THE EXPECTATIONS BOARD.
Loyola University New Orleans could be said to have a reputation for its liberal artsiness. Placed against the backdrop of mega-school Tulane right across the street, we look like a bunch of quaint little hippies with our required 9 credits of Philosophy.
SAGE needed to appear on the campus scene somehow. What we really wanted was to know what we were dealing with. If we were going to address gender inequality on our campus like our constitution said we needed to know what kind of shape gender relations were in. That's when the Expectations Board was born.
Everybody these days loves a forum. Also, everybody loves writing things with Sharpie markers. We decided to make two huge pieces of poster board out of a bunch of poster board and hang them on either side of a rolling chalk board. These big canvases were bordered with magazine clippings from Cosmo and Glamour and GQ and such. One had media images and advertisements that overtly projected the specific kinds of femininity we are force-fed every day. The other featured those images that teach us masculinity and all the particulars and restrictions that come with it. On the feminine side we wrote "What do you expect from women?". On the masculine side we wrote "What do you expect from men?". Then we took the rolling chalk board and placed it in the middle of the most trafficked quad on campus during its most populated time of day.
Our end goal with this board was to demonstrate through the pictures and hopefully through our fellow students' astute insights that media expectations of BOTH women and men are limiting and unrealistic and that our true expectations are closer to equal. This is a sentiment all of us SAGE officers took as truth. We wanted to hear what our campus had to say about it, to start a dialogue.
HOWEVER. We ended up making a very different point.
Pretty much as soon as we put out those Sharpie Markers, it became clear that what we had created was an anonymous forum where people could push boundaries and take a stab at offensive humor without having to sign their names. We observed some interesting phenomena. Women often approached the board alone, writing for themselves. There were a good deal of instances of groups of men coming up to the board together, writing in packs, writing for each other, to get reactions out of the men they were with.
We always had officers near the board when it was out, but we wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible. Anonymity emboldens people to write things they may not write if they feel monitored. However, at one point, Morgan, one of our co-presidents, was witnessing the rendering of a big old penis in the middle of the board. The artist, male, was thoroughly enjoying what he was doing and how clever it was. She stepped in and simply asked him not to do that please, told him that the board was for writing on. As she tells it, once he was caught, he morphed into a genuinely apologetic, redhanded little guy. Embarrassed, probably.
By the end of the first day, the board was covered in sex. COVERED. Penises abounded. Also, some really horrible, violent, blatantly misogynistic stuff. That hurt. In my own naiveté, I'd not planned for that kind of nonsense. It was beyond my comprehension that someone would write such pointedly offensive comments about another gender at all, let alone knowing that there are people of that gender standing right next to them as the write it, reading every word. We wanted to steer the conversation away from sex, so when we put the board out the second day, we put a big sign on each side reading "OK. WE GET IT. SEX. WHAT ELSE?" and circled every sexual comment from the first day (there were a whole bushel of them) in red marker. Basically, we wanted to provoke real, not sensational responses from this crowd of borderline adults in the midst of their higher learning.
"What do you expect from women?" after its two days on the quad. |
Signs didn't do much. I believe it was that day that we got our most violent comment. Something about choking and slapping. At one point, the Office of Co-Curricular Activities came out to read the board. They were horrified. (AS WERE WE ALL.) A little while later, the President of that office returned and told us that we had x amount of time to take the board down-- much shorter than the original amount of time they'd allotted us when the board idea was originally approved. He said it was "offending the women in his office." Well, it should! Some of the things people had found it in their hearts to write were very offensive. ALSO, it should be offending YOU as well. Not just the women in your office. The kind of language my peers put on that board should offend EVERYBODY. I wished he had come on his own behalf, asking us to take it down because it offended him and everyone in his office. Instead he came out to protect the ladies. Here were those projected gender expectations at work. Women, you're supposed to be fragile and get your feelings hurt. Men, you better not let anything phase you emotionally, because you have to step up and take care of those breakable ladies. Just lots of interesting things that this board brought out into the light.
"What do you expect from men?" |
So we put our heads together. Maybe they board didn't have to go back up. Because we would make a new board that would be more reflective, that people couldn't sully. We persuaded them to let us put it back up as long as there wasn't a possibility of it getting as trashy as the last board had. We counted every comment that had been written (exactly 100 on the femininity side and exactly 150 on the masculinity side, oddly enough) and divided them into categories based on the nature of their content. Then we did some math to figure out percentage-wise how people had responded to our simple questions "What do you expect from women?" and "What do you expect from men?".
Now let me just say, the board was not all trash. We got some really fascinating, insightful stuff, too. One person went to the library and printed a page that simply said "What do you expect from humanity?" and taped it to the light post next to the board. That was my favorite. Kind of the whole point. Thank you, one person, for understanding.
Maddy and Me with second board |
To which we responded: ".......yes. Precisely. Totally on purpose."
The other side. The original boards fit much better on the chalk board. |
And there it all was, lying open, exposed on the quad. Reinforced pressure to perpetuate sexism in all-male communities. Pressure on women to laugh at these jokes that relegate them to a pretty hideous place, cause if you don't you are most certainly a bitch without a sense of humor.
The fact that we're all there at a university being educated together counts for something, yes, but by the same token, we're all there being educated together. Shouldn't we be thinking bigger?
And in answer to that anonymous question posted next to the board on the very first day, "What do you expect from humanity?": I'm going to keep expecting love, intelligence, and respect despite what I saw scrawled all over the Expectations Board, because to accept that behavior as some kind of permanent fixture of human nature is to give up all hope.