Co-Ed Dorm Rooms?!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Footprints04
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Haha, it’s interesting to observe the difference in viewpoints on this subject.

I don’t personally view it as a big deal - at most colleges now it’s not uncommon to have friends of the opposite sex over to hang out/spend the night, and it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything sexual going on… My roommate and I often have friends (male and female) over and whether it’s because we’ve been up studying, watching tv, playing cards, etc. it gets late and people just fall asleep. shrug

I also don’t think this is something that a college would ever “force” on anyone - just as you can state your preferences for a roommate who shares your taste in music, your sleep habits, major, or religion, there’s no reason for a college to force people of the opposite sex to room together if they don’t want to.

Besides, most dorm buildings are co-ed now - they’re either separated by floor or hallway - some are even every other room.
 
I don’t see it as a big deal either. I would never do it as I can’t envision myself sleeping in the same room with anyone I know from college.

Haha not that they would sleep anyways. They’d be drinking all night.
 
And the countdown begins until “roommate rape” is statistically tracked category. I swear the world is going to end in the next ten years.
 
nobeerinheaven said:
And the countdown begins until “roommate rape” is statistically tracked category. I swear the world is going to end in the next ten years.
Click to expand...
And because dorm rooms aren’t traditionally co-ed, this means roommate rape has never happened before? Not that this would make the instance of heterosexual rape within a shared living space even remotely acceptable, but the beginning of this trend is not going to be the “beginning” of sexual assault within the dorm.

Most of the time, a victim knows their rapist, either through acquaintance or friendship. Being a roommate is not a requirement.
 
Colleges cannot force co-ed room assignments on anyway. An option must be checked by the applicant about whether-or-not co-ed roommates are acceptable.

Don’t get me started on co-ed dorm bathrooms ewwwwwwwww
 
I think it’s kind of sketchy too. I lived in a co-ed floor and I loved it - and nothing shady went on. We were separated by halls, but I think it’s really good for girls and guys to be in close proximity and learn how to interact together, etc. But I still would not want to live with a boy unless he were my husband 😉

I think by ‘roommate rape’ she simply meant that the person who rapes you is actually your roommate; not that people haven’t already been raped in their dorms.
 
I think the original poster has a point. I mean years ago, we had strict male only female only dorms and then that changed sadly over the past 20 years from what I can tell even at Catholic Colleges (I guess you cannot expect them to be Catholic these days).

This basically is just letting one thing after the other and dulling our senses to what is right. Young people already have enough pressure to seek out sex (though the people who will do it will do it regardless of whether its a roomate that they live with or not). Anyways, this is rather unacceptable and a general promotion of placing oneself in an occasion of sin. Again, the more academic institutions promote these arrangements in an institutionalized way, the more young people accept these arrangements and the more they are lead astray… even good Catholics who wish to practice their faith. With the acceptance of LGBT groups on college campuses, it is no wonder more catholic college kids see no problem with homosexual relationships (I don’t have data, but I bet that is the case).

So yeah, accept this, if you like slippery slopes because the slide is now pretty steep and people fall pretty fast. The people who sought co-ed dorms may never imagined this situation as ever happening. I do not know what worse situation they could do at a college to promote even worse situations (oh wait, have “College Hook-up Night”… please no college student say this is an actual event… blah!).

Peace,
LittleOne1
 
I don’t want to be pointing fingers at anyone, but some of the responses just show how desensitized people have become to modern society. Seriously, having guys spend the night in your dorm room is scandalous, which is sinful. You might know that it was completely innocent and absolutely nothing happened, but someone down the hall might not, and they might think “Oh wow, she’s that Catholic girl and she has guys spend the night,” and this can lead others into sin. Scandal can be mortally sinful if you lead others to sin mortally. So this is not a laughing matter.

Co-ed dorms don’t surprise me at all, once you start passing boundaries you just keep pushing past new ones.
 
Besides the moral issue here… what girl would want to live with some random guy? They’re messy! I’ve seen guys’ dorm rooms and they aren’t pretty! I’d have to really love one to want to put up with that. 😛
 
I asked one of my daughters what she thought. Her first reaction was to laugh and say probably it would end up all the gay guys living with girls, cuz they’re best friends anyway.
 
Jeanne_dArc said:
I don’t want to be pointing fingers at anyone, but some of the responses just show how desensitized people have become to modern society. Seriously, having guys spend the night in your dorm room is scandalous, which is sinful. You might know that it was completely innocent and absolutely nothing happened, but someone down the hall might not, and they might think “Oh wow, she’s that Catholic girl and she has guys spend the night,” and this can lead others into sin. Scandal can be mortally sinful if you lead others to sin mortally. So this is not a laughing matter.

Co-ed dorms don’t surprise me at all, once you start passing boundaries you just keep pushing past new ones.
Click to expand...
Just to make things clear - I’m not Catholic, so perhaps this explains our difference in views on the subject. I don’t know if there is an actual teaching on this anyway, but it seems like God wouldn’t be very pleased with us making moral decisions based on what other people “might think”, so the real issue we’re discussing here seems to be putting oneself into a position of temptation.

So let’s talk about temptation. If you really think having friends (I say this generally because we have friends of both sexes over) over to hang out (which may or may not lead to someone falling asleep over their piles of homework on your floor) leads to temptation, I’d be curious to hear your justification for it. I was talking to a friend of mine about this topic last night, and we got to talking about living situations at each of our schools. Next year I’m living in an apartment with four guys and one other girl. The girl and I are rooming together (my school doesn’t do co-ed rooms), but the fact remains that we’re all still in a small living space together. I’m in no way, shape, or form interested in any of these guys, so it’s not a “big deal”. However, I can say if I were attracted to any of them, I would probably rethink my decision to live there.

Anyhow, as someone already pointed out, it’s not as if a school can force this on anyone - this type of living situation is an individual choice, so if it seems scandalous or immoral to someone, they have no obligation to deal with it.

I also think people are too quick to label any kind of social change as becoming “desensitized”. Let’s remember that use of this word refers to overexposure to scenes of violence, cruelty, and suffering. Last time I checked, LGBT groups don’t endorse any of those things, and neither are college campuses by expanding living situations to involve co-ed roommates.
 
First off, I think it is really, really sad that people are assuming that ‘sexual tension’ must somehow be a given just because two people of the opposite sex are spending time in a room together. We’re not sexual animals! We can co-exist with people of the opposite gender without beginning to sexually desire them! :banghead:

That being said, I don’t think it’s appropriate. Same building, fine. Same room and same bathroom? I don’t think so. People need privacy. The people who are living together seem to have that sort of relationship, a brother-sister thing. Brothers and sisters generally don’t share rooms past a certain age, so why should this be different? I could only see co-ed bathrooms if it was a single-person bathroom, not the sort with stalls. You go in, lock the door, no one else traipses by. I dunno, that seems like common sense to me. 🤷
 
I hope I don’t ever have to live in a world where sharing public restrooms with women is a reality. Men are so much more clean than women.
 
My father is a custodian in a public school, and he says that the women’s rooms have consistently been less clean than the men’s rooms ever since he started working there 23 years ago. They also tend to smell worse.
 
I will say my daughter told me she’d rather be stuck in a dorm room with a gay guy than with a gay girl. (Where I live, that’s a big issue… this is a gay-friendly town.) I can see in that respect a non-co-ed dorm wouldn’t be comfortable for the people in them. I can’t imagine any experimentation in co-ed rooms would go well after the first few semesters. As I told my daughters: Imagine the people rooming with their boyfriend or girlfriend and they break up. What a mess! You’re trying to study and you’re living on campus stuck in a 10 x 12 foot room with someone you don’t like anymore. It would be like a marriage breaking up. Who gets custody of the beanbag chair?

Bad idea all around. The problem is, most campuses have housing shortages and so you can’t even specify female-only dorms or female-only floors because you’re lucky to get housing period.

Another problem is, we never hear the phrase “near occasion of sin” in the pulpits anymore, so the kids roll their eyes when you try to explain why it’s a bad idea.

I’m not looking forward to sending my oldest to live in co-ed dorms. But familiarity does breed contempt. Maybe watching college boys acting stupid will demystify the whole gender for her, since she doesn’t have brothers.
 
I’d honestly rather live with a gay guy than a lesbian too, but I would not consent to living with a guy unless he were my husband. To me, it’s not the whole sexual tension thing (I love all my guy friends to death and trust them, especially since they’re pretty protective of me in that regard) but a modesty issue. They don’t need to see my dirty lingerie or anything relating to my period. They don’t need to see me in my PJ’s and I wouldn’t want to see their underwear either. I will be living in a co-ed dorm next year, but I don’t mind so much because my roommate is a girl and there’s not a lot of men on this campus to begin with (we like to joke about how this is NOT the place to get your MRS, hahahaha). I don’t see that as being much of a problem as living with someone of the opposite gender. One of my best friends is a guy, I love him to death, but I would NOT be roommates with him, especially as we’re both Catholic and people could get the wrong idea.
 
I very much agree with what sanctamaria said about modesty. With guy friends, sure you certainly don’t always (if ever) deal with any type of feelings toward them…but yes, there is a modesty issue with being the opposite sex.
 
I consider the whole dorm culture to be a strange extended childhood anyway. Most students don’t live on campus anymore, let alone in dorms. At least that’s the way it is around here, and has been for a very long time. As long as I can remember it has been quite common to share living spacc with whomever you can regardless of sex, age or anything but trustworthiness – and even getting to turn down a situation because you can’t trust someone is often a luxury. People work out ways of dealing with privacy issues and any issues of uncertainty about who is sexually involved. Learning these ways was a part of my childhood and adolescence. I was 22 when I first met someone who assumed anything just because a man and woman lived together. My reaction was that he was a dangerous person with a wild imagination. Between widespread poverty, crowding and lots of gays, asexuals, bisexuals, and other odd categories, we all knew that what sex people are and whose underwear that is on the towel rack don’t necessarily correlate anyway, and besides you can’t pick and choose where you live.
All this to say roommate rape was rare. When people are accountable for how they treat roomies, that cold hard pavement will teach them to behave.
It also put a lot of incentive into getting a good enough job to afford your own apartment and keep it!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top