naked Ivies
The Scotsman - January 8, 2007
BIRTHDAY-SUIT PARTIES ALL THE RAGE FOR IVY LEAGUE STUDENTS By Craig Howie
Students at America’s prestigious Ivy League universities are
rebelling against their colleges’ stuffy reputations, casting off
society’s norms along with their clothes to hold naked parties.
The Pundits, a secretive society at Yale University, initiated the
events — which profess to be non-sexual in nature — in the
mid-1990s, open to a select few. The society claims that president
George Bush’s daughter, Barbara, attended a naked party during her
second year, in 2002. The White House has always declined to comment.
But the naked parties are now fixtures among liberal students being
primed to become the nation’s elite.
While one campus source at Yale — to which Euan Blair, the Prime
Minister’s son, has won a scholarship — says naked parties are “the
No1″ thing to do before graduation, students who attend the six to
eight parties held each year say it can be a life-changing
experience, far from the “frat-house” bawdiness portrayed in films
such as Animal House. Megan Crandell, a final-year Yale student who
has attended six naked parties, said: “The dynamic is completely
different from a clothed party. People are so conscious of how
they’re coming across that conversations end up being more
sophisticated. You can’t talk about how hot that chick was the other
night.”
Another Yale student, who did not want his name to become known by
campus authorities — which do not try to stop the parties but do not
encourage them — said: “Part of it is just the mystique of not
knowing where you’re going. It’s become a hip thing to do.”
The events are magnets for social-climbers at other top academic
institutions, including Columbia, MIT and Brown. Students invited to
a party at Columbia last year received this e-mail: “Compadres, join
us in refusing to comply with a culture that tells us to hide our
body, to be ashamed of its scents, secretions, curves and hair, to
conceal those parts that have been dealt sexual connotations.” Some
students wear token items, such as hats; others bare all.
Occasionally, parties charge $1 for each item of clothing worn. Some
are even held in college libraries, though the early, underground
events were often referred to in code as “bar mitzvahs”.
Touching, beyond a salutary greeting, is not encouraged.
Of party etiquette, Mollie Farber, a senior student at Yale, said:
“You’re allowed to give everyone a quick once-over as you say, ‘Hey,
what’s up?’, but after that, you’ve got to maintain pretty good eye
contact.”
However, Alexandra Robbins, a Yale graduate who detailed secret
sorority life in her book Pledged, warned: “It can be a rude
awakening. It really comes down to the idea that if I shed my
clothes, I will lose my inhibitions. But it doesn’t always work that
way.”
Birk Oxholm, who graduated from Columbia in 2006, was not convinced
of the liberating effect of the parties: “To pretend you’re feeling
great and happy to be overcoming the oppressiveness of clothing
overlooks the more authentic feeling, which is, ‘I feel kind of weird’.”
In 2002, a Yale first-year accused an older student of making
unwanted advances after following her home from a naked party.
He pleaded no contest to fourth-degree sexual assault and was then
placed on probation.