Seeing as they were during V-Week and near the performance of the Vagina Monologues, you can’t say they weren’t timely. Whether you feel that they were “cowardly,” as one D opinion writer seemed to believe, or that they addressed a dark underbelly of campus that everyone knows about but rarely acknowledges, you certainly can’t say that they failed to elicit a reaction.

Because no matter what, we don’t seem to talk about it enough. As you may have guessed, “They,” refers to those who put up the signs at a number of fraternities, sororities, and Parkhurst. And  “it,” of course, is sexism and sexual assault on Dartmouth’s campus.

As a male student, it’s hard for me to say what it is really like to be a woman on campus. I don’t get the same looks, the same reactions, and the same sexual norms and expectations imposed on me like females do at Dartmouth. Some of it is endemic in society, if not all over the world. Some of it stems from American culture, from our troubling media fascination with sexualized women and violence against them.

But some it also falls on us, Dartmouth students and community members, the inheritors of a College that just a few decades ago was dead-set against co-education and is still trying to cope with its consequences.

Anyone who has tried to change a culture, whether within a company, a bureaucracy, or a community, can tell you that the process requires more than a few months or even a few years. Even in a college environment, whose student body is entirely different every sixteen years, institutions persist. Whether it is the sports teams, or fraternities, or traditionally male-dominated social activities, power structures don’t just disappear. MAV (Mentors Against Violence) facilitations target sports teams, who mostly scoff and laugh at their message.

“Alternative social spaces” has become generic codeword for social spaces, mostly nonexistent, outside of the fraternities. The administration and endless committees perennially attempt to reduce sexual assault. It’s not to say we haven’t gotten better over time, but it certainly sounds like the hot-button issues remain the same, year after year.

But many rail against this description—specifically, “we,” the seniors. The intuitive reaction to these issues by many men is “I don’t do this. My friends don’t do this. This doesn’t concern us.”

And to not misrepresent campus sentiment, even many women dismiss the seriousness of the problem at Dartmouth.

Even those who pay lip service to how “bad” things are at Dartmouth often seem to feel that it’s an issue to trumpet, like poverty and world hunger—and not something that truly would ever affect them; it isn’t a problem for “us” anymore, they argue, and the attempt to describe it as such is just as misguided as trying to pin the blame for past discrimination on us.

What, after all, does the oppression of Native Americans have to do with today’s students? We were not the slave owners, the lynchers or the ones who passed Jim Crow. If those sins, traced down to our generation through blood, shouldn’t be pinned on us, then how can the sins of past classes, with whom few of us have a relationship, be passed to our shoulders?

Of course, as is true of racial discrimination, today’s harms are more subtle than the literal guns, germs, and steel of yesterday. They are more subtle than outright hatred and prejudice. Instead, harm lives on as the small accumulation of small advantages that we cannot see and we cannot feel.

For those who feel that these mean nothing, I would highly recommend Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, who is far from a radical ethnic-theory apologist. The reason is the same as why children who start out younger in schools radically underperform their slightly more physically mature peers by a considerable order of magnitude. It’s the same reason why all of Canada’s elite hockey players are born, almost unfailingly, in the first three months of the year.

Our tiny advantages accumulate, giving us further advantages, which lead us to even further advantages.
It seems obvious in the case of a sports player who happens to perform better in tryouts because he feels particularly good one day—and gets further training, experience, and finally becomes far better than those who he pulled ahead of originally for no reason other than luck.

Why isn’t it the case in issues of racial discrimination? Why isn’t it the case in issues of sexual discrimination?
My own heritage precludes the “blood” argument. My parents came from Taiwan. Their parents came from China, though they moved to China when the Nationalist Army fled the Communists. Despite my roots on the other side of the world, I still reap the benefits of where I am at Dartmouth and where I am perceived in society. My own small advantages—having parents who, although they arrived on American shores with little more than $200, were well-educated and became computer engineers—added up to an Ivy League education and its perceived signal of my talent and ability.

If I were born in a Chicago slum and attended the city’s public schools, with their poor resources, and was without parents whose background enabled them to help me, would I have had achieved the same results? My own effort factored into it, no doubt—but the largest difference was nothing but blind luck.

I’ve wandered a long ways from the issue of sexism at Dartmouth. Perhaps that’s because it’s hardest to see what is closest to us—and it may be easier to recognize what sexism does with us here, and how we perpetrate it without meaning to, by first seeing a similar principle in action elsewhere. But another part of the issue is that, no matter what, I don’t know what means to be a woman at Dartmouth.

Being a racial minority—there I have a bit of experience. Economically disadvantaged—I have a bit of that too. But I don’t know what it is like to write a reasoned blitz to a professor and receive a response that essentially calls me an aggressive bitch. I don’t know what it’s like to have guys ogle at me and then tell me that I should be flattered. I don’t know what it is like to feel helpless against an assaulter bigger and stronger than me. I have seen all of it, at Dartmouth and outside of Dartmouth, but I don’t know what it is to experience it.

The reality is that it isn’t usually so blatant. Sexual assault is a serious issue. Overt sexism is a serious issue. But what is most virulent and corrosive in our community is the small uncertainty, the slightly imbalanced perception of “aggressiveness,” and the small feeling of expectation that women face.

These small things affect how a woman perceives her capabilities, which in turn affect her social standing—which change how she is treated. And on it goes, with small problems contributing to the larger problems, ones that still dog us nearly forty years after the first female Dartmouth students stepped onto campus.

It may seem hopeless. It may seem like a lost cause. The behaviors are so small and undetectable that we presume nothing but their gradual erosion through time will take away the problems that we inherit and become part of at Dartmouth. But time doesn’t seem to have done much in the case of our small behaviors and those small advantages and disadvantages.

I wish I could propose a solution that would solve everything, but I can’t. It isn’t as simple as moral platitudes. It isn’t just a matter of “thinking about what we do” or “speaking up.”

Such acts are inherently too fleeting and too contrived to maintain, making those who do maintain them seem banal or sanctimonious in our eyes.

All I do know is that we must first recognize these things as the problems they are, and take ownership of them as our own in all their ugly glory. Last week’s signs have done little to advance this particular goal, ultimately.
They painted with too broad a brush and highlighted only our most overt issues, issues their target audience has mostly shrugged off with righteous indignation. The signs fail to strike at core issues, and in so doing further perpetuated a feeling that our problems lie in intractably “big issues” rather than small ones.

Despite all of this, even without signs, we still do not talk about the issues. We do not think that they’re everyone’s problem. Although my own conversations with seniors have left me to think that many of us often come to the conclusion that great problems do exist on campus, they believe that it’s too late for us to spearhead a cultural shift. But that’s as far as it goes, just as it was for the seniors before them.

Much of our campus has taken a defensive stance towards the now infamous signs, and believes that they are an affront and a form of hatred themselves. I may not feel that these signs were our most prudent way of conveying a message, but I wouldn’t dismiss them.

They represent something that has happened year after year, as seniors attempt to convey to underclassmen the lessons that we have learned. It is a last cry to younger students to recognize and somehow break the cycle. Judging by our campus’ reaction, although the seniors may feel that these are our issues, there is clearly still work to be done before the rest of campus considers them their issues.

Science is not democratic. Science is not emotional. Gravity doesn’t care if everyone votes against it. Power won’t make itself perpetual for a while if Congress passes a stimulus. Poison ivy won’t stop that itch if you ask it nicely. The virus killing that child won’t stop no matter how hard and how tearfully his mother begs.

Truth is a difficult notion because no matter how “certain” the word sounds, our conception of it is supremely relative. Putting aside any “emotional” or “spiritual” truth, however, empirical truth—what science measures—cannot be swayed by human feeling or belief.

The world turns. Reality is. All science does is measure it. This seems obvious. But if it is, why does everyone try to change or ignore the science, believing that it will impact empirical truth?

Our society’s scientific plight seems to be a recent phenomenon. Many Americans laugh in the face of decades of climate change research. Nuclear skeptics still buy into some updated notion of the China Syndrome, according to which nuclear waste from a meltdown might burn a hole all the way to China. Evolution is widely thought to have “missing pieces,” despite the debate concluding nearly a century ago. And the media likes to shine on popular psychology, often to the detriment of clinical psychiatry.

We have virtually tossed out the careful, systematic study of the world that helped lead humankind away from superstition and into the modern era. It seems like just one generation ago that our scientists and engineers were the ones we looked up to—when they were the subject of a speech by President Kennedy and were our greatest bulwark against Communism. Now, Americans look up to Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.

But if we look deeper, we might find a startling and terrifying truth. It may have only been during the fight against Communism that Americans put real stock in their experts. In the late nineteenth century, it didn’t matter what anthropologists said or documented—America ignored its poor until Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives. The public was largely ignorant of the meat packing industry’s disgusting conditions before Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. More recently, in the 1960s, we ignored DDT as a potential threat until Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. What these cases all have in common was that they triggered a massive public reaction, one fueled by emotional resonance. The power of these statements was not in their meticulous documentation—it was in their appeal to primal gut reaction over logical data analysis.

Today, we have a vast apparatus of universities, research institutes, and public intellectuals. But no matter how much we invest in them, we can effectively relegate them to being a vestige of the Cold War era considering how they factor into the American consciousness.

Non-experts happily invent data or challenge scientific studies by merely claiming that it doesn’t “feel right” to them. Even in the public health sphere, we see phenomena like Jenny McCarthy—former Playboy Playmate and B-film actor—now being regarded as more trustworthy on a “cure” for autism than researchers and doctors who have studied the condition for most of their professional lives. When McCarthy calls for parents to avoid vaccinating their children because the standard package of vaccinations “causes autism,” thousands of parents listen—making her responsible for single-handedly reviving long-dead diseases like measles and mumps. When challenged with over twenty studies that disprove a link between autism and vaccination, she once claimed that her son is her science.

To the American public, it seems wrong and “undemocratic” to deny someone that argument. Cold numbers can’t replace warm, nice-sounding words, and the “tyranny of facts” almost seems to be something from an authoritarian nightmare. And so, we listen to those who spout on about science, about public policy, and about everything else that they have no knowledge of—and trust them more than those who we pay to be experts.

Maybe it isn’t so surprising that we only trusted our scientists in an era when we accepted many other authoritarian measures in order to battle totalitarianism.
This underlying culture is not something that Alexis de Toqueville, observer of 18th century America and now darling of the health care debate, wrote about. It isn’t something that we rhapsodize about when exalting American freedom.

But it is real, and part of the reason why we so fervently deny the reality that is climate change. It is part of the reason why we still don’t have nuclear plants while the rest of the world goes on. And it is a large part of why more and more of our brightest minds now go to Silicon Valley start-ups, mega-corporations, and Wall-Street instead of dreaming to be NASA scientists, civil engineers, or medical researchers.

Intellectual firepower only matters when you can use it to reach your goal—now money—without giving a damn about what others might think about your idea.
It is a dangerous trend for a country that arose largely because its spiritual originators in Europe were able to shake off irrationalism and religion, forces that acted as intellectual shackles on the people. A tyranny of facts overcame a tyranny of men.

As we watch our society wrestle with bigger and bigger problems, ignoring what the scientific process tells us, one has to wonder whether we will again fall under the spell of irrationalism, tightly controlled and disseminated by a self-interested elite holding onto power.

The more I watch Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and a host of other anti-rational, anti-fact public figures gain prominence, I cringe.

The more I see others who should know better emulate them in order to get results, like the Democratic Party has begun to do, the more I despair for this country.

It’s finally spring break, so you and your friends decide to pay a visit to warm, sunny Florida. But on the plane, you all decide to get the party started right then and there—and what better way to do that than to order some mile-high cocktails? The flight attendant comes and hands you that cute little shot in a bottle and ice in a plastic cup. But you also thirst for a Diet Coke—a chaser. Add a can of Coke and another plastic cup of ice in front of you. During this long flight your eco-friendly Dartmouth Nalgene idly awaits in your dorm room—couldn’t fit into the back pocket of your mini skirt—so you order several little plastic cups of water to stave off the formation of an arrival-ruining hangover. As the flight attendant comes around to prepare everyone for landing, you hand him all the plastic cups stacked in front of you, four in all. Your friends do the same, as do everyone on the flight, and everyone on every flight in the U.S. every day. All in all, this adds up to a whopping four million plastic cups in airport trash—every single day.

Four million is a big number. Forty million, the number of paper cups we use every day, is even bigger. I’d never seen four million of anything before—that is, until I heard about the photographer Chris Jordan.

Chris Jordan uses his art to help viewers visualize America’s consumer-addicted culture. In an interview with Bill Moyers he explained, “All of my work is meant to evoke a whole bunch of different layers of discord between the attraction and repulsion that we feel toward our consumer habits and our consumer lives. It’s like there’s this tremendous power in our culture that has a dark side to it that has surfaced lately. And that’s kind of what I’m working with.”

With Plastic Cups, 2008, Jordan enables us to visualize one million plastic cups—six hours’ worth in the American airline industry—as part of his Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait project. In this collection, he reconstructs a Charlie Brown comic using pictures of 10,000 collars—the number of unwanted dogs and cats euthanized in the U.S. every day. In Skull With Cigarette, 2007, Jordan uses 200,000 cigarette cartons (the number of people in the U.S. who die from smoking every 6 months) to recreate Van Gogh’s famous painting by the same name. Paper Bags, 2007 depicts the 1.14 million brown paper bags that Americans use every hour. And Ben Franklin, 2007 uses 125,000 one-hundred dollar bills (the amount spent in Iraq every hour of the war) to create an image of our founding father.

The images on this page are from Barbie Dolls, 2008. The full image is that of a woman’s chest. Zoomed in, we see an intricate floral pattern. And looking eve more closely, we see that each ‘flower’ is actually a circle of 24 Barbie dolls. In total, the photo uses 32,000 Barbie dolls, the number of women who undergo elective breast augmentation surgery each month in the United States (for a total of 384,000 women a year). The photo is beautiful; the message is haunting. Chris Jordan explains this intention: “I [use] beauty as a seduction, to draw the viewer in to sit through the piece long enough that the underlying message might seep in.”

And seep in they do, beginning with the moment you read the statistic attached to each of Chris Jordan’s photos. I, for one, will be packing my Nalgene this spring break.

The true potential of music cannot be realized until its beauty has been shared. As a violinist in the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra, I rediscovered this seemingly obvious statement through the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 on Saturday, February 27th, with Philip Back ’10 performing the virtuosic piano solo.

In a sense, hearing the Rachmaninoff piano concerto is a remarkably personal experience. You realize that the soloist has invited you in to share the profound passion and commitment he himself feels for the music. When you first meet Philip, you get a sense that he’s extremely reserved, as though mysterious barriers have been constructed around him. This may compel you to maintain your distance, not wanting to disturb or impose upon the reputedly impenetrable Philip Back.

But when he plays the piano, you hear the rapturous melodies of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2, and you cannot help but become inextricably drawn into the thrill and intensity of the music, his music.

For any musician, one of the most gratifying elements of a performance is the ability to share it with others. While this satisfaction makes any concert worthwhile, it made Saturday’s concert even more so—because that night, our orchestra not only performed musical masterpieces, but we also saw one of our peers, Philip Back, share his own music and passion with a public audience in Spaulding. And as fellow musicians, we could all relate with and respect the commitment it takes to perform the Rachmaninoff concerto.
After the concert, a piano instructor Phil and I both share told me that he once asked Phil: “Out of everything you could have performed, why did you choose the Rachmaninoff?” Philip answered that he’d heard the piece when he was young, and fell in love with the music. With that early fascination, Philip (a philosophy and music major, soon-to-be 2nd lieutenant in the US Army) committed himself to realizing those dreams at Dartmouth. And for anyone listening, to experience the culmination of that dedicated passion inspires an even greater appreciation for the music itself.

The Rachmaninoff piano concerto ended in a powerful, dizzying climax, immersing the entire orchestra with tangible energy and emotional connection. As I heard the audience explode, surging into a standing ovation, I felt the unexpected and uncharacteristic traces of moisture on my own cheeks, and at that moment, I realized that sharing music is not a one-way street. Because ultimately, the music Philip offered was for the audience, for our orchestra, and for himself. After that concert, no one could doubt that the true potential of music is meant to be shared.

Vagina Day, usually shortened to V-Day, embodies a world-wide movement to empower women with knowledge of their bodies, their sexuality, and the dignity and honor that comes with possessing both. Most importantly, V-Day lets people everywhere know that women don’t deserve to be raped, manipulated or abused. In other words: the beatings stop here.

Everyone is aware of the world’s sexist past. One thing most people don’t realize is that the feminist movements of the twentieth century haven’t obliterated sexism or violence against women. In Latin America, gang warfare between drug cartels has led to women being kidnapped and raped. Thailand enjoys a thriving sex trade of women and children. In the Muslim world, women who refuse to wear a veil or a full-body burqa may be subjected to “honor killings” performed by their male relatives. The Japanese government still has not issued an official apology to the thousands of “comfort women” who were abducted from China and Southeast Asia and were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers during World War II. Wherever or whenever war may be found, whether it be in Iraq, Bosnia, Vietnam, Darfur, or Nanking, women have been gang-raped, tortured, and killed. Most of the aforementioned atrocities were remedied after the fact, if they were remedied at all. These atrocities should have never occurred in the first place.

Vagina Day began as a play by Eve Ensler called the Vagina Monologues. The aim of these monologues, narrated by women of different ethnicities, cultures, ages, sexual orientations, and economic backgrounds, was to allow men and women to learn more about female sexuality so that it would be honored and respected. You would be surprised to know how little women know about their sex organs and their sexuality, even in the present day. Many women have never had an orgasm, even if they are sexually active. Some older women have never even seen their vaginas and probably would not be able to locate their clitoris if asked.

There is too much misunderstanding and mystery surrounding female sexuality. The wonders of female sexuality and sexual organs were deified by ancient cultures for their ability to create life. In ancient India, both male and female sexuality was understood and encouraged. The symbol for female sexuality, the yoni, held just as much, if not more importance, than the male sex symbol, the lingam.

However, the rise in power of patriarchal religious systems such as Confucianism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity throughout the centuries made a major switch from the earlier religions now collectively referred to as “pagan.” Male sexuality was deified while female sexuality was demonized, crushed and effectively silenced. The remnants of this systematic subjugation are still evident today. For example, why is male masturbation widely accepted and female masturbation hardly spoken of? Did you know that as late as the last century, young girls could have their clitoris medically removed if they masturbated too much? According to the Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, the last clitoridectomy in the United States occurred in 1948 and was performed on a five year old girl. And you thought “female circumcision,” a.k.a. genital mutilation, only happened in Africa. Did a boy ever have his penis removed for masturbating too much?

The silence and the mystery surrounding female sexuality enable women to be misunderstood, abused and ignored. Many women are afraid of saying the word “vagina.” They use other words to describe “down there.” If women are too uncomfortable to even use the right word to describe their primary sexual organ, how can they voice their sexual desires? How can they defend themselves? Are any men afraid to say the word “penis?

“?The Vagina Monologues empower women to reclaim their bodies, their sex, and their vaginas. Women need to realize that their sex organs and their sexual pleasure don’t belong to their husbands, but to them. Women need to know how to be masters of their own sexual pleasure. They should see masturbation as a liberating force, not as something shameful. Did you know that the clitoris is the only organ in human anatomy whose purpose is solely for pleasure? With 8000 nerve fibers the clitoris has more nerve endings than anywhere else in the body including the mouth, lips, fingers and tongue. That is twice the number of penis. Twice! Can you believe that? Natalie Angier, author of Woman: An Intimate Geography, couldn’t believe it either. If men had such an organ, everyone would know about it. Why is there so little focus on women’s sexual fulfillment?

Right now, most of the world’s focus is on male sexual pleasure, from porn to pole dancers. The world must learn to see female sexuality on the same level as male sexuality. That way, the abuse of females physically, emotionally, psychologically, and sexually will not be excused. Many see masculinity as aggressive while femininity is recessive. This is only because female sexuality remains silent, unknown, mysterious, lost on the world and lost on women themselves. Women are then defenseless when it comes to protecting their displaced sexuality, a sexuality that has been used for centuries to prop up male sexuality. Vagina Day has helped women worldwide reclaim a sexuality that must be able to stand strong and alone on its own two feet.

I encourage women (and men) to read the Vagina Monologues or attend the public readings held on Vagina Days all over the globe. Money raised at these readings goes to providing workshops for women struggling with abuse or hoping to learn more about their sexuality. More importantly, the money also goes towards opening safe houses in places like Africa and India, where women fleeing abuse may have nowhere to turn.

The world is slowly being forced to realize that domestic abuse can’t be ignored. It can be found at all levels of society and doesn’t just go away. Even in a feminist society, domestic abuse and sexism still exist. Those who support Vagina Day are fighting for women who are being abused now, but they are also fighting to prevent women from being abused in the future. Hopefully men’s and women’s mindsets about female sexuality can be changed, and changed for the better.?

Recently, Apple has been heading in a much more “lady-friendly” direction if you know what I mean [insert iPad joke here]. Now, Winkpass Creations has developed an application that allows women to track their menstrual cycle via their iPhones. That’s right—we have entered into the age of the aptly named iPeriod “period-tracker.”

This detailed application affords the user a multitude of services—it generates the average length of one’s cycle and the estimated start date of one’s period. Cutesy hearts and flowers mark important dates on the calendar, such as the start and end of the ovulation cycle.

In fact, the application itself is dominated by pink and purple hues, as if to alert the user that iPeriod is indeed intended for those of the female persuasion; nothing says “menstruation!” like magenta and cartoon fauna.

Despite the fact that iPeriod’s presentation seems to lend itself to the Bratz-doll set, it does provide useful services for women hoping to get pregnant—the notifications of the days of ovulation are particularly helpful. The app also allows the user to record “flow,” “mood,” “appetite,” “cramps,” “breast tenderness” and “headaches.” As a result, iPeriod can effectively predict the time, duration, and severity of one’s next period.

iPregnancy on the other hand is designed to—you guessed it—track the details of one’s pregnancy. As such, it seems like a natural extension of iPeriod. The app allows users to track the exact age of the fetus (“Baby Heidi is now 24 weeks 5 days”), and the amount of time remaining until the due date. It also records the fetus’ approximate length and weight, provides a baby name generator, and tracks the user’s OB appointments, among other things.

But despite these apps’ apparent utility, there is something inherently creepy about them. Maybe this derives from the fact that technology is encroaching upon something as intimate as one’s menstrual cycle and pregnancy.

Perhaps it also adds certain sterility to these two natural processes in a way that is generally disturbing. Aren’t women supposed to be earth-goddesses in tune with the natural rhythms of the world? However, women’s health has often benefited from technological advancements—I’d venture a guess that few women would call for pre-1900 gynecology.
Maybe it has more to do with the name? There is something so hilariously nonchalant about an app called iPeriod. Or maybe it’s that the emphasis on the micromanaging one’s life has progressed to a farcical point—that menstruation and pregnancy must be managed by an iPhone.

Vajazzling. [vuh-jaz-ling]— the art of applying hundreds of Swarovski crystals to the area immediately around a woman’s vulva. It’s a new, invisible fashion fad conceived by Completely Bare Spa in New York City, and it’s gaining ground among top celebrities—most notably Jennifer Love Hewitt. Hewitt described her experience with the trend on Lopez Tonight, where she said vajazzling was “great” and helped her get over an unpleasant break-up.

Vajazzling is a simple process. You go to one of Completely Bare’s spas, get your long, curly pubes removed by way of bikini wax, have one of their specialized technicians superglue a bunch of sparkly rhinestones to your pussy, and voilà! Your unattractive twat shines like a disco ball from 1976! In fact, it’s so simple that you can even do it at home. Completely Bare Spa sells vajazzling kits online, so no need to travel all the way to New York to get your pussy BeDazzled!

Now I may be old-fashioned, but in the olden days, vaginas looked like vaginas, not gaudy jewelry. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for a woman’s right to what goes in, out, and on her body (vaginal flatulence excluded). But extravagant though it may be, vajazzling is just another way to demean women and tell them their beavers and mud flaps are hideous. It’s a slap in the face to the body acceptance movement.

Where are the true vagina lovers out there, the muff-divers who don’t require overpriced crystals to lick pussy? Surely not at that spa, purchasing over-the-top Austrian bling-bling for their hairy beavers.

Completely Bare as of yet doesn’t sell crystallized tattoos for penises, and I’ll admit that the idea of shimmering scrotums isn’t as attractive as glittering vaginas.

But in a world where you can put tacky jewels on just about anything, why not? Why stop with genitals? You can bedazzle your dog, your boring professor, even the Venus de Milo!
The point being, ladies: your fur pie is beautiful and you don’t need tawdry embellishments to make it, or anything else, attractive. You don’t need to vajazzle like J. Love to feel good. A nice, thick dildo will suffice.

The true potential of music cannot be realized until its beauty has been shared. As a violinist in the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra, I rediscovered this seemingly obvious statement through the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 on Saturday, February 27th, with Philip Back ’10 performing the virtuosic piano solo.

In a sense, hearing the Rachmaninoff piano concerto is a remarkably personal experience. You realize that the soloist has invited you in to share the profound passion and commitment he himself feels for the music. When you first meet Philip, you get a sense that he’s extremely reserved, as though mysterious barriers have been constructed around him. This may compel you to maintain your distance, not wanting to disturb or impose upon the reputedly impenetrable Philip Back.

But when he plays the piano, you hear the rapturous melodies of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2, and you cannot help but become inextricably drawn into the thrill and intensity of the music, his music.

For any musician, one of the most gratifying elements of a performance is the ability to share it with others. While this satisfaction makes any concert worthwhile, it made Saturday’s concert even more so—because that night, our orchestra not only performed musical masterpieces, but we also saw one of our peers, Philip Back, share his own music and passion with a public audience in Spaulding. And as fellow musicians, we could all relate with and respect the commitment it takes to perform the Rachmaninoff concerto.

After the concert, a piano instructor Phil and I both share told me that he once asked Phil: “Out of everything you could have performed, why did you choose the Rachmaninoff?” Philip answered that he’d heard the piece when he was young, and fell in love with the music. With that early fascination, Philip (a philosophy and music major, soon-to-be 2nd lieutenant in the US Army) committed himself to realizing those dreams at Dartmouth. And for anyone listening, to experience the culmination of that dedicated passion inspires an even greater appreciation for the music itself.

The Rachmaninoff piano concerto ended in a powerful, dizzying climax, immersing the entire orchestra with tangible energy and emotional connection. As I heard the audience explode, surging into a standing ovation, I felt the unexpected and uncharacteristic traces of moisture on my own cheeks, and at that moment, I realized that sharing music is not a one-way street. Because ultimately, the music Philip offered was for the audience, for our orchestra, and for himself. After that concert, no one could doubt that the true potential of music is meant to be shared.

I thought Dennis Kucinich was going to be just about the best Democratic congressman I’d ever come across. He was straightforward, told the truth, said all the things I wanted to hear (different from the things most Americans/Democrats want to hear)…. until he started talking about aliens. I was beginning to forgive and forget, let him maintain the best congressman award in my mind, until I heard about Ann McLane Kuster.

Kuster, candidate for the Representative of New Hampshire’s 2nd district, came to speak to a packed Class of 1930 room at the College Democrats meeting last Monday. A quick pre-meeting browse on her website piqued my interest: it looks as though it were designed by whoever created barackobama.com, and she has the support of both EMILY’s List and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Turns out she was an Obama delegate at the Denver DNC, and is pro-choice! (No, like she actually says she is pro-choice and doesn’t skirt around the issue with vague and contradictory statements) She is of course opposed to the Stupak amendment, advocates for a public insurance option, and if elected, would insist that the banks pay back the bailouts in full.

To the Class of 1930 room crowd, she said we “[have] two wars we never should have been in”— a more direct and honest statement from a politician than I have heard in a while. A second look at her website, however, left me a little confused. Her issue statement on Afghanistan maintains that we are at war with Al Qaeda, and seemed to form a strong link between our military presence in Afghanistan, and our security at home. I imagine (or hope, rather) the first to be a more honest comment, and the second a “necessary” statement required to gain the votes of Democrats.

While there seem to be a few contradictions, and a few statements obviously devoted to gaining support of moderate democrats on her webpage, she seems more genuinely liberal than any candidate I have seen in a while (since Kucinich, or Barack Obama). What she will do if elected, no one can tell. Despite this, hearing her speak made me willing to once again support a progressive candidate and hope that they will live up to their liberal values, and not let me down.

As Barack Obama continues to massage the “Recovery Act” in an attempt to bridge the disparate demands of Republicans and Democrats over health care, the economy, and the government, energy has once again gained his focus—albeit with a more pro-nuclear tone than before.

Lying somewhere between the low-carbon diets of the donkeys and the insatiable appetites of the elephants, nuclear power appeals to many as a panacea for our rampant energy crisis, especially when this panacea comes from the mouth of our Fearless Leader.

The carbon emissions generated by nuclear power are minimal, and with enough money we can construct power behemoths that will each survive for over forty years. Obama recently stated—to the uproarious applause of both Democrats and Republicans (but mostly Republicans)—that he plans to “triple loan guarantees required … to finance safe, clean nuclear facilities” in order to “revive the nuclear industry in the United States”. Sounds like a squeaky-clean plan, right?

Wrong. First of all, there is no such thing as “safe, clean nuclear power.” Although nuclear power is safe in the sense that it won’t have you choking on smog every time you walk past the local reactor, the fact remains that there is no existing long-term way to dispose of radioactive nuclear waste systematically. Even the fact that Barack Obama describes it as “safe” suggests an intrinsic fear of the poorly studied dangers of nuclear power: we don’t hear people saying that coal mining is “safe” because we assume that it will not precipitate an explosion or permit the construction of a nuclear warhead.

As of now, our methods of nuclear waste disposal are temporary solutions at best and economic and environmental catastrophes at worst. In order to find out exactly what these “solutions” for disposing of waste are, I went to Steele Hall to interview professor Anthony Faiia, professor of Isotopic Chemistry.

DFP: ““How do nuclear power plants normally dispose of waste?”

Professor Faiia: “After a Uranium fuel rod is spent, they will typically put it in a pool inside the power plant until it cools down a little. Then they will seal it in a cement or iron cask, which they then put outside on the premises of the plants… Some of those isotopes will last millions of years, some of them will last hundreds of thousands of years.”

DFP: “Is there any more centralized way of storing the radioactive waste that would be better?”

Professor Faiia: “The truth is that putting nuclear waste all in one place is not the best way to store it. There is too much risk concentrated in one area. People have suggested storing the waste in places like Yucca Mountain, or even sending it into space. But then there is the [problem of] transportation: what happens if the spacecraft full of Uranium 238 explodes before it reaches space, as a handful of spacecraft have in the past? And all those semi trailers making the pilgrimage to Yucca Mountain or wherever would have to drive on the same roads as many civilians.”

DFP: “Yeah, I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable driving next to an 18-wheeler full of radiation.”

Though there have been no additions to our 104 nuclear facilities in America in over thirty years, Obama’s proposal wants to increase this number to 106 with the construction of two new reactors in Georgia. It seems that political inertia has proven to be no obstacle for Obama’s “Recovery Act”.

Unfortunately for nuclear supporters, a group of anti-nuclear progressives has made itself known just across the river in Vermont. Last week, in the state’s Senate chamber, the long, storied life of one such nuclear reactor was cut short. Since Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant’s (VY) first day of operation in 1972, it has provided over a third of Vermont’s electrical power.

If that seems like a long time, it’s even longer when you consider the 70-year half-life of uranium, or the virtually infinite amount of time before it’s completely gone. For what it’s worth, it appears that our nation’s energy schema has taken two steps back and one important step forward.

In front of an audience of over 100 anti-nuclear citizens, who had been staying in hotels in the capitol over the course of the 3-day hearing, a vote of 26-4 overruled Vermont Yankee’s license to operate, effective in 2012. The event was covered in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, ABC, and even The Guardian in the UK. A public ruling to decommission a power plant has not taken place in the US in over 20 years, as such legislation is usually considered by members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

A loophole opened up in 2002 when VY accepted a contract according to which it deferred to the authority of the Public Service Board of Vermont (PSB) in exchange for an increase in power output by 20%. This loophole was further exploited when lobbyists helped to pass Act 160 in 2006, which stated that all nuclear power plants in Vermont needed a “certificate of public good” from the PSB in order to renew their licenses, making it even harder for VY to extend its operation.

And now, what appeared to Vermont Yankee as an understandable bargain seems to have derailed the future of the plant. Thanks to the incremental progress of so many anti-nuclear activists, a slew of once-futile testimonies against the plant made adequate ammunition to take down the giant in a battle akin to David and Goliath.

Citing a water tower collapse and a transformer fire in the last decade—and, more recently, evidence that Yankee not only denied the presence of underground drainage pipes, but also denied tests that found that these pipes had leaked traces of radioactive tritium into our very own Connecticut river—the lobbyists were able to corner Vermont Yankee defendants.

Despite the attempts of VY and Entergy (VY’s parent organization, whose slogan, ironically enough, is “the power of the people”) at corporate coercion, the chances of turning over the Vermont Legislature’s vote are slim.

Bob Walker, director of the Sustainable Energy Resource Group (SERG), reiterated in a phone interview with the DFP that “the Senate’s decision was not dependent on the economics of the situation so much as the issue of trust, or a lack thereof, in Vermont Yankee.”

Other activist groups are not so confident. One of the main groups responsible for the long-standing battle against VY is the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG). In order to look deeper into the fears and ambitions of the activists, I interviewed James Moore, the Director of the Clean Energy Program at VPIRG.

DFP: “Will you be expecting any amount of “corporate coercion” on the part of Vermont Yankee and Entergy to reverse the Senate’s decision?”

J.M.: “Yes, absolutely. The main problem that we’re facing is that we have a [senate] election in November. [In order to renew its contract], Entergy needs permission from the state legislature, and the concern is that they could try to buy votes in the next legislature and overturn what has been accomplished.”

DFP: “What can we do to prevent that from happening?”

J.M.: “Well, we can work to make sure that the people who vote for legislators are educated. If we can expose what is going on enough, I am sure the voters will support closure [of VY].”

DFP: “I heard the figure for decommissioning VY is over $1 billion. Why is it that decommissioning costs so much?”

J.M.: “Well, in that billion-dollar number there are two things. The first is cleaning up the building, getting rid of contamination, digging up foundations, etc. The second part is keeping the radioactive waste on the premises until the federal government comes in and takes it away. That could be decades, since we have no standardized solution for getting rid of that waste in this country.”

DFP: “But Vermont’s annual budget is only about $1 billion, and the state is already in debt. Who is going to pay that cost?”

J.M.: “That is actually a highly debated question. When Entergy bought VY in 2002, it promised to be responsible for the full decommissioning of the plant, and all the clean-up costs. Now they are trying to go back on their promise by deferring the cost to their limited-liability subsidiaries, which presumably would not pay the full price. We don’t want the big parent corporation in Louisiana to take all the profits and then walk away from the liability.”

Although Vermont Yankee has its fair share of problems, it is neither the oldest nor the most decrepit of the 104 nuclear reactors in our country. There is a rising trend of similar management and infrastructure problems in nuclear power plants in the US: 27 of them are still currently leaking radioactive waste.

Even if these leaks have not yet been connected to any widespread health concerns, as is the case with VY, this is no proof that nuclear power is safe. The effects of radiation are long term and sometimes unknown for decades, as was the case after Russia’s Chernobyl incident.

Nor does this take into account the latent potential for weaponizing nuclear material at any nuclear plant. In addition, we must remember that uranium is by no means an unlimited or cheap resource.

In the face of such daunting odds, the success of progressives in Vermont should serve as a model for energy legislation in all states. On our side of the Connecticut River, for example, is Seabrook Nuclear power plant.

Although Seabrook is one of the newest plants in the country, New Hampshire may look to what is happening in Vermont and decide that as Seabrook gets older, New Hampshire must be sure to have a voice in its fate.

Hopefully, President Obama will hear the cries of Vermonters and begin to change his energy policies. There is simply no getting around it: nuclear power is dangerous, unsafe, and an unsustainable long-term energy source.

If Barack Obama must continue to build new plants, we progressives need to make sure to resist by shutting down old plants, exposing corporations like Entergy for their lies, and looking for alternative sources of energy.

In 1788, when Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay published the document now known as “The Federalist Papers,” they used the pseudonym Publius to protect themselves from persecution. Theirs was a difficult and dangerous time when dissent was treason and free speech was a pipe dream.

Well, in the wee hours of the morning of February 23, 2010, Dartmouth’s own Publius was out and about putting up signs that accused several Greek houses on campus of racism and sexism and Parkhurst of tacit acceptance of these prejudicial behaviors. The signs proclaimed that our new Publius was holding the signs’ recipients accountable for their hurtful actions.

I have some unfortunate news for the authors of these signs: accountability is a two-way street. In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. said the following:

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”

I believe that Dartmouth signed the same kind of promissory note in the fall of 1972, when women first set foot on this campus as Dartmouth students. If we have defaulted on this debt, then we ought to be held accountable by all means necessary. The problem with anonymous signs is that we don’t know where to send the new check.

As the son of a member of the last all-male class at Dartmouth, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we have come a long way in the last 37 years. My father witnessed Theta Delt sing at the infamous 1975 “Hums” (see “Early days of coeducation at the College were bitter ones” from the November 14, 1997 issue of The Dartmouth), and I have heard stories about a fraternity brother stealing every toilet seat out of the girls’ dormitory. I recognize that we still have a long way to go to reach true gender equality, but I would like to remind the members of our community who see these signs as a victory to look around them.

We do not live in the Dartmouth of the mid-1970’s. In today’s Dartmouth, anonymous signs are not brave or courageous. They are cowardly. They use mystique to sensationalize the issue and get media coverage.

I believe in free speech. And I believe that free speech is a necessary factor in the production of change, but not when there is no one to claim it. In these cases, free speech can harm as much as it can help. Perhaps it is a sign of the times when anonymous blogging has become a viable means of social critique, but such actions are, from a purely practical point of view, fundamentally flawed. We do not need secrecy. This campus has plenty of “secrets” already. What we need is open and frank dialogue. Part of activism is talking the talk, but the other part is walking the walk. Activists, just like the status quo against which they fight, are accountable on both of these fronts, and I would wager a pretty penny that most of the people responsible for these signs visited the basement of at least one of the accused fraternities over Winter Carnival.

So to the Dartmouth Publius,
If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. You’re part of it every time you set foot in a frat basement without saying something. You are just as guilty as Parkhurst. You perpetuate the cycle just as much as anyone else. But the ship has sailed on this incident. Coming forward now would not help your cause, a cause which I believe should be shared by each and every member of the Dartmouth community. I am not suggesting you “stand up and say that to our face.” That would be counterproductive at this point. It would only lead to unproductive finger-pointing.

But what I am saying is this: follow in the footsteps of one of the greatest activists in modern history, Mahatmas Gandhi, and “be the change you want to see in the world.” Do not stay silent, but do not be anonymous. There is a place for anonymous accusations and name-calling. It’s called Bored@Baker. You’re better than that.