Hegemony 101

"Sexuality itself has to some extent been left behind as a form of self expression. Even though it is everywhere on display, it no longer has time to realize itself in human love-relationships It evaporates into the promiscuity of each passing moment, into a multiplicity of more ephemeral forms of contact."
-Jean Baudrillard, America, 1988

In a college town, walking around on Friday and Saturday nights (and Tuesdays, and Wednesdays and Thursdays) really makes a person wonder what it is that people are really looking for, just what that animal part of our psyche is trolling around the streets in search of. There are packs of guys walking around in backwards hats, carefully chosen t-shirts and baggy jeans, looking for some beers and some girls. Then there are the bevies of young women, in heels and tube tops, looking for a place to go and some guys. Occasionally, you'll run in to those who have surpassed this stage of barely veiled sexual frustration, ditched their friends and paired off. Some guy and a girl walk by, clumsily falling all over each other-- the guy hoping he'll get some and the girl hoping he'll give her a reason to.
These girls, whose heavy use of accessories and alcohol on an empty stomach makes them easily identifiable, have become to be known as "biddies" to both older male and female classmates, who have been around the block and know how these things work. And yes, these girls are an easy target. They wear eyeliner, stumble around looking for parties with older guys and act stupid. But one can't criticize the product without blaming the system.
The "system" undeniably promotes the "dumb female" model, the one that makes college girls feel that they need to cater to a stunted male population by assuming the (distorted and restricting) role of the idiot to align themselves with that amalgam of 21st Century American Female (take your pick of the flock of the vapid, bleached, and permanently drunk women that we somehow equate with the ultimate in feminine success). What results is a society so far from honesty that we not only lie to each other, but we are no longer truthful with ourselves. Because of the great division between sexes that popular culture has had no small part in creating and promoting, in 2007, women and men are often so far from recognizing each other as humans that we often view one another more as accessories to the self to be acquired or beings able to be tailored to fit our needs, creatures to be tamed into submission. We're a culture so unsure of what we want or should aspire to that we seek to fill the void with another person, without realizing that this fails to consider the other person, as well as being a completely ineffective means of dealing with a personal and cultural absence of meaning.
And, I hate to have to ask, but where is the derogatory term for the perpetually hungover cro-magnons walking around campus with "take your top off" t-shirts who can be overheard shouting with their brahs about how they can't remember the name of the chick they just banged?

"Perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most 'unfeminine' quality of all- that of intellectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world."
- Gerda Lerner