Sadie Hawkins Dance, In My Khahi Pants, or, the Tri-Polar College Girl

Scan the cafeteria for some good seating
I found a good spot by the cheerleaders eating
The quarterback asked me if I'd like a beating
I said that's one thing I won't be needing
And since I'm rather smart and cunning
I took off down the next hall running
Only to get stopped by a girl so stunning
only to get stopped by a girl so stunning

She said, "You're smooth, and good with talking.
You're going with me to the Sadie Hawkins"

The Sadie Hawkins Dance
in my khaki pants
There's nothing better
oh oh oh
The girls ask the guys
it's always a surprise
There's nothing better
baby do you like my sweater?

-Reliant K, “Sadie Hawkins Dance”

Before reading Chapter 7, “Sex Ed and Husband Hunting,” of Lynn Peril’s College Girls, I didn’t know the history of the Sadie Hawkins Dance. While I remember taking issue with the idea that Sadie Hawkins was the only event where it was acceptable for girls to ask guys out in high school, I was unaware that Sadie Hawkins was a girl so ugly that she had to quite literally chase down and capture a husband for herself. Charming. That Sadie Hawkins days are still so ubiquitous that Reliant K wrote a widely popular song about the tradition is somewhat disturbing to me. For some reason, girls have never been able to ask guys to Sadies in a private, personal settings still holds true. Peril’s section on Sadie Hawkins finally explained the bizarre tradition at my high school where senior girls would stand on the balcony and all at once drop down banners with their intended dates’ names on them for the whole school to see. I always found this incredibly strange, but now I can see that it is just a continuation of a highly public fight to get a man.

The Sadie Hawkins tradition is part of a constant tension for college (and high school) women between being beautiful and sexually available and being über-studious shrews. Peril notes that “portraying the college girl as an eroticized playmate defused the threatening image of a man-hating intellectual harpy by reducing her to a sexy submissive pussycat” (Peril 317). It seems to be my theme this week, but it really is astounding how far we still have to go, how far we haven’t come. We are either harpies, or we’re frail and need to be protected, or we’re well-educated prostitutes. On the conservative side of the spectrum, Peril relays that “in the 1930s, Elizabeth Eldridge declared William and Mary’s rules to be the most conservative…Eldridge dryly wondered whether proximity to the sights of Colonial Williamsburg resigned ‘the co-eds to living in the deliciously quaint pattern while on other campuses their gayer sister go whither they please unquestioned’” (Peril 284). While W&M certainly no longer has rules on where students may go on dates, this idea that women need to be forced into protection is still present. While I agree that services like Campus Escort and Steerclear are incredibly valuable when you need to get across campus late at night and that it’s always safest to go out in groups, I hate that friends always ensure that I walk with a friend or get a ride from one of those services late at night or that I go to the frats with friends, but never bug their male friends about the same issues. On the hyper-sexualized side, however, you only need to look at the latest late-night tv ad for Girls Gone Wild to see just how crucial the idea of the promiscuous college girl is for an unfortunately large chunk of our economy.

Eldridge illustrates this perpetual tension when she describes the ideal coed: “bluestockings in class, and silk hose and silver slippers in the evening. It’s a big order, but a girl today must be equal to it if she is to deserve the name of co-ed” (qtd. Peril 290). The college girl of yesterday, of today, and hopefully not of tomorrow must be bright, intelligent, and forward-thinking in class but must revert to the mindset of a (hypersexual) Disney Princess on the weekends.

-Cate Domino