As many of you who are tuned into Community, Jezebel, or Orchid know, or my personal political-spam list know, the “Mr. Wellesley Freshman Contest” run by HerCampus has been an enormous debacle. From forcing our first-year interns to choose freshman from other schools to insisting that our trans students are not “real men,” the HerCampus founders have displayed a profound ignorance with regard to the purpose of Wellesley as a single-sex institution as well as their conceptions of gender categories. Their disregard of our complaints and blasé attitude surrounding our protests has sharply stung many students.
However, this is not being written to address the concerns surrounding HerCampus. The Community thread has bludgeoned this issue with enough quips and insults that dwelling on the point further would simply result in a dull repetition of a fading issue. I am writing this opinion because of our ability to easily forget. I am writing because of the structural disregard that enables and encourages us to tuck our concerns into quiet corners as we slick on another blank face to step onto rigged playfield. I am writing this because I am sick of speaking in languages that can’t encompass my feelings and spaces that won’t hold these big words that I’m trying to say.
Our culture valorizes forgetfulness, letting go, and forgiveness. Posters on HerCampus have encouraged Wellesley students to “Get a Life” and “realize that there are much more important issues to spend your energy on.” We should move on, heartened that our requests have been half-fulfilled and smug that the Jezebel article has brought some dignity and national gossip to our side. With all due respect, I strongly disagree. I will not, have not, and shall never turn the other cheek or even venture to forget the sting of a slap. An ignorant apology brought on by Jezebel shame is no victory to celebrate. When systematic structural discrimination still holds women sexually, socially, and financially bound to men, then we still have reason to remember. When our gendered binaries instill within us limiting and repressive notions of behavior, sexuality, and potential, then I will not move on.
So I would like to call upon people to hold onto their anger. Empty apologies that swing back to continue ignorant discrimination don’t deserve our attention and can’t diffuse our desire. I am unwilling to stomach a world of saccharine apologies where rejection labels you an ungrateful bitch and acceptance sticks you back into systems of gold-link oppression. To steal a page from Howard Beale, “I’m mad as Hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” I am angry in a slow-boil way, like a churning of memories or a symphony into subterranean currents where I can claim the stone-dignity of my father’s heart. Because although a family’s acceptance should not be contingent upon the length of my hair, political persuasion, or choice of partner, sometimes things aren’t theory-perfect. Coming to Wellesley, some of us have left homes of whispers and communities so silent that goodbye was a difficult sound to manage. We come here for something better, for the ache of anger to slip into the comforting solace of a liberal-arts bubble. I have not come to this community for it to become HerCampus.
So I will continue to hold my anger, triumphing it above my head like a torch, a spark, or just an angry fist. Ignorance is no apology and my mind is no sieve. I will fit myself around your large words like “Bitch” or “Lesbian Feminist” (a most interesting insult by a HerCampus poster) until my anger breaks so much and so far that there’s a little space for a new type of speaking. A new language, or something that sounds like breathing, that I can work in words that fit smoothly around my lips. Like a promise of reprieve.
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