stay connected

FrumForum Facebook FrumForum YouTube Update Twitter FrumForum Flickr

Gender Neutral Housing

October 15th, 2009 at 8:40 am David Frum | 16 Comments |

Share
| Print

Call me a stick in the mud – but I cannot even begin to imagine what an argument in favor of this would look like – much less understand how anybody could be persuaded by it.

Recent Posts by David Frum



16 Comments so far ↓

  • DFL // Oct 15, 2009 at 10:23 am

    Playboy portrayed a university that went this way thirty years ago, complete with pictures, of course. I forget the institution of higher learning. If you’re a young woman who feels comfortable sharing the same bedroom with a young man or is okay with showering in front of the boys, this might be right for you. Somehow, I think the popularity of Gender Neutral Housing will be limited to young men who want to gawk at undrressed women.

  • Positive Liberty » Gender-Neutral Housing // Oct 15, 2009 at 10:40 am

    [...] Gender-neutral housing comes to Princeton. David Frum scoffs. [...]

  • jjv // Oct 15, 2009 at 10:53 am

    Gender Neutral sounds fine at first but the operation is both invasive and painful.

  • EscapeVelocity // Oct 15, 2009 at 11:02 am

    Oh, come off it David Frum, you and your out of date sense of propriety, we are creating a Brave New World on the cultural and political landscape in Western Civiliztaion, and you are only alienating voters by opposing it.

  • balconesfault // Oct 15, 2009 at 11:08 am

    eh – Spelman Hall is like a big apartment complex. Essentially, each unit is a 4 person suite with individual bedrooms, a shared living room/kitchen, and a shared bathroom.

    I’m guessing the biggest factor here is that some guys are going to have a lot cleaner bathrooms and kitchens than were they living in an all-male suite.

    For what it’s worth, these units all function essentially like “mini co-ops” – residents have to work out who cooks, who cleans, etc, the same way co-ops have been functioning for decades in numerous old houses bought around campuses across the country. And I’m assuming that just as nobody was coerced to join a co-op, nobody will be coerced to do the gender neutral thing.

    If a woman wants privacy when she showers, I suppose she’ll lock the bathroom door. There will probably be arguments over bras or smelly socks left lying around, and dishes left in the sink, and whether someone’s guests were particularly rude or obnoxious. You know … life.

  • sinz54 // Oct 15, 2009 at 12:43 pm

    Having women in the dorm housing would have made no difference to us male engineering students.

    We chose engineering as our major, precisely because we found microprocessors easier to understand than women.

  • balconesfault // Oct 15, 2009 at 1:03 pm

    lol – I made my life easy, and married a fellow engineer …

  • esurience // Oct 15, 2009 at 2:04 pm

    Next thing you know they’ll stop requiring women to wear burqas!

    You asked an argument for it, but I’m curious what the argument against it would be. It makes me wonder, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, whether the people who are against this kind of thing have some kind of uncontrollable urge to rape women when given an opportunity, or whether they just think other men have such uncontrollable urges? And really, if a guy has an uncontrollable urge to rape, is living in a separate building really going to stop him?

  • sricher // Oct 15, 2009 at 2:46 pm

    meh… live with whom you want and how you want… We can certainly raise an eyebrow, but let’s not regulate it…

  • mlindroo // Oct 15, 2009 at 4:01 pm

    > eh – Spelman Hall is like a big apartment complex. Essentially, each unit is a
    >4 person suite with individual bedrooms, a shared living room/kitchen, and a shared bathroom.

    Gender neutral dorm housing has been the norm in Scandinavia for ages.
    To my knowledge this has not caused any problems.

    MARCU$

  • balconesfault // Oct 15, 2009 at 4:10 pm

    Gender neutral dorm housing has been the norm in Scandinavia for ages.

    Hell, I remember 30 years ago visiting Smith College for parties one weekend with teammates (one teammate had a girlfriend there) and finding that their bathrooms were co-ed. This is absolutely non-news.

  • oldgal // Oct 15, 2009 at 6:23 pm

    O.K., David, you’re a stick in the mud. Dorms at Colorado State U. had this arrangement in some of their dorms 50 years ago and found that the overall behavior and manners of everyone was improved and that there were fewer problems in the dorm.

  • Arch // Oct 15, 2009 at 7:07 pm

    More years ago than I’d like to admit (think twenty) (-ish) I was in college and lived in a co-ed suite of rooms, sharing a bathroom. There weren’t coed room-mates, but suitemates? Sure.

  • hormelmeatco // Oct 15, 2009 at 11:10 pm

    @mlindroo:

    The housing buildings at my school have been “gender-neutral” since the school opened. All but two of the buildings have individual bathrooms for each room. Roomates in the same room will be the same gender, but can be different genders if both people agree and arrange it ahead of time with the housing office.

    David: It’s a complete non-issue. The “gender-neutral” tag may have tripped your PC sensor. It’s just a fancy term for co-ed buildings.

  • LauraNo // Oct 16, 2009 at 11:16 am

    My nephew shared this kind of arrangement with 3 women. You would think he was in his glory, wouldn’t you? But the young women were slobs and stole his food. Same old roommate problems, nothing new. He hasn’t mentioned the women trotting around the place naked…will have to ask him about that.

  • Moderate // Oct 16, 2009 at 12:34 pm

    I respectfully disagree with Mr. Frum. Speaking as a male college student who once spent a semester living with three girls, I find nothing about this shocking or outrageous, and I consider myself a fairly conservative, old-fashioned guy.

    We didn’t have orgies. We had debates about political theory.

Leave a Comment

You must log in to post a comment.