Colleges' final frontier: mixed-gender housing

In 1789, the first coeducational college in the United States opened it's doors. Now, over 200 years later, a handful of colleges across the country are eliminating the final vestiges of academic sex segregation and providing the option of gender neutral housing.

Gender neutral rooms, which are now available in over 30 colleges nationwide, are being hailed by many as a positive step in eliminating gender boundaries, the last politically correct type of segregation to exist in America today. Indeed, no one would never dream of separating students based on race, class, or religion. So why is it still acceptable to separate college students, who are legal adults, from rooming together based on their gender or sex?

The answer, as conservatives would tell it, is that gender neutral housing will promote sexual promiscuity. This argument is nearly identical, and equally ridiculous, to the arguments and debates which surround the distribution of contraceptives in schools. Everyone knows that students of a certain age, whether they are in high school or college, will be sexually active. This is completely healthy and normal. To imply that allowing gender neutral rooming will be opening a floodgate of sexual activity is to imply that such activity does not already exist. Such a claim is ridiculous. And in the majority of cases, mixed gender roommates are merely close friends. [And if they're more then friends, they eliminate the awkward inconvenience of sexiling their roommate!]

In addition, such arguments are painfully heteronormative. If colleges were genuinely committed to the elimination of sexual activity between roommates, as conservatives claim they should be, they would base rooming assignments not only on gender but on sexual orientation as well. To imply that mixed gender housing promotes sexual activity is to claim that only type of sexual activity which occurs on a college campus is between men and women. Anyone who has gone to college, especially a small liberal arts college, can tell you this is certainly not the case.

Click here for a full article on gender neutral housing published in the Boston Globe.

-Bronwen