I have just received an astonishing letter from one of my female readers pertaining to the dynamic between men and women at Tulane, and I feel obliged, lest her sentiments go unheard, to share it with the world.
Sir,
I am a woman at Tulane University who presumes to have the character, if not the beauty, worthy of a respectable gentleman. I like to think that I have always carried myself well around the opposite sex and received affection in return. I had never, until college, had any trouble on the romantic side of my life, save for those inevitable pains that we all endure in our youth. But at Tulane, I have yet to find an ample suitor. Those who have approached me have done so in the grossest of manners, with no regard for the customs of romance. They have assailed me at bars and parties with outrageous requests. Nobody, I am sure, has more nerve than the men on this campus. For a while, I blamed myself for this and assumed that the good ones, if they did exist, had no interest in me. It was only when I confessed my problem to a friend who shared my plight that I realized I was not at fault.
I have now talked to many women, all of whom report similar, or even worse, experiences with the men at Tulane, and I no longer question my own appeal. None of us, indeed, should blame ourselves for the lack of decency we have received on campus.
The problem is not our quality but our quantity. We are cursed by the fact that we outnumber men two to one. We are in high supply and low demand. Our value is deflated and theirs inflated, and the two parties have borne these respective values for so long that they have come to believe in them. The insecurity of women is in direct proportion to the arrogance of men. And the discrepancy in self-worth has emboldened the men to treat us with the utmost disrespect.
We are forced to tolerate it. A woman at Tulane may keep high standards, but she will never have them met. She will find very quickly that if she does not lower them, another woman will. Men, for their part, have lowered the expectations as much as possible, to the point where every woman is forced either to stoop to their barbarism or to anguish in loneliness. And so even the most distasteful of men, the most wretched creatures, can find some woman willing, out of desperation alone, to put up with them. The men, in short, treat us poorly because they can.
With the current demographic, the only way for us to stop to restore the social balance between the sexes would be for us to resist men entirely in all forms of romance. Just as a farmer hoards his crops to drive up the price, so we could remove ourselves from the romantic marketplace until the men recognize our worth and treat us as we deserve. But such an undertaking would never work in practice. The less headstrong of us, seeing their competition taken out of play, would seize the momentary advantage, at the expense of everyone else. And for this, as I have said, I cannot blame them, so deprived have they been of the proper affection.
I hear that Tulane wants to start admitting more men, and I am all for it. But such a measure, even if it does work, will take a long time. There is a wide gap to make up for, and it means little to those of us who are now condemned to the unwanted majority and will graduate long before any real change. So, I suppose in the meantime, we must make the most of things, stoop though we must. I can only ask that the overlooked, underappreciated and undervalued women of Tulane remember that, once we leave this place, every man we meet will seem like a chivalric knight—and, even better, that our now fortunate foes, if they do not adjust themselves, will receive a proper humbling.
I remain, sir,
Your Most Humble Servant,
Melissa Meanwell
