The 1880

A Response to Hand-Me-Down Night Brouhaha: Lucy Goldberg

Lucy Goldberg is the Elections Commissioner for the SGA and is “not a voting member and [does] not have a constituency to represent.” She’s e-mailed us this response, which you, our readers, are more than welcome to do by sending it to the form on the lower left.

I would like to applaud those students who have expressed their interest in the Student Government Association of Emerson College. This is partially in response to the controversy that has erupted over the budget allotted to the 2008 Hand Me Down Night Committee, but it is in response to something larger that plagues the nation at large as well as our own direct democracy- the utter lack of communication.

Until now, we have not heard many individual voices with a genuine complaint or concrete concerns as to how our small government is run. As the board gathers every Tuesday in between class schedules and work schedules to discuss the newest appeal or the ever-present business of dealing with Aramark’s services without comment, it becomes difficult to remember that anybody actually cares about the decisions we make. Even the staff reporter from the Beacon becomes ambivalent as we all fill in our governmental roles, nothing more than practice for the day when we will become professionals in the real world.

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Guest Article–On the Hunt: A Response

The author of this guest article, Stephanie Appell, is a junior WLP major. She has also been called a feminist after expressing sentiments that differentiate her from a doormat, but hipster indie guys aren’t really her type. You can contact her at stephanie_appell@emerson.edu.

By now, either by word of mouth or by reading an article in this very blog, many of us have heard about the nineteen-year-old self-professed “college girl going crazy with sexual frustration.” We’ve seen, been invited to, or even joined the Facebook group it triggered. We may have even speculated with our friends as to the identity of this mystery girl. But in the interest of balance, I’d like to present an alternative view on these happenings. I think I’ll begin with a few statistics.

First, according to a study recently released by eMarketer, there are more women online than men, and they tend to use the Internet for social networking and task-oriented activities rather than as a diversion or for pure entertainment. According to the report, “females, especially adult women, are more likely to use the Internet to get things done, rather than to have fun.”

As of this moment, the aforementioned Facebook group has thirty-six members; 72% (twenty-six) of them, including the group’s creator, are male. Expanded to include the number of people invited to join the group but who haven’t yet responded, the number of total potential members increases to fifty-six, yet the percent of male members (no pun intended) remains the same.

Finally, on the Boston Craigslist Casual Encounters section, where the ad was originally posted, there are presently 4,288 results for the keyword search “m4w” (a man seeking a woman), but only 195 results for a “w4m” search (a woman seeking a man). The gender gap on the part of posters seems to hold up regardless of with whom, exactly, they’d like to have a casual encounter: There are 1,459 “m4m” results and only 152 “w4w.”

So. There are more women online than men, and they like to use the Internet for communication and to accomplish everyday tasks. Yet it appears that, for some reason, there are more men soliciting casual sexual encounters online than women - at least on Boston’s Craigslist. And the overwhelming majority of members of a Facebook group designed to at least ridicule (judging by the group’s profile picture) and at worst initiate a “hunt” to publicly humiliate a young woman who did use the Internet in search of a casual sexual encounter are male.

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