Dormmates, Bedmates?

Coed dormitories have become so numerous over the past five years that more than half the nation's resident college students now live in them. Do men and women who eat, study and brush their teeth together also tend to go to bed together? How does living in close proximity (which may range from neighboring rooms to adjacent wings) affect the way they feel about each other? With a survey of a small sampling of 96 Radcliffe girls, Psychiatrist Elizabeth Aub Reid gives some answers in the current American Journal of Psychiatry.

Comparing a group of women interviewed before their dormitories were open to males with a matched group who had been living on the same floor with men for several years, Reid found little to worry about in the new pattern of housing. A few more of the women rooming in the coed dorms were having long-term love affairs than those in all-female dorms, but casual sex was no more common. Women students discovered that they can develop enduring platonic friendships with men and that they are far less self-conscious around them.

Good Company. The benefits even extend to relationships with other women. Students interviewed in the early group complained that women were "competitive and irritable" around other females. Constantly preoccupied with men, they didn't bother to be good company with each other. Having men around, notes the study, seems to encourage greater friendship and respect between women.

The new dorms also encourage women to put aside sexual stereotypes. Students often used to discuss various activities as "masculine" or "feminine." Said one: "I think I'll go into the foreign service. It's less masculine than politics. Competition, backbiting in politics tend to make you less feminine." In the coed dorm, such attitudes are challenged as "sexist" and "untrue." Some of these changes stem from women's lib, Reid notes, yet she is convinced from the tenor of her interviews that the coed dorm life-style was even more influential.

Though Reid did not poll the opinions of Harvard men, male students across the nation seem to react positively to coed housing, according to surveys conducted on seven campuses by Psychologist Joseph Katz of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Like Reid, Katz found a small increase in sexual activity by students living in coed dorms as well as a "greater depth of relationships that are nonsexual."

Surprisingly, he found that more women are active sexually than men—at least in the confines of their new dormitories. At one Eastern school, for example, 47% of the women had sex in the dorms but only 42% of the men did so. Both sexes, however, prefer to bring in partners from outside. This, says one psychologist involved in setting up coed dorms at Harvard, is easily explainable. Says Jerome Kagan: "Romance tends to flourish when there is some mystery between partners, and sharing bathrooms loses a bit of the mystery."