Re: the study referenced above, don’t confuse causation and correlation. Students living in single sex dorms are self selecting and one can assume that they are less into partying and more conservative in their sexual mores before they made that choice. Despite the article’s premise, most students I know choose to be in those dorms. I don’t think coed dorms turn unsuspecting, unwilling students into crazy sex fiends. 
I am starting to get offended.
As a survivor myself who has worked with countless other survivors, I find the exact opposite. We tend to be pretty good advocates for ourselves.
I was actually attacked in a bathroom by a man I trusted. I’ve never been afraid of bathrooms or men because of it and, honestly, having men around would make me feel safer since 99%+ of them are not going to attack someone in the bathroom.
198 @runswimyoga
“I would offer you the explanation that it might be the overall culture change that has occurred since hookup and a faster paced party culture became the norm… leading to this outcome you post.”
Yes, I totally agree that our culture has changes and that has lead to a new “normal”. And this new normal is hard on some people and it appears that those sensitivities are not being factored by most people. There seems to be a prevalent attitude of ‘buck up and deal with it’ or ‘you’ll get used to it, its fine’. I wonder how many people drop out of college because the new normal doesn’t work for them?
Promiscuity is a loaded word and one I don’t hear much these days. It implies a moral tone IMO. How does one define it? What’s the tipping point for being promiscuous and not being promiscuous? Does it differ for males and females?
I’ve shared this on another thread I believe, but my freshman year (early 80’s) I lived in a coed by room dorm, but the bathrooms were single sex. Girls bathroom on one wing and the boys, the other. My room just happened to be across from the boys room so you can bet my roommate and I used the boys bathroom as often as possible - never to shower (I don’t think) but brush teeth and pee. Details are hazy but I think we would yell we were coming in and either wait till guys left or after a while just do our biz while they were there. We were all friends after a few months and it was no big deal. Until one boy got hepatitis and all the boys, plus my roommate and me, had to line up for hep shots. Think that cured us for a short time of using the boys bathroom.
Now D2 is in an all girls dorm (not by choice but enjoying it nonetheless). It’s an old building and quite small. During move in hubby noticed to his chagrin there were no male bathrooms on the floor. From what I hear boys are in the dorm often - assume overnight as well, so guess they are doing what we did in reverse, using the girls bathroom.
I think it would probably be easier to have these rooms be coed, and have everyone know what to expect, than to have someone surprised to see someone of the opposite sex suddenly appear in their bathroom one day.
Now that I think of it, I’m going to have to check back with my alma mater to see how the bathrooms are designated in my old dorm and see if they’ve changed with the times…
UPDATE: Just checked online - dorm used to have single sex the first two floors and then coed by room, now is all coed by rooms. And the bathrooms are described this way: Gender inclusive private bathrooms. Not 100% sure what that means, since I looked at a floor plan and there are not private bathrooms per room, but still two large areas designated bathrooms, but looks like somehow divided up more privately than when I lived there (the big open rooms Pizzagirl described earlier…)
So times they are a changin…
@romanigypsyeyes #201
I am so sorry to have offended you. Not my intention at all! I am literally just trying to speak from the perspective my mom gave me as a survivor. She is the one that taught me to speak up for girls that may to too afraid to speak for themselves. So sorry I upset you.
Wait wait wait… I thought my generation was the whiney, babied one that always had to have things conform to THEM rather than “suck it up.”
Also, women don’t have any more sexual partners today than we have in decades.
“There seems to be a prevalent attitude of ‘buck up and deal with it’ or ‘you’ll get used to it, its fine’. I wonder how many people drop out of college because the new normal doesn’t work for them?”
“Well, the sad truth is that as coed dorms have become the norm and studies have been done about the impact on all of the students, but especially the girls”
All of this over a coed dorm or a gender neutral bathroom? I would offer up that college is about new experiences and adapting or not adapting if you choose not to. There are always other options - commuting, living off campus, getting a housing accommodation or registering with disability services if you have PTSD from molestation, utilizing college counseling services… college is about learning to become an advocate for yourself
For a large majority of students, coed dorms (and yes, even gender neutral bathrooms) seem to work just fine. Im sorry but I just don’t see this as the problem for girls you are suggesting it is.
The thing about high school girls wearing bathing suits to shower in open athletic-type shower rooms really interests me. I think there is a ton of culture and generational issues in it.
I had showers like that in school, starting in 5th grade. We were boys, of course (I am an ex-boy, or superannuated one), but plenty of boys were uncomfortable with that. (10-11 is not an age where everyone feels comfortable comparing circumcised and uncircumcised appendages in public.) In those benighted days, we were most certainly NOT offered accommodations, or the option to wear a bathing suit for privacy. The clear, simple message was: “You are men. Men shower together. Man up.” My wife, who did not experience anything like the preppy jock culture I did, nevertheless had similar experiences with group showers.
She spends a lot more time at the gym than I do, and she reports there is a clear generational divide, with women of our generation (i.e., old) comfortable being naked in a women’s locker room or mass shower, and younger women, especially millennials, very mixed, and often going to great lengths to avoid being observed naked by other women. It often involves women whose normal mode of dressing is not much different from going naked in front of everyone, from an old-folk perspective.
Is it true that today’s younger women have more exaggerated privacy needs? How about men? Good or bad? (It certainly makes locker rooms more expensive to build . . . )
Is it generational or does lack of caring just come with age and experience? By experience, I am thinking things like going through childbirth. (For one of my deliveries, which was difficult, there were 9 medical personnel in the room in the final stages!)
As I mentioned before, neither of my kids are very modest. Some of it is upbringing and the way we ran our household. Some of it is experiential - one kid was a dancer, one a big jock, both went to boarding school - plenty of experience with group locker rooms and bathrooms. Their friends range in modesty level.
I also wonder how much of it is cultural? Many cultures/societies have group bathing traditions across generations - Korea, for example.
The article you linked to @mom23b8kids, also mentions that 90 percent of college dorms are co-ed.
So we have to consider the following: Do co-ed dorms cause the things the article talks about? Or is it a matter of self-selection, that is, are students who prefer a less boisterous lifestyle more likely to choose a single-sex dorm if one is available?
The article mentions that some students were assigned to one type of housing or the other; they didn’t necessarily choose it. But it doesn’t say how many.
It would be interesting to do a study at some colleges that have only co-ed dorms and ask students about their habits (drinking, sexual partners, pornography, etc.) and also ask them “If your college offered single-sex housing, would you have chosen it?” I suspect that you might find substantial differences between the students who would have preferred single-sex housing and the others. And if that’s true, it may be that being the kind of student who prefers single-sex housing is the important factor, not where you actually live.
I would guess that a fair number of the 10% of dorms that are single sex are at schools that are very religious and/or socially conservative. So yes, definitely some self-selection going on there.
I’m skeptical about the whole idea of co-ed dorms as causative agents of wild and crazy lifestyles partly because I know quite a few people – including myself – who lived in co-ed dorms at some point during our years in college and who do not drink to excess, do not abuse drugs, and can count our lifetime sexual partners without running out of fingers (in some instances, without running out of fingers on one hand).
I lived in a coed dorm my first year, single-sex my second year (not by design - undesirable dorm, had a poor lottery number) and a sorority the last 2 years. Trust me, there was no difference in levels of drinking, debauchery, sex, etc.
While I agree that adapting is sometimes necessary, really, in this case with all the choices out there, why should anyone have to? One person’s ‘no big deal’ is another person’s daily source of extreme anxiety.
Life experiences, body issues, cultural and religious values and even personal trauma can make this a significant source of stress. And who needs more stress in the first month of college? Like many have said, everyone is just so different.
A devout religious boy or a girl with an eating disorder or a survivor of abuse or rape might struggle with showering next to a person of the opposite gender, but might think nothing of giving a speech in front of 200 people. I wouldn’t want to do either with utter strangers in my first weeks of school, but I would be literally terrified of giving a speech. Which is, of course, no more or less valid than any other fear or preference.
Whatever happened to the special accommodation case at Yale for Orthodox Jews a couple years back?
OP- when my D first started looking at colleges being able to live in a suite with a private bathroom was very high on her selection criteria. She is fairly modest and being an athlete was not that comfortable in the shared athletic facilities bathroom situations. As she got deeper in her search however other factors gradually took on more importance- academics, athletic participation, extracurriculars, etc. and she was not finding a lot of schools that also had the suite style dorm rooms available to freshmen. She is now in her jr. year at a small midwestern lac. She lived in coed dorms her first 2 years and she has not been uncomfortable with that situation. Most of the older dorms at her school are coed by room and have separate men’s and women’s bathrooms on each floor. They have some gender neutral bathrooms as well but I don’t think they are available on every floor and certainly the vast majority of the bathrooms are not coed. The newer dorm she is in this year is suites, quads, doubles and singles that all have private bathrooms, no hall bathrooms. In the old traditional dorms the showers all have a small area for changing with a bench and hooks for clothes and a curtain and then another curtain dividing that area from the shower stall. There is a dorm on her campus that is mostly women with one floor of boys and the rest of the floors are all women.My niece did have a suite as a freshman at Columbia with a private bathroom. At UM, my S’s freshman dorm was single sex by wing.
My feeling is that a lot of schools are still going to have some single sex bathrooms in many of the dorms even if the dorms themselves are coed.
Are other folks seeing lots of schools where gender neutral or coed bathrooms are the only choice?
This thread has been such an amazing education for me. I really appreciate everyone that has participated in the process. It has definitely lead me to educate myself about dorms in general and has challenged a lot of my thinking on what environment my daughter might thrive best in. It has also lead me to do more research. A case in point;
Andrea Anne Curcio, a Georgia State University College of Law professor, researches sexual violence issues, including campus sexual assaults.
In this piece, Curcio reveals a fact seldom highlighted on campus tours or freshman orientation. “What no one is talking about is that most assaults occur in dorms and residence halls — a fact that should play a critical role in awareness and targeted prevention efforts,” said Curcio. The essay was originally published on TheConversation.com
“Most likely an attacker will be a friend or acquaintance. A study conducted by the National Institute of Justice, the research wing of the U.S. Department of Justice, found that 90 percent of college sexual assault victims knew their assailant.”
“The majority of assaults happen when one or both parties have consumed alcohol. Parents and students usually associate alcohol use with parties, and particularly fraternity parties. Rarely is the connection made about what happens when a student returns to the dorm after those parties.”
“However, a 10-year study looked at rapes and sexual assaults between 2001 and 2011 occurring on Massachusetts’ college and university campuses – including dorms, apartments and fraternity houses. The study found that 81 percent of all reported rapes and assaults occurred in the dorms, 9 percent occurred in houses or apartments and only 4 percent occurred in fraternity houses.”
A lot of us have personal experiences that are guiding our perceptions. But I think it is interesting to look at the research as well.
Sorry, mom23g8kids, I didn’t mean to post such similar ideas as your post 191. I tried to post earlier, but my computer wouldn’t let me for some reason. I took a break, came back and posted without reading the most recent posts that I had missed.
On one hand, I have read comments on other threads suggesting that fraternities and sororities (single sex residences) are at the center of the wild parties and wanton sexual antics of this current crop of wild and crazy students. Then I read other comments which suggest that coed dorms are associated with promiscuous behavior. Which is it? Or maybe, as romanigypsyeyes alluded to, that the perceived shift in cultural mores is about a change in reporting and an openness of discussion rather than reflective of a sea-change in behavior.