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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Thursday, Oct. 3, 1985
America's running scared.
Fear of the unknown
Amel Kee's running scared.
NEW YORK — Thousands of women chant "Keep AIDS out of school!" and 18,000 students skip classes to protest a decision allowing a 7-year-old girl with AIDS to attend public school.
MILWAUKEE — Rising health claims prompt Wisconsin's largest life insurance company to consider eliminating AIDS from policy coverage.
Not since polio has a disease gripped the country with such intense fear as AIDS. Not even the herpes scare of the early 1980s united as many Americans in their fear for the public health
NASHVILLE, Tennessee. Health officials blame unfounded fears of contracting AIDS by potential blood donors for critically low supplies of blood in Tennessee, Oklahoma and other states.
Few answers on the public safety question flow out of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and other research
centers across the country. Still, experts search desperately for a cure.
In the meantime, the public continues feeding on a steady diet of scary statistics.
So far, as many as 500,000 to 1 million Americans are infected with the AIDS virus, health officials say. As many as 12,000 Americans — twice the present total — probably will develop the deadly AIDS disease by next year.
That's the stuff stampedes are made of.
Unfortunately, a stampede is just what health officials must avert.
The public cries out for answers on AIDS. Only when they get them — when doctors come to a consensus on the health risks that AIDS victims pose to others — can the public decide whether to bar AIDS victims from public schools.
Until then, any decision on quarantining AIDS victims is unfounded.
And America keeps on running scared.
About three weeks ago, Jeff Polack, student body vice president, resigned as chairman of the board of directors of the Associated Students of Kansas, a statewide, nonpartisan, student lobbying group.
Polack later said he had seen no reason to announce his resignation earlier because KU had always had a representative on the board of directors, the administrative body of ASK. Polack was replaced the day he resigned.
The secret resignation
But many student senators still did not know about it last week. In fact, one senator questioned Polack about the move at a Student Senate meeting. The senator said he had heard rumors.
Polack's stated reason for not announcing publicly — or at least to the whole Student Senate — looks flimsy.
ASK receives 64 cents from every $28 student activity fee, which each student pays with tuition each semester. That amounts to more than $24,000 for fiscal year 1986.
Because the Senate can make decisions concerning ASK, the Senate needed to know — as soon as it had happened — when one of ASK's top officials had resigned.
Polack was elected to his office as student body vice president. ASK is a group that represents students and gets money from them. Those students have a right to know when one of its top officials resigns.
Polack had a duty to tell both groups — immediately — that he had resigned. By not doing so, he was being negligent.
Behind sealed doors
Not all segregation practices are unacceptable.
One discrimination practice, welcomed by those who like clean air and healthy lungs, segregates non-smokers from smokers in public buildings.
Florida's Clean Indoor Air Act bans smoking inside all public places unless authorities grant exemptions.
This week, Florida began enforcing one of the toughest state anti-smoking laws in the nation. With any luck the other 49 states, and the University of Kansas, will consider its example.
A total ban may not be fair. But-setting aside a room for smokers allows them to breathe polluted air to their hearts' content and frees the rest of the world from the discomfort.
Studies indicate that inhaling cigarette smoke—even
someone else's smoke — can cause lung cancer.
Watson Library has the right idea. It limits smoking in the library to designated, sealed smoking rooms.
A policy against smoking in campus buildings exists. But wherever possible, a closed room or two set aside in each building could prevent the uncontrolled drift of cigarette smoke that annoys non-smokers.
Any smoking policy should recognize the needs of smokers. But no one on campus should be subjected to cigarette smoke against his or her will.
It's not easy to favor a policy of public segregation.
But the Constitution doesn't yet protect the right of smokers to light up in a public place.
Rob Karwath
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AND ALL THE HOMOSQUAULS ARE CURED!
THEY'RE NOW IMMUNE!
YOU'VE GOT THE PRETTIEST EYES!
Sorority hazing comes out of closet
Fraternity hazing has been the object of scrutiny recently. But another problem in the greek system has been virtually ignored by this focus, a problem just as heinous as the crimes committed in fraternities.
Trying to respond in French class, her voice hoarse and rough from endless hours the night before in foreced singing.
The heartbreak of sorority hazing.
Ask any sorority woman about some of these previously unacknowledged forms of abuse:
What sorority woman would not cringe as she recalls naively approaching a house full of rowdy fraternity men, a box of stale donuts under each arm, averting her eyes as the men prance about in their jockey shorts and disdainfully refuse to buy even a single donut?
Returning from a weekend with her pledge sisters to find the actives had viciously left their bed sheets in the cold rain.
Sitting in a hard, stiff, early American chair for long hours, a Princess phone at her ear, frantically answering a continuous influx of calls.
Gina Kellogg Staff Columnist
Yet most women remain mute on the subject.
Why is this? Perhaps they hope that these lessons will better enable them to obtain their MRS degrees.
After all, what man can resist a woman who can sleep on a soggy mattress without complaint, who can sell a cold denot for 30 cents when a hot one can be bought for 19 cents, who can keep track of hundreds of telephone messages a day for 85 women?
However, sororites are not eager to enlighten the public on the ways they educate their pledges. I recently spoke to a woman who had just been initiated into her sorority after several long months as a pledge.
"I swear on a stack of LL. Been catalogs that I will never, ever go through those horrible tests again," she told me.
"But wasn't it worth it to become a sister of a prestigious and popular sorority?" I asked.
"Well, of course, but thank God I'm now an active! They treat the pledges like they don't know the difference between a Halston and a YSL! Did you know you expected me to memorize the Greek alphabet? Why, the horiz thing isn't even in any kind of logical order!"
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous ("What would the girls in the house think?"), recalled the dreadful hours she was forced to remain mutely seated in one of the strict study halls that her sorority maintained.
"If we dared to speak a single word, the study monitors would look at us with such dreadfully mean expressions on their faces!" A tear trickled down her face as she remembered. "Why I couldn't even listen to my Madonna tape on my Walkman!"
The woman told me of the constant threat of losing pledge points that was held over the young women's heads. Pledge points, she explained, are the standard by which each
woman proves herself worthy to become a member of the sorority
A point is awarded to each woman for each activity in which she participates, and a minimum number must be acquired before initiation.
"I remember waking up from this terrible nightmare," the woman said "It was initiation, and the pledge educator would be coming at me with this huge pair of scissors. This evil smile would appear on her face and she would tell me they were going to have to take away my pledge pin and not initiate me.
"Then she'd take the huge scissors and cut off my pledge pin, leaving a ghastly hole in my gorgeous Laura Ashley dress. I used to wake up crying every night!"
Few women have had the courage to describe the horrors in their sororities. A curtain has been drawn around the issues of pledgeship.
But the day will come when the sororities, too, finally throw off the cloak of mystery (and hang it next to their collection of Ralph Lauren sweaters and accessories). Only then will the greek system be able to proud state that its members are no better — only richer — than the rest of society.
Calendar peddles dreamy images
Remember the old song: "I love, I love,
I love, I love my calendar girl and
every day of the year." Well,
love is in the air.
Yes, friends, Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity once again is taking applications for its Dream Girl Calendar, which features campus women wearing fashionable clothing, I say that it and its counterparts exploit women. Obviously, the Pikes and the models disagree.
Troy Scillian, calendar chairman for the Pikes, told me the 1986-87 calendar would be the house's sixth.
"I don't think I'm exploiting women," Scallan said. "We're not
Dan Howell Staff columnist.
The use of fashionable clothing
forcing anyone to apply. They've seen the pictures in the past. It's decent and it's tastefully done."
Those criteria fail to get at the basic problem, the still-pervasive treatment of women as sex objects. Unfortunately, Scillian's words could be those of a movie producer or Playboy photographer. Taste is relative.
The pervasiveness shows in that the calendar is a national tradition for Pi Kappa Alpha. Scillian said it began in 1955 at Arizona State University. This year 70 houses submitted their calendars for awards
The Pikes aren't the only ones who see nothing wrong with this procedure. Scillian said he thought about 200 applications came in last year.
The obscurity lies in the continued treatment of women as sex objects. The Dream Girl Calendar perpetuates the traditional dynamics: Put her on a pedestal, play for it in a thousand other ways.
Obviously the calendar isn't the same as nude or bikini pimps in auto repair shops. I just don't agree that it's better. The obscenity doesn't lie in how much or what portion of the body is exposed, although that can be done obscenely.
solves the nudie problem but introduces another. Instead of just celebrating the fantasy of the dream girl, this calendar also celebrates conspicuous consumerism and social elitism.
calender should be a nude so we can get that much straight.
Notice, too, the consistent use of
And don't trot out the Chippendale syndrome, where women take revenge by gazing at male strippers. Reduction of sexuality to physical appeal is no good going either direction.
'Little girls don't become big girls; they become women. Maybe the calendar should be a nudie so we can get that much straight.'
the word girl, not only on the calendar dar but also around campus. It's fraternity men, but it's sorority girls — the typical denial of female maturity and the individual autonomy that it can bring.
So I object to the "dream," the
Either way, it contributes to the trivialization and distortion of sexuality.
The use of the word "dream" is revealing, too. What exactly is a calendar owner supposed to dream about?
Little girls don't become big girls; they become women. Maybe the
"girl!" and the calendar. While I'm at it, I object to February. But that's another thing.
The calendar demonstrates how different attitudes toward sexuality can be. I'm sure several thousand people on campus could make my point: Women don't deserve the confinement of a pedestal, even when they want it. Men shouldn't have to hold the pedestal up.
Yet others are totally oblivious to the point. The message of women's liberation isn't getting through in our society. Liberation isn't sassy lmg's or professional work. It's acceptance of the whole person by the self and others.
I began by recalling an old sexist song, and I end the same way:
"Whenever I want you, all I have to do is dream."