Courting on campus

If a journalist from the New York Times came to Bloomington and asked me how I felt about the men on IU’s campus, I would have to plead the Fifth.

No offense, guys. I think you’re all great in your own special way. But there is one area where the majority of you leave much to be desired.  

The chivalry our mothers and grandmothers were afforded when they were single does not exist in today’s society. Our moms would probably be appalled if they witnessed the way “courting” often works on college campuses in this century.

Alex Williams, a reporter for the New York Times, got a group of women from the University of North Carolina to spill for his article “The New Math On Campus.”

Williams’ article was about the shortage of men on campuses and how it affects the lifestyles of female students.

The article began with Williams describing a typical night out for the women at UNC. They get all dolled up just to go to a local bar and belt out Taylor Swift songs with each other.

Williams quoted the women making statements like, “Women do not want to get left out in the cold, so they are competing for men on men’s terms.”

Their quotes weren’t even groundbreaking, though the group did sound pretty lonely.

But then some of the women freaked out and ran to celebrity gossip Web site Gawker crying about how they were misquoted. Their whines resulted in an italicized clarification at the bottom of the article on the NYT Web site. One woman was afraid her quote made her sound like she condoned men cheating on her.

These women allowed a reporter to follow them around with a note pad, monitoring their conversations and asking intruding questions. They should have known their quotes would be in the form of sound bites and that their words could be interpreted any way the newspaper pleased — and eventually any way the reader pleased.

They made the mistake of throwing their sorrows into the public domain. Blaming a reporter for doing his job makes them appear immature and naïve — in addition to sounding lonely and undesirable. These poor women are one “misquote” away from landing their own reality show. The only problem would be their likely beef with the camera crew for making them look 10 pounds heavier.

I hope I never get asked to provide a quote about my love life for the New York Times. Journalists are trained to get the scoop on the intimate details of their sources’ lives.

It wouldn’t take 30 seconds before I was spilling my guts and disclosing tons of confidential information about my romantic past and the less-than-chivalrous men with whom I’ve been involved.

The quote would sound like it was lifted from a whiny Alanis Morissette song. And I’ve never even had my heart broken — though I have experienced a similar frustration to that experienced by the women in the article.

The way men and women interact on college campuses is flawed. But no self-respecting woman should vent about it to a reporter from the New York Times.

E-mail: jzaslow@indiana.edu