Arti­cle   Wellesley’s State­ment   My Response to Welles­ley   Hate Mail

> —-Orig­i­nal Mes­sage Fol­lows—-
> From: [Name redacted]
> To: ‘Sun­jay Dixit’
> Sub­ject: RE: FW: from a welles­ley GIRL
> Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 21:28:20 –0500
>
> Dear Jay,
>
> Thank you so much for respond­ing to
> my e-mail. I wish, how­ever that you
> would take my com­ments to heart — namely
> in the most dis­turb­ing facts about the arti­cle:
>
> 1. The turbo charged erotic les­bian: Where is there
> one healthy, balanced,or roman­tic detail about women’s rela­tion­ships
> on cam­pus? The most bla­tant exam­ples are the one woman who com­ments
> that les­bian­ism on cam­pus is due to some “prison effect” where, as I
> said in my e-mail, women turn on each other like inces­tual
> beasts. The sec­ond is in the state­ment where the
> woman talks about how her and her friend’s get
> drunk one night and all start mak­ing out.
> Other than that, you cite the Dyke Ball and the
> “Naked Party” – both of course, hyper sex­u­al­ized
> atmos­pheres. I am not say­ing that what you
> reported is not true, because it IS! What I
> am upset about is the pre­sen­ta­tion of facts,
> which as you prob­a­bly well know in jour­nal­ism,
> is about 75% of the story.
> You bla­tantly leave out any sweet or endear­ing
> qual­i­ties of les­bian life, and yes, there are many.
>
> 2. The Male Cast: The pro­fes­sor you inter­viewed,
> Ran­dolph, is such a dis­ap­point­ing exam­ple of
> pro­fes­sors at Welles­ley, and not at all rep­re­sen­ta­tive
> of the aca­d­e­mic envi­ron­ment. Con­trary to his belief, it
> is not com­mon­place for stu­dents to bang professor’s in
> their offices. I mean, the young man who worked
> in the food ser­vice that went up into student’s rooms to have a
> quickie between meals? And the male stu­dent that claimed that he slept
> with 20+ women? You make it seem like we couldn’t even eat a meal or
> call Cam­pus Police with­out hav­ing to snatch a male employee for a
> quick fuck.
>

blog post: sWelles­ley Girl

I’m Coleen. Wel­come to A Day in the Life of a Lunatic. I try to update
this daily with mostly mean­ing­less ver­biage that I hope is atleast
enter­tain­ing, if not gram­mat­i­cally cor­rect and fraught with typos. For
the usual intro­duc­tory blurb and back­ground infor­ma­tion on me,
check­out the first page in the loony archives. (And if you’re look­ing
for my dream jour­nal entries, you’re in the wrong place. I know, the
orga­ni­za­tion here is a lit­tle screwed up, but I didn’t intend to have
an online jour­nal, let alone two, when I started this site.)

Okay, so I come into work this morn­ing and what do I find in my inbox?
A mes­sage from Haji Paji, which is in turn a for­ward, sig­nal­ing me to
the fact that Rolling’s Stone’s cur­rent issue has a huge arti­cle in it
titled:

Col­lege Life 2001: The Highly Charged Erotic Life of the Welles­ley Girl

Yeah, “Welles­ley Girl” was in red, just like that.

At first I was a bit ruf­fled at the appar­ent, sen­sa­tion­al­ist premise
of the arti­cle. But what can you expect? It’s Rolling Stone, after
all; you don’t exactly pick it up for the prose. I think the only
Rolling Stone I ever read was an old copy that a friend gave me to
read when I got my wis­dom teef out and couldn’t do any­thing but read
media slop. Oh but what fun slop it is. I espe­cially like the first
pic­ture in the arti­cle… I’m not being sar­cas­tic for once; the girl
is hot! Mmm mmm. Plus she’s got lit­tle boobs, so she gets extra points
from me.

Any­way, I read a scanned-in copy of the arti­cle (or tried, to any­way;
one of the pages doesn’t ren­der and the ends of the pages are all
chopped off. Can I just say: hack job?) and it was bet­ter than I
expected. Sure, they made Welles­ley out to be a brothel where most
women were either sex-starved husband-seekers or rugby-playing dykes,
but there’s a ring of truth to things. HOWEVER. There’s that
par­tic­u­lar ring of truth to almost all under­grad­u­ate insti­tu­tions. And
of course an all-women’s col­lege will nec­es­sar­ily have a dif­fer­ent
dynamic than that of say, an all-men’s school or a co-ed uni­ver­sity.
Size, gen­der dis­tri­b­u­tion (espe­cially when so stark), loca­tion,
aca­d­e­mic rigor… all that will play a huge role in the school’s…
per­son­al­ity, shall we say. Goes with­out saying.

And there are stu­pid chicks every­where. Even at Welles­ley, where
everyone’s pretty much smart book-wise. I remem­ber being in the Sen­ate
bus, which is a partly-school sub­si­dized bus into Boston, with my
still good buddy Michelle, and rolling our eyes at a first-year
gab­bing about Leonardo de Caprio. Yes, ladies and jellyspoons, even at
sWellesley.

So the stu­pid chicks in the arti­cle fol­lowed around some male vis­it­ing
stu­dents on cam­pus with cow-eyes or found cam­pus po’ (cam­pus police,
those hogs) attrac­tive (!) or went there to become an MIT doctor’s
wife. Gag. But these things hap­pen. Every­where, sadly I say.

Wellesley’s a funny place. I think that’s one of the things that
both­ered me about the arti­cle: that the writer was prob­a­bly a guy and
he didn’t go to Welles­ley as most of us went there. As a woman and
full time. That makes a big dif­fer­ence. You ask me to explain what it
was like there and I really can’t explain so that you’ll know… but
if I talk to any Welles­ley alum, we both get that look on our faces
and say, “Well. You know how it was. It was… Welles­ley.” It’s very
strange. I had a good time there but would never want to go back. And
who were all these chicks get­ting laid all the time? Man. It was one
lonely row of years I had there. All I did was study. I’m not kid­ding.
I saw nary a true week­end while I lived on cam­pus. I did party a lot
in junior year, but then, I was “study­ing” abroad in France.

Okay. So that I will not go down in his­tory as the Biggest Hyp­ocrite
Ever, I will admit that I once did such a ran­dom thing as have a
three-some with a pro­fes­sor and my ex-girlfriend, but a) he was never
my pro­fes­sor, b) it was the night before I grad­u­ated, and c) he did
not have a wife and kids in tow, and c) it was on my own terms. It was
for kicks. You know, some­thing crazy to tell the grand­kids, some­thing
wack to say good­bye to the momen­tous under­grad years with. I don’t
think I would have put myself into a weird sit­u­a­tion by doing
some­thing like that out­side of the lim­its I listed above. But to each
her own. Every sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent; even pro­fes­sors are peo­ple (I
used to freak out run­ning into a prof in the bath­room. You pee? I
would be think­ing, mut­ter­ing hello and wash­ing my hands beside her).