I live in a female college dorm where men are forbidden. And I wouldn’t change it for the world!
I feel safe, I have great friendships with both men and women, and I feel supported in my relationship with Christ. I would never settle for anything else.
Despite the “liberation” that most colleges promise their students—including most religiously affiliated colleges today that long ago abandoned their own principles, establishing co-ed residences or late-night visitation rules—my experience is that keeping men out of girls’ dorms creates the happiest living space for women. It upholds the safety, community, and integrity of college campus life.
The majority of college campus sexual assaults in the U.S. take place in residence halls. A 2019 study by the Association of American Universities revealed that 67% of sexual assaults occur in student residences. Another study, from the same year, revealed that 79.4% of the incidents at Harvard occurred in on-campus housing. Colleges should be aware of these dangers and take these facts into account when making decisions about campus life.
Women’s safety needs to be a top priority. One concrete way to combat these risks is to offer women a place where ill-intentioned men can never enter.
At my college, I have experienced the benefits of setting boundaries around sleeping areas, which helps make the community free to flourish. Every year, in the freshman dorms especially, girls are always out in the hallways, chatting or doing homework or just enjoying time together. They are out there until late at night, sometimes even falling asleep in the hall! The freedom to build these tight-knit friendships is largely because we never have to worry about a guy coming along. Even if the guy had the best intentions, it would still feel like a breach of the vulnerability that girls can have with one another.
Of course, some men do have ill intentions, and women should always be protected from that. Because my school actively and successfully keeps men out of the dorms, we have a space where we can fully let our guard down.
For men with integrity, socializing outside of the dorm rooms is a worthy sacrifice. Giving up the convenience of gathering in student rooms for an entire building of ensured security? Yes, please! The rest of the campus is available to spend time all together. This sacrifice by men on campus uplifts the whole community in mutual respect, and it sets a cultural standard of reverence for the well-being of women.
Beyond safety, community thrives in a single-sex dorm. Though it may not seem intuitive, separated residence halls enhance the community throughout campus, both among women and across the broader student body. In my experience, there is something about having relationships with other women that is irreplaceable. This has surfaced in moments like those at “Chick-Chat,” an event on my campus where girls get together and discuss topics that are most important to them as women, so we can help one another as a community. The separated halls offer a perfect environment for this event and encourage the conversations to continue beyond just one evening. And these conversations help all of the students in our relationships!
The culture today insists that college students need to live with the opposite sex in order to learn how to socialize well with them. In what world? If the idea is that a woman has to live with a man in order to be friends with him, the whole concept seems self-defeating. By living in a separate dorm, the particular gift of who I am as a woman is fostered every day. Because of this, I am more able to be myself in my friendships with guys, and they in turn can share their own unique experiences. I get to hear what they have to bring to the conversation without living under the same roof. I think this will serve me well in life after college.
Finally, separated residences support the integrity of a college campus, especially a religious one. The Christian life is hard. As a young Catholic, I find it important to be in a college that supports my faith. I want a college that consciously makes decisions that support the whole student body in a deep relationship with Christ. There are plenty of challenging things I have to deal with as I make my way through school. Balancing classes, papers, reading, sleeping, work, eating, and social life—that’s enough!
I don’t need the added pressure of living in the same building as my boyfriend. That situation would bring temptations similar to cohabitation, which are incredibly difficult to surmount. While there are certainly young people with the strength to stay virtuous, I highly value that the college I attend doesn’t force me into such a hard situation to navigate on my own. Living in different dorms doesn’t do away with the need for strong virtue while dating, but it helps to avoid temptation, which seems like a healthier environment for discerning with love.
Setting healthy boundaries, instead of living on the edge, helps me focus on loving others genuinely through Christ. The integrity that single-sex dorms demand from students has offered me a far greater foundation for an integrated community than shared sleeping areas ever could.
Living in a women-only dorm provides safety, community, and integrity to my college experience. The relationships formed on campus seem to be the real “stuff” of life: the friendships we long for so much. Given our fallen human nature, no place can be a paradise with the best friendships guaranteed. Each person’s choices impact the community, for better or for worse, and policies can’t change that. However, I’ve seen how building campus culture on the bedrock of safety and integrity has offered an environment where my community can flourish in genuine trust and delight.
With separated dorms, we are enabled to cultivate deep friendships in and out of the residence halls. Why have so many colleges taken this away from their students? From spontaneous swing-dance nights to study groups to small communities of faith, the men and women on my campus strive together toward healthy and wholesome relationships.
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As much as I agree with the idea that males and females should be residentially separated, this essay reads like script from a toxic estrogen Lifetime TV script, where all men are monsters and the world is centered around women and their concerns. Note: “Women’s safety needs to be a top priority”. “For men with integrity, socializing outside of the dorm rooms is a worthy sacrifice.” “The freedom to build these tight-knit friendships is largely because we never have to worry about a guy coming along.”
The author doesn’t realize how much those sentences could have been pulled from a now out of print, post-apocalyptic, dystopic novel about a Sapphic society entitled “The Shore of Women” (1986) by feminist atheist Pamela Sargent.
Decades ago I lived in a sex-segregated dormitory, and there were “dorm monitors” in the female dorms-something I know definitively since I got a campus job as one-but were none were stationed in the male halls-so the girls just came to the male halls for forbidden overnight visits.
I learned a lot about those “innocent” girls when I noticed that the smell of a freshly delivered pizza would bring them out of their rooms looking for a slice and they quickly learned exactly what sort of nightwear would make me agreeable to sharing. I finally figured out the game the night I ordered two pies and ate one piece. I quit having pizza delivered, since I knew I could see plenty of flirty women in revealing clothes in my own hall and around campus as soon it got warm in the spring.
And let’s be blunt, some reported assaults are post purchase regrets conceived during the hard reality of the following morning’s “walk of shame”.
I have a friend who had a dalliance while in college at a party-only to discover the woman in tears the next morning muttering “I’m not that kind of girl”. He confided to me once that he immediately realized her sobbing meant how he treated her after the encounter would determine her “view” of it. So he called her and they began dating. Now in his 60’s, they just passed their 40th anniversary. Now he’s a model of marital durability and not a rapist.
So, men need to be protected as well both from false accusations and to use an archaic phrase, women of easy virtue (deficient integrity). Rape is a an accusation where the third wave feminist soaked college cultures operate on the idea guilty until proven innocent.
Let’s note as well- made up accusations were levelled against two SCOTUS justices as political weapons, and both accusers have profited from their accusations and while men both survived the attempted detraction-neither man enjoys a perfectly restored reputation, because some people still don’t think women are capably of lying.
Not discussed: How women are victims-in-waiting in college dorms, but fit for the rigors of combat.
Also not examined is whether dormitory life at all is conductive to intellectual, moral or spiritual development or just a stew of pretentious immaturity at time in life when peer approval creates cliques, echo chambers and group think-in large part because the residents are tossed together and free from parental restraint while generally still dependent on parts-creating an illusion of adulthood-autonomy without economic responsibility.
Of course, it’s going to be increasingly easily to find female only dormitories in the future, as the overt academic hostility towards men has driven them away from college.
Of a total fall undergraduate enrollment of over 19 million in 2025, women will constitute 10.9 million undergraduates compared to 8.3 million men. If present trends continue unabated, that 57% will soon be 67% or 2 to 1 female.
Grade C+ Primary thesis presented and defended. However, perspective is primarily from personal experience and lacks important context and subordinates and ignores corollary concerns.
Sooo…your solution is co-ed dorms at Catholic colleges, then? If not that, then what *is* your solution? It’s not clear from what you’ve written. Or are you not offering a solution because there isn’t really a problem, and you’re just using this piece as a springboard to work out your own issues and absolve yourself of some past guilt involving pizza and negligees? I’m confused, man.
“As much as I agree with the idea that males and females should be residentially separated”
Opening phrase. How could any reasonable adult construe those words as advocacy of coed dorms?
Does condescending to a woman who is likely less than half your age make you feel like a big, important man?
Men just really cannot stand the idea of women having spaces entirely to themselves. Thank you for proving this point.
Nicole C: You come across in such a manner that any normal man would be more than happy to give you a VERY wide berth.
That’s quite a pile of grievances heaped up on a very simple premise: many women feel more comfortable after hours in single-sex spaces. But you have to turn it into a mini rant against feminism, misandry, women in combat, etc.
I’m sorry you FEEL that way, but it’s all interconnected.
A reminder: Not all men are marauders, hunting down women whom they can rape. Let’s not perpetuate unbalanced views on matters of male-female relationships. Men are NO LESS capable of being found virtuous than women.
A reminder: most men are.
Instead of chastising women for wanting to have a community in which they feel safe and aren’t continuously being sexualized, maybe you can try chastising men for making women feel unsafe or like sexualized objects in the first place. Y’all want to blame women for trying trying to protect themselves while completely ignoring the root cause of why women need to protect themselves.
Indeed. It’s a simple fact that sexual assault and harrassment is overwhelmingly directed by men against women. Not many men act that way, but enough do that it seems reasonable for women to want their after-hours quarters to be safe.
steveb: We are talking about Catholic men on a Catholic campus that is overwhelmingly populated by reverent, orthodox, conventional, morally upstanding MEN AND WOMEN. No one is saying that women (and men) are not entitled to the private spaces to be with their own sexes. But the impression should not be left that the women at Christendom College need to kept safely hidden from predatory, rapacious and marauding male students on campus. This betrays a very warped and unhealthy attitude toward the opposite sex.
The article was written by a female Christendom student and would naturally present a young woman’s perspective.
As a mother of both daughters and sons I can see how single sex dorms protect both male and female students.
Devout young adult Catholics have the same amount of hormones as everyone else and separate dorms are just common sense. It’s no disrespect to either men or women.
There are multiple types of sexual assault; and some involve physical force or restraint. For reasons that should be obvious, but are routinely denied, men can perpetrate that sort of assault. Men have more body mass and proportionately more strength.
However there are forms of assault that do not rely on physical force. It’s become routine for female teachers to be charge with assault of male students.
People who old enough to remember Mary Kay Letourneau remember her “marriage” to her former underage victim and how the media treated it as romance. It wasn’t until later her victim admitted he finally understood the relationship was “unhealthy”.
Good comment as far as realism and practicality.
They need to tone down their dressing, especially in the cleavage area.
Praise God! Every Catholic College should do this.
Amen, Br. Jacques.
Let’s be clear about something else. Sexual assault can just as easily (perhaps more so) take place within the confines of an automobile. In fact, it is MORE LIKELY to occur there rather than in a dorm within earshot of fellow students.
So….as a well-advised cautionary note, no female undergraduate ought ever to enter an automobile with a male student unaccompanied. In fact, I had a male student at one of the Newman List Colleges tell me that he was regularly having sex with his girlfriend in his car. So, to the young lady who wrote this article I would encourage her to tell all her female college friends never go enter a car alone with a male student.
When I met my wife and finally conjured up the nerve to ask her for a date, I cleaned my bachelor pad on wheels pig sty of a car by scrubbing, vacuuming and shining it so well so well you could have eaten of the floor and I was ready to present this freshly detailed car as suitable chariot.
Instead she insisted on meeting me at the appointed place, so she had a vehicle to “escape” if required. I was offended, but understood her caution later when I realized it was prudence, not rash judgement or undue suspicion.
After a few months of picking her up at what was her workplace, I wanted to pick her up at her residence-at that time she resided with an older sibling. I had two reasons to do so-I wanted to make sure my growing affections were directed at a woman who was in fact single and two “so I know that when I drop you off, you aren’t travelling that lonely road home and I leave knowing your hid just hit your pillow”.
She was “miffed” and said “You have to drive that same road home”. My response was “well true, but nobody would want to rape me, and on the off chance they do, my (then) 225 pounds are a much different obstacle to them than your 135.”
Now in the decades that have followed, it’s sort of amusing to me that this otherwise sober and objective woman, even in her 20’s would have thought it perfectly fine to be on guard against a potentially malevolent man, but unable to fathom that I would want to ensure against being involved with a cheating wife.
Of course the answer is the cultural miasma that routinely derides “toxic masculinity”-forgetting it’s the flip side of a man charging into a burning building to rescue people from entrapped incineration.
For the same reason a male teacher involved with a student is a monster, but a female teacher involved with a student (now an epidemic) isn’t viewed quite viewed as the same sort of predator.
For the record, my caution was warranted-there are a LOT more cheating wives (women initiate 70% of divorces and many are now quite happy to digitally share their light and transient reasons for pulling the pin-many on men they admit are devoted husbands and fathers, but not making them “happy”) than violent men.
head, not hid. Stupid automistake.
This like everything else that has changed for the worse is common sense, in my days there were no co ed dorms and we did not feel that we needed them and it was accpeted as normal that women should have their intimacy and orivacy.then came the sexiual revolution and guess who came out losing.Thanks for the article and its good to see that common sense is coming back. 70% assualts is good enough reason
I just had this discussion with my doctor who has become my friend. She has a little girl now and hopefully this article will plant a holy seed which will blossom when her little one goes to college. Thank you.
God bless you, Teagan. One of my children lived in a Christendom dorm also. Praise God for that experience & the life long friends they made there.
mrscracker: The benefits of single sex dorms on college campuses aside, I’d hope that you’re not endorsing her apparent cynical views of Catholic men. Not all Catholic men are lechers.
You didn’t mean the author of the article? I didn’t detect any cynicism there.
It just seems common sense to provide separate dorms for the best interests of both men and women.
mrscracker: I’ll re-read it and consider your thought. But I did detect a hyperalertness to malevolent male intent. That said, I’m very much in favor of single-sex dorms. That’s a no-brainer. But it’s best to understand the underlying motivation.
True comment, but a lass should be prudent. My farm boy advice to anyone I worked with who had little girls was, “all men are pigs.” This was more so for as they got older to watch them. When my niece was moving on from the catholic middle school to the public high school I made sure she understood where one swift kick could temporarily disarm a male who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
All people aren’t church shooters either but we are now taking precautions in case we are confronted with one in our parishes.
“When my niece was moving on from the catholic middle school to the public high school I made sure she understood where one swift kick could temporarily disarm a male who wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
Interesting. I intended a similar disclosure to my own niece, except she was already aware of that, but of course I actually made her test her ability to execute it.
I told her to show me how she’d do it. She protested that (she was sure from playground scuttlebutt and media) that she’d leave me in pain but I insisted knowing full well she would “wind up” by swinging her leg backwards and telegraphing her intent. Of course I easily grabbed her ankle. At that point, I asked “what’s your next move”. She thought for a few seconds and said “I don’t know”.
I then explained that she couldn’t think of a next move because there was none and that this was an overrated maneuver because she wouldn’t have time not to think about winding up and some people have just cat quick reflexes. Of course if you miss, now your attacker is enraged at your temerity.
I then wheeled around and pointed to a picture on her grandmother’s wall taken many years earlier with her mother flanked by me and my brother on her wedding day, pointing out that she would more likely be facing a man of my age in that picture-and that young me would kick older me’s *ss without much effort.
Then I taught her more effective self defense techniques and was willing to pay for martial arts, but her activities were dictated by after school socializing with classmates, so field hockey it was.
This is nothing new. Ohio State opted for this in the new Towers in 1970. I stayed in a female only dorm. Women in dorms walk to the showers in their robes. They study in PJs. I just did not feel comfortable in this scenario with guys outside my door. Interestingly, the young janitor did get some legal headaches for inappropriare comments and touching..
Linda Woodward: My bet is that these same females during summer vacation spend time at pools and beaches wearing swimwear and seem to have no problem with that. The last time I looked, there were always males on the beaches and in the pools.
I am NOT making the case that same-sex dorms are not wholesome ideas. I am just stating that the reason should not be based on a peverse, disoriented, warped view of men as if no man is capable of living a virtuous life. BOTH MEN AND WOMEN ought to safeguard the sanctity of their bodies because their bodies are the Temples of the Holy Spirit. But, let’s not leave it that women are somehow more virtuous than men.
I cannot help but wonder how this article would have been received if it had been a young man asking for/promoting single-sex dorms. Men also need “safe spaces” as well.
Probably about as well as if they asked for STEM programs restricted to males.
What’s good for the goose isn’t reasonable for the gander.
You know, just a thought: perhaps Catholic colleges should also offer affordable housing for married students?
That used to be more of a thing years ago.
Good point.
Have you seen the marriage statistics? Later and later, if at all.
The young author stated, “Of course, some men do have ill intentions.” This perfectly true statement does not say or even hint that “all men have ill intentions.”
Is anyone on this thread seriously denying her statement? Take about being hyper-sensitive!
We could state the author’s point this way: coed dorms create a massive near occasion of sin for men and women alike, albeit in somewhat different ways. The whole concept of “occasion of sin” refers to the fact that every human alive on planet earth today is capable of giving in to temptations. A responsible social order tries to limit the situations that are predictably tempting.
This is more than enough reason to have single sex dorms.
End of discussion.
Teagan Byrne, congratulations on a very good debut article!
I’m always amused when women lecture men on their nature, especially without much experience. Bluntly, I’ve been married to the same woman longer than the author has been alive, so I bet I understand women (almost not at all) better than she understands men and just to get a perspective I trust, I showed my wife the essay, she found the naïve perspective of the essay amusing.
Nobody here is suggesting co-ed residence halls are desirable or should even be permitted. They are a stupid idea only exceeded by women in combat. But residence halls in general as stupid. Most undergraduates move into apartments as soon as they can for good reason. If you want barracks life, join the military.
Conversely, are you denying some women have ill intentions? I have a young relative finishing up her time at a secular college. As a freshman, she was assigned to a roommate that festooned her side of the room with lesbian phonography that required an emergency room switch. One of the residents down the hall was bringing home so many “guests” that in the morning the girls would tell the guys “hey dude, better get tested”.
Should my young relative feel some disarmed comity with those females just because they are all female-or sharing showers, sinks and toilets?
With the number of young people having been successfully groomed to “identify” as “non-binary”, the women who are indignant that men resent being constantly presented as rapacious animals might want to consider that members of their own sex might enjoy seeing them in various stages of undress.
Maybe author’s college is free from these deviances of modernity, but I doubt it, a religious mission isn’t immunity.
Those of us in the gym culture know about the “gym creep” phenomenon, where some woman goes to a gym, usually in attire by Sherwin Williams and then records herself doing something designed to draw attention. When somebody notices the activity, they post indignant videos online about the “gym creep”. Clearly, males need to be protected from women as well.
Sorry, but we’ve been around long enough to know that women aren’t “sugar and spice and everything niece” and to present an argument based on that premise is betrays a disordered view of humanity.