I Forget Which of the Scooby Doo Characters Scripps is...

Because today's comic references an all-girls' high school, I thought this might be a good time to muse about why I chose to register at an all-girls' college.

First of all, Scripps is sort of Girls' School Lite: since it's part of the Claremont composium, there are boys in the neighboring colleges and even boys taking classes at Scripps. The only places there won't be boys are the dorms and the bathrooms, which brings me to my second (first?) reasons for choosing an all-girls' school: the idea of co-ed bathrooms makes me really unconfortaBLE. I am sure that a set of pangendered or transgendered people feel equally uncomfortable walking into a boys' versus girls' bathroom, but I think that one-stall unisex bathrooms are probably a better solution to this than multi-stall boy/girl bathrooms, which are now standard for most schools. I plan to avoid this!

All-girl dorms also = cleaner and less likely to be smelly?

The second/third/fourth reason is that I can't count, JUST KIDDING, is that an all girls' schools caters to girls. This sounds trivial, but since one of my biggest fears about college has been a rocky transition, I think it will help to go to a school that has seen and understands what it is like to be a nervous girl in a new place. Also, there are tea parties and a rose garden and pianos. These are things that ladies like I enjoy.

This brings me to my last reason: girls are nice. An anonymous male friend to whom I mentioned this warned me that "girls can be pretty nasty" and brought up one of my least favorite old stereotypes: "if a man doesn't like you, he tells you to your face, but girls go behind your back." As a girl, I know where this stereotype comes from: I do think that women are less likely to approach people they dislike about their flaws, but I don't think that this stems from some evil desire to plot and deceive. The concept of women being more than sweet, docile creatures--that is to say, beings capable of anger--is relatively new, and not all women feel brave enough to express anger, especially towards men. This does not seem nasty or conniving to me. While movies like Mean Girls, John Tucker Must Die, Bring It On, and a bevy of other such movies paint groups of girls as a sort of noveau mafia that customizes cement shoes for its enemies, I haven't experienced anything like this. Girls can be dumb jerks, but they are not inherently evil or conniving except in some extreme cases. And anyway I haven't heard too much about girls bringing guns to school.

Can tea parties actually count as two reasons? I like tea a lot.

I think being around girls will be a welcome change. I will get to wear sundresses and not worry about eating too much cake. When I spoke to ma belle-mere about it, she told me that it was really exciting coming from an all girls' high school and going to a co-ed university, and even though she took it back when I reminded her that it would be the other way around for me, I think the excitment may work in either direction.

Expect to hear more on this topic if I go and decide that I hate it!