The Llama Ledger - Bard College at Simon's Rock's Student Newspaper

Issue date: 12/10/08 Section: Opinion

This article is the product of a group project for Women's Studies 101 on the pressures placed on women based on societal standards. It is the culmination of individual research done on these pressures on a broader scale, in an effort to bring this research to our own community and see where Simon's Rock fits into the epidemic.

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On a campus of a school defined by its website as having an "institutional commitment" to diversity, the question of whether gender discrimination plays a role for the student body may seem inane.

In interviews with female students on campus though, this is not entirely the case. The "Simon's Rock bubble," as it is often fondly referred to, is certainly immune from some of the pressures faced by students at other colleges, but for some the women of Simon's Rock, life inside the bubble can feel as harsh as the realities that many of us enjoy escaping while on campus.

Although the physical and fashion standards at Simon's Rock may be somewhat altered from those in the rest of the world, it seems that they are not entirely absent here.

"During the first semester of school I often wore lower cut shirts that showed a modest amount of cleavage, but the guys on campus and especially the ones in my class only saw me as more of a sexual object than a fellow student. Since then I've changed my usual dress to be higher cut, such as boy tanks and non v-necked sweaters," says sophomore Danielle Henak.

Junior Elana Carroll puts this feeling into broader terms: "I feel like dudes can look like a wreck and be considered interesting/ hip/ intellectual/ whatever while girls shouldn't look 'too masculine' or 'too feminine' but somewhere in between…I feel like everyone judges the appearance of females much more easily than they do males, and that this plays a role in school, work places, families, etc."

This inequality felt by some is not shared by all of the female community members, though. "I think people here see me as more of a student than a female, probably because there are so many more female students than male students," says freshman Stacey Monjong.

Continued...

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