A new “woke” college dorm
I have discussed at length the design of the traditional college dorm, with students housed two-to-a room and a shared bath with a row of stalls, showers and wash basins in a common area down the hall. I have long lamented the fact that in such an arrangement, it was difficult for a guy to find any private space in order to engage in any sort of masturbation activity, and how this might affect a guy’s outlook, happiness and performance in college. I also have explained that in my last two years as an undergraduate I managed to snag a single room in a suite containing a shared bath and two doubles and this turned out to be an ideal setup for, well, you know.
Let me also add that back then, colleges and universities thought they had a role in playing parent when the parents were not there (locus parentis), as in preventing young single men and women from having sex. So dorms were separate by gender, and in separate buildings. Gays were simply assumed not to exist. So two gay guys or two gay women could request each other as roommates and no one in university housing would be the wiser. Though, straight guys getting an assigned roommate often worried about what the sexual orientation of the roommate might be and this could be all over the place. Worse, what was the assigned roommate going to learn about my masturbation routine given the close quarters?
Interestingly, university housing in recent years has discovered that young men (and women) much prefer single to double rooms, and most new dorms are designed as suites containing baths shared by a common space. Everyone wants some privacy, male or female. Dorms used to be single-sex places and there were only 2 defined sexes. Anything else simply did not exist, according to university housing.
Gradually, the newly-built dorms became towers with men and women residing on separate floors within the same building. This has happened to the 9-story dorm I lived in my cherished single room as an undergraduate. the individual floors became single sex “houses” like in Harry Potter, where men and women could reside on the same floor but in different areas though maybe not with names.
The 97-year old Charlie Munger is the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and has money—lots of it. He has been making donations to colleges that are somehow connected to him, one of them being the University of California Santa Barbara. This is a place with beautiful ocean vistas and extremely expensive land, plus lots and lots of undergrads who need affordable housing--affordable as in a dorm room.
Munger donated to the school money to build new dormitories, the first being an eleven-story undergraduate dorm. Read all about the details here. Munger is also an architect as a hobby,
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/29/busin...all/index.html
The first 11-story building will house 4500 students, and according to the article, Each residential floor would have eight "houses," each holding 63 students. There are eight suites in each house, and every suite has eight single-occupancy beds. The single rooms are tiny, windowless and cell like. The controversy is centered on the lack of windows. The 8 students share two baths just off the common area which appears to contain a long conference-like table and chairs. The private cells appear to be about 7 ft x 12 ft. and each contains a “faux” window that is really just a digital panel.
California generally likes to claim to be the wokest place in the nation, with the colleges and universities being the wokest of the woke. In my undergraduate days these were the hippies, but no more. Hippies believed that everyone was entitled tpo “do their own thing”. But today wokeness focuses on gender, sexual orientation and race. And we have students divided into houses with 8 students each.
Let me suggest, for example, that 8 gay guys decide it would be fun to hang with just other gay guys, so eight gay guys decide they want to room in a single house. Is that permitted? Same for gay women? Can a university somehow place restrictions on gay sexual behavior as it traditionally has done in attempts to keep men and women out of each other’s dorms in an effort to stop sexual activities like a parent might attempt to do.
Or, what about the straight guy who brings his girlfriend into his single dorm room for sex. Is that allowed? Or, vice versa. What are the other male house members going to think if there are girlfriends wandering around the house on a regular basis in the common area?
But issues become more still more complicated. Suppose we have 8 trans students. Some are males who transitioned to female. Others are females who became male? Can they all live in a single house or should they be separated based on their current not birth gender? And can they identify their house as trans?
And the bisexuals? Can 8 bisexuals all share a common house? If so can it be labeled as such?
And the non-binary, as in students who do not identify as male or female. Is there a separate house for non-binaries?
And race? Are 8 African Americans allowed to be in the same house? 8 Latinos? 8 Asians? 8 Caucasians? Or is there some weird university rule requiring each house to be racially diverse? What happens if 8 students all want to room together by choice? Is it a responsibility of the university to force racial diversity in each 8-student house?
UC Santa Barbara housing faces some interesting questions, questions more complicated than whether or not a guy can find a private space in which to masturbate. I keep reading that only 5 to 10 percent of adult males self-identify as gay, and I presume the largest share of these engage in some form of partner sex that involves the interchange of bodily fluids. But then I also read that a much larger percentage of adult males have engaged in one or more episodes involving same sex activity, maybe 30 or 40 percent. For the most part I presume this activity is mutual masturbation in one form or another.
I realize that my readers here are generally big fans of engaging in masturbation while wearing a snug-fitting swim brief, and that such an activity might be even more arousing when another guy is doing the same thing as each of you watch each other get hard. There are a lot of guys out there where mutual masturbation becomes the only same-sex activity—guys who otherwise ultimately end up living as a straight married guy. To me the interesting part about all of this is what happens when a guys are suddenly in a house with 8 private rooms, guys that may not self-identify as gay, but still take advantage of a great opportunity to engage in mutual masturbation within such a setup.