Each week, a headline either bemoans the delay of marriage or the hookup culture that has purportedly developed as a result of this shift. College-aged women are warned their lives will be unhappy and meaningless without steady relationships. This spring, the "Princeton Mom" encouraged female undergrads to spend their college careers finding husbands so that they would not have to suffer the inevitable "heartbreak" of life as a single postgrad. Over the summer, an article in The New York Times led the reader to believe that most women at elite institutions are dissatisfied with or even harmed by their sex lives, and seemed to criticize the fact that many undergraduate women today are prioritizing careers over relationships. Journalists at almost every media outlet are preoccupied with the potential consequences of changing gender relations and the related hookup culture; with every emerging study, journalists are eager to interpret statistics to declare that this generation is doomed to become full of misandric cat ladies.
With each of these articles comes discussion at Dartmouth. Female students are often interested in or at least amused by what analysts predict their future will look like. Yet in reality, as opposed to in these articles, the Dartmouth female's life does not revolve around her relationships or lack thereof. One is more likely to hear a senior girl fretting about ill-received job applications rather than her relationship status. Real college women don't strategize their sexuality like they would plan out a major or internship.
Yet a recent website gives some credence to the stereotype of the desperate unmarried woman. Stephanie Smith, a reporter for The New York Post, started a website entitled "300sandwiches.com," and it has gone viral. After first seeing the website on Facebook, I heard girls discussing it during rush, standing in line at KAF and while trying to study.
Smith, a woman in her mid-30s, has spent a little over a year making 179 sandwiches as of yesterday. Why? Smith had been dating her boyfriend Eric Schulte for two years, and each morning he would say something along the lines of, "You've been up for 15 minutes and you haven't made me a sandwich?'" This iteration of the long-running sexist joke, which originated in a 1995 Saturday Night Live skit, did not push Smith away. Rather, she finally gave in and made Schulte a sandwich one morning. His response? "You're 300 sandwiches away from an engagement ring."
Whether Smith's boyfriend was joking, Smith took his words literally. From the moment Schulte proposed a proposal, Smith got cooking. In addition to the problematic implications of a woman's domesticity being her qualification for marriage, making hundreds of sandwiches for an engagement ring is ridiculous. If Smith and Schulte claim that the website is entirely lighthearted, I would think that Schulte wouldn't make his girlfriend spend all that time making every single sandwich. Some could argue that by this point Smith and Schulte expect a book deal or their own 15 minutes of fame, but regardless of their current motives, the creation and perpetuation of the website set a bad example to young women everywhere.
Women of Smith's age and younger could look at 300sandwiches.com, see its popularity and decide that such a seemingly unequal pursuit of marriage is normal. If Schulte were making Smith, say, 300 cupcakes to go along with each one of her sandwiches, the website would be less problematic. But he isn't. Smith's efforts thus present a poor role model for today's women because unlike those New York Times stereotypes, her situation isn't hypothetical. Smith has literalized the plight of the unmarried woman.
