Gender relations at college campuses

Women have become the majority of college students, but this hasn't resulted in a more female-friendly environment, at least socially. Via Chronicle of Higher Education, I found the Commonweal column "Role Reversals" by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead:

In the wake of last spring’s sex scandal involving the Duke University men’s lacrosse team, a Rolling Stone reporter named Janet Reitman went to Durham to interview current students. She returned with a revealing portrait of social life at Duke, and particularly of what it is like to be a female student at the school that ranks eighth on the latest U.S. News and World Report list of the nation’s top universities.

The women she met were hard-working superachievers. They had impressive GPAs, letters in sports, double majors, and high career ambitions. Almost to a one, they were fit, attractive, and stylish. They stood out as the very model of the independent-minded young woman of the twenty-first century. Yet in their social lives, Reitman discovered, they were abjectly dependent on winning the approval of the male students at Duke. This required going to bashes organized by men, matching them drink for drink, hooking up for sex and acting out men’s pornographic fantasies at theme parties like “Dress to Get Lei’d” and “Sex and Execs.” Moreover, these elite women couldn’t think of anything that might be wrong with this kind of behavior. To them, it was just the normal way that men and women socialized....

As recently as the early 1960s, there was a familiar gender divide on coed college campuses. Men dominated the classroom. They outnumbered women, were taught by male professors, and enjoyed the privileges of male sponsorship in their academic pursuits and future careers. Women dominated campus social life. They set and enforced the rules for dating and parties. They organized the rites and rituals of coed socializing-including such now-arcane courtship rituals as pinning ceremonies, formal dances, and male serenades-where men were obliged to defer to women’s fantasies and desires....

The Duke coeds don’t see their social condition as a form of servility, but they do experience it as a source of perplexity. On the one hand, they believe that their generation of women has achieved sexual equality. To them, that means that girls can get hammered and have sex with as much freedom and abandon as the guys. They’ve been taught that this represents progress from the old double standard and from the burden of female modesty. On the other hand, they don’t always feel good about themselves. Their participation in the booze-drenched party culture, they admit, is at odds with their own sense of dignity and self-worth. One Duke woman, who confessed to having sex with a popular guy in order not to lose him, said wistfully: “I have done things that are completely inconsistent with the type of person I am, and what I value.”

(Reading the full column requires free registration.)

I've been sheltered from these environments. I was a student at MIT, where the focus was on studying and there were few enough women (especially in computer science) that we didn't have to go out of our way to attract men. I'm a professor at Mills, a women's college, which has different social problems.