I mentioned here that I thought Claremont McKenna is has a male-dominated campus, by which I meant campus culture. A male CMC student disagrees (calling my opinion "a blatant lie"). I want to preface any discussion that may follow by saying I'm not an expert in feminism or even what male domination fully means. I'll state also that I know that Claremont McKenna also enrolls some empowered women and some awesome dudes as well. Nor do I want to disparage the CMC faculty- in fact I'm enrolled in an excellent class on women and the law at CMC. And I think that the fact that the California Men's Colony shares an acronym with CMC is just an unfortunate coincidence. And it wasn't at CMC that the dumbass, notorious, yet short-lived Masculinist Coalition (which I won't link to here) was formed. The comment I made at the time was based only on my personal impressions.
But here's some evidence supporting my statement:
- Until 1976 CMC was a men's college.
- CMC student publications routinely assume their readers are straight males.
- Currently on CMCforum.com there are pictures of 9 men but only one woman.
- By my count the Forum only has 2 female staff members compared to 12 male staff members.
- CMC has had at least one exclusive all male social club.
And some anecdotal evidence:
- Tuesday night's Ath speaker Fareed Zakaria had to specifically ask for a woman to ask a question (and the woman who stood up to ask a question was a Pitzer College student).
- Rumors of the freshman girl "draft" too tenuous to seriously cite here.
- CMC's urbandictionary.com definition.
- And this blog post written on October 14th by a Claremont College student, shows that I'm not the only one out there with this impression:
The stereotype of “phallocentric” fraternities is enhanced by many comedy movies, and often what is said about these buildings is that they are hangouts for macho, homophobic boys who constantly binge drink and invite lots of girls to come partake in the festivities. Although the Claremont Colleges don’t have fraternities, Claremont McKenna College is considered by some students to be one big fraternity or the “jock” school. The party scene at CMC often tends to consist of male sexual predators and drunken females who might seem willing to engage in sexual activities due to their party attire or their difficulty in making clear decisions, but there are many stories about girls getting taken advantage of in this atmosphere.
One can definitely sense that females are often objectified in the male-dominated party scene by the way that couples dance, how the females feel obligated to dress to impress the men, and the ways in which a number of boys attempt to prey on drunken girls. Since group intimidation and alcohol-induced violence are common in Western society, it is unsurprising that these traits would begin to develop on college campuses.
So, I'm not saying that CMC men are all rapists and perverts. But yes, in my own mind, I think its campus social and academic culture are dominated by males.
What do you think?
Ben Casnocha CMC '11 was in the Providencia neighborhood of Santiago, Chile when the 8.8 earthquake struck. Excerpts below, but you can read the whole post over at his blog.
At 3:34 AM I awoke to my entire apartment shaking violently. My bed creaked and I heard a vase of flowers in my kitchen fall over. I did not mentally process or consciously think of anything, not even "earthquake," but I had an instinct to walk over to my desk and grab my laptop. [I'm not what it says that my first thought was to protect my laptop, but there you go.] Propped up on a stand I feared it would fall over the desk and break, and indeed it was going to do so shortly had I not grabbed it. I stood clutching my laptop. A sliding French style door that separates my living room / desk area from bedroom moved and hit me, so I backed up and leaned against the wall for support. The shaking continued for a bit more time and then stopped and everything was silent and dark. The power had gone out in my building so all white noise and power lights: gone. I heard no screams or sounds or anything. Just total black silence.
...
In the late afternoon, I walked around my neighborhood a bit more. The sky was a gray haze from a supposed chemical fire that had started downtown. Nevertheless, I was amazed at the tranquility of Santiago. Public buses full of people passed by. Cars drove calmly. People chatting on the streets. I ate dinner at my favorite local restaurant and it was full of people. Much of the rubble and glass I had seen earlier had already been picked up. The scene was such a contrast from the images on TV. I know what I saw was a million times better than what the scene is like more north in Santiago, or especially in Concepción and along the coast. Still it's a reminder that it's hard to generalize about a situation in an entire country, let alone in one city.
Related posts:
- A CMC Guy Explains Why CMC Guys are Douchebags, and When They Aren’t As part of our ongoing discussion on the male-dominated campus culture at Claremont McKenna, here's the CMC Forum's Alex Mitchell responding to a female student [blogger's...
- CMC Security Alert Dear Members of the CMC Community; At approximately 9:00pm last night (Sunday, October 25th), a female CMC student was jogging on the north side of First...
- CMC Gets My Respect I found this video of last year's Mr. Stag competition at Claremont McKenna. Regardless of the weird patriarchy stuff going on in the competition itself, this...
- CMC Student’s Dispatch from Chile ...
- CMC Adopts Pitzer’s Takeout Box System The Claremont Portside's blog "The Compass" reports that Claremont McKenna will adopt our reusable takeout box program: According to Vice President of Student Affairs Jeff Huang...
Amy,
CMC’s male-dominated culture, or lack thereof is an important subject for investigation, but all of the evidence above is anecdotal.
Emily Meinhardt edits the Forum & is responsible for picking staff members.
More useful statistics are that CMC’s student body is 55% male and has a higher percentage of athletes than most schools.
It would be helpful to survey the women of CMC and find out if there’s a statistically significant level of male dominance here compared to other schools.
The class of 2013 is 52% female. I should have looked up the statistic before I commented. My apologies
And what a dumb question she asked! Apparently, though, neither sex has a monopoly on stupidity.
Attempt to “prey on drunken girls”? Surely you jest. A lot of guys don’t go to the parties, but I don’t exactly see women beating down their doors to try and talk with them. It takes two to tango, after all.
Kevin beat me to this point, but I thought it bears repeating: It’s Emily Meinhardt that runs the Forum and runs it tightly, with an iron fist.
But embedded in this question is the idea that a male-centered college is wrong or bad. It isn’t, especially when you consider the Taliban like conditions that Scrippsies live in just next door. When will you criticize that all women school?
–Calling Elena’s question dumb has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. But I’m skeptical you actually do think it was a dumb question, since we know you love to call people out on their stupidity, and since none of your three separate blog posts about the event mentioned the question itself.
–I didn’t write that excerpt; I posted it because a male CMC student called me a liar when I wrote that that CMC was notoriously male-dominated. But your saying that– NO CMC guys prey on drunken girls based on the fact that some guys don’t go to the parties– makes no sense. Some dudes live in Stark, therefore there are no creepy guys at CMC? It takes “two to tango”, therefore all sex is consensual and not predatory? Your logic is faulty.
–I know that Emily Meinhardt runs the Forum, and I’ve been very impressed with some of her reporting. But I think it’s relevant to this discussion that most student-generated news from CMC comes from male students. A couple examples come to mind:
Patrick Atwater’s bizarre misogynist rant.
The following article on the Cool Kids which assumes all college students are into women:
Your own article on dating at CMC which touches on some of the same issues and provides better evidence that CMC is male-centric than anything I’ve cited:
And:
Skimpy Halloween costumes imply that girls are whores, while the more sexual partners a CMC guy racks up, the better.
–Likening Scripps College to the Taliban is just dumb. And of course Scripps College is a female-dominated college; it’s a women’s college. If a women’s college were male-centric that would be pretty weird. CMC, on the other hand, is co-ed.
–Is it bad that CMC is male-centric? Based on the indignation of the male CMC student who took offense to the claim, some people think so.
I didn’t comment on the question because Jeffrey Sachs has been so thoroughly repudiated by every serious economist to question it. We’re kind of tired of the usual, “What does this mean for poverty” questions at the Ath.
I’ll respond to the rest after I’ve finished writing a speech.
Here is a thought for you:
“So, I’m not saying that CMC men are all rapists and perverts. But yes, in my own mind, I think its campus social and academic culture are dominated by males.” –Amy Jasper
sounds a lot like:
“[Obama is a] guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture. I don’t know what it is…” and then saying “I’m not saying [Obama] doesn’t like white people…” –Glenn Beck
Do you see how that is kind of a rhetorically duplicitous thing to write? I think there is probably truth to the idea that CMC is “male dominated”. That is to say, if one was to look at the number of men holding positions of power amongst both students and staff, I believe one would see more men.
I don’t, however, think it is fair to subtly link the idea of CMC as a “male dominated” campus with misogyny, rape, and womanizing — Unless of course you have some better sources than Urban Dictionary, acronym coincidences, and a few anecdotes from the CMC Forum.
So basically, I’m not saying you are a terrible writer. I’m just saying that maybe … er no wait. You are a terrible writer.
Is being a terrible writer a bad thing? Judging from the fact that you’ll take offense at it, probably.
Glenn Beck said that Obama was racist and then seconds later retracted his statements. There’s no evidence that Obama has a deep-seated hatred for white people, which is why it was ridiculous for Beck to say that. I would go out on a limb and say that Glenn Beck likes to stir shit up for ratings without regard for truth or principle. Is it possible for Obama to both hate white people and to like white people? No, it’s not.
Alternately, I made a qualified statement about a sentiment that I hold based on my own experience and a lot of anecdotal evidence. The two parts to my statement don’t necessarily contradict each other. By saying “I’m not saying that CMC men are all rapists and perverts” I did not mean that sentence to snarkily imply that I actually think most of them are rapists and perverts. I just wanted to clarify that even if we somehow proved that CMC’s campus culture is disproportionately dominated by males, it still wouldn’t necessarily mean that all CMC men are perverts.
“Male dominance” is a difficult topic of conversation. So when you make statements about something like that, it’s often necessary to include qualifying phrases like the one I made. (If you type in “I’m not saying that all men” into Google you’ll get 16.4 million results.) When Kanye said: “Now I ain’t saying she’s a golddigger”- he actually was implying the opposite; he pretty much was calling “her” a golddigger. That’s not what I was doing.
My original point was to show that having the opinion that CMC is male-dominated is a valid one. I think I’ve shown that at least some people agree with me, and I just got a little more evidence: The CMC Forum just invited me to attend their “Debate Night at the Ath 2.0: 1400, Alcohol, and Men”. I’m happy if I was any small part in encouraging this discussion:
Finally: If I made my point so badly that you compared me to Glenn Beck– Jeez, maybe I am a terrible writer.