Shut Up About ‘Scene,’ Will You?

If you’re anybody who matters, you know that the first issue of “Scene,” Harvard’s magazine of “Society, Style, & Living” debuted in drop-boxes across the campus this month. The cover features a blurry picture of a young man tying his cravat and, apparently, wearing a gigantic, gold cocktail ring. On sight of this piece of man-jewelry, I was deeply impressed. “So, this is how the men at Harvard occupy their time!” I yelped with joy. “I thought they only did math problem sets and made gimp key chains!”

The photographic tableau demonstrates the beauty of the magazine: The men that I know at Harvard tend to be work-obsessed, sensitive, and horridly awkward around women. Indeed, for most of the boys I know here, ladies are individuals whom they alternately fear and want to lose their virginity to. The men of “Scene” are of a different breed, entirely. They’re like young Cary Grants—they don’t understand the concept of a “women’s center,” but they love to “fete on” attractive Harvard women by cooking them gnocchi. They even attend the Westminster Dog Show and wear “dangerous” ties. How cool is that?

The women of “Scene,” although underrepresented in written verbiage, are equally incredible. They only go up to a size 10, and can wear Brooks Brothers shirts without pants—a feat rarely accomplished in the harsh New England winter (then again, one mustn’t forget that those Puritans were of a hardy stock.) “Scene” women are also phenomenally well-versed in sexual lubricant. Who knew that K-Y Jelly is actually gauche? Apparently it’s much like wearing an item from the Mary Kate and Ashley line to the Oscars. These are social niceties that the average Harvard female, desperate to talk to a man without a facial deformity, can only imagine.

The magazine’s mission statement states that the content of the magazine “is representative of the diversity [at Harvard].” The only explanation I can contrive for this quaint aphorism is as follows: Even though a majority of the publication’s editorial staff is involved in some kind of Final Club (58 percent by my calculations—hey, I took “Counting People”), it is amazing what diversity in furry animals and mythological characters these respected, committed journalists are able to represent. A Fox? A Bee? An Owl? ‘Tis a veritable menagerie!

Some plebeians in various other campus publications, and the vast majority of the plebeians with whom I chat, have derided “Scene” on the basis of its socioeconomic exclusivity. “Such haughtiness!” they cry, and point triumphantly to the magazine’s grammatical errors and pixilated photographs, as if to say, “Not that I would ever, ever want to be a part of such a publication…but, let’s say, hypothetically, if I were armed with my daddy’s credit card…I would never make such mistakes.”

These arguments belie a sort of defensiveness. Much like Victorian chimney-sweeps, the poor, hard-working non-socialites of Harvard claim to be oppressed, but they still work under the assumption that their rivals have some kind of power over them. “Don’t rub it in our faces that we didn’t go to the Spence School for Girls,” the critics shout, en masse, waving their newsie caps, coal-soaked handkerchiefs, and sickles.

But essentially, I’ve always hated Marx. Mostly because of his serial infidelities and his penchant for coffeehouses. But more to the point, he just seemed to give the rich much more credit than they really deserved. The scene represented in “Scene” is, in my humble opinion, scarcely more important than any other scene here. Their staff is just another bunch of crackpot weirdos who really want to validate their existence, just like the rest of us.

Needless to say, Harvard has many different scenes within its walls. There is a Mathematics-concentrator scene that seems to involve a lot of Rachmaninoff and anime. There is a Biology scene, which appears to require constant avowals of a preference for “academic biology” and a hatred of “medical school.” And there is a pretentious, English-concentrator scene that definitely entails smoking and pretending Gordon Teskey is a close relative.

There are many, many more scenes available, more than I care to write about, for fear of being offensive. “Scene,” however, doesn’t even try to reflect any of this diversity, and merely inspires constant exclamations of, “Who are these people?” and “Are those diamond cufflinks?”

But even if Scene retracted its claim to diversity, and eliminated all of its entrenched classism, it would still a proponent of wearing an oxford shirt without pants, sporting “dangerous” ties at the Westminster Dog Show, and wearing black T-shirts with mink collars, which is something I simply cannot abide by.

—Staff writer Rebecca M. Harrington can be reached at harring@fas.harvard.edu.