It is hard to pinpoint the emotion I felt upon opening this past week's Dartmouth Mirror to Georgia O'Keefe's "Guide to Eating Out" ("Aurora's Guide to Eating Out, Oct. 5). I was expecting something relative to the "Upper Valley," which the front page of the Mirror had led me to believe. Well actually, with Aurora Wells '10's (the actual author's) meticulous focus on the clitoral hood, "Upper Valley" may in fact have hit it right on the nose (pun intended): "It's all good in the hood."
Perhaps it was the graphic that startled any of what's left of my conservative tendencies. I'd call it distasteful, but according to our author, "vayjayjay" is anything but. How excited I was when I found out that the graphic was a scratch and sniff!
At first, I was dismayed. Come on, Aurora, my grandpa reads The Dartmouth! And while he loves to tell me stories about his war days in Korea and how much local women would charge for a "happy ending" ("a pittance, my boy, a pittance"), some things are just not peachy for an audience that includes stoic Men of Dartmouth who barely exclaim "dangnamit" when they lose their tee time at Augusta without blushing.
As an aside, let this response not go without some experience in your field of study; I consider myself an avid "cuntoisseur." For example, I only go down on women with a good vintage ... anything from '37 or '45 has wonderful oak notes and a pleasant tannic bite. If you got that last one, I'm coming for your grandma.
Unexpectedly, most of my peers did not seem uncomfortable with the actual content of the article, but, more so, the context in which they found it. The true question is whether a daily paper, even if in the context of a weekly "Arts" insert (lol, he said insert), is the right resource for something which may be better explored in the privacy of our own rooms, on our laptops, with an adequate supply of tissues and our roommates at class. So now you know, Jon and Teddy, why the door is locked at 3 p.m. after you come home from your 2's. But it's O.K., I'm just standing over a mirror and learning about how things work down there. Very unattractively.
The reaction to the depiction of an apparently quite wide-set vagina/vulva/Grendel complex was for many, surprise. But that was the limit of the reaction, so let us not take this as a sign of Dartmouth's lack of touch with Her students' own bodies. If the article were widely objectionable, there would have been protests, effigy burnings and angry letters to the editor, all culminating in a "Rally Against Vagina," this time led by The Dartmouth Review. Actually, I guess Tim Andreadis could have led that one, too.
Perhaps this lack of true protest demonstrates reaction to the growing liberalization of The Dartmouth, which does a figurative "eating out" of the administration and whoever has been offended most recently.
This small example may be analyzed through a political lens. It seems perfectly fine to insult the more conservative members of the Dartmouth community with openly sexual manifestos, but certainly inexcusable to even mumble a critique of any more liberal minority.
Surely if my last article, "How to Blow Me Like a Well-Trained High-Class Prostitute, Young '11 Girls" were to have been published, my inbox would have been flooded with accusations of chauvinism. I would have been labeled as a man who demands female submission sexually and academically. Which I am.
Your article was wholly with good intention, Ms. Wells; however, it does reveal a certain political atmosphere on campus, one in which the rules of propriety shift from keeping some things private, and others, well, spread-eagled on my daily newspaper. Thank you for the tips. Many found them genuinely helpful, and you used a widely circulated paper to help both genders improve their sex lives. My friend Matt, who didn't even know what a vagina was, extols your expos. "I thought it had teeth. My priest said it has teeth."
And without much of a fomented response, other than some blushing and whispered pooh-poohs, The Dartmouth seems to be, in the court of public opinion, a fecund uterus for the fertilized egg that is your column.
If, without much ostensible activist opposition, we are headed down the road of openly public sexual omniscience, let us put the napkins on our laps. Garcon, one order of steaming hot, moist, supple, sopping wet, fragrant vagina, please! Hold the mayo.
