There’s been some mischief afoot: Someone, this week, posted an (apparently somewhat flawed) list of dudes on this campus in final clubs. You might have seen it by now. Besides the list, an incredibly robust discussion about gender, power, social space—and, yes, the act of posting the lists themselves—has sprung up on the site.

We can debate all day whether or not the site itself was an “appropriate” gesture. But there’s a more important underlying question here: How is this discussion about social space, about who hosts and has access to parties, who is a host and who is a guest in clubs, also a discussion about social mobility? About the distribution of opportunity on campus?

How do the networks that exist here—the networks we are part of before we even come in; the networks that exist far after our time here is up—affect, not only how we get down, but how we get ahead?

Lots of us are socially mobile at Harvard - we enter exclusive spaces with no previous connection, from backgrounds radically different than the norms of this place. And that’s amazing.

But a lot of us are not.

That’s a big problem. But it’s also a big opportunity. If our social networks can keep us back, exclude us, propel us forward, or concentrate power in the hands of the few, they can also change the world.

Intimacy, and its connections the networks that distribute resources, is power. And through restructuring the way we do intimacy, we can create better institutions here and elsewhere.

Justice in our social life is social justice.

We can be kind and respectful to our sexual partners, knowing that sex, love, and intimacy are things that can empower us or hold us back.

We can talk to our friends and peers about the discomfort we might feel about social structures on campus.

If we have access to exclusive social spaces, we can restructure those spaces from the inside to be more inclusive.

I think a lot, a month away from graduation, about that night freshman year. Me perching nervously in my corduroy pencil skirt, a battered copy of Ulysses peeking out of my brown leather bag, neck splotched with hickies, hands splotched with ink.

I have learned and grown a lot since then. I have met people I never thought I would meet, become a person I never thought I could be, loved people both within exclusive spaces and without. I’ve done well.

But we can do better. Not only for those of us at Harvard struggling to be socially mobile in a space whose norms and institutions seem calculated to keep us down, but for the broader society that our social networks, through their connection to professional power, disproportionately affect.

After all, what is Harvard—what is any powerful institution—but an extended network of friends?

 

Reina A.E. Gattuso ‘15, an FM editor, is a joint literature and studies of women, gender, and sexuality concentrator in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.