TASOAE: 012
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Take a bunch of guys who are interested in science and engineering, and are therefore likely to be less socially skilled. Now put them in an environment which has a 5:1 male:female ratio. It creates a gender environment even more screwed up than the typical college experience. Rose girls are simultaneously hot, because they’re smart or geeky or whatever, and gross, because they’re fat or geeky or whatever. It’s impossible to get a date, because of how few women there are, while a surprisingly large proportion of the women are single. If a woman does poorly in class, it’s because girls suck at engineering; if she does well, she must be flirting with the teacher or getting extra help because she’s a woman. There’s no trouble with sexual assaults on campus, but everyone knows that if a woman has trouble at an XYZ fraternity party, she’s got only herself to blame, because everyone knows how those guys are.
College is a good time to learn lessons about the real world for people who had the luxury of not learning them earlier. It’s still semi-sheltered and structured, but gives students enough independence to make mistakes and act on their own. One of the important lessons is that men and women are all just people, and that there’s nothing fundamentally different about how women think and feel. A lot of people never learn this lesson.
I was always distressed to learn that the guy who had been casually hanging out with me for a few weeks and then suddenly disappeared was actually interested in dating me all that time and never got the courage up. This happened more than once. Also, I learned that I am really oblivious to that sort of thing.
It didn’t help that many of the students acted like children. Most of the student body was badly in need of some growing up (myself included of course).