*LOST POST* RePosting my "Babes in Boyland" Entry that didn't appear

I thought I posted this for Babes in Boyland back in October, but it doesn't appear on the site so I'm posting it again.

Thoughts on Babes in Boyland:

In Babes In Boyland, Gina Barreca’s account of her days in male dominated Princeton, Barreca is sanguine about her ability to survive in the culture of male privilege and camaraderie. She says on page 4, “A bet, dare, and challenge is precisely what Dartmouth College was in 1975.” I believe her. Barreca didn’t fit into the acceptable categories at Dartmouth. She wasn’t a flawless beauty, and she wasn’t a boy, and she didn’t come from a privileged background. Instead, she had to deal with being herself, a girl from Brooklyn. I think she presents a version of herself that was very well equipped to deal with these hardships. She recalls countless instances where she was able to expose the foolish prejudice and sexism of the men who surrounded her. I found that her representation of men was almost universally negative. On the one hand she was put into an aggressive situation, so her reaction was somewhat natural. On the other hand, for better or for worse, there was no sense of distance from the events of her undergraduate years at Princeton. Even though the memoir was written years later, I did not feel as though Barreca had gained any perspective beyond straight resentment of the De Facto sexism of the day. Now that the wounds are not so fresh, and the errors of that time are widely acknowledged, I didn’t find the story that compelling.

I think that Barreca’s experiences as an undergrad had a far greater effect on her perspective as a professor than vice versa. She initially put a lot of emphasis on being an outsider to the academic world, the only girl in her whole family to have gone to college. She also implied than going to college alienated her from her old world, so she was doubly trapped. The whole thing worked because she told the story with an entertaining good humor.

I also was a bit put off by the episodic nature of the story. Because she jumped around so much, I didn’t feel like I was getting the full story. It seemed like she was leaving things out, only reporting the anecdotes that made her look like a “tough cookie,” and leaving out the rest. Overall, I felt that the story was entertaining, but it didn't make a significant impact in my understanding of male/female relations in the college experience.