CSotD: Equal but separate
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Dan Piraro hits on one of the great elements of not-getting-it in today's Bizarro.
Does anybody still use this word as a noun? I remember having a discussion about it in the newsroom about 20 years ago, but having a woman publisher and a woman city editor, it was a short discussion. Women students at Plattsburgh State were referred to as "students" and occasionally, when relevant, as "women students."
But it didn't stamp out the noun, which is still around, though it's like "negro" in that, when somebody says it, your ears kind of perk up and you wonder if you just heard that. And, since it's still an acceptable adjective, it does come up in legitimate contexts.
"I'm joining a co-ed volleyball league" is fine. "He was walking across campus with a co-ed" gets a say-what?
I may be more sensitive to this specific issue because I went to an all-male university that became co-educational shortly after I graduated. Which is to say, I was in one of the last classes to go through before it became harder for borderline male students like myself to get in.
But that wasn't my point. My point is that, once the school began enrolling both men and women, they were all co-eds, not just the ones who wouldn't have been there in the past.
"Negro" was, in its day, merely descriptive and carried no particular judgment value of its own. But "co-ed" was a dismissive term right from the start.
The assumption was that Betty Co-ed was just there to get her MRS degree, and that assumption was not helped, in olden days, by professors who said things like (and this is a quote, or at least a very accurate paraphrase), "Philosophy won't teach you how to change the diapers, but it will give you something to think about while you change the diapers."
And that professor was at a women's college, albeit not Smith or Radcliffe.
That patronizing attitude had more to do with generations than with gender, and that may account for some of the fury that erupted in the early days of the (current) women's movement.
I suspect that a lot of women had their "click" moment and then found that people who should have been their allies were not feeling the same fervor.
Which is another way of saying that, whether or not they were consciously invested in maintaining the status quo, there were professors and administrators and parents and contemporaries who sure as hell didn't get it.
And, as with those people who just don't get sarcasm, it's not a function of intelligence. Witness the number of clueless gits who honestly and sincerely can't figure out why the NAACP doesn't change a century-old name despite the last two words in that name having fallen out of favor.
"Why is it offensive if I call them 'colored'? They call their own group the 'National Association for the Advancement of Colored People'!"
Now add an element of sex to the issue and watch the befuddlement double.
As late as the 1980s, Colorado College — a progressive liberal arts school that has admitted both men and women since its founding in 1874 — appointed an athletic director and an athletic co-director. If the political science department didn't have a problem with that, you'd think at least a professor of logic would raise an objection. (Someone may have. I just looked and they are down to one athletic director and a coach who is also designated as "senior woman administrator." Better an apparent demotion than a linguistic fiction, I suppose.)
The significance of "co-ed" is the assumption — also seen in minority enrollment — that the default is the model, that others are there with the permission of those who truly belong there, and that, like children permitted to eat with the grown-ups, they are expected to act like grown-ups and defer to the real grown-ups.
It's not as simple as insisting that Betty Co-ed is only there to get her MRS degree. It's the insistence that women who rise in business are expected to act like men, right down to the blue suit and the string tie.
And all the black guys should be Sidney Poitier. Early Sidney Poitier, before all that "Mr. Tibbs" attitude began to kick in.
A lot of this, as noted above, is generational. And a lot of it is formed around insecurity and uneasiness with change.
Piraro may be flogging a dead horse with this particular one (though it made me laff), but, if the noun has disappeared, the attitude has not.
I'd like to say it will die out with the current generation of clueless old gaffers, but who knows?
Rush Limbaugh — a clueless old gaffer who is a year younger than I am — still manages to draw a large number of young-adult listeners, even though he seens convinced that women need to take a birth control pill every time they have sex, most likely because that's how his pills work.
In the words of Ms. Van Pelt, "It's like bailing water with a pitchfork."
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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