Kate Mooney’s insistence (in her “Just Broads” column, 9/28) on the importance of “finding a man” left me unsettled. Her word choice reveals the disproportionate weight she puts on this search: It takes place in a “version of the state of nature” where females compete with one another until, disappointed and alone, they “drown.” Mooney first implies that females, stripped of their humanity, revert to a pre-societal stage in their quest for dick, as she calls it. Further, the failure to find a man apparently kills these beast-like women.

Before death, though, the females are forbidden another component of their humanity, namely the ability to form friendships. The only way Mooney imagines having bonded with certain females is through the men they pursued “in common,” as if they have nothing else of worth to share with another person.

Deciding to enter into this state of competition is, of course, a personal decision. And in no way do I discourage hot, wild sex among Oberlin’s feral students – when that sex is on equal terms. But Mooney takes a particularly disturbing perspective on the matter. She mourns the days when senior guys “did younger girls and then disposed of them.” The “quintessential senior male” (another unfortunate victim of Mooney’s worldview) assumes a position of authority that negates his partner’s declaration of her will to consent or refuse because it casts her as, well, refuse. The combination of the direness of the search and the questionable willpower one participant retains in the search is what unsettles me.

All this taken together, Mooney’s female consists of two main vacancies: the lungs awaiting suffocation after a failed sexual quest, and a vagina left empty by a “dearth of dick,” this forlorn organ apparently taking up so much negative space that it edges out the human ability to form emotional connections and to exercise one’s will.

I’m sorry that Mooney has not had the luck of developing emotionally fulfilling relationships, sexual or not, with the many multidimensional students – male, female or transgender – on this campus. Before she graduates, perhaps she should think about Oberlin’s ability to offer her this opportunity instead of about how she’s grown above the campus and its students.