When the Daily Princetonian announced, on October 6, that grade deflation was “dead,” campus remained oddly quiet. There was no cheering, no laughing or dancing or popping of screw-top champagne.
I fell in love with Lana Del Rey a week after I got my driver’s license. Sixteen and in the deeper throes of teenage angst, I’d taken to calling the suburban split-level I’d grown up in “my parents’ house” and spending as much time as possible out with my steady, if less than stable, high school boyfriend.
A teenage girl is found dead in her bedroom. The culprit? Emo, a death-obsessed youth subculture. But while some teens claim emo romanticizes mental illness, others call it therapy.
I thought I understood the general order of Lawnparties: live music, free food, and somewhat unsettling numbers of drunken upperclassmen at ten o’clock in the morning. When a roommate first let me in on the “preppy” dress code, however, the tradition struck me as strange. While I knew Princeton was widely considered to be among the “preppiest” of the Ivies, the label had always held a negative connotation to me, and I puzzled as to why students would actively work to perpetuate that stereotype.
When unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was fatally shot by white police officer Darren Wilson this past August, Americans of all colors raised their voices in sorrow and outrage.
And as the yelling continued, it became clear to me that we had done nothing — nothing, that is, except for being female and alone on a Saturday night.
Ever since the giddy, popcorn and T. Swift-fueled “Truth” games of seventh grade slumber parties, those two words have become a default response to countless puzzled male faces. From Sex and the City to Gossip Girl, generations of chick flicks and girl-power soap operas reinforce the idea that no crush, no kiss, and no hook up, no matter how “casual” or “on the D-L,” is to be withheld from a girl’s close circle.
When I walked into the women’s locker room at Dillon gym earlier this week, I noticed a poster that made me bite my lip. Tacked up between weekly fitness schedules, the sign grabbed my attention with the headline: “The weight is over.” The line, I thought, could have been pulled from a diet product ad—Sensa, maybe, or Alli. It was the sort of cheesy slogan you see on caffeine-and-diuretic “supplements” at CVS.
