What's up world? I apologize for not blogging in a dickyear but I've been busy and shit. To update you, I'm now an RA at UK and moved into my castle last week.
This room is fucking huge. It's a triple, three desks, three closets, three times the space, yeah it's huge. I have it pretty damn well furnished and no doubt is pretty damn comfy. It's basically an apartment. In fact our hall director calls it an apartment. I call it a castle. Because it's big.
This is actually the first time in my life I've actually had property under my belt. Last year I had a tiny ass room and I had to fucking share it. Now I have my own bigass studio, and I also have like 18 rooms and little kiddos to look out for that I'm all responsible for. It's pretty clutch.
I've noted this in previous posts, but this will be a paradoxical part of my life as I will be the primary authority over alcohol and marijuana. Like to the point where I get to fucking ruin someone's day. And living in the Haggin residence hall, I'll probably do it more than once. So yeah this is pretty cool.
"Disclaimer to the following section: I have a girlfriend, happily. Dishonesty or immorality has nothing to do with my next topic. They are simply psychological observations I have noticed and find interesting to analyze with the intent of learning what is not previously known. Science mothafucka. Thank you. "
So there's an interesting little case study I've come across during this RA training. Most dorms at UK are coed, which means the staff of RA's is coed. All dorms are coed except for Haggin and Donovan. So naturally one can infer there are similarities of the behavioral differences between coed high schools and gender-separate high schools. Here's what I've noticed.
In a coed environment, the opposite gender is a friend; i.e. just another person. There's no preliminary differences in the way the guys act to the girls and vice versa (other than the fact that you can have sex). Guys and girls work together frequently and usually develop friendships before they develop intimate relationships.
In a gender-separate environment the fundamental dynamic between guys and girls changes dramatically. The opposite gender turns into either a target or objective. Every single girl on the other side of the dividing line isn't seen as a friend or just another person, no that's what the guys who are with you are for. The girls just become the primary mission in everyone's mind.
With the Haggin and Donovan example, it's like every five minutes someone makes a joke about flirting with Donovan girls. And when we're in the same room as them, holy shit the Donovan girls are just as bad! They seem to objectify a dorm full of guys just as much as we objectify a dorm full of girls! Which indeed is interesting. And for everyone in the case study, "being friends" is definitely not part of the motivation for the shenanigans. I have a fairly strong intuition that if there were three single Haggin RA's and three single Donovan RA's stuck together unsupervised, all six of them would get laid somehow! Just because everyone who's gender-separated seems to put a bullseye on the opposite gender.
But this doesn't seem to happen at the conscious level. It seems to be a behavioral difference between the gender-separated and the not; and I seem to be the only one to notice it. But once you notice it and think about it it's obvious.
I think it has to do with survival instincts, like most subconscious behavioral oddities, which trace back to cavemen days. If you are in a group, your mind slips into group-communication mode and all of your minds subconsciously work together, that's how it works in groups and accounts for things like pseudofactionism (the driving force that makes one group of people think they are better than another for dumb reasons like "football players are better than soccer players, go us.") So if there is a scarcity of the opposite sex in our group, like having no girls at all, we as a group become worried that we will not be able to reproduce and pass down the genes of our group. Make sense? So we naturally get super excited when we see a group of the opposite sex, and so do they. In coed situations, there is no sense of urgency. Therefore there's time to not worry about reproduction and what not, so there's less social pressure to get together with the chicks.
The social pressure seems to be a key factor in this (especially with gender-separate high schools). I'll use myself as an example. I have a girlfriend, who's moving in tomorrow and I'm steadily happy about being with. However since she isn't moved in yet, I still get the residual group mentality that "dude, we gotta start asking out these Donovan chicks." It even induces stress. The other Haggin RA's who have girlfriends are the exact same way. The group mentality of gender-separate groups is to get together no matter what. The group mentality of coed groups is the normal, evolved human mindset.
So with that all said, gender-separation (the 'traditional' method) may actually be more animalistic, and harmful to adolescent minds than if everything were just coed. This explains many many many raised questions about, perhaps the 'sluttiness' of all-girl-schools, compared to coed.
I really kinda wish I had some sort of credentials to back me up on my theory or some shit; because as far as I know, no one has done any sort of studies on this and it explains a lot if you sit there and think about it. Especially if you go from a coed group to a 'traditional' group of people your age, you literally find that the way you talk to your friends is entirely different. Oh well. Anyone reading this better cite their fucking sources if they use me in a paper. Bitches. Until next time...
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