Final Clubs and Gender Relations

In today’s Harvard Crimson, Daniel Herz-Roiphe has written an unusually articulate, well-argued entry in the perennial “Why Final Clubs Are Still Really Bad” essay contest. I’m glad he focused on gender discrimination and inequality, rather than also trying to tackle racial, hetero-normative, and class-based elitism. Those other forms of discrimination are equally important, but I think they’re pretty low-hanging fruit. Herz-Roiphe has tried to articulate what is often very hard to explain: how all-male clubs can be bad for women, even when women choose to go to their parties and create their own single-gender clubs.
I think Herz-Roiphe puts his finger on the problem when he talks about the “imbalance of control” that pervades the final club scene. Men throw the parties, buy the booze, choose the music, pay the rent, deal with alumni, decide who gets in, and judge (implicitly but also explicitly) who’s attractive, who’s fun, who’s cool, etc. Even when this control entails serious responsibility (i.e. the liabilities that come with hosting huge parties on a college campus every week), the mindset it perpetuates is one that says, men will take care of everything and women just have to “smile and look pretty,” as one interviewee of Herz-Roiphe put it.
Herz-Roiphe also takes down the oft-heard counter-argument that, so long as women are forming their own clubs, we don’t have to worry about the state of gender relations on campus. First, he points out the obvious, which is that female final clubs don’t have the sort of prestige, wealth, or alumni network that the male clubs do. Second, and more controversially, he says that, even if the clubs were equal, separateness wouldn’t be desirable. I really appreciate his willingness to take on this question. In my opinion, we don’t need any more institutionalized single-gender camaraderie. It’s already the case that most people, most of the time, associate with and befriend people of the same gender. When this natural habit is unnecessarily institutionalized, the inevitable result is to create a sense of “otherness” surrounding the opposite gender. The solution to the good old boys’ network, men in power privileging other men because they’re “like them,” is not to create a good old girls’ network that can do the same thing for women. The solution is to break down the gender divide, on the assumption (which some people might contest, admittedly) that men and women are equals in all relevant respects.
In the Crimson‘s comment section, a lot of people have been criticizing Herz-Roiphe for himself being a member of a final club. But I actually gave his article greater, not lesser, weight because of this alleged hypocrisy. Herz-Roiphe, unlike most critics of the final club scene, knows whereof he speaks. And he can probably do more to change things than can five or ten or twenty critics who aren’t final club members, myself included. If he felt this strongly about final clubs three years ago, when he joined, the hypocrisy would be more concerning. But my hunch is that his views have probably evolved over the years.
I also want to respond to one of the sillier critiques offered in the comment section, which is that everybody and everything is discriminatory, including (or especially) Harvard itself, so we should leave final clubs alone. Look at the (il)logic of that kind of argument. Imagine if someone said, “Lots of laws are discriminatory, so let’s leave Jim Crow alone. Lots of leaders are evil, so let’s leave Hitler alone. Lots of people are poor, so let’s leave starving children alone.” I’m not saying final clubs are comparable to any of those things; I’m just drawing attention to the rottenness of a certain kind of argument, which we only find intuitively satisfying in some cases because the stakes are relatively low (or seem that way).
Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong in the comments.
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