Wendy Shalit ‘97 is quoted in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine article on “Friends, Friends With Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall.”

Wendy Shalit, whose book, ”A Return to Modesty,” embodies what has been termed ”the new chastity,” also says she believes that girls are being manipulated, but by a society that tries to convince them that they should act like boys, turning sexual modesty into a sign of weakness or repression — something young women are taught to be embarrassed about. ”In the age of the hookup,” Shalit writes, ”young women confess their romantic hopes in hushed tones, as if harboring some terrible secret.”

Shalit was one of the most famous undergrads on campus during her time at Williams because of an article that she wrote about co-ed bathrooms in Commentary. Although that article does not appear to be on-line, interested readers can look here for an example of Shalit’s writing.

I first became interested in the subject of modesty for a rather mundane reason — because I didn’t like the bathrooms at Williams College. Like many enlightened colleges and universities these days, Williams houses boys next to girls in its dormitories and then has the students vote by floor on whether their common bathrooms should be coed. It’s all very democratic, but the votes always seem to go in the coed direction because no one wants to be thought a prude. When I objected, I was told by my fellow students that I “must not be comfortable with [my] body.” Frankly, I didn’t get that, because I was fine with my body; it was their bodies in such close proximity to mine that I wasn’t thrilled about.

How is the co-ededness of bathrooms decided in First Year entries nowadays? I would think that a private vote by mail over the summer would make for a better proceedure that a public vote during First Days.