But it's not fair. I'd call justice to my defense. No matter. Defensive action meant being an enemy of the male cause. I didn't know enough then to have any confidence that that cause might be wrong.

For I still lacked the distance that could analyze. I was too busy learning how to cope with my new status--the status of "Beautiful Person," i.e. rich bitch. I found it pinned upon me like an epithet. Glamor, I was discovering, signalled at Harvard a licensed free-for-all for aggressive attention. Be it jealousy or secret sex dreams, contempt just depended on the particular form of the particular insecurity. Glamor got attention all right. Glamor meant a presence to be dealt with, to be talked about, gossiped about, pigeon-holed, and dismissed with a movie magazine's form of voyeurism. It was impossible to start anything with anybody off cleanly. I was (looked) an enemy to the radical politicos, someone fit only for preppies; I was a scatterbrain for intellectuals; I was fantasy material for the dreamers, a never-neverland for the shy, a threat to the sexually insecure. I started carrying around my good looks like a guilt stained Scarlet Letter.

This glamor business was fast festering as the royal ass pain of my life, and one with a built in Catch-22 at that. Harvard, you see, has an ongoing hate-love affair with glamor. It pretends to despise what fascinates it most, and presents an indifferent face to what it cannot leave alone.

After a while, I developed a strategy designed for disarmament. I would scout out each new face for insecurity blemishes. And I'd play up to that particualr lack of confidence in a seductive effort to waylay its defensive instinct. I would, in other words, convince them that I was unworthy of their attack, that I was harmless. At first this meant telling funny stories at the dinner table about the various fuck-ups in my private life: about being paralyzed with fear when a beautiful sailor tried to seduce me; about trying, bravely in the now or never spirit, to throw away my virginity one night, and waiting with eyes clenched and a rigid back, only to find that he was impotent; about having a Persona hallucination (where the faces merge upon the screen) with a best girl friend; about my family's bankruptcy. And fairly soon I heard that I was crazy. And I figured I was safe. Better crazy than cruel.

But this confidence of cool dismissal, then, was only surface deep. At night I used to play back scenes of the day like tapes, editing out the blunders for next time. Such safety, I was finding fast, was no cure-all for loneliness.

BY THIS TIME I was spending most of my time with the girl who lived beneath me. She was small and squat with frizzy hair and with a grim tightness at the corners of her mouth, like the look of middle age. She was Jewish, from New York City--compulsive about studies, socially insecure, socially ambitious. She wanted to marry a rich Eastern preppie, and she had come to Harvard looking for him. And when she didn't find him she wanted to transfer to Wellesley. I think, now, that part of her attraction to me grew out of her thinking that I could lead her to him. I never understood this delusion of hers, but I'd drag her to parties anyway. And she would torture herself beforehand into the Look, a wasp-haired caricature, binding her curls tightly in a turban around her head, in a towel steamed for straightening. And she would chatter, and the pink would glow in her face. But then she would stand mum and prudish all night and hate herself in a corner. Afterwards, I'd try to comfort her, doing a stint of complaining myself to cheer her up. She never believed though, that I could hurt, too. She wanted, you see, what she only imagined I had.

Anyway, we saw more and more of each other, growing closer as we grew more unhappy. One especially grey day I was down in her room unburdening myself as she was stretching her hair and wrapping it up again before the mirror. I was telling her, finally, what I'd always been too embarrassed to tell anybody: it had to do with my hating sexual objecthood--that all the male attention was too big a cross to bear, that it made me feel like an animal on the defensive, all the time. And suddenly she wheeled around with a screaming red-blotched face, ripping herself out of bathrobe and bra until she was white and naked before me. She pointed hysterically to her stomach and she was shrieking "Shut up! Shut up, will you? I've got hairs on my stomach! Look at them! Can't you see them? They're hairs there! Spiky black hairs. They're ugly. They're disgusting" she stuck her stomach into my face, and then she stiffened coldly and turned away as I heard a low "I--hate--them" wrenched out from somewhere deep inside her.

IT WASN'T LONG after that before I fell in love. But I found soon enough that he was gay. And so sophisticated. Our first time out, he told me about his Oedipal complex, about how everybody he knew was in psychoanalysis, about how he spent his freshman year staring hour after hour out the window. He talked with a double-tongued irony I didn't understand. Neither did I get the clipped idiom in his humor, nor the whimsy behind his taste. I didn't get much at all. But I did a lot of listening, night after night long to his storytelling.

Stories about a friend who could boast of having put fewer than 30 attended lectures under his belt in his entire Harvard career because he spent his daytime gambling at the race track, and his evenings getting laid. Stories about a friend who liked to liven up dead and dull cocktail parties by whipping his penis out of his unzipped trousers to dangle bare for all to see; he would then approach a professor and carry on in all dignity until the professor looked down and choken on his liquor, at which point he would unobtrusively take leave and approach someone else. Stories about another friend who walked into an administrator's office one fine fall day and politely asked the secretary if she'd like to fusk; when she said no and backed against the wall, he neatly stipped and chased her through the building.

And then there was the friend who had always wanted to rape someone and talked about it so incessantly that X decided, as a birthday present, to let him purge his fantasy. So X scoured around town until he found a girl who happily had always wanted to be raped. A weekend was assigned and the girl was assured of no more than that someone would show up sometime during the weekend to rape her. And sure enough, Saturday morning as she was puttering around her apartment, the birthdayboy rapist snuck in and hid himself in the broom closet. When she eventually came out to the kitchen to make her lunch, he leaped out of the closet and raped her. She was terrified, he was unstoppable, and both were quite pleased when it was finished. They parted cordially and never saw each other again.

In my innocence, I took most of these stories heavily to heart as the Harvard way of doing things. And I figured I should conform. But then I really didn't want to, and here I was stuck with a gay boyfriend who tucked me into bed at night with just a peck upon the cheek. This on top of all the orgy stories, and the phonecalls, and the confrontations with perversion, and the rumors, and the sex-starved suicidal best friend.

Well, to make a long story short, I started to get sick. I couldn't eat, and I lost 30 pounds, and eventually I looked like what I was, which was sexless. I couldn't sleep either, and I'd obliterate those ungodliest of hours with mindless roaming around the city. I guess that I was unconsciously looking for rape. I wasn't even any good at that.

All this strange behavior, so different from their Emily, disturbed my parents somewhat when they whisked me off to the Virgin Islands on a vacation. They suggested I see a doctor, a head doctor that is, and I was incredulous. Still naive and laughing, I chalked it up to "identity crisis." I returned to Cambridge full of good intentions which lasted all of a week. I ended up, finally, in a mental hospital in Chicago. There they put me through an intensive psychoanalysis and I discovered that I hated men.

But it was hardly, in this case, unnatural, now was it? And analysis was quite useful for a while, a little while. I could go on and tell you about its setbacks. After all, I've told you a lot of juicy stories now. And I've got a right, don't I, to put it to you straight, to dig in my message so it sticks. About this screwed-up system of sexual power, so intransigient, that is built into your head from birth. And about how I finally came round to this picture of things. About finding psychoanalysis to be only half a science; about its being dedicated to the health and happiness and long life everlasting of the bourgeois morality; about how it robs you of your beliefs in just about everything except the Method, i.e. the Word. But forget it. You don't want to hear it right now. Maybe you'll find out soon enough.

I'm a senior now, jaded and Harvard-weary. I suppose that I am a bit tougher, a bit less vulnerable than I was that freshman year. I live alone, but I'm not so lonely anymore. You could explain me away with ease: a rich girl radicalized, a neurotic psychoanalyzed, and then the political radical rejecting psychoanalytic individualism for feminist collectivism. You could type me and pigeon-hole me and attach your label to my name to discredit me by such convention. And I know you will. Go right ahead. But my experiences are as true as your explanations.

MY FRIENDS who have graduated tell me that coming to Harvard is nothing next to the shock of leaving it, a mere ripple next to a tidal wave of vibrations in your head. And I believe them. But my belief is something digested in the brain rather than felt, a shaky acceptance for lack of knowing. So I'll just tell you what I'm telling you: if you think you're lost now, baby, just wait. Because you are really in for it.