Wednesday nights at Dartmouth are for Greek house meetings. I learned that Freshman year when my residence hall would empty out on Wednesday nights as upperclassmen and women made the trek to Webster Avenue.
Fraternities began this long Greek tradition of weekly meetings at Dartmouth in the mid-nineteenth century and coed houses and sororities have perpetuated it.
The first sorority at Dartmouth was Sigma Kappa, formed in 1979. Women sought a haven in sororities. There, they could offer support to each other in a still predominately male college and also have fun.
But what responsibilities do sororities have to the Dartmouth campus? I have asked myself this question many times. As a member of a local house, I believe our responsibility is to provide an alternative social space, where the door and the tap are controlled by women instead of men.
There are other reasons for sororities as well, such as building a support network for women and a base for community service. These reasons allow me to intellectually justify my existence in the system as a whole.
But when you get down to it, I am in a house mostly because it is fun. Lately, however, I find the responsibility aspect creeping into my consciousness more and more.
Last week, in between bouts of laughter, a friend told me that her sorority had hired a male stripper to entertain sisters at Wednesday night meetings. She proceeded to describe his naked gyrations and anatomy in hysterical and rowdy detail, taking apart his body piece by piece.
I listened to her and was amused for a while by the picture in my head of this buff, oiled man dancing in a g-string for a house full of Dartmouth women. But for the last two weeks, this image has started to disturb me.
I am sure that the stripper was hired in the interest of fun, with no bad intentions on the part of the sisters. Regardless, by institutionalizing the objectification of men and hiring the stripper as a male commodity, these women have shown poor judgment.
By employing a stripper, these women made their house into the meat-market that most women so often condemn the fraternities as being.
The bottom line is that a male stripper is an object. Every time we objectify the opposite sex, especially under the auspices of an establishment like a Greek house, we take a step backwards for co-education and gender relations at Dartmouth.
This issue is far from clear-cut. Women have historically been the guests of Dartmouth, not its true daughters. Women have been play-things merely carted up for special events like Winter Carnival.
Because of this, it seems acceptable &emdash; more like playing &emdash; if a sorority employs a male stripper. It would seem much scarier to me if a fraternity employed a female stripper. A female stripper would be perpetuating the already existing and historically-grounded stereotype of women as objects.
Is it really that serious an offense to reverse the double standard? Dartmouth is, after all, a world where men are usually taken seriously and encounter minimal amounts of discrimination due to their gender.
This plays into the age-old question, do two wrongs make a right? The automatic answer we've all been conditioned to give is: "No, of course not."
But it is not that easy. The place of women at Dartmouth is hard to define.
In order to possess Dartmouth and its experiences, women must first appropriate its male-based traditions. But now the women of Dartmouth have accomplished that. And now that we have a firm hold on the male traditions, it is time to change them.
We cannot continue to let the things that challenge our respect for the opposite gender as real, living, breathing, feeling people overtake our sense of dignity &emdash; even in the name of fun.
Women should not and cannot be held responsible for repairing all the gender rifts on this campus, for fixing and normalizing all the interactions between men and women at Dartmouth. But we should also not hold back in condemning our own community for actions that work against common ideals that will benefit us all.
It is time to create our own traditions that celebrate us as women and as integral and crucial parts of the Dartmouth community &emdash; not carry on stale rites that remain the vestiges of a Dartmouth that was once hostile to our very presence.
