As a prominent institution that prides itself on eager, thoughtful, and reverent action, Pomona College has many opportunities to act as a shining beacon of liberal thought in an otherwise reticent, thoughtless and irreverent world. The College’s adoption of a gender-neutral housing policy is a recent example of such an action. However, it is merely one step in the right direction.

If Pomona College really wants to shake the foundations of society’s oppressive sexual hegemony it should start with the very foundations of our dormitories. Now that we’ve instituted a gender-neutral housing policy, the next step is to build gender-neutral housing. I’m not talking about housing that any gender can live in. That’s been around at Pomona ever since the labyrinthine split-level superstructure known as Oldenborg—which, rumor has it, was built to suppress rioting by a crazed, mixed-gender horde driven mad by proximity to the opposite sex—opened in 1966. I’m talking about building dorms that are, themselves, gender-neutral.

Many of Pomona College’s dorms were in fact built for a specific gender. Most of this is the result of the division of men and women onto North Campus and South Campus, respectively, pre-1966. South Campus dorms, home to the women, placed a premium on the privacy and modesty befitting a mid-20th-century sexually-suppressed belle. They lacked, and still lack, for the most part, the open spaces and common areas currently occupied by beer-pong tables and tattered couches on North Campus. The powers of the college envisioned the women tucking neatly into their compact South Campus rooms each evening, while the men smoked cigars and recounted bawdry tales in front of fireplaces up North. The design and construction of our early dorms cemented the sexist social expectations of the College’s early history. North Campus was built to foster open social interaction, South Campus to repress it.

Today, this legacy is reflected in the overwhelming popularity of North Campus dorms. Very few people of any gender would choose to live in the social purgatory of Blaisdell Basement, Harwood’s black-widow-infested pits euphemistically referred to as the “patios,” or Wig’s more aptly nicknamed “Death Row,” if they had a chance to live on North Campus. Choosing to live in dorms historically inhabited by men alone isn’t a reflection of extreme masculinity throughout the Pomona community. Rather, it is simply an indication that most Sagehens prefer dorms not designed to discourage social interaction. All North Campus dorms are now inhabited by both sexes, and will soon have rooms occupied (legally) by members of more than one gender. However, even after remodeling or complete reconstruction, some dorms still seem to cater to a specific gender. Gender-neutral housing at Pomona has to go deeper than the policies. It needs to be in the blueprints.

Take the hyper-masculine Lawry Court, for example. Despite the fact that it was constructed in the early 1980’s, designers chose to go with three phallic towers that have been extraordinarily successful at fostering traditional, boorish masculinity. Threadbare and unadorned, the Lawry towers offer little more than a place to make a post-Pub conquest and then discuss it the following afternoon while drinking beers with your chums and wearing Oxford shirts. Whether consciously or not, Lawry was built in a fashion that has led to a self-reinforcing cycle of architecturally-amplified stereotypical masculinity, and its current reputation reflects that.

What’s my suggestion for amending this situation and avoiding the construction of gender-biased dorms in the future? Sterilize Lawry, first off. In a perfect world, a team of architects, gender theorists and interior decorators would complete a comprehensive retrofit of each and every gender-biased dorm. Think of it as a sex-change operation for a building. The only known example of this in Pomona’s history is the castration by paintbrush of Prometheus following the gender desegregation of housing on campus. Perhaps the thinking was that women should not be exposed to such virile images, for fear of spontaneously conceived newborns dropping like cups in Frary’s hallowed hall. However ill-contrived its origin may be, Prometheus’s smooth, featureless crotch stands alone as an extremely oxymoronic and misguided guiding light of neutrality in the historically masculine world of North Campus.

Hopefully the dorms currently under construction on North Campus have been designed not for men or for women, but for humans. We know, thanks to ad nauseam promotion by our desperate-to-be-a-shining-beacon-of-liberal-thought administration, that they will be LEEDS Gold Certified sustainable. What we don’t know is whether these dorms are going to be certified free of gender bias, or whether such an esoteric certification process even exists. At any rate, we should be conscious of the ghosts of sexism and segregation that haunt the hallways of our campus whenever we think about the evolution, past and future, of the environment we share.

For more information on this subject, see “North and South” in the Winter 2010 issue of Pomona College Magazine.