Article was not neutral in examining gender gap

TO THE EDITOR:

 I am writing in response to The New York Times article about dating on college campuses where women outnumber men. So far, most of the responses to the Times article (including that of The Daily Tar Heel) have focused on the content, i.e., the student quotes and the ways in which they misrepresent the attitudes of female students on UNC’s campus.

What in my opinion is far more incredulous is the overall structure and framing of the article. It is extremely telling of contemporary gender relations that an article in the Times about the increasing number of women on college campuses would choose to angle this issue in such a way as to emphasize the (erroneous) increased power of men and thus assuage male anxieties about loss of power in the social sphere.

This article could have been structured as a more neutral exploration of changing gender relations on college campuses or as a look at how the “new” demographics have ushered in an era of increasing power and new roles for women at UNC.

Equally important, as Stephen Farmer points out on the UNC Admissions blog, is the idea that there is nothing “new” about these demographics whatsoever.

Women have outnumbered men at Carolina for the last 30 years, so this fallacious aura of newness exposes the sexism inherent in the very premise of the story.


Lauren Brenner
UNC ’08