Debaucherous Dorm Design Plasters Campus Walls The Truth Comes Out When You Step Inside Popular Trends in Student Decoration

Author: Abbie Beane

We've got sex, we've got beer, and we've got all species of hard liquor, but don't worry Mom and Dad, we also appreciate French impressionism and contour maps. So I guess that means there's still hope for us. This weekend I visited 86 dorm rooms inhabited by students of both sexes and various majors, ages and ethnic backgrounds. Roaming around Ross, parading through Pearsons, bopping through Battell, combing the rooms of Coffrin, slinking through Stewart - actually it would suffice to say that I hit them all.

And in my quest to uncover the starkest differences between how humanities majors go about interior design (as far as you can really practice "interior design" in a shoebox) as compared to science majors and what males find most "aesthetically pleasing" as compared to females, I also uncovered a few strange fetishes, a lot of even stranger odors and one three-foot tall bone called a "giraffe femur."

It's hardly necessary to mention that everyone decorates with a bit of sticky laundry and a lot of dirty dining hall dishes. What you might not guess is that there isn't a vast difference between rooms of select age groups or between majors. Seniors' rooms aren't really any more distinguished or classy than those of first-years. I still have all the same tacky crap that I had freshman year, too. In fact, the only "upgrading" I've done is obtaining more cheap, useless curios and a Wyoming flag.

The distinction only begins to surface when you've visited enough male and female suites to say, "Okay, why am I not surprised?"



Women



It seems not a lot has changed since my mom was a teenager. Approxiamately 36 percent of the female rooms I inspected had wedged old Led Zeppelin right in between Monet and Robert Doisneau. I won't attempt to over-analyze the "whys" of this phenomenon, but it seems as if it might give us chicks an edge. We're saying, "Hey, when it comes to our core, we're pure intellectualism and artistic beauty, but we'd go out for a wild night on the town with Led, too - oh, and have you seen my fishnets?" Which is not to discount that smaller percentage of females with landscape shots and topographic maps, Cubs' posters and hockey paraphernalia - or the ones who look like they live with Led by day and possibly, once in a great while, stop to appreciate art on the way to the beer pong exhibit (like me).

The other piece that approxiamately 24 percent of girls boast is the poster of Rockefeller Center, "Eating above Manhattan." This may only be because it's a regular at the poster fair, though I'd rather think that it's because even overly choosy college girls wouldn't banish a good, hardy construction man from their circle of dating possibilities.

On the contrary, seems like they'd never even dream of discounting the French. If you took every poster with a French connection that I saw this weekend, within the female sector, and divided them up evenly amongst the 43 girls that I visited, each would walk away with a total of approxiamately two and a half French posters. The two most popular were Matisse and Van Gogh. In fact, nearly 67 percent of girls claim at least one Van Gogh - I bet those guys wish they were college boys again.



Men



This is the part where I talk about how surprisingly exciting I found the male dorm rooms to be, despite the fact that they were so unsurprising. As you all probably figured, this is the point where I talk about sex and alcohol. In fact, out of 43 rooms, I only saw two female rooms with anything mildly sexually suggestive or alcoholically oriented. As for male dorm rooms and male suites in particular, the numbers speak for themselves: Each male suite inspected, out of 15, had an average of nine liquor and beer decorations spread among the hall, the sitting room and the bathroom and an average of six sexually suggestive posters - and we're not talking "mildly" suggestive either, folks. Five had more than 23 decorations that fell into this racy category, meshing the two types, sex and alcohol, together. This does not even include marijuana art - the numbers would be much higher.

I suppose the most amusing part about all of this was the enthusiasm these men expressed in helping to point out all of their pornography and booze related "art." Every time I thought I had an accurate count of the number of "skin posters" and neon beer signs, I turned a corner, looked behind a door or tipped my head up toward the ceiling and found just one more. They were crawling about everywhere, just waiting and ready to spring. Mixing these numbers with the dangerous levels of zeal I encountered, I would say that the male message is very clear: "We're here, we like beer and if you're female please come in - oh, and did we forget to mention our intoxicating levels of masculinity?"

Surprisingly, however, there was no significant difference in the number of sports related decorations between males and females. The most popular sport seems to be skiing, of course, of which just over 58 percent of these posters belong to the men and the other 42 percent to the women.

The way men express that they think about more than just sex and booze is through maps, which if added up and divided amongst all of the males visited, would come out to approximately three maps per male student.



As a Whole



There are things, however, that we all share, such as tapestries, mood lighting and pride in where we go to school. The Middlebury poster with the munching cows was the most popular, seen in 28 out of the 86 rooms, and each student has an average of approximately 1.8 tapestries. I'd guess this tapestry fetish stems from the fact that they're large and will cover the walls without much effort - and then of course they also make us look funky, even if we're boring and uncreative.

Finally, band and movie posters are fairly gender neutral, as well. About 77 percent of you have either one or the other and the most common for both groups is a Beatles decoration, in some form or another. In fact, nearly 21 percent of rooms visited had an Abbey Road or a Yellow Submarine poster.

The other two on the top three list? The Grateful Dead and Phish. Movies were a little less consistent in winning student hearts.