tea parties: how lovely!

Yes, the boarding school girl is back. It is an annual tradition in my school for the senior girls to host a tea party for the female faculty in order to visually depict the girls’ gratitude before graduation. As a product of four years of private, boarding school education, I embrace the message behind the event since showing appreciation is a nice gesture.

But why the tea party? It is my impression that the school is enforcing senior girls to uphold the image of refined and educated ladies who have mastered the tea party manners. The girls are expected to send elaborate invitations to female faculty, dress nicely in sundresses, wait tables with big smiles, and pour teas with our dainty little hands. If this was the students’ choice, I would respect the decision and volunteer as a fully-functioning member of my class. However, the event is mandated by the school and what ticks me off the most is that it’s a girls-only event. Our male counterparts are not required by the school to host any form of appreciative event for the faculty and male faculty generally do not attend the tea party. When I consider all these disparities, I can only arrive at a conclusion that my school is, once again, trying to make housewives out of us. Moreover, my class’ seeming ignorance or apathy towards an-extremely-visible gender discrepancy in the school infuriates me. In fact, when I kept bringing up the issue during class meeting, most girls dismissed it as another “complaint” from “that feminist girl.” (Luckily for me, I found a great excuse to miss the event.)

I find this to be a potentially great opportunity for the senior class to give back to the teachers but when the expression of gratitude is expected to be delivered by the ladies (while the gentlemen sweat away in fields and the gym) through pleasantly-domestic means, it makes me wonder what the purpose of my high school career was exactly.

yay diversity and stereotypes

This post occurs at the same boarding school where girls have to wear pastel dresses for commencement. Ah, the bright future that lies ahead of us as the esteemed, Ivy-Leagued educated CEO’s wives…

Another tradition (among many) that irritates me is International Night. This is an evening event hosted by yours truly, ASB, where the student body celebrates its diversity through ethnic dinners, performances, and finally, dance. The motivation behind the event is truly commendable: a campus fraught with students from various regions around the world takes benefit of its diversity and celebrates it. However, when applied, it becomes a crow-pleaser—a victim of superficiality.

As an avid critic of school events, I have never attended this event since my freshmen year (a traumatizing event we won’t get to…) but in order to be a good friend, I decided to go since many of my friends were performing. What greeted me as I entered the supposed “microcosm of the world” were pathetic backdrops and amateur decorations: the Sri Lanka section had exotic drapes of different pastel-slash-neon colors and the China section had the famous lanterns. I don’t know a lot about the cultures represented last night, but I am pretty certain that the atmosphere was, at best, quasi. The next irritating aspect was the food. Each booth had catered food from decent restaurants around the campus, but an absence of truly representative food made the menus from each booths all identical.

After meandering around aimlessly, I finally sat down for the performances, completely unaware that I would be even more disturbed. There were some great moments: many student performers took their responsibilities seriously and maintained poise throughout the show. The Spanish folk song, Chinese traditional dance, and Bollywood dance were superb! The majority of performers, however, were giggling, indifferent, and ditzy. The girls in Chinese sword dance were giggling, desperate to make eye-contact with their man-friends in the audience; some of them looked like they didn’t want to be there (then why are you wasting my time?). The next was the Hawaiian hula. Strategically, they had the regular-hula-practitioner at the front to charm the audience, hoping that their inability to shake their pelvises would be undermined by the leader’s grace. But I saw through that.

typical hula dancing outfit. sextastic.

First, the boys were not fully dressed: they were shirtless, as if to flaunt their pubescent sexuality and they had forgotten to tuck in their underpants (I never knew that hula dance outfits consisted of blue checkered underpants). Then the girls. Oh, how visible it was that they girls were lured by the revealing aspect of the hula outfit. Instead of paying attention to perfecting their dance moves, they were busy pulling their skirts up. But alas, this was only the beginning.

What followed was an Israeli hip-hop where the group’s mentality was that if you play an Israeli music despite the very-American sweatpants and very-American moves, the dance can be officially categorized as “Israeli.” Not only was the dance pathetic to look at (since physically-challenged person like I could imitate), but the attitude of the group, frankly, infuriated me. Girls stood with their hair down and flirted surreptitiously (but visibly) with their partners and the whole purpose of the dance was not in conveying the Israeli culture, but rather in presenting how popular they were in school.

Perhaps I was being too critical, but in my mind nothing about the evening was international—it was pathetic.. I commend the school’s efforts to take advantage of the diversity but it has clearly failed to add some gravity to the event. These are people’s cultures we are trying to understand through festivities. Chinese culture has more than Panda Express and the Israeli hip hop is not about the sweats. Not to mention the implicit gender discrepancies. It was so evident that the girls had joined to flaunt their bodies and boys to have access to them (I guess the need to flirt and mate is an international theme). The entirety of the evening undermined the richness of cultures and amplified how stupid my peers are.

My conclusion: there was a reason in never attending this event for the past three years.

generic boarding school!

I attend an independent boarding school with some caliber. Wait, I lied. I attend a set of schools: one for the boys, one for the girls. Students are admitted through an application process. The tuition resembles that of Ivy League schools and in return, the school offers academic, leadership, and social opportunities.

As a second-year immigrant from Korea living in a heavily Asian-immigrant-populated city, I decided to apply to this school. It seemed to have an abundant amount of diversity. I applied with my poor English and I was ecstatic to find out that I had gotten in with financial aid. But, imagine my surprise on the first day of my freshmen year. I walk into my first class and there are no y-chromosomes.

Soon, I learned that freshmen and sophomore would be in single-gender classes and that upperclassmen would attend co-educational classes. The school’s logic is that certain subjects are better off taught as single-gender classes. For example, in math and science classes, girls would feel more at ease without having boys in class. Vise versa for boys in humanities classes. While I respect the Administration’s concern for younger students, I see no value in separating the students by gender. And as a senior awaiting graduation, I can really say that I did not benefit at all from this curriculum.

I’m not bad mouthing my school at all. I loved my time here, but I remember dreading the single-gendered-ness of my first two years in school. I found its existence purely offensive. Not only that, in classes that are discussion-based, I felt like the direction was limited since most of us thought in similar ways. Then comes my junior year and I felt so much more engaged in classes. Both boys and girls were surprised to find that they had different perspectives from each other. We achieved wonders in classes, and I kept questioning, “What’s so dangerous about productive discussions that they are reserved for upperclassmen?”

There are other subtleties in my school that frustrate me. The fact that I seem to be the only one noticing it aggravates my anger. Since there are so many and since I am a senior, I’ll use graduation as an example. The senior boys are allowed to wear any suit of their choice and their graduation is held at the heart of the campus. The boys’ graduation location is one of the oldest spot on the campus that embodies years of tradition and value of the school. The juniors, sophomores, and freshmen attend the event in their uniforms, looking sharp and professional. It’s a very majestic event that conveys their manhood.

graduation

Girls’ graduation, on the other hand, is a tea party. We don’t even have a location since ours is held in the middle of the football field. What does football field have anything to do with a school that doesn’t even have girls’ football team? Not only that, other classes wear all white –if that’s not a virginal imposition, I don’t know what is. To top it all off, senior girls are expected to wear a pastel dress. Not just a dress, a pastel one.

Parents of both boys and girls spent thousands of dollars on their children for a high-quality education. Four years later, boys graduate as men in a regal ritual with grandiose. Girls, however, are encouraged to purchase yet another pastel dress to look pretty, in hopes of finding a husband much like their male counterparts. I know that this is not the school’s intention but I can’t seem to convince myself with its reasoning. Luckily, my class officers are trying to change this pastel image with a more classic garment: caps and gowns. They have my full support. If it doesn’t work out, the school should expect to see a spot of black suit on the podium in a bouquet of pastel dresses.

I am female. I attend a private, 9-12, coed boarding

Last month, as I sat in the auditorium during our weekly All-School Meeting, a horde of senior boys suddenly leapt on stage, clad in only short-shorts and wacky accessories. Reel 2 Real’s “I Like to Move it” (popularized by the movie “Madagascar”) blasted over the sound system, and the audience realized that this year’s highly anticipated Senior School Meeting had officially begun.

Senior School Meeting is a time-honored tradition at my school. It always hits at the peak of spring term, when the weather is nice and so-called senioritis is in full swing. It’s always kept under close wraps, the details pronounced highly confidential so as to not spoil the surprise. And it always involves scantily clad senior boys – the jocks, the hunks, the creme de la creme – engaged in some provocative, pelvis-thrusting dance.

 
Now, Senior School Meeting has never bothered me in the past. I understood that the pelvis thrusts, gyrations, and simulated sex acts were all done in good fun, if not good taste. I screamed and squealed with all the other girls. And the guys seemed to delight even more in this sexually charged, blatantly homoerotic spectacle.

But the hype reached a new level this year when the dancers came into a new, strange formation. Two boys facing each other spread their arms vertically, their palms touching. Other boys would enter the narrow space created by the arms, barging through downstage toward the audience. Check it out (skip to 4:10 to see what I’m talking about):

To go directly to the YouTube link, click here

It didn’t take the crowd long to figure out what was going on. The screaming grew louder and peaked when two boys, who were repeatedly colliding with the “vagina,” finally crashed through.

I admit that, at the time, the implications of what I was seeing didn’t fully register. It was only later, as I sat in my room that I began to feel uneasy. I brought up the subject with my friend, and we realized that we shared that same feeling. It was a feeling of confusion, awkwardness, and marginalization.

Boarding schools have rebranded themselves in the past few decades as diverse, inclusive, egalitarian institutions. And this is, to a large extent, true. (Wealthy WASP males are now a minority at many schools.) Last year, my school celebrated its 25th year of coeducation (it is nearly 200 years old), touting the achievements of its female students, both past and present. Indeed, it is girls and not boys who dominate on campus. For example, the prize awarded to the dorm with the highest GPA has gone to a girls’ dorm every year since 1991.

Yet female students have been largely failed by the institution that benefits so much from their personal success. Just look at our recent Senior School Meeting. It was boys who directed it, boys who starred in it, and boys who left feeling good about it. I can’t speak for every girl in the audience that, but I for one (plus my friend, two) could not feel good about it at all.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room so testosterone-filled in my entire life,” I said later to my friend.

“Yeah,” she replied. “It was almost like being a girl at an all-boys’ school.”

I myself go to a private co-ed school- which has existed since 1915 but has been co-ed for maybe 25 years. Not quite as intense as boarding school, but those lovely patriarchal traditions are still largely intact, although nothing quite like what was described above. It has always confused me, though, why when the boys in our school act inappropriately and offensively in ways such as these, the “it’s just boys being boys” excuse comes to save them. Well, when girls are just being girls, it usually doesn’t include sexism, so why are boys being boys getting away with it?

*Kudos to Cassidy F- the author- on this. Tried to find your e-mail on feministing but was unable to. Thanks for writing this though!

**Also just realized that this school (Lawrenceville) is the same school that one of my very good friends goes to. I’m going to check with him and get his take on it. That to follow…