Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

THERE WAS ONCE a game made out of movie star gossip. The object was to try to list everyone that counted in Hollywood--the experts could do it alphabetically--according to who slept with whom. And the winner completed an unbroken chain of names, an incest ring. I heard it rumored that one die-hard fan had played the game with Harvard gossip, and won. But it's most likely just a rumor.

Because despite all the talk, Harvard is no nest of erotic bedlam. And oddly enough, coed living appears to be partially responsible for the sexual stalemate. It maximizes the opportunities for sex--sex would be as natural as a stinger after dinner. But sex at Harvard doesn't seem to be much past the talking stage. Harvard has failed to naturalize the situation it contrived for itself. And the reasons for this go deeper than coed living.

A big trigger in the move toward coed living was the New Feminist impulse. The move was a symbolic statement about sexual equality as well as an implication of relaxed social mores. The issues raised by Women's Liberation were voiced loudest in an atmosphere heavy with the vibrations of the New Sexual Freedom.

For me, fresh from the Midwest, the liberations came hand in hand. They shaped each other, and the differences between them were confused. What seems to have happened in their intermingling is a steady backfire; the combination has put a stopper on the practice, if not the noise, of each.

IN 1969, if we were conscious of anything, we were very conscious of being women. Radcliffe was a women's citadel--its dorm switchboards, its lookouts on guard against gentleman intruders who had to identify themselves and state their errands before admittance. We were cautionless about wearing just our underwear in the halls or breakfasting in pajamas; the few men that bothered to visit cut conspicuous figures at meals. Our self-consciousness about femalehood was imposed upon us just as much as it grew out of all female living, because we were such a minority. We dressed for class, for the invasion, because we were a spectacle. Often the entire Freshman Union would clamber to its feet when a woman entered, cheering, pounding silverware, jeering or bellowing. I remember being a one-girl exhibition in a Hum 8 section of 25: the sectionman would spend 40 out of 50 minutes making wisecracks about football, and then he would catch himself mid-sentence and bow like Sir Galahad before me inquiring, "And Madamoiselle, how goes the fashion world, pray?" This was the same attitude that insisted on parietals through 1969, that kicked us out of Yard dorms at 7p.m., and politely sent the cops after the delinquent few of us who failed to check in at 1 a.m.

In those days we blamed the rules for what felt like the failure of active Sexual Liberation at Harvard. So we campaigned for their removal, hoping secretly that the traditions--the milk and cookies on Saturday nights, the midnight food raids on the kitchen, sedate jolly-ups, all part of the same inhibiting idiom--would go out with the rules. Because an all female Radcliffe--corridor doors promising no more than someone in curlers and bathroom slippers hunched under a hairdryer, or exam hysteria when girls lined the walls clut-ching their notes to their breasts like death row diariers--because a lime, peach, and chocolate flavored Radcliffe was Hell.

THREE YEARS LATER the rules are gone, the traditions for the choosing. The superficial changes are tremendous. But Women's Liberation has been diverted into political preoccupations and its observable impact can be summed up: women at Harvard can now do, if they've a mind to, just about anything that men do. Which leads me to think that the women have settled for second best, for a man's world. They have failed to follow up the central implication of Feminism--the idea that "Woman" embraces a unique identity, one that society has repressed, one that men were never willing to credit. Feminism was an experiment in understanding the female consciousness. Forgetting that, it compromised itself.

We renounced Radcliffe under the banner of nobullshit equality. Anything that singled out our femaleness was sexist and degrading; masculine advances to our feminity were repugnant to our New Femininity. When we voted for cohabitation we voted to abandon Radcliffe as our shrine. We carried only our sex to Harvard, but we rejected its traditional symbols. There were no longer any institutionalized times or places for girls to be girls or boys to be boys. Many men hightailed back into final clubs or athletics, but Radcliffe surfaced ubiquitous, from House crew to Lampoon. And Harvard started to dress differently--women foreswore the affects, the glamor girl niceties for blue jeans and shags like the men.

AS WOMEN, we invaded a man's world with a tough ivied tradition. And we came defenseless, lacking a sure tradition of our own. We were uncertain of what it meant to be a woman and in revolt against familiar ideals, we claimed Harvard life as our own. And this was traitorous, for it made us symbolic men.

I think we scared Harvard a bit too. Radcliffe had been a stronghold to be conquered, courted, and panty-raided. But those sharply writ symbolic fields of action for sexual interplay are gone. We rub shoulders in coed bathrooms and hang out in each other's bedrooms with an armpoking buddy-buddiness. Cohabitation has bred a defense against its natural tensions: the unconscious disavowal of our sexual differences. Harvard and Radcliffe have identified.

When Women's Liberation bestowed its blessings upon "liberated women" who accomodated themselves to a masculine world, the sexual confusion took root. And this confusion filled the ballooning Sexual Revolution of 1969 with air. That dreamy easy sex we hoped to fashion from coed living was wrought into a cool undergraduate assumption: sex was there for the taking--that was understood. But an unconscious identification between sexes stalls the assertion of sexual differences. Instead, the spectre of sex, a nagging, hovering possibility, gave rise to a gossip that paralyzed. We missed our privacy. Our peers were all too close. We were equals bereft of our symbolic ground of sexual distinctiveness. Hanging about in packs, we preserved their sexless equilibrium with implicit codes. Here the identification takes shape in something like a plot to prevent sex. The self-consciousness is killing.

AND AS GROUPS bemoan their lack of sex, they ogle the neighboring exceptions, the happily wedlocked without the ritual--the couples who bring special coffee to breakfast, grim-faced and silent, hugging each other's company like a bad habit--and then back away as if from a scary "No Trespassing" sign. One brand of psychological androgyny shudders at another more extreme form, the two becoming One.

After three years of just liberated talk to feed on, it seems only logical that Harvard should be desperate for the old, the familiar separations, a richly laid out sexual battleground. And sure enough, last spring in Dunster House the Boys got together for a bachelor fling and acted out this nostalgic retreat--a bunch of stags, drinking it up, chumming it up over dirty stories, studding the egos up with dirty displays, and even making a contest out of it, cross-legged in a large circle so that everyone could hear, on and on until the sordid details were stretched way beyond titillating plausibility, yet still on until everyone had got his horny rocks off. And no one seemed much bothered by this exhibition of rooster revelry. In fact, one eyewitness registered relief.

HE IS GOING to have to be disappointed though. Because the fact that the Women's Liberation movement and the Sexual Revolution have been once intertwined has done something irrevocable to sex. It has turned sex into a political act. The sight of a boy paying for two at a movie theater box office, or the picture of handholders obviously dressed up for each other are images of a dead past. Even wearing make-up for some can imply conformity to a pattern of feudal chivalry.

In the long run, however, this politicization of sex may be the way out. The blurry confounding of the sexes breeds a sexual frustration that is unnatural and well nigh intolerable. Here, in the need to resolve the tension born of this unhappy androgyny, lies the impulse that will push us, drive us toward a sexual redefinition. And given the politicization of sex, a re-evaluation of sexual identity means the re-evaluation of political identity. This is the only hope for either the Sexual Revolution or Women's Liberation--the only way either can begin anew.