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(Young Dr. Lin at work in his private laboratory)
6. The Play Boy Survey
Sometime during my study at BereaCollege, the Play Boy magazine conducted a nationwide survey of all the universities. They were trying to identify and rank order those locations where campus romance was alive and doing well. They must have engaged reputable social scientists and statisticians and researchers in the design and implementation of this survey. What interested me (and my readers) most of all was that BereaCollege was ranked among the top in this particular survey.
I remembered reading the survey findings in the Play Boy magazine that I borrowed from Lin Chi Chung. He had a complete collection of the magazine since he arrived at Berea in 1970. He said it was required reading for his scientific study on sex and I had no reasons to doubt him. Anyway, he must have spent a lot of time studying this “scientific” publication because the few issues that I borrowed from him all showed signs of having been read many times over.
Well, getting back to the point I was trying to make – I believe there were good reasons why romance was flourishing (love was in the air) on Berea campus. Firstly, it was a small campus with only a thousand or so students. They ran into one another at a high frequency, and as I learnt from Physical Chemistry 101, the rate of chemical reaction was a direct function of the concentration of the reagents and the temperature of the solution. In layman’s terms, if you rub two things together long enough and hard enough, something will spark sooner or later! Secondly, the students at Berea came mostly from poor families. They couldn’t afford anything that would cost more than a couple of dollars, and romance cost very little at least at the beginning, so dating was one of the few campus activities that Berea students could afford. Thirdly, Berea is a liberal arts college. Some students might have come to Berea thinking (erroneously) that the term “liberal” actually extended to the area of sexual norm and they thought they were just doing what they believed they must do in order to fulfill the mission of BereaCollege!
Whatever the reasons, it was true that as one walked around campus, one would see many students pairing up, holding hands, kissing, embracing; and as you would expect things got hot and steamy in the student dormitories. In my first year living in the dormitory, I was absolutely shocked when I became aware of an extracurricular activity called “Panty Raids”. Simply put, usually on a Friday night, we (the male students) would go to one of the girl dormitories, rushed into the rooms of some of the students and hijacked their panties from their drawers and kept them as “war trophies”! In one of these raids, one of us (not me!) got an extraordinary surprise, a one of its kind panty. It was flaming red, with yellow stitching across the front: “Come on baby, light my fire!” He was so proud of it, he hanged it on his door for days until somebody stole it (not me!)
In case some of my readers found these “Panty Raids” vulgar, barbaric and disgusting, and an insult to the female race, I should point out that they were in fact a long-standing tradition at Berea. These raids were actually led by the resident assistant (RA). He would actually notify the RA of the girl dormitory in advance, and we would only go into rooms occupied by girls who had volunteered for the occasion. And we followed a very strict rule of conduct: we never touch any of the girls, unless of course they initiated contact, then we were allowed to defend ourselves. How did we know which rooms were “fair game”? Well, we looked for rooms where the doors were open and a red light bulb was kept on. I knew all about this because I must…I was an RA in my sophomore year and one of my duties was to organize and to lead these “Panty Raids”...a duty that I grudgingly discharged.
I’d like to think that perhaps my hard work, dedication and leadership in this particular area (even though I was as I said very reluctant) was a contributing factor to a chain of event that culminated in the high ranking that Berea college had received in the PB survey. When I was drafting my resume in applying for my first job (many years later), I thought of describing the role I played in these “Panty Raids” under “Major Accomplishments in Extracurricular Activities”, but I decided to leave it out. If I had put it in, I might have followed a very different career path...and became the managing director of Play Boy International for the Asia Pacific region!
- To be continued - |
