Another Sexy Article About College Ladies

Princeton Mom is back, and we didn’t miss her.

Susan Patton’s most recent Wall Street Journal op-ed advises college women to stop gorging on Japanese takeout and get hitched to elite male classmates before their biological clocks melt like Dali paintings. A sequel to her March 2013 Letter to the Editor, which earned Patton a book deal, her latest piece has provoked a bevy of humorous and outraged responses along the lines of: “Could you back off the rampant gender stereotyping for a second?”

I didn’t miss Patton. But that’s not because she’s a particularly shocking pundit in pop-culture gender politics. I didn’t miss Princeton Mom because she’s just one voice in a chorus of commentators fixated on the sexualities and marriage prospects of college women and recent graduates. Boldly covering such pressing topics as the demise of courtship, female horror at “hookup culture,” and the plight of women “alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box,” these pieces all concern themselves with how women’s academic and professional gains are affecting heterosexual relationships. Rather than consider the full diversity of college women and their experiences, the pieces tend to focus on white middle-and-upper-class women—those disproportionately likely to go to college. They neglect the stories of women who are struggling in school, even though almost half of students who enroll in college programs fail to obtain degrees within six years. Finally, these stories spotlight students from prestigious institutions, such as the Ivies and their peers.

Only 38.7 percent of working-age Americans hold two or four year degrees—a figure that includes substantial disparities across class and racial lines. So why are we obsessed with the sex lives of college women?

On one level, it’s a matter of sensationalism: tales of the decaying morals of ladies at elite universities are sexy. Take Kate Taylor’s July 2013 New York Times article, “Sex On Campus: She Can Play That Game Too,” which profiles driven University of Pennsylvania women as they perform cost-benefit analyses, have casual sex, and do other things that make virile gentlemen hot under the collar. Taylor’s language plays into this, emphasizing her subjects’ conventional prettiness: the women she describes as engaging in “hookup culture” are “slim and pretty,” or “athletic,” “blond,” and “pink-cheeked.” The article’s accompanying photograph features a pair of bare, light-skinned legs on rumpled sheets. Taylor can play, indeed.

But there’s something else going on here. In her incisive send-up of the genre on Slate, Anna North suggests that “women’s stories” like Taylor’s reflect moral panic about the relationship between middle-class female success, and the supposed downfall of the family. And it’s a genre of writing that has prompted numerous feminist responses. But all this point and counterpoint on the sexual mores of the new female elite obscure a broader issue: while some women are achieving as never before, for many women, the economy is failing.

America’s socioeconomic makeup is shifting—and women are achieving more than ever. At first, the numbers seem to unanimously support this trend: women make up almost 60 percent of university students and earn more advanced degrees than their male counterparts. The Department of Labor predicts that by 2020, women will be 57 percent of the labor force.

At the same time, the gap between the rich and poor is widening. A recent Oxfam report shows that the richest one percent of Americans have reaped 95 percent of the wealth created since 2009. In the same time period, the bottom 90 percent of earners have gotten poorer. Women, and particularly women of color, most often bear the brunt of this gap. Though women make up 46.9 percent of workers, they are 62.7 percent of minimum wage earners. Black and Latina women are also disproportionately affected: 10.7 percent and 15.9 percent of the female workforce respectively, they are 15.9 percent and 18.8 percent of female minimum wage workers. For a breadwinner with a family, this is far from a living wage. In short: even as trends in educational attainment skyrocket, women are more likely than men to live in poverty.

Cautionary tales about hookup culture among college women are certainly unenviable; they can be shaming, exclusionary of students who don’t fit a narrow mold, and downright caricatures (remember the pizza box?). But the appealing scandal of these narratives masks a more complex reality: that even as some women infiltrate the ranks of institutional accomplishment and wealth, bringing changing sexual mores with them, many women occupy—and organize against—financial situations that grow increasingly tenuous. These women have their own stories of sex, and choice, and the body, stories just as vital and complicated and misrepresented as those of any coed. When we devote so much of our time and bandwidth to worrying about the sex lives of Ivy League women instead of considering this broader picture, it is these stories that we miss.

Reina A.E. Gattuso ’15 is a joint literature and studies of women, gender, and sexuality concentrator in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.