Well, smack my gob!

I am gobsmacked. (Which, by the way, could be your word too some day. Use it once, use it twice, use it three times, and it’s yours. Although it is intrinsically not one that you’ll use often, unless you’re exceptionally gobsmackable, so getting to the third, possessive usage might be difficult.)

The normal course of Plebe events is that a certain number of newbies shows up for orientation, and then that number minus 10% shows up again the following week, then by the first tournament we’re down to that number minus 50%. By the beginning of sophomore year, we’re down another 20% or so of the remainder. But that hasn’t happened. Almost every second-year Sailor is back, one way or the other, and few of them had ever dropped off in the first place. And almost all of the returning horde are already signed up for something, including but not limited to PF. Strange.

But that’s not the big news. At the orientation this year we were inundated with students of the female persuasion, which has never happened before. The sea of debating Sailor faces has never been exclusively male, but it hasn’t exactly been Hockaday either. But this year the first batch was entirely female with one exception, and last night, rather than entirely disappearing as I had feared, there were even more of them, and they were still mostly all female, including the new ones. This is a remarkable happenstance. As you well know (or should well know), there is nothing about the nature of the activity that is gender-tilted, but going into it it’s probably about 60/40 male/female overall. And over time it does continue to tilt up on the testosterone scale, as there does seem to be some gender bias at the varsity level, especially on the $ircuit, for a variety of reasons that have been discussed here and elsewhere (although, to be honest, I mostly ascribe it to the losers who go to college and can’t find anyone to hang out with so they show up at high school tournaments every weekend pushing their latest discovery in their philosophy classes as proof of their intellectual superiority instead of hanging out with college girls who won’t give them a tumble because, well, they’re not intellectually superior and they can’t tell a burro from a burrow, which comes out in their misogyny, but one way or the other you’ve heard that from me before too). Still, for the Sailors’ gene pool to shade over to so many XX chromosomes is a new one on me. Maybe it marks a whole new generation of us. Maybe the same thing is happening throughout Westchester. Maybe even Scarsdale is Xing up.

I love the whole idea of it.