Why is there still an association of women students?

Seriously. Why? I think this is an important question.

Don't get me wrong. This organization does good things. My absolute last goal in this post is to offend anyone who has spend their time and energy under the umbrella of this organization contributing to the student body. I appreciate the thoughtfulness they give to funding other important ventures. What they do is good. And their panels are with the best of intentions. Femininity is an important cultural conversation. Womanhood is an important conversation. Modesty, gossip...these are words we roll our eyes at now. Sometimes it's obvious we need to have more good conversations about these things.

But why, why, why do we have an Association of Women Students? That is literally 50% of our student body. There is no Association of Male Students. The idea of an organization with that name is laughable, actually, because no man would come. Is this an old organization carried over from the older days of the college, when women in colleges were in the minority and we were all Home Economics majors?

Never have I once ever defined myself as a "woman student." My identity as a woman is so intertwined with my identity as a daughter of God that it is not a separate part of me. To me, an Association of Women Students is about as absurd as having an Association for People With A Left Arm.

When we put gender into an organization - a gender which is not a minority needing to be represented with concerns to be voiced, but a large part of a group of students, we REGRESS. We are suffragettes in parades again. We put on our corsets again. And those vitally important conversations are still unnatural, forced, shrill, grasping. We do not move anywhere that is more normal.

I will not apologize for my stomach sinking when I read that a panel of MEN are going to speak to the Association of Women Students about MODESTY. Why are we having that conversation?? Why are women not having this conversation with their sisters, fathers, brothers, friends? Who are these random young men to have the right to tell me how to dress, coming from their own personal background, weird hangups and temptations? These are regressive conversations. They take us backwards. They breed fear -- fear of womanhood, femininity, sexuality and certainly a fear of men. When maturing women learning to make decisions for themselves about their bodies and hearts are listening to men they do not know personally about how to dress and act, we need to be worried. At least I am. And I can't support an organization that organizes these conversations on purpose.

I think I have two bones to pick, I realize after writing this. The first is that the name and purpose of the organization is antiquated, irrelevant to both our culture and to the deepest issues of women's hearts. The second is that the conversations they host seem to breed fear (or to be redundant or pointless, or to feed college women's sometimes unhealthy hunger for talking about marriage, dating and singleness). Men are not having these conversations (maybe at all, but I'll leave that to them to work on if they want to). And I think I might be the only one looking from the outside in, saying that this is saddening and bizarre. What do you think?