Material Girl
Suck
Goddamnit did I want everything: brown leather heels and quotes from “Ulysses,” endless red lipstick, and sex. Sex especially. At eighteen, I thought the feminist revolution had happened. You ever had a morning when you can’t even enter Annenberg without tripping over like three people whose genitals you’ve interacted with? That was my freshman year. But there was always something funny about those breakfast run-ins: Very few of them involved eye contact.
We All Have Feelings About Final Clubs
This is something of a Deal for me, since I only have a couple good friends in final clubs, and isn’t it cool to analyze social structures with people who have slightly different standpoints than I do? And at this point in the conversation, Ms. Desire-Mambo kind of snorts, as if to say, "Reina, you are ridiculous,” and goes, “I’m in a final club! You’re friends with me!”
Harvard Aesthetics
I came to Harvard because it felt hostile. And it felt hostile, mostly, because of how it looked: stained glass windows, heavy spires, thick oriental rugs. I was eighteen years old and bursting the seams of my small town, having outgrown its ugly linoleum-halled high school and muddy, Confederate-flag-strewn pickup trucks. Harvard seemed big. Harvard seemed evil. When I walked through the Yard one October morning, a girl in red lipstick, black skinny jeans, and black heels power-walked out of Weld looking sexual and important. On a Wednesday. Harvard was mean because Harvard was aesthetic, and I, said the admissions committee in a fortuitous letter in late April, was Harvard.
Belaboring the Humanities
I know: by now even the literature professors are hoping the humanities will just kick the bucket already so we can finish talking about them—about how they’re dying, how they’re not really dying, how they already died in the 70s but nobody noticed, how the real reason they’re too sad to function is because the girls have left them.
Do Women Always Help Women?
The debate, between leaders of the campus chapter of “Lean In” and from two of the College’s feminist collectives, was an important one for all of us here at Harvard. I’m not a huge fan of Sheryl Sandberg’s: I don’t think she’s evil or the downfall of feminism, but I do think her top-down approach, with its attendant focus on individual achievement, is not nearly as effective and important as systemic change. Lots of smart people have made great critiques of Sandberg’s stances, and in some ways, the furor around Sandberg steals airtime from less privileged voices saying more important things. Yet there’s at least one point that comes up frequently in Sandberg’s work that merits more discussion: the argument that women at the top will help other women. It’s a notion fundamental to a lot of feminism, including Sandberg’s, and it’s one that doesn’t always hold up.
