McGuire Misses On Coeducation

At first I suspected that G. Brent McGuire's opinion piece of last December ("Coeducational No More," Dec. 13, 1994) was an attempt at comedy. By the time I reached the end of the article, I realized that McGuire was in all seriousness.

I decided to write back, because unlike McGuire, I attended an allmale college for two years before transferring to Harvard, and though I think there is much to say for single-sex education, McGuire's slimy consideration of sex and gender relations only damages the cause of single-sex education.

McGuire proposed to end coeduation at Harvard. When you've finished stomaching that sentiment as sincere, consider his argument: Harvard is a men's institution, he asserts, and women should leave. Radcliffe should be operated separately from Harvard, for women exclusively. McGuire's expressed opinions concern only men, defending men's education, and preserving masculinity as some stylized Greek idea. He never considers women or women's education, itself. Women are incidental to McGuire's master plan, where men wear the togas in the house.

McGuire writes, "Although these men would be better served if they came to recognize a smart woman as something other than a threat to their manhood, an 18-year-old instinct will not be educated away with an RUS visit to a proctor meeting." What this says is that 18-year-old first-year boys are men, and that men in some circumstances are justified in their ignorance and hatred of women. McGuire suggests a separation of the sexes in order to maintain that hated, rather than a forceful confrontation of those fears and hatreds.

McGuire also writes that "a lasting marriage depends upon each partner's proper understanding of his or her role in that partnership." "These roles are complementary yet distinct, as reflected in the act of intercourse itself." He goes on to say that coeducation confuses these roles, and ends up creating dykes and queers. The sexual act is no typology of gender roles. A look at the sexual act can only show that McGuire's is a limited, particular and constructed understanding. For example, do we say that the penis breaks in while the vagina remains passive and receptive, a silent victim of rape? Gender roles simply do not partition as neatly as McGuire suggests.

Nevertheless, it is a shame there is not more single-sex education available in the United States. I despair in finding single-sex education supported by people such as McGuire simply to further the case of bigotry and hatred. Adam M. Hancock '96