum with the options to maintain, revise, or eliminate the Honor Code. The amendment now must receive 2/3 of the vote in a referendum in which 2/3 the student body votes and must also be ratified by the faculty.
Change in the Air
Middlebury’s academic Honor Code, far from a lone initiative, was the product of social changes on campus that created profound shifts in student life during the 1960s. The College of the 1930s-50s was on its way out in several ways that precipitated the creation of an Honor Code.
Historians of the College have written much about the changes that took place in the 1960s. Among these reforms were major social changes to the institutional rules surrounding student freedoms. The influential Dean of Women Elizabeth ‘Ma’ Kelly oversaw a period in the ’60s when the ground shifted under students’ feet regarding their freedoms and rights as young men and women.
In the ’60s, parietal hours — the now seemingly antediluvian rules that governed when men and women could visit opposite-sex dorms —were gradually phased out. The College began to offer help to students with questions about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. Finally, the fraternities and sororities, long the bastions of the social life of yesteryear, became less and less of a mainstay of the campus party scene.
Historian of the College David Stameshkin said the ’60s were a period of remarkable change, bar none.
“Students wanted to be treated as adults. The administration wanted to treat the students as adults in certain ways but not others,” Stameshkin said in an interview. “It was incredible how things changed in the time [James] Armstrong was President.”
These changes, taken together, amounted to a climate of dramatically increased student responsibility in social life. Naturally, this trend simultaneously made its way into the academic realm.
As discussions were underway about a potential code, the Campus polled 254 students in October 1962 and found 80 percent approved of a code in theory. The newspaper also polled students and found that 35 percent of those surveyed had experience with an honor system at their high school. However, “a majority indicated they would not speak directly to a student if they found him cheating.”
The first instance of bringing the Honor Code to a vote occurred on November 19, 1962, when it failed. Harold Freeman ’62, the Student Association (SA) President, informed the Campus that the vote to inaugurate an Honor Code was defeated, 623-512, a combination of students voting “no” as well as “No-with-Qualification.” 235 voted no, 388 voted no with qualification and 512 voted yes. The students in favor did not reach the 85 percent threshold of “Yes” to send the measure to the faculty for a vote.
However, Freeman gave hints that the fight for a code was not over. “Freeman observed that by adding together the Yes and No-with-Qualification votes, almost four-fifths of the students were in favor of at least some form of Honor Code,” reported the Campus. Nonetheless, it would not be easy to convince the students who voted No-with-Qualification.
The SA, in a postmortem, theorized that a main cause for the defeat was the clause requiring students to report observed violations. This clause was considered a hallmark of longstanding honor codes at universities, including Stanford and Princeton.
Peer-Reporting Controversy
These qualms about the code reared their head repeatedly in the next two years. Surveys revealed approximately 80 percent of students supported an honor system as an ideal, but blanched at the proposal under consideration. “The main objection was to the obligation to report an offense committed by another person,” reported this newspaper.
Helen Gordon, president of the Panhellenic Council, “agreed that an honor code would be a benefit to Middlebury, but thought reworking of the ‘obligation’ clause necessary,” according to the Campus.
Gordon said, “It’s unrealistic to assume that human nature will [report others] but I don’t think they ought to leave out entirely this kind of an idea because it denies the opportunity to a person who’s really honest.”
The peer-reporting requirement would remain an issue through the end of the 1960s and beyond. As the clause became a sticking point in the debate, those in support of the Honor Code pushed back on the idea that peer-reporting meant “tattling” or being a “rat.”
In a December 1963 issue, Campus Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey J. Joseph opined that “whenever one brings up the subject of an Honor Code, the listener politely nods, makes a disparaging grimace, and quickly manages to say something like: ‘You going to the hockey game tomorrow night?’”
For all of the social life changes happening contemporaneously with the Honor Code debate, a large number of students felt comfortable enough with the status quo to stymie any efforts at instituting an honor system. Joseph explained that many students thought of the proposed Honor Code as either a way to end fraternities or to increase social code regulations and theorized that these factors led to its defeat.
“Let’s face it,” he wrote, “if someone wants to cheat, he cheats. If someone wants to ‘tell’ on him, he should be allowed to ‘tell.’ It is important to realize that a provision for ‘telling’ on someone is not included for the main purpose of making enemies out of friends. It is there to protect every honest student by presenting to the cheater a possibility that he will be caught. If you have any qualms about ‘telling’ on your buddy, keep your head down in your paper where it belongs.”
Despite the support of students like Joseph, the SA leadership began to contemplate foregoing the peer-reporting requirement. The Vice President of the SA was reportedly “willing to drop the stipulation that students report others, adding that ‘the maturity of Middlebury students ought to be able to make an honor code successful.’”
In December 1963, the chair of the student Honor Code Committee, Michael McCann ’65, cautioned against pushing the code too vigorously without almost unanimous student support. Two months later, the SA polled students on a potential honor code in what would be the run-up to a second push to pass it via a student body vote. A point of particular emphasis in the questionnaire was intended to gauge how students would feel about peer-reporting. The article stated that “McCann stresses the importance of questions dealing with student and faculty reports of offenders.”
The survey occurred concurrently with the 1964 election of a SA President, in which candidates weighed in on an honor code. Both John Walker ’65 and Peter Delfausse ’65 made an honor code a part of their platform.
Delfausse, who would win the election, said to a Campus reporter, “We on this campus are treated as adults in everything but the integrity of our academic work. Shouldn’t this be the first area in which we should be trusted? Nothing can force the student body into accepting something which isn’t wanted, but if an honor system is desired, we will find the right words with which to express it.”
Nevertheless, concurrent discussion about combating student apathy regarding the SA gives the impression that the Honor Code was an issue important to the members of its committee, but perhaps was less relevant to the wider student body. Richard Hawley ’67 was the Editor-in-Chief of the Campus, and said other issues captured the student body’s attention more than the Honor Code, particularly parietal hours — although he nonetheless appreciated the code when it was instated.
“I remember feeling a kind of relief,” Hawley said in an interview. “What a relief it was to take your exam to the library and do it there. I remember thinking, ‘This is wonderful.’ But I don’t remember student passion about it.”
Princeton on the Otter
Within the next few months, a figure who would be pivotal to Middlebury’s history weighed in on the code. College President James Armstrong, who had stepped into the position in 1963, approved of the proposed Honor Code in a meeting with McCann.
Armstrong said in a comment to the newspaper in April 1964, “Herding of students into the fieldhouse like animals, with proctors standing over them like jailkeeps, is not in keeping with the ideals of a liberal arts education.”
The influence of the college president and other key members of his administration may have been crucial to the Honor Code’s passage. Before arriving at Middlebury, Armstrong had spent his entire academic career at Princeton, an Ivy League school with one of the nation’s oldest academic honor codes — passed in 1893, with an obligatory peer-reporting clause. Armstrong earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton and then served as a faculty member and dean until he was appointed Middlebury’s 12th President.
“When Armstrong came as president from Princeton, he started bringing people from Princeton,” Stameshkin said in an interview. “In fact, the joke on campus was it was ‘Princeton on the Otter.’ That’s what they used to call Middlebury during the ’60s because Armstrong kept bringing people there.”
Another Princeton man, Dennis O’Brien was previously an assistant dean there before arriving at Middlebury in September 1965 to serve as the Dean of Men. His experience with the honor system at Princeton impacted his view of a potential Honor Code at Middlebury.
“Because myself and Jim came from Princeton, we had lived with it and we found it comfortable,” O’Brien told the Campus in a recent interview. “It seemed to establish a different relationship between faculty and students. Faculty were not always snooping over students’ shoulders to make sure they weren’t cheating; we were more like mentors. To suddenly switch over from being the person who is teaching someone to someone who is monitoring your honest behavior seemed not to be the image the faculty wanted to have.”
On top of a Princetonian as president, Middlebury’s stature as an institution was on the rise during the ’60s. O’Brien believes the Honor Code was part of the improvements.
“I think there was clearly a kind of an upgrade in terms of the quality of the students and the quality of the faculty that we were able to attract at that time,” he said, “and so it seemed like a much more senior, adult institution than one having proctored exams.”
The desire for an upgrade to Middlebury came from both above, with the administration, and also below, from students of the ’60s, particularly those who were tired of the fraternities’ hold on campus life.
“There was a genuine feeling that there should be more seriousness at the College intellectually,” Stameshkin said. “And the same thing was happening at Williams and other schools. This idea that there should be more intellectualism and more feeling of scholarship was also happening in the early to mid-60s.”
Nonetheless, the vocal support of Armstrong and O’Brien did not help the Honor Code at the ballot box at first. The proposed code failed in May 1964 to clear the 85 percent hurdle of students voting in favor, and the referendum did not receive even half of the student body’s participation. The result was devastating for those students who had worked tirelessly on behalf of a code.
“After two full years of preparation, an academic honor code was put before the student body Monday via a yes-or-no ballot – and failed to gain the needed support,” said a front-page article in the Campus. The measure received 69 percent “yes” votes from the 45 percent of the student body that voted. The rejected code included “that the test-taker pledge that he had neither given nor received aid” and that students report those they suspected of cheating within 48 hours.
The aforementioned Honor Code Committee displayed dogged, even stubborn, persistence to pass the measure. McCann told this newspaper, “This year’s balloting was far more encouraging than last year’s and there will be another honor committee next year trying to get this thing through.”
Victory, at a Cost
Despite McCann’s optimism, the outlook was grim: two votes and two defeats for an Honor Code within three years. But finally, in March 1965, the Honor Code was approved in a landslide. With 1,000 “yes” votes to 313 “no” votes, it was a marked improvement from the previous two tries in the fall of 1962 and the spring of 1964.
However, the code approved by students contained no compulsory peer-reporting clause such as that of Princeton, due to the fact that the committee viewed the clause as the reason for previous defeats. The Middlebury code stated that students with knowledge of an infraction should confront the student and if he or she does not report themselves to the honor board within 24 hours, the observer should. In O’Brien’s words, it was a passive reporting clause, with no teeth to punish a student who observes cheating and does not report it. The code that passed, unlike the previous versions, said students “should” report those they observed cheating, not “must” or “shall” of previous drafts.
The compulsory reporting clause had also been under fire in the opinions pages of this newspaper. In a Letter to the Editor on Feb. 25, 1965, William Michaels ’66 wrote: “Under the present system of exam proctoring, the College denies us the privilege of attempting to live up to the ideals of moral responsibility … this would also be the case if an honor code were passed which possessed a mandatory student reporting clause, since the student is not thus delegated the responsibility of looking after his own morality: it is merely shifted from the proctors to the other students.”
It was also a significant change that the threshold for victory was lowered to 75 percent from a lofty 85 percent, what it had been in 1962 and 1964. Some students grumbled about the idea of voting for an Honor Code for a third time, suggesting that other factors may have been at play in its success. A joke printed in the Campus poked fun at the code’s long-awaited victory. “Did you favor the Honor System at the recent election?” a student asks. His friend replies, “I sure did. I voted for it five times.”
President Armstrong was understandably pleased following the successful vote, as it was an initiative he had supported since the past spring, and he immediately set to work assigning administrators to it. In an October 1965 letter to the four members of the new subcommittee of the Faculty Administration Committee on the Honor Code, including Dean of Men O’Brien, Armstrong said, “Although I do not think you will be called upon for heavy duty quantitatively, I know you understand how important I believe the Honor Code is for the College and that a guiding hand from the faculty will be important and possibly crucial.”
Armstrong also probably worried that a lack of faculty support might end the last chance for the Honor Code to become a reality. He was present in a meeting of the Faculty Educational Policy Committee (EPC) in March 1965, after the code had been approved by the referendum.
“The honor code statement worked out by the students and brought to us with a large supporting student vote … was discussed,” states the meeting’s minutes. “It was felt best not to subject the statement to the scrupulous kind of inspection the EPC would normally employ in surveying a faculty document, but vote on it yea or nay as it stood; some felt that return of the document for a second student consideration and vote would defeat the proposal. Vote was a unanimous pro.”
It appears the EPC’s worries about the Honor Code failing in the student body led them to streamline its approval process, despite reservations that undoubtedly existed among the faculty.
The faculty also approved a key word choice in the code in April 1965. During the faculty meeting in which they approved the code, according to the article in the Campus, the faculty “did not demand a change to ‘must’” in the reporting clause.
Students Not Sold
There is a small piece of evidence that the College may have enacted an honor code regardless of the student vote. Dean of the College Thomas H. Reynolds wrote in his annual report dated July 1, 1964:
“There is an excellent chance that an almost unanimous student vote will be achieved next year. In the event that this kind of a program does not succeed next year, I recommend the College take some action towards bringing an academic honor system into effect.”
While Reynolds never ended up having to make that recommendation, O’Brien disagreed with his premise.
“I don’t think you should impose it without a successful student vote. I think that would have been a mistake to try to do that,” O’Brien told this reporter. “I think the whole idea of an honor code, to a certain extent, is to get away from the high school syndrome of, ‘You have to be proctored and not entirely trusted.’”
The following year, as new Dean of Men, Dennis O’Brien’s first annual report was pessimistic, illuminating the reasons why Reynolds or others might have pursued an Honor Code if the student body would not.
“By the time the student reaches the last half of his college career we have pretty much either got him involved intellectually or we have lost him for good … they may be active in fraternity life, extracurricular life, athletics, they may be valuable citizens in other ways, but academically they run along on minimal requirements seeking the gut courses and paying only lip service, if that, to the intellectual community,” wrote O’Brien in his annual report in June 1965.
He went on in that report to comment on the lackluster implementation of the Honor Code.
“The Honor Code was approved by students in early March,” O’Brien wrote. “I may have missed something, but I think no further initiative toward its implementation came from students until practically exam time, if then.”
O’Brien also observed how the administration was involved from the very beginning and that students were not yet invested in the code:
“Many students are far from ‘sold’ on the Honor Code. They feel that the Administration has been determined to have an Honor Code here no matter what and that the students finally let the Administration have its way. These students have a sort of uninvolved, ‘play it cool’ attitude. They intend to wait and see how ‘they’ will work it out. If students who felt that way could see the minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee on Honor Code for May 27, 1965 they would feel that their perception was largely confirmed. These minutes make it clear that the Honor Code Committee, chaired by the Dean of the College, consists of several professors and administrators and that to the meeting of this committee were ‘invited’ several specified undergraduates.”
O’Brien also cited a study from Columbia University that said for honor codes to be effective, the motivation should come from students and should appear to be coming from students. The difference between the honor codes at Princeton and Middlebury, he told this newspaper in October 1965, was not Princeton’s “obligatory clause for reporting, but a strong and firm belief in the system by faculty and students.”
Of the code, “it was held with a great deal of pride,” O’Brien said. “Most complaints of the new Middlebury system that I have heard have not been substantive, but procedural. And I think there are some false expectations about the system by a few students.”
A Reversal in Student Perception
Two years later in another report, O’Brien suggested that the honor code might have already backfired soon after its implementation.
“The Honor Code seems to be functioning well although there is still a certain amount of feeling against signing the pledge,” he wrote. “I personally feel that the distaste for the pledge grows out of a hypersensitivity on the part of students today that they are not trusted. As they are not trusted to close their dorm doors during parietal hours, so they feel they are not trusted in the matter of honor in examinations.”
This reversal in opinion was extraordinary. The push for the Honor Code, at least from students, was based on the idea that it would give the students more responsibility and was in the same spirit as a move away from parietal hours. Based on O’Brien’s report, the code had the opposite effect, making students feel like the administration trusted them less than before.
Whether the code was truly being followed is difficult to assess based on available records, but O’Brien writes that “a student was convicted of a violation of the Honor Code this year and suspended for a semester,” a low number of convictions by any standard.
Although during the 1960s the social rules at colleges and universities like Middlebury were being chipped away from all sides, it still took a great deal of effort on the part of members of the SA to pass an honor code via a student vote. Additionally, the faculty minutes and annual reports of the College show that at least one top member of the administration was ready to intervene to institute an honor code and held back probably because of concerns of its effectiveness if instated and operated by Old Chapel.
O’Brien’s 1967 assessment is revealing. There had been two unsuccessful votes from students amid vocal support from the administration and faculty; as a result, many students identified the Honor Code as an administrative device. A corollary explanation is that the social changes in the 1960s cut both ways on an honor system: while these sweeping changes helped make the code a possibility, they also changed the way a code was viewed in the years afterward. Increased freedom for students allowed them to pass the code; however, the perception of the code after 1965 was that it was an administrative measure — not a student-owned freedom.
“It’s very important that the students read the honor code as an administrative imposition as opposed to something that boiled up from the students,” Stameshkin said. “The students felt often as if the administration was kind of the enemy. They wanted to be adults and they felt the administration was treating them like children—you have to be in at this hour and all that — it wasn’t paranoia, but the students felt that way about a lot of things.”
The Campus reported in March 1968, three years after the code passed, that the student Honor Board was worried about the new system’s efficacy. The board had only heard six cases since 1965, and three of those were in the 1967-68 year. Two cases resulted in convictions, and only one of the six cases was because of a report submitted by another student. “This the board felt suggests either that only two students have cheated in the last three years, or that students have not accepted the responsibilities implicit in the system,” reported this newspaper.
The Honor Board, as a result, began to consider changing the constitution of the new Honor Code from passive acceptance of the code to hold responsible a student who did not report a violation.
A decade later, in January 1976, the student body approved by a landslide the revisions proposed by a committee on the honor system. There were dual changes: students now had a moral obligation to report cheating, moving away from the ambiguous language of the original code, and also proctors would be allowed in some cases with the specific authorization of the Judicial Review Board. Even under the best of circumstances, O’Brien said in a recent interview, getting students to report their peers may be asking too much.
“My guess is that [peer-reporting] never works terribly well, unless you’re in a highly codified organization like the military academy,” O’Brien said. “I’m not even so sure how well it worked at Princeton … it’s a nice thing to have: there’s a certain moral responsibility, and I love the idea of going up to somebody else and saying, ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ But I suspect it doesn’t happen very often.”
It is difficult to assess whether the code cut down on cheating, as suggested by research that shows colleges with an honor code have less self-reported cheating by students. On that front, Emeritus Dean of Advising and Assistant Professor of American Studies Karl Lindholm ’67 said the Honor Code did not hurt and probably helped.
“I remember thinking it was a great idea. I don’t think there was any greater level of cheating than when the exams were tightly proctored,” Lindholm said. “It was almost a challenge to see if you could beat the system then,” with stories of notes written on hands and crib sheets hidden during an exam. “With unproctored exams, I don’t recall any greater level of cheating,” he said.
Approaching Another Vote
In a January survey by the SGA, 33 percent of the student body said they support the Honor Code in principle but that there need to be changes. 59 percent of the 1438 survey respondents said they support it in its current form and about 7 percent said they don’t support it.
Additionally, the Campus published (“Cheating: Hardly a Secret,” Oct. 30, 2013) the results of a survey by Craig Thompson ’14 for the course Economics of Sin where 35 percent of 377 students surveyed admitted to violating the Honor Code at least once in the 2012-13 academic year. 97 percent were not punished.
On Sunday, the discussion came to a head when the SGA Senate approved, in a nearly unanimous vote, the decision to move ahead with a bill that would subject the Honor Code to a biennial student referendum. Per the Honor System's Constitution, 2/3 of the student body must vote, and 2/3 vote in favor, for the change to take effect. The amendment would then need to be ratified by the faculty at large. If the amendment passes, a spring 2016 referendum would give students three options: to vote to maintain the honor code as it stands, to eliminate it or to revise it. A majority in favor of revision would cause the Honor Code committee to survey opinions during a two-week revision process. Students would then vote on the revised Honor Code to either approve it, to maintain the original code, or to eliminate the code.
Student Co-Chair of Community Council Ben Bogin ’15 was an impetus behind the SGA proposal and said fighting atrophy was a goal. “The idea behind our method is to encourage people to continue talking about the Honor Code after they sign it as a first-year,” Bogin wrote in an email. “The Honor Code only works if it’s a living, breathing document that people cherish and take seriously. We’re trying to breathe a little more life into it.”
SGA Director of Academic Affairs Cate Costley ’15 added that the idea is to reclaim the Honor Code as a document students care about and take ownership of.
“Through conversations and debates, we settled on a schoolwide vote to try to solicit the voices of our peers and to see what they think,” Costley said. “And having an edge to it with the possibility of eliminating the Honor Code is to say to people, ‘Let’s not take this document for granted.’”
Vice President for Student Affairs, Dean of the College and Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Architecture Katy Smith Abbott said she believes discussion has also been sparked by the decision in the Economics Department to proctor exams in introductory classes starting last spring.
“It’s not that proctoring hasn’t been an option for faculty — it has been — but it’s required a certain kind of approval process that most people thought was not necessary or wasn’t in the spirit of the Honor Code,” Smith Abbott said. “And I think when that decision was made (thoughtfully, and at great length) by the Economics Department, it meant that a larger number of students were being exposed to the question of whether the Honor Code is working.”
Smith Abbott also said that the code could possibly fail in a referendum, based on what she has heard from students.
“I think some of my lack of a firm sense of how it would go is based on the variety of opinions out there right now about whether or not the Honor Code is working,” she said. “I think if we have entered into a period where more students, through their own experience or inherited wisdom, think the Honor Code isn’t working, we could see it fail.”
Several on Community Council, according to Smith Abbott, have raised doubts about the wisdom of a biennial survey in which the Honor Code could be eliminated.
“I think a lot of folks on Community Council — and I have mixed feelings about this — felt that those are insurmountable odds that, if two years later, you have two classes of students who have never lived with an Honor Code,” Smith Abbott said. “What’s their investment in bringing it back? Why are we putting that on them by saying, ‘[An honor code] worked for some people and didn’t work for others, but it’s on you to decide to overwhelmingly vote it back into existence?’”
Bogin, however, said that that he is not worried about failure and that the discussion of the code’s relevance is worth having through a referendum.
“I think that it’s incredibly unlikely that the Honor Code would fail in a vote. According to our most recent student survey, in which about 60 percent of the student body voted, 92 percent supported the continued existence of the Honor Code,” Bogin wrote. “I also think that it’s important to say that if something isn’t working, and everybody agrees, we should be able to get rid of it. It’s hard to say that the Honor Code is student owned if students don’t have the power to get rid of it.”
Hawley, who was at Middlebury during the Honor Code debate, said renewed attention to the code is not a bad thing.
“I think the cycle of concern is probably the best thing, whatever the outcome, because it’s heightening student awareness of how it’s my responsibility to do my own work. I don’t think there’s anything that would prove that a certain kind of honor code produces more honor,” Hawley said. “It’s sort of what Jefferson said about the American Constitution: it should be revisited; there should be at least a thread of revolution every 20 years to keep attention fresh on what the values are. I think raising the climate of concern about it is probably the most important thing with respect to honor, not necessarily what code you have written down.”
(03/12/15 12:14am)
In my junior year in high school, I used to believe that people who didn’t choose to come out to their friends and family were part of the problem. Their “being in the closet” was detrimental to the visibility of LGBT+ people in the world and, therefore, was slowing down the biggest challenge for all queer folk, marriage equality. I, too, used to believe that marriage equality was the most pressing gay issue. Making myself visible to the public and striving for marriage made me one of them. I was playing up to hetero-ideals of success in life and relationships. Now, I see how this desire to assimilate is presented in today’s politics and my personal dialogue about the importance of coming out.
Recently, the Obama administration formally supported nationwide gay marriage, and President Obama included gay Americans in his speech at 50th Anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma Alabama. He says, “We are the gay Americans whose blood ran on the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge.” I cannot help but tear up. Our President was claiming my gay identity as both American and his. I found this part of his speech remarkable and daring. How would the American public respond? How could anyone possibly disagree?
Working under the model “the personal is political,” it would make sense why the concept of being out is such a public (read: straight) affair, when in reality “being in the closet” is a private (read: queer) affair. In order for there to be political progress, a population of people need to first identify as LGBT+. The little Harvey Milk in me wanted to believe that all struggles for the LGBTQ community would disappear if we were out and about and proud. But also I’ve begun to see violence in having people come out in order to gain these human rights because “out-ness” comes with privilege. Even though Obama’s speech made me want to stand up with him and own my American-ness and sexuality in the same sentence, I was exercising a type of privilege and putting myself into a box. I found myself becoming “normal” to the American public. Is that the point of marriage equality? To normalize queer folk?
A part of marriage equality is having queer people assimilate to heteronormative standards of relationships. There is no more room for sexual liberation at the center of queer life. Instead, marriage equality shows that we are just like them when, in fact, we aren’t. We should not be fighting for the very institutions that uphold heteronormative values against us. Marriage shouldn’t be the sacred center of equality for the LGBT community. We do not have to tone ourselves down. We do not have to get married in order to have meaningful relationships. We do not have to oppress ourselves for who we are.
This argument obviously becomes more complicated when presented with same-sex couples adopting children and hospital visiting rights, but I believe that those issues can be solved without marriage equality. Politics aren’t being changed in our favor; instead, we are becoming the exception to the rule, our rights and perspectives are still being marginalized as a whole. This obsession with coming out and claiming marital rights is contradictory to the diversity within the queer community. Queer people endure all types of job, education, medical and housing discrimination before they can even start to worry about marriage. Some can’t even come out without fearing for their lives.
These aspects of the queer community put in perspective how marriage equality and coming out are issues that are too caught up in marketing our identities to the public than catering to the actual people affected. So now I find no importance in coming out or marriage equality. There must be other ways in which we can educate the American public about us without perpetuating our own oppression. There must be other ways for our same-sex relationships to hold their importance on paper without assimilating to marriage.
(03/11/15 11:12pm)
Mesopotamia was the birthplace of civilization. Its fertile lands allowed for the first instances of agriculture and organized society. From between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris emerged the first empires. From within that crescent of land came the first accounts of writing and the rest, as they say, is history.
The Islamic State’s indisputably effective media arm wielded yet another masterstroke by announcing that it had bulldozed the ancient Assyrian archeological site at Nimrud, Iraq. Though burning people in cages, selling women and children as sex slaves, throwing gays off buildings and countless beheadings had rightly outraged many the world over, these recent attacks on the very foundations of human civilization struck a whole new nerve.
But the question is whether it is any worse. Does reconfiguring stone, when imbued with cultural connotations trump exterminating a living person? The tangible human abuses carried out by the group have become so commonplace that each new beheading loses relative shock-value. They tried doing several (21) at once in Libya, but this only furthered the impression that banality had attached itself to barbarity. The blatant destruction of cultural artifacts is just the latest way of them grabbing our attention, and it worked.
UNESCO declared it a war crime and public figures declared their outrage but the IS has been committing war crimes on a daily basis. Further, the great stone edifices at Nimrud and other places, as beautiful and important as they are were, were doubtlessly constructed under slave-labor and a monstrously oppressive regime, the likes of which the IS would love to emulate.
The Islamic State’s espoused ideology would suggest that they were merely eradicating false idols, cleansing their newly appropriated lands of any pre-Mohammedan religion. But it would take a special sort of fool to sincerely believe that the militants think that Iraqis were still going around worshipping winged bulls with human faces. The Islamic State may be driven by heinous Wahhabi fundamentalism but their modus operandi is terrorist, and terror is employed in order to provoke. It is unlikely that anything they do will force President Obama’s hand into declaring total war but actions like these can nonetheless provoke serious questions for us in the West, the crimes’ intended audience.
We live in a world where horror is commonplace if not immediate. Our interconnected global space hosts countless abuses each day. Our media and our choice of media select which atrocities we perceive as being especially awful. The destruction of artifacts, culture and history strikes us as particularly bad, not necessarily because it is worse, but simply because it is rarer. We have been over-saturated with violence to the point where the sight of broken stones hurts more than that of broken bones.
I heard a story once from a man, an actor, who had run away from the Ayatollah’s regime in Iran. He said how he had a come across a man cleaning a bathroom once who seemed especially jovial. The actor was having a rough day and asked the man to what he owed his happiness. The man explained how he had a successful business that left him feeling unsatisfied. So one day, he quit his job and swore to never listen or watch the news ever again. And thus, he found joy.
Absolute denial might not be the best way forward but rather one should be aware that when dealing with a group like the IS, outrage begets horror. Reaction only fuels their fire further. Their media output is astonishingly sophisticated and ruthlessly exploits our own and the media’s complicity in the spread of their barbarity.
Increasingly, western powers seem unable to articulate what it is that we believe in. We know what it is that we dislike, yet we fail to defeat it. Progress cannot solely be negative. We need to believe in something. Perhaps that something would be the defense of some conception of civilization, or perhaps it would simply be the integrity of individual persons. The question asked in the title is one for each of us to ponder. Its answer might indeed frame the intellectual standpoint of our age.
(03/04/15 7:04pm)
In light of the recent release of 50 Shades of Grey and the upcoming Porn Party at the Queer Studies House, we thought a good topic for this week would be a list of porn and kink-related vocabulary and their misconceptions. Some of the terms you will find are very commonplace while others are not.
The reason we think this list is valuable is because what people find attractive and sexually enjoyable varies in many ways, aside from just sexual orientation. Sex positivity is all about remembering to respect everyone’s desires and sexual interests instead of shaming them. Context is a huge part of something being sexy or unsexy, and there are no rules to what should or should not enjoy. As long as everything is safe, consensual, informed and controlled, there is not a reason people should feel shame for how they manage their sex lives, from abstinence to pony play.
Kink and Fetish
The difference between a kink and a fetish is often unknown. A kink is more activity and behavior-oriented while a fetish is more focused on an object or part of the body. For example, a foot fetish is sexual enjoyment focused around a person’s feet and watersports refers to the fetish of sexual enjoyment focused on urine. Role play (where partners adopt personas that differ from their own) and enjoying spanking during sex are kinks, or can be described as kinky. While the two terms often appear in similar places they are not the same thing.
BDSM (Short for BD/DS/SM)
BDSM is usually regarded in society as a taboo practice because of its reputation for being dangerous and the result of trauma. However, liking BDSM is not the result of a trauma and, much like any other sexual practice, there are safer and less safe ways to do it. Many people engage in some form of BDSM, whether it is blindfolding or flogging. BDSM is all about deriving pleasure from pain and suspense. Consent is crucial to BDSM. That means having a safe word (a word likely not to come up in conversation during sexual activity, which alerts that a person is nearing or has reached their maximum comfort zone). Safe words are also great for communication in any sexual activity, not just BDSM.
Pony Play
A style of role-play in which the roles are divided into masters/riders and ponies. There are no actual animals involved; rather, the two roles reflect the power dynamic between horse riders and their horses. Many pony play activities also mimic those of actual horse riders and horses, such as washing or sex positions that resemble riding.
Strapadictomy
The act of strapping on a dildo in preparation for vaginal or anal penetration. Many people find using strap-ons to be an activity reserved for lesbian couples. However, many men (including heterosexuals) enjoy having their partners penetrate them anally, and may very well use a strap-on. Strap-ons and dildos are also a common tool used by transgender people.
Erotic asphyxiation
Arousal resulting from intentional restriction of oxygen to brain. Sometimes referred to as breathe control play, many people find erotic asphyxiation to be an exhilarating activity. As long as things are monitored appropriately, everything is consensual and there is not an excessive aggression with the restraints or forces used, there should be no sign for alarm. Caution is always advised, most especially with autoerotic asphyxiation in where the person restricts their own breathing and may be alone.
Masturbation
The act of giving oneself sexual pleasure. Many forget that masturbation, while commonplace in today’s American culture, masturbation was once seen as a sinful sexual deviancy and still is in many places in the world. Much like we have learned that masturbation does not prevent someone from being a happy and healthy individual we hope it carries to other practices society views as wrong and we can have open conversations about sex.
(03/04/15 7:01pm)
This past weekend, MiddCORE launched their first Springboard Weekend, taking a program that is usually taught during summer or in a J-term course, and packing it into a weekend. In groups of three to four, students had three days to identify a campus issue, research the problem and do a presentational pitch to Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of the College Katy Smith Abbott, among other Middlebury faculty. Students addressed campus issues such as social life, the athletic divide and lack of sex- positive education and introverted spaces.
Set in the Kirk Alumni House, the crash course on leadership and innovation included talks given by Former COO of Life is Good Roy Hefferman, Founder of LeaderScope Consulting Mary Hurlie, Cofounder of Curious Industries Blake Glenn, Instructor in Persuasive Communication Mike Kiernan and MiddCORE Marketing Director EJ Bartlett.
MiddCORE has been growing exponentially with numerous additions to the entrepreneurial program. They have just recently opened their own office on campus located in DKE Alumni House next to the Axinn Center at Starr Library and have seen an influx of funding and guest speakers from administration and donors who value the program’s efforts.
MiddCORE promotes itself as Middlebury’s innovative summer and J-term program for undergraduates and recent graduates. The program instills in its students real-world life skills — such as leadership, collaboration, negotiation, networking, communication, and decision-making, among others. MiddCORE is most well-known for its four-week intensive summer program in which students reside in Tahoe, Sierra Nevada College where they work with upwards of 40 highly qualified and successful mentors, attend 52 hands-on skill-based workshops, spend 20 hours developing their creative ideas and enjoy 60 meals with their mentors. The impressive list of mentors from an array of backgrounds and successes include familiar names such as Marc Randolph, Co-Founder and former CEO of Netflix; Heffernan; and former governors, Company CEO’s, Executives, Directors, artists, and journalists.
In addition to a plethora of external mentors, many of Middlebury’s own faculty members are deeply invested in the program. Associate Professor of Economics Jessica Holmes also serves as the leading Director of MiddCORE. Holmes views MiddCORE’s entrepreneurial education as coinciding cohesively with Middlebury’s mission statement.
She suggests that MiddCORE, like the College articulates in its mission statement, strives to “cultivate the intellectual, creative, physical, ethical, and social qualities essential for leadership in a rapidly changing global community.”
Holmes added that students are in need of opportunities to gain better leadership and innovative skills.
“This generation is seeking out the toolkits and mentorship that will help them achieve greater impact in the world,” Holmes said.
MiddCORE appears to be the program and opportunity to do so. MiddCORE creates an environment that challenges students to test themselves and apply their liberal arts education to real life strategic problems and scenarios. It is argued that MiddCORE is not changing the academic mission at the College, but rather accompanying it. While many see the benefits reaped from MiddCORE, others challenge it, critiquing that it may be a step away from a liberal art education and not holding true to the College’s disciplines.
No other NESCACs offer a program like MiddCORE, making the application process extremely competitive and selective.
According to Holmes, “MiddCORE is a real differentiator for Middlebury.”
Students at the College are able to apply to the J-term session for free, where as the Tahoe program, open to students and grads from other schools, costs roughly $10,000. While some need-based financial aid is available only to students already on the College’s financial aid, scholarships are limited and the price differentiation can be a major setback for students interested in participating during the summer. A complaint voiced by students around campus is the lack of availability and limited acceptance to the highly- demanded program.
“If there is such a high number of credible student applicants, why can’t they add more sessions or expand the program to accommodate us?” a student rejected from the J-term program said, who wished to remain anonymous.
Many students do not have the means to answer the large expense of the Tahoe session, and find themselves unable to ever participate if they could not otherwise participate in the free J-term session.
“We are currently limited by a staff that is shrinking, not growing,” Holmes said. “So for now, we are focused on ensuring high quality J-term and summer MiddCORE immersion experiences for all our students and mentors.”
The program is extremely demanding, time-consuming and challenging. Students work long hours, daily, for four weeks straight, proving especially trying in J-term when many of their peers are enjoying the relaxed nature of taking one class. That said, nearly all students interviewed after their MiddCORE experience spoke positively and found the end results vastly more rewarding than tolling.
“[MiddCORE] has affected me in powerful ways. I didn’t really understand what ‘failing forward’ meant when this program started…I’m more excited than ever to take risks and more willing to accept the possibility of failure,” one recent participant said.
In incorporating an innovative and distinctive new style of teaching and learning, MiddCORE is inevitably greeted with contrasting opinions. A reoccurring thought gathered among students interviewed who had not participated was that MiddCORE is too much of a time commitment in addition to being expensive: “I think it is a cool idea and program, but I just don’t have the time to dedicate four weeks out of my summer when I could be working,” shared one student at the College.
Despite critique, the influx in applications and competition for acceptance as well as the demand for program growth are indisputable. Such attributes are representative of the positive effects and influence MiddCORE has on its students.
“The most rewarding part of MiddCORE was learning that I have creative capabilities to contribute to the world. It was about rediscovering my skills and passions and combining them together to bring about some innovation into society,” another MiddCORE participant said.
An aspiration for the program would be to relinquish some of the financial stresses for students with an increase in donations, but until then, directors are focused on bettering the program internally. MiddCORE is providing students with a unique opportunity to stray from traditional curriculum and initiate creative ideas to impact our world.
(03/04/15 6:53pm)
It was a Sunday afternoon like any other, and I found myself sitting in a Proctor booth chatting with some good friends about sex in college. During my time at Middlebury, I’ve really enjoyed the authenticity of such conversations:
“Neither of us came, but it is still a
great memory.”
“It took me 21 years to have an orgasm with a partner.”
“Threesomes.”
“I was just too tired...”
“That’s weird, right?”
“I’m not playing that game.”
“It was casual, but consent was still
really important.”
“OMG THE NOISES.”
I think that the reason my friends and I are able to discuss sex so bluntly has to do with the fact that we deeply trust one another. We have created a space for ourselves where we can openly admit that sometimes our
(s)expectations do not align with our lived realities. From my point of view, there is a huge void on this campus when it comes to sex positivity, and I would like to change that.
This column is my attempt to foster conversations about consensual sexuality among a wider Middlebury audience. My goal is simple: to create a space where Middlebury students can learn through the anonymous (s)experiences of their peers. So I have set up an email account (greatsexpectations@aol.com) where students can submit stories about sex in college. Each week, I will select one or two stories, which will be anonymously published in that week’s edition of the Campus.
This column is YOUR column; I’m merely the moderator. This column will be an inclusive, supportive space that welcomes a variety of identifications and experiences. And if you identify as asexual or abstinent, I would love to (anonymously) share your
perspectives, too.
If you want to anonymously add your voice to this conversation, please submit a 300-word story to greatsexpectations@aol.com. When you are sharing, please make note of how consent functioned in your story, even if that is just in a sentence or two (because it is so important!). I look forward to reading and publishing your submissions each week, and to kick off this adventure, here’s an anonymous story from a current Middlebury student (who is also the most honest sexual storyteller I have ever met):
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Two summers ago, I was working on the Appalachian Trail, giving out trail information and telling people to stop waiting around at moose crossing signs. Most of the people I hung out with were young twenty-somethings who lived in the woods, or else thru-hikers that had been hiking for months. In other words, the place was a sexual
tension minefield.
One evening, my friend and I hiked to a nearby campsite where we were soon joined by two thru-hikers, Veggie Tales and Brightside. Before long we were playing cards and listening to their stories about the trail.
At some point, I became aware of Brightside’s knee against mine. Before I knew it, our friends had gone to bed and we were left alone. After half a second of small talk, I leaned over to kiss him, but as I did so I was a hit by a smell so acrid and pungent I could not bridge the gap. He noticed my hesitation and explained that in his excitement at the prospect of hanging out with (cleanish) girls he had bathed himself with bottle of full strength bug spray, hoping to mask his body odor. I was touched by the gesture, or maybe a little high from the DEET, and decided to check “hook up with a thru-hiker” off my bucket list.
We made out for a while, and then Brightside made it clear he wanted to do more. Making out was fun, but I started to imagine lichen growing on this guy’s pubes and decided to call it quits. Despite being desperately horny, Brightside did not push it. He kissed my cheek and went to bed. Now on hikes that seem impossibly long or heinously buggy, I remember our encounter and laugh, and remind myself to always look on the bright side.
(02/26/15 3:01am)
The lecture hall was already packed ten minutes before Dr. Tyrone Hayes, a squat man with a prominent kinky beard, large silver dangle earrings,and an engaging aura of sassy humor, started his story. Over 150 students squeezed into the room even after the seats had all been taken, settling in the aisles and leaning against the walls, eager to learn about his controversial findings on the health consequences of atrazine, a common herbicide applied to corn.
Hayes, a professor of integrative biology at University of California Berkeley, was chosen as this year's Scott A. Margolin '99 lecturer in Environmental Affairs. His presentation, “From Silent Spring to Silent Night: A Tale of Toads and Men", took place in Bi-Hall last Thursday evening.
Hayes’ personal narrative began describing his curiosity as a little boy. He grew up as one of several children in a household with an annual income of $9,000, studying frogs in a little patch of forest by his grandmother’s home. He went on to earn an undergraduate degree in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard, and started teaching at UC Berkeley following his doctoral and postdoctoral work on the role of hormones in amphibian responses to environmental cues.
After the Swiss agribusiness, Syngenta, approached Hayes to test their product, atrazine, in 1997, he found that the chemical acts as a strong endocrine disruptor that adversely affects reproduction and health. His laboratory work with frogs revealed that atrazine demasculinizes and feminizes a significant percentage of exposed males at concentrations as low as 0.1 ppb.
Because the herbicide interferes with the secretion of androgen, a hormone crucial for male development, and enhances the production and secretion of estrogen, a female hormone, the amphibians lose their distinguishing sexual features. Atrazine-exposed male frogs had lower semen counts and malformed testes; some even developed female ovaries and generated eggs. Individuals that were once biological males began behaving and reproducing like females. The subjects also had a higher risk of developing estrogen-induced cancers.
Given that atrazine now contaminates vast expanses of fields and waterways, Hayes’ research has immense implications for environmental and human well-being. Amphibians are in rapid decline, as the title of his talk suggests. "Silent Night" refers to the disappearance of "ribbit"-ing frogs. Atrazine could be responsible for this. By drastically changing the population's sex ratio, Hayes blamed atrazine for lowering the procreation rates of amphibians.
Human studies have also shown a correlation between exposure to atrazine and reproductive problems. Because reproductive mechanisms and results derived from amphibians are comparable across vertebrate classes, the demasculinizing, feminizing, and carcinogenic repercussions of the chemical could play a part in decreasing fertility and increasing cancer in humans.
These health impacts also intersect with issues of social injustice and structural violence. Workers who labor on farms that use atrazine belong to disadvantaged racial and socioeconomic minorities who do not have the means to minimize exposure to the chemical or deal with its effects. Additionally, poorer groups are more vulnerable to exposure through water because they cannot afford sophisticated filtration systems.
Syngenta, however, claims that atrazine is harmless. It has funded over 7,000 studies that conclude that there is insufficient evidence to identify the chemical as the cause of abnormalities relating to endocrine disruption. On the basis of his identity as an eccentric nonwhite producer of knowledge, the company has attempted to discredit Hayes and stop him from publishing his findings. It insists that his methodology is flawed, his sample sizes too small. It has even gone as far as investigating his background, plotting to ensnare him in a trap, and threatening violence against his family.
The EPA has directly stated that the social ramifications of agricultural chemicals have to be considered in the context of their economic value. Although Hayes has not backed down from speaking against the agrichemical industry and continues to irk it by propagating his research in a plethora of biological and general interest publications, he realizes that the data alone has little power. “It’s not about science,” he said. “It’s about politics and economics.”
Associate Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry & Environmental Studies Molly Costanza-Robinson, who suggested Hayes as this year’s speaker, was pleased with the lecture. “He brought the science to life. He made it personal,” she said. “It’s only a subset of scientists that are both amazing in the science, but then also really speak to the broader environmental studies. I’ve known of his work for a long, long time. He’s a hero of mine. I thought he would be perfect. We felt like he would be able to bring in a lot of folk from the environmental justice aspect, from chemistry, from biology.”
Molecular biology major Emily Hoff ’15 also enjoyed the talk. “He did a good job taking a very scientific argument and creating it into a story that had scientific fact incorporated into something that was accessible to the general population,” she said.
She pointed out that Hayes’ lecture was important because it raised awareness about the environmental hazards we are exposed to daily. “My biggest takeaway was to be conscious of what I personally expose myself to,” she said. “It’s really important to realize that although these chemicals on the surface level might impact the growth of crops in a positive way, they can have some severe ramifications on human health and the health of the environment.”
(02/26/15 1:53am)
Over the last few months, thanks to the Supreme Court declining to take up the marriage equality petitions before it in October, a tidal wave of judicial decisions in favor of marriage equality has swept across the nation’s courts, expanding the number of states where same-sex marriage is legal to 37.
More than 70 percent of Americans now live in a state where same-sex marriage is legal. Poll after poll conducted in recent months continue to show a solid majority of Americans, including an overwhelming 80 percent of those under 30, in support of marriage equality.
This torrid pace of progress, combined with a likely Supreme Court ruling establishing a national constitutional right to same-sex marriage this June, has led some people to declare victory in the civil rights movement of our generation.
It is true that the rapidly evolving attitude around marriage equality over the last two decades is without precedent in the history of American society.
Twenty years ago, just a quarter of Americans supported the legalization of same-sex marriage and a Democratic president signed into law, with wide bipartisan support from Congress, a bill that pre-emptively prohibited federal benefits from being conferred upon same-sex married couples. Today, support for marriage equality has more than doubled and that law, better known as DOMA, has been declared unconstitutional.
By every measure, the LGBT community has won the battle for marriage equality. But even as we celebrate all this progress, I am wary of what will happen after this June, after marriage equality becomes the law of the land, after the dust has settled on all the exciting legal battles and after the big name lawyers have moved on to the next big case.
Yes, it is a wonderful thing and a giant step forward that every American will be able to join in the sacred union with whomever they love and receive the benefits and bear the burdens of that contract. But just as the movement for equality between the races lags on decades after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the movement for LGBT equality is about so much more than winning the legal fight on same-sex marriage.
It is about protecting LGBT teens from discrimination and bullying in their schools and their homes. Today, LGBT youths are four times more likely to attempt suicide and as much as 40 percent of homeless youths identity as LGBT. Marriage means little to you if you’ve just been kicked out of your house or are harassed by your peers for being different.
It is about protecting LGBT workers from discrimination at their workplace. Today, employers can fire workers based on their sexual orientation in 29 states and based on their gender identity in 35. Marriage means little to you if you’re struggling to feed yourself because your homophobic boss just gave you a pink slip.
It is about protecting the right of a loved one to visit their same-sex partner in the hospital when he or she is sick, for same-sex couples to jointly adopt children and start a normal family together and for crimes committed against someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity to be prosecuted exactly as they are: hate crimes. It is about addressing a new HIV crisis in the LGBT community, one that has caused the infection rate among young gay and bisexual men to rise 22 percent between 2008 and 2010 and disproportionately affects African-Americans and Latinos.
Without all these civil protections from discrimination and more concentrated efforts to alleviate the real, substantive plight of LGBT life in America, life as an LGBT individual will still lack the full dignity it deserves, for the right to marry is nothing but an empty shell if that is where progress stops.
Marriage equality has galvanized the nation because it is a straightforward issue and has a clear finish line. That finish line is now in sight but let’s not delude ourselves in the excitement of the moment and declare the battle over. Breaking down all these remaining legal and social barriers will require just as much energy, patience, and willpower as has been put into the battle for marriage equality, if not more.
As the great Winston Churchill once said: “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
(02/25/15 2:07pm)
Hundreds of Vermonters recently debated a new bill on gun control. The bill hopes to expand background checks and bar people considered mentally ill from carrying a weapon alongside imposing other restrictions on gun ownership.
The Senate Bill 31 was met with much opposition as the largest crowd descended on the State House since the Vermont Civil Union Bill - which granted the full benefits of marriage to same-sex couples - was debated and passed 15 years ago. The 43 people who signed up to speak in favor of the bill were outnumbered by the 65 who spoke against it.
Critics of the bill were concerned that the new legislation was against the spirit of the Vermont Constitution and the Sportsmen Bill of Rights. Many feared it was the first step on a slippery slope which would eventually lead to gun confiscation.
Bill Moore of Vermont Traditions Coalition emphasized that “we don’t need them in the safest state in the nation.”
FBI figures show that with only 115 violent crimes per 100,000 - a third of the national average - Vermont was indeed the safest state in 2013.
The Gun Owners of Vermont issued a statement in which it expressed concerns over possible inclusion of Veterans who have returned home from Desert Storm and sought counseling at the Veteran’s Administration among people who might be prohibited from accessing a gun in case the bill passes and is made into a law.
Ann Braden, President of the anti-gun group Gun Sense Vermont, was adamant that the legislation would not impede on the Second Amendment rights of Vermonters. She had announced in May of last year that the group would focus on the issue of introducing universal background checks for firearms sold in the state.
“It’s focused exclusively on keeping guns out of the hands of convicted abusers, violent felons, and drug traffickers,” Braden said.
The Green Mountain state, which prides itself on being the most liberal state in the country, is also among the most protective of its right to bear arms. It is one of only three states which allow anyone to carry concealed weapons without a permit. It also has a firearms preemption law that prevents cities or counties from enforcing gun laws that are more restrictive than state law.
The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 renewed debate over gun control laws in Vermont but in spite of repeated attempts by many in the House of Representatives, such as former Rep. Linda Waite-Simpson of Essex, to introduce gun-control laws the bills have failed to garner enough votes and often have not even made it to the House Floor.
Gov. Peter Shumlin attributes Vermonters’ passion for guns to “years and years of Vermonters respecting guns as a tool to manage wildlife and to put food on the table.” Gov. Shumlin is among the most prominent pro-gun voices in the state, as he himself was raised in a hunting family.
“The current laws that Vermont has in place around guns serve us well,” Shumlin said in a news conference held at the end of last month. He wanted the Legislature to focus on affordability, property taxes and health care costs instead of debating issues that “divide us,” the Burlington Free Press reported.
(02/19/15 1:44am)
When people say they are opposed to homosexuality, what are they talking about? What is different about the homosexual lifestyle? Really, the only distinguishing factor of the homosexual lifestyle is the sex, and when people say they’re opposed to homosexuality or even just uncomfortable, really they mean they are opposed to gay sex.
Now I’m not saying we should all just obsess over gay sex and how amazing it is (although it most definitely can be). But it is worth unpacking what it means to say you have a problem with homosexuality.
Typically, when people think about homosexuality, they think about male homosexuality. And when people think about male homosexuality, they think about anal sex and then everyone is uncomfortable and being gay is wrong and unnatural. However, aside from the erasure of lesbian sex lives, it still isn’t appropriate to say that gay sex is anal sex.
Firstly, there are lots of straight men and women who engage in either role of anal sex with their partners. Trust me. Either role. Lots. Considering that, it’s odd that most anti-sodomy laws legislation against anal sex are aimed at gay men, and often in less tolerant countries it’s only gay men who are prosecuted for breaking those laws.
Then, there’s the argument that okay, there are some heterosexual deviants, but they have the option of engaging in normal sex. Gay men can only have anal sex, and that’s why it’s unnatural. Anal sex doesn’t lead to procreation so we aren’t meant to have it. The vagina is meant to take the penis.
And this is where a lot of people really are just missing the point of sex. Firstly, the purpose of vaginas is not to ‘take’ a penis. Vaginas are capable of a lot, and they have a different use for everyone who has them. This doesn’t go to say that there aren’t people for whom sex is only to create children and chose not to have it otherwise. There are and that’s awesome.
But the reality of the vast majority of people is that we have children for a multitude of reasons, such as pleasure and forming intimate bonds with our partners.
There are many different kinds of people who can’t have children from having sex: older people, people who’ve had ovarian cancer, people who are naturally sterile, people who aren’t ready for kids, people don’t ever want kids. The list goes on and if you’re going to say the natural thing to do is make babies, then you’re saying the vast majority of people aren’t doing it right.
Sex isn’t just about having children, and in having sex people are going to do a wide variety of things outside of vaginal penetrative sex, like blowjobs. Oral sex is everywhere in our society. It’s referenced in songs and television. People, especially college students, joke about it in their casual conversations. And while it’s not something everyone is into, it’s definitely culturally accepted. So if blowjobs are fine, why is it that two men having anal sex so weird. Thus, the problem isn’t gay sex, because straight sex has all the same things.
The truth is, sex is weird. Like, all sex. Objectively, who thought it was a good idea to say, let’s get naked, rub up on each other, rub tongues, and put our body fluids into each other? It’s funny -looking and gross. But as we get older, we try things and many of us think it’s great, so we do it. The problem is when you hear about something different. Often, we equate things being different to things being unnatural, and we equate things being different to things being wrong. And when we say being queer is having gay sex and that makes you wrong, it’s stressing and destructive to a person. But gay sex is just sex with gay people and being gay isn’t just having gay anal sex. In fact, many gay men choose to not engage in anal sex at all.
Gay people can hold hands, maybe drink some soda, sing along to the radio, have a bowel movement. There’s no gay lifestyle. Gay people are just people who are gay and when a person says they are against homosexuality, you aren’t really saying anything except that you don’t really know what homosexuality is.
