With its fairytale forest on the banks of the Hudson River, a two-hour train ride from New York, the Bard College campus is as romantic as a landscape by the painter Thomas Cole.
The love life of its approximately two thousand students is less so.
No one-on-one dinners in the cafeteria, no walks on the trails two by two: at each start of the school year, the students of this university form single-sex groups of friends who get closer on weekends during alcoholic evenings including the main function is to procure partners for the night.
“Every Friday, we dress up and take stock of the boys who interest us,” says Elise, 20, a psychology student.
And every Sunday, it's the same disappointment, either from coming home empty-handed, or from having had a one-night stand with a student who has already slept with lots of girls we know."
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Love life at Bard College is a paragon of what Americans have called hookup culture, a relationship model characterized by the absence of any attachment.
The novelist Tom Wolfe described the phenomenon as early as 2004 in his book
I, Charlotte Simmons
, whose heroine was inspired by his interviews with real students.
In this model, it is common for a boy to be interested in several girls from the same group, often in turn but sometimes simultaneously, as when Elise and her friend Julia each received a text – “What are you doing this evening ?"
– from the same student, while they were having lunch together.
In this culture, it is normal for relationships to be free.
“When a couple forms, the boy continues to flirt with other girls without even bothering to lie,” continues Elise.
It's public.
And it is accepted.
What can you expect from someone who finds themselves in the open countryside with a bunch of beautiful girls who are all looking for the same thing?
Normalize no-strings-attached relationships
Since Tom Wolfe, this normalization of relationships without ties or feelings on campus has continued to generate ink in the United States.
Some commentators have blamed the explosion of pornography, social media and dating apps, others the sexism of hip-hop culture.
What if it was a matter of demographics?
Bard College has 62% female students to 38% male students.
In the United States, this proportion is not extraordinary: since the 1980s, during which men became a minority in higher education, women have continued to widen the gap, reaching this year the symbolic threshold of 60% of those registered nationally.
According to a survey carried out among 25,000 final year students for the organization Youth Truth, 77% of high school girls but only 57% of high school students plan to study.
In other words, today there are three female students for every two students in the country, and this disparity could worsen.
Long celebrated, the irresistible rise of girls is now causing panic in American college admissions committees.
This fall, a New York Times Magazine
investigation
revealed the more or less discreet efforts of various institutions to balance their workforce.
Art universities, long indifferent to sport, created second and third division teams to attract athletes.
Others are investing in marketing campaigns aimed specifically at boys.
And most favor male applicants informally during the selection process, something U.S. law does not prohibit at private universities.
For defenders of this practice, the disparity has such harmful consequences, particularly on the social and romantic lives of young people, that “positive discrimination” in favor of men would be in the interest of female students.
Parity as a priority
Professor of literature at Rollins College, in Florida, where she sits on admissions committees, Jana Mathews confirms that boys placed on the waiting list necessarily have a competitive advantage.
“It goes against all my feminist impulses,” she admits, “but diversity is a priority for our institutions, and that includes a student body that comes as close to parity as possible.
Despite these boosts, the rate of male students at Rollins College has been around 40% for fifteen years.
During visits, high school girls, interested in this campus near Orlando, often ask: “Where are the men?”
» And many of the young people she supervises at university talk about the effects of this shortage on their private lives.
“Students complain that there is no one to go out with, or rather that no one wants to go out with them.
And the students say that they are in paradise: the reservoir of potential partners seems infinite to them,” adds the professor.
Already evident in class, the over-representation of women is at its peak in the student party circuit.
In a book about the gendered social organizations that Americans call fraternities and sororities (
The Benefits of Friends
; Inside the Complicated World of Today's Sororities & Fraternities,
2022), Jana Mathews shows how men's clubs push their advantage by manipulating invitations.
“For example, a fraternity will organize an evening reserved for its most senior members, and to which all members of several sororities are invited,” she explains.
The idea is to guarantee a ratio of at least two female students, and often three or four, for each male student.
The result is a large number of young women vying for your attention.”
The majority of women
Too Many Women?
(Too many women?) This provocative question already appeared on the cover of a book co-written by the feminist social psychologist Marcia Guttentag and her husband, Paul Secord, published in 1983. This couple of Harvard professors developed a bold idea known to Americans under the name of
sex ratio theory
: the rarer sex, because it has a greater choice of partners, dictates the terms of heterosexual relationships, with profound repercussions on morals, marriage, divorce and education children.
Researchers showed that in periods when women had this power, for example at the time of the conquest of the West, they took advantage of it to promote the formation of monogamous relationships and obtain strong parental investment from men.
“When it is men who form the numerical minority, the argument is that they prefer a more… fluid relational model,” comments Jana Mathews, choosing her last word carefully.
Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord are more direct.
In groups characterized by a shortage of men, women, they write, are “more likely to be viewed as mere sex objects.”
In 2010, sociology professors Jeremy Uecker and Mark Regnerus set out to test this theory using data from a survey of a thousand heterosexual female students.
Researchers have shown that on campuses where the student body is more than 60% female, female respondents have statistically fewer serious boyfriends and more fleeting relationships with more partners.
“As Guttentag and Secord's hypothesis predicts, women who attend universities where they are more numerous tend to view men as less interested in commitment and less trustworthy,” the sociologists write.
And to conclude: “It seems that men behave differently depending on the relationship markets.”
Published in the journal
Sociological Quarterly
, this study was criticized for its apprehension, considered reactionary, of relations between the sexes.
Other researchers have tried to show that young American women see themselves not as victims of hookup
culture
, but rather as enthusiastic participants, using the opposite sex for their own pleasure.
“There is a lot of research on the subject, and the results are mixed,” says Jana Mathews.
It is true that not all students dream of a monogamous relationship, and that many young women favor sexuality without commitment at this stage of their lives.
The fact remains that, unlike men, they have no choice: if they wanted a boyfriend, there would not be many people to apply.”
Being “on the market”
This summer, 19-year-old Lexi finally found a
boyfriend
in her parents' small town, a farming community in Illinois, where people "date for long periods of time."
A sociology major at Bard College, this competitive tennis player talks about her “tremendous relief” at no longer being “on the market” for college.
During her freshman year, she accepted one of those label-free relationships that Gen Z Americans call
situationship
.
In this new love pattern, “there can be an emotional bond, but without commitment,” she deciphers.
All doors remain open, and guys have so many.”
Before our interview, Lexi had just consoled a friend who had left for a rival, after three months of this diet.
“It’s a conversation that’s too common at Bard,” laments the student.
Even for ongoing relationships, we have to share the men: they rotate.
It has a huge impact on self-esteem.”
In the rare institutions of higher education where there are more men, morals seem from another century.
Former economics journalist at
Fortune
magazine , Jon Birger will never forget his visit to Caltech, the major scientific university in Los Angeles, where he invited students of both sexes to a
focus group
on romantic relationships.
He says: “It was just after Valentine’s Day and I asked them what they had done, out of curiosity.
They told me that the tradition in their student hall was for boys to write cards for girls and make them pancakes for breakfast.”
In his 2015 book
Date-onomics
: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game
, Jon Birger ranked forty American universities based on their male-to-female ratio, then compared how students described their dating culture in their college guide
The College Prowler
.
We learn that Georgia Tech University in Atlanta (60% men) is a “fairly monogamous” campus, where most students like to be in a relationship.
At Boston University (42% men), the first year is described on the contrary as a “sexual explosion”.
“All these young people live in the same modern world,” comments Jon Birger.
The only difference is the percentage of men.”
“Mixed collar” couples
Beyond campuses, the phenomenon is already affecting the pairing of a generation of American women.
Among millennials, there are 134 women for every 100 qualified men: those who hope for a partner with the same level of education are condemned to a game of musical chairs that is all the more interminable as men have little incentive to get involved.
According to a new report from the Survey Center on American Life, 45% of single, educated women say their dating situation is due to their inability to find someone who meets their expectations (only 28% of single, non-educated women point to this reason).
Jana Mathews notes that some of her students – “intelligent, beautiful, wonderful” – give up all love lives.
Others date men who are involved in the working world, to escape a university culture that they consider “hostile” to monogamous relationships.
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blackmail
In
Date-onomics
, Jon Birger called for a rise in “mixed-collar” couples, as he called the union of a college-educated woman with a working-class man.
“I had no idea that this would be the most controversial aspect of my book,” he comments.
Some women have accused me of encouraging them to make unacceptable compromises.
But the idea that marrying an artisan would be a compromise, while marrying an investment banker would not, makes me uncomfortable.
My entourage may be unusual, but I know several couples where the woman is more educated.
I have a friend who runs a successful landscaping business.
He didn't go to college.
His wife, yes.
They are deeply in love, and their relationship is enviable.”
In her latest book,
Make Your Move, the New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge
(2021), the author persists and signs off, suggesting young women to “uncheck the education level box” on dating apps. encounter.
Jon Birger not only encourages young American women to adapt to the shortage of qualified men by broadening their criteria, he also urges public authorities to tackle the shortage itself.
He does not believe in the policy of quotas: “If I were a young girl of 18, and I was taught that it is materially more difficult for me to enter a prestigious private university simply because of my type, I would be rightly upset.”
For this economist, the problem must be resolved at the root: boys dropping out of school.
“I don’t think girls are inherently smarter,” he explains.
On the other hand, it has been shown that they mature more quickly.
Extensive research suggests that delaying boys' entry into school by a year goes a long way to narrowing the educational gap.”
In the meantime, he recommends enlightening male adolescents on the two paths that will present themselves to them upon leaving high school: either higher education and an overabundance of girls, or working life and a shortage of potential partners.
“If I were 17,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t be insensitive to this argument.”
French love
The feminization of the student body also concerns France, where there have been more girls on university benches since the 1990s. According to the most recent statistics from INSEE, 56% of the 2.78 million enrolled in the he higher education at the start of the 2020 school year were female students, an over-representation of women less pronounced than in the United States, but greater than in Germany.
All ages combined, half of French women today hold a higher education diploma, compared to 40% of men.
This disparity has already disrupted the ancestral tendency of women towards hypergamy (the choice of a partner with a higher social status): thanks to data from INED, the sociologist Milan Bouchet-Valat has shown that from the In the year 2000, couples in which the woman is more educated than her partner became more common than the reverse case.
This reversal, particularly clear in France, would explain why educated French women are less likely to be single than their American counterparts.