One of the things about blogging for a few years is that one regularly has the opportunity to reflect upon — and revise — old posts. Mind you, I don’t dip into my archives and surreptitiously rewrite old pieces. Rather, I sometimes find that the passage of time has given me a different perspective. It is so with an issue freshly in the news once more: mixed-sex dorm rooms.
I wrote about the subject of colleges assigning different-sex students to the same dorm room in 2006 in this post. What troubled me then was not that folks would seek out roommates of the opposite sex. What I wanted was to encourage bonding with one’s own gender. Boys who find it difficult to relate to other males; girls who’ve found relationships with other females to be characterized by competition and judgment — these were, I argued, the sort of young people who could benefit from confronting their own discomfort with living with the same sex. Rereading that post three and a half years after I wrote it, I wince at my willingness to be so prescriptive of what young people need. And while I stand by my conviction that we do need to do more to encourage some young folks to fight through their fears of bonding with those who share their biology, I’m much less willing to insist upon it.
I’m thinking about this because the Los Angeles Times, a few years late to the party, ran a front-page article yesterday on what is no longer as much of a novelty as some might imagine: Mixed-gender dorm rooms are gaining acceptance.
The number of colleges offering the option increases each year, though the total number of schools at which it is possible to room with someone of the other sex is still only about fifty. The Times profiles the situation at nearby Pitzer College (an institution to which I have seen a number of my best and brightest transfer over the years), and interviews students there and at my alma mater, Cal. (In the 1980s, the innovation at Berkeley was bathrooms shared by both sexes. After the first week, having women walk past men standing at urinals became old hat.)
What heartened me was the willingness of so many young people to separate the idea of close physical proximity from sexual intimacy. The assumption of an older generation, of course, is that the power of desire is so overwhelming that it makes uncomplicated friendship (or, simply, roommate-ship) impossible between two heterosexual young people of different genders. Read the comments after the Times story; lots of predictions of rape and distraction. The myth of male weakness raises its head in the thread over and over again.
The comment that caught my attention was this one from someone called “cmfreedom”: I guess “gender-neutral housing” means asexual. I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted! Bold is mine.
What impressed me about the young people in the article is the same thing that depressed me about cmfreedom’s remark. Our dominant cultural narrative is the discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire. We believe that men — particularly those of college-age — are so in thrall to raging hormones that they are constitutionally incapable of seeing women as anything other than sex objects. The peddlers of the discourse sneer contemptuously at those who insist that men are, in fact, are both quite capable of self-regulation and frequently not as sex-crazed as their elders believe. To claim for men the capacity to exercise control, to insist that young men do not all think about sex every seven (or sixteen, or thirty-five) seconds is to invite derision.
I still remember having this argument with a colleague (a Christian mathematician whose knowledge of gender and sexuality was woeful). He looked at me when I made my standard point about male weakness being a myth and said “Only someone deeply naive or willfully obtuse could underestimate the power of our God-given desires.” I smiled, and asked him which of the two he thought I was. He hesitated and said that he thought I was something altogether worse: “a charlatan deliberately promoting what he knows to be untrue in order to gain attention.” His commitment to the notion that sexual desire — particularly male desire — is an overpowering force that trumps conscience and reason was sufficiently strong to make him reconsider our friendship.
But cmfreedom’s remark isn’t just a lament about the self-control that the young people in the Times article evince. Whoever she or he is, cmfreedom doesn’t seem to be taking the tack of other commenters, with their dark predictions of the inevitability of rape. Rather, the comment expresses bewilderment that friendship can exist between a straight young man and a straight young woman without a throbbing undercurrent of sexual tension. In addition to the discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire, we have another discourse (one made famous by Billy Crystal in “When Harry Met Sally”). Call it the “men-and-women-can-never-really-be-friends-because-sexual longing-will-invariably-cause-tension” discourse. Again, those who imagine themselves to be wise in the ways of the world are the chief promoters of this idea; they are dismissively contemptuous or pityingly condescending to any who insist otherwise.
What cmfreedom and the others don’t grasp is that sexual desire, for all of its undeniable power and influence in our lives, is shaped by culture as well as (if not more so than) by biology. Young people of the sort profiled in this article weren’t raised as older generations were. They don’t see the other sex as mysterious, inscrutable, impossible to understand. Rather than breeding contempt, familiarity with the other sex tends to breed the capacity for safe, non-sexual intimacy. Sleeping in the same room night after night, seeing each other undressed (or with bed head), tends to demystify and de-eroticize. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all.
This doesn’t mean, as cmfreedom apparently worries, that young people like this will have trouble finding satisfaction in lasting heterosexual relationships. After all, in most marriages the routines of dressing and undressing quickly lose their erotic charge. Most couples in long-term monogamous relationships find that sexual desire is something that requires effort to create and sustain — it doesn’t happen automatically every time someone sheds their underwear to hop into the shower. Sexual heat, in other words, becomes something we create rather than something that close proximity automatically creates for us. And while that may be frustrating to those who imagine that the chemistry they felt in the first weeks of a relationship ought to last forever, it’s a comforting reminder to the rest of us of our power and our responsibility to exercise sovereignty over our intimate lives.
I’ve lived with four wives and three girlfriends. I’ve also lived with female roommates, and shared close space with women to whom I was not related and with whom I was not in a romantic or sexual relationship. And yes, since I’ve outed myself a time or nine, I’ve lived with men with whom there was at least a soupçon of mutual attraction. But that wasn’t inevitable either. As a gay college roommate of mine told me (even though he didn’t need to) “Just because I’ve seen you naked doesn’t mean I want to do ya”. I can think of a lot of lovely friends of mine of both sexes whose bodies I have seen in various states of undress — and near which I have slumbered — for whom I could say the same. And my libido is hardly unnaturally timid. If I am unusual in my candor, I am not unusual in my experience.
Do I think that everyone ought to have a roommate of a different sex? Of course not. But I do think roommates are important. For those who have only shared space with relatives, sharing a room with someone from a different background than your own is an invaluable opportunity to learn many things, including the all-important art of compromise and boundary-setting. For some, that lesson may be learned best with someone who shares their physiology; for others, it may be preferable to share space with someone whose body is different.
I retract most of my views expressed in that post from 2006, and offer an enthusiastic endorsement to the work of the National Student Gender Blind Campaign. And I honor the commitment of those young people who understand that there is so much more to desire than mere physical proximity.
When I started college in the fall of 1987, my grandmother was shocked and horrified to see that my dorm was coed by room and we had coed bathrooms. She lectured me rather sternly (and as I think back rather naively) about men and women and the need, the absolute need, for the genders to be separate. My father gave me the same lecture over the phone a few weeks later. My mother, my contrast, saw no problems in the arrangement. Mixed gender rooms are the obvious and to me uncontroversial next step.
I find myself thinking about youth group at church. Our kids travel together – to and from camp, to and from service trips, they share lodging space on service trips, slumber next to one another in church basements, share bathrooms as necessary on service trips or church retreats. We teach them sexuality education in mixed gender groups. We as adults do our best to model healthy, open communication between the genders, between parents, between partners, lovers and spouses. Our kids are learning that lesson. They are learning that you familiarity creates a space for authentic friendship.
I wonder, and maybe I missed it in your post, if the question concerns where we put the emphasis. Women of my grandmother’s generation (she’d be almost 100 today if she were alive) and men of my father’s generation (in his 70s) were taught the genders are very very different – they were taught that the differences between men and women were definitive and determinative (is that a word?). The differences defined men and women as inherently separate creatures – divided by differences in biology, psychology, emotions, and abilities.
By contrast, I picked up somewhere (as did I think our peers, you and I being almost the same ages) that men and women are very much alike – that the differences are real but the similarities are perhaps more important. Men and women share the same needs for love, affection, friendship, intimacy both sexual and not. If you think of men and women as more similar than different then these “innovations” in housing arrangements are relatively trivial. If, by contrast, you think of men and women as inherently and essentially different, then these housing arrangements seem unnerving, if not in fact, downright scandalous and wrong.
I may have more to add I want to ponder this further.
What cmfreedom and the others don’t grasp is that sexual desire, for all of its undeniable power and influence in our lives, is shaped by culture as well as (if not more so than) by biology. Young people of the sort profiled in this article weren’t raised as older generations were. They don’t see the other sex as mysterious, inscrutable, impossible to understand.
I think this is an important point.
This kind of attitude the social conservatives project is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people believe themselves incapable of controlling their sexual impulses, then they will, in fact, be incapable of controlling their sexual impulses. If people believe living close to or next to a sexually desirable gender will lead to sexual consummation of a relationship, then they are more likely to have sex with the people they’re close to.
There is also a lack of appreciation of diversity. Assuming it isn’t a self-fulfilling prophecy and these people are genuinely not in control of their own feelings and impulses, why is there a need to generalize? If a man feels that he cannot live next to a woman without wanting to sleep with her, why is it necessarily true that all or even most heterosexual men also would not be able to live next to a woman without wanting to sleep with her?
Also, from a pragmatic standpoint, college students will do what they want to do. If college students want to have sex, they’ll have sex. It won’t matter if they’re in separate dorms or separate rooms or separate floors. If college students don’t want to have sex, they won’t have sex. It won’t matter if they share dorms or floors or rooms.
I lived with three women my senior year in college. Guess what! No sexual tension. No sex. Nothing. Nada. I was just one of the girls to them.
I think the best way to contest this is to recognize diversity within genders. Men can be many different ways. Women can be many different ways. And don’t forget lesbians and gay men. If desire is so strong, should they necessarily be placed with roommates of the other major gender?
I am sure that we would disagree, Hugo, in our views on the origins of sexual desires and the degree of conscious and voluntary control that we have over them “in the raw”, as such; and I also disagree with your dismissal of the notion that proximity can lead to desire. While not “creating” desire, as such, obviously, proximity is going to provide that many more opportunities for it to manifest.
All of that being said, dealing with sexual desires and their implications, especially in contemporary cultural circumstances in which men and women mix more freely and equally than they likely ever have in the Western world, is an important life lesson to learn. I see it as more of that “acknowledge and redirect” thing you have spoken about in another context, rather than a need to disclaim this or that as a “myth”. Coed dorm rooms, for those students comfortable and mature enough to make them work, are probably an excellent way to further that implicit social education at a time when many young people will be learning a lot about how to live civilly among their opposite-gender peers.
Isn’t part of the controversy whether boyfriends and girlfriends should be allowed to room together? Sometimes one roommate in a dorm room functionally lives with a partner (spending every night at the partner’s place), but they do still have their official space to come back to if the relationship ends. Isn’t there some concern that people will sign up to live with a significant other and then if they break up the housing people will have to be in the middle of a break-up fight over who has to move out, or, if someone doesn’t move out, over bringing new partners “home” to the room shared with the ex?
Isn’t part of the controversy whether boyfriends and girlfriends should be allowed to room together?
No one is gay?
It seems I recall a great many couples figuring out how to live together in my college dorms. It worked like this – get one partner to draw for a double, the other for a single. You moved the the “roommate” into the single and then moved the partner into the double – voila, the couple lived together but officially you had two males or females in the double and one person in a single. It was easy. It was even easier for same sex couples who literally did not have to game the system to live together.
As Hugo pointed out, however, much of the issue here is separating physical proximity from sexual intimacy. The idea – seemingly still potent for many folks – that you can’t share a room without having sex with someone of the other gender. You see a similar attitude with regard to gays in the military – if gay people are allowed to serve openly, they won’t be able to control themselves and they’ll shower with straight men and just have to have sex with them.