From the Annals of Failed Term Papers (Either Through Idiocy or Lack Of Effort)

Published April 10, 2007

This section highlights academic pursuits of UVM students that never quite materialized. We want to share with you the great papers that never-were.

Thesis Proposal for a Women’s Studies and Sports
Medicine interdisciplinary self designed major.

Title: In the Locker-Room: the female athletes’ appropriation of chauvinist behaviors.

Abstract
The Varsity Women’s locker room serves as a unique platform from which female athletes appropriate, expand upon, and posture conventionally male forms of sexual harassment and hazing. In the protected area of the locker-room, a place absolutely void of the male gaze, female athletes undress, shower, and re-dress all the while perpetrating two types of male behavioral appropriation. Under the guise of re-appropriating male-perpetrated sexual harassment, the reverse occurs and the female athletes actually participate in the same activities they deride outside the locker-room.

Chauvinist Sexual Harassment

1. Female athletes are no strangers to obscene sexual harassment from male athletes, coaches and spectators. However, despite this experience, female athletes participate in the appropriation of sexual harassment in two ways:

a. Verbally- Female athletes will affect a male voice and in crude terms, compliment one another on a fine bust or posterior.
b. Physically- Minor touching, snapping of bra straps and wedgies, pinching, slapping and grabbing also occur with the same artificially subversive intent.

2. Hazing- All varsity athletes must complete the required course, Life Skills for the Student Athlete, in which they learn about the horrors of hazing through specific example’s in UVM’s athletic history. With this knowledge, the female athletes posture the male idiocy of hazing, by lightly whipping one another with wet towels or tossing bras and panties across the room while fellow athletes attempt to re-dress after the shower. This insincere mockery of male hazing actually serves the exact same purpose: hazing.

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