The point that drew my attention occurs early. Christina Hoff Summers: "It looks to me as though the way society used to police and monitor the lives of gay people, now it's moved to heterosexual males. They are under constant criticism and surveillance, and their normal sexuality has been pathologized."
This turns into an eleven minute conversation, some parts of which are more interesting than others. Camille Paglia's point that her generation fought for the right to risk being raped is phrased in a controversial way, but she's right: the focus on winning freedom for young women in her era was being fought against a protective instinct from colleges. I remember my mother talking about her college campus in just the way she does: that the women had to sign in and out, and be in by a certain hour.
The 'microaggression app' sounds unpleasant in the extreme.
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I theoretically had to sign in and out of the women-only campus dorm I inhabited for my first year of college, in 1974. That dorm was the first experience I'd had with gender segregation. I didn't like it at all, kind of a sorority vibe that's never done much for me. I found people to crash with most of the time at the more relaxed and interesting co-ed dorms nearby, then moved off-campus for the next three years.
My college being somewhat engineering-oriented, the student body was about 3 or 4 to 1 male-to-female. What's the use of going to a place like that if you're going to hole up with a bunch of women? I liked the atmosphere: geeks all the way, my kind of guys.
Oddly enough, though my mother complains to this day about the unfair restrictions in the dorm, my father was the one who found the far-lighter restrictions placed on men unbearable. He joined a fraternity for no other reason than to get out of the dorm, then quit it when he found roommates. My mother put up with it until they got married, at which point she was allowed to live outside of the dorm.
Those kinds of restrictions are unimaginable today, but they were real enough in those days.
Japan still does things the traditional way. When private high schools don't, they mention it.
And for some reason, the high schools have boarding halls like colleges. I wonder if they are all mostly privately owned like hospitals.
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