I am a junior at Smith College. As of now, on September 12, 2021 at 7:56 p.m., due all my friends being in relationships, I will be going on a hunger strike to protest not having a girlfriend at Smith College.
Posts published in “Opinions”
We, the Community Health Organizers, constructively disagree with the article, “How to Have a Good Convocation,” published on September 1st in The Sophian. Although we recognize that the article was not meant to be taken seriously, all Smith students have a responsibility to model safe and inclusive practices for living in community, meeting new people, partying, and participating in consensual sexual encounters. This is even more important during a pandemic, to keep everyone safe and healthy.
Women of color need to be protected at all costs because our identities have been marketed to evoke sexual utility by an industry that makes our bodies readily accessible to anyone on the internet. While we are conditioned to feel vulnerable, men are miseducated to believe that our bodies are objects for them to take, distort and photograph.
The coolest of the cool had slept through the unconscionably early dining hall breakfast, only to convene two hours after its close in the beautiful light of the Hubbard dining room at 11am, cherry-white chocolate chip scones in hand.
Fear no more. With these ten easy steps, you not only will have a night of revelry but you might just make some friends!
As people received vaccines and Hot Girl Summer was declared across the nation, I watched as my friends, all newly in love from their coronalationships, peaked longingly through the confines of their fortresses.
It’s been a year and a half since I was accepted into Smith, nine months since I took my first college class, and three months since I first arrived on campus. As a first year during the pandemic, it feels like I started college in stages—last fall, I experienced a college-level workload. This semester, I lived on campus away from home for the first time, and next fall (knock on wood), I’ll finally have the full college experience:
It’s a common story at colleges across the country: student activists demand a phaseout of fossil fuel investment at the institutional level, and the board of trustees offers a provisional fifteen, twenty, or thirty-year plan. Smith made the switch in 2019 following a survey in which 92% of students voted in favor of divestment. Yet the school’s fifteen-year, best-case-scenario promise falls short of scientific consensus– the U.N. writes that we have nine years left before climate collapse becomes irreversible.
On Feb. 1, 2021, police body camera footage surfaced online of a nine-year-old Black girl being dragged through snow to a police car, handcuffed, and pepper sprayed. The officers responding to a report of “family trouble” acted in this aggressive manner after the girl expressed that she wanted to kill herself and her mother. While the girl refused to sit inside the police car and said that she wanted her father, an officer dismissively told her that she’s “acting like a child,” to which the nine-year-old replied, “I am a child”–– then they pepper sprayed her.
I may not be the best person to write about marriage. The thought of being officially committed to someone for the rest of my life makes me want to crawl out of my skin and I don’t think I’ll ever get married. Not because I’ve never been in love (although I haven’t), but because the institution of marriage horrifies me.