Writer
Reina A.E. Gattuso
Latest Content
Harvard Heard Women, Alright
For generations, Harvard feminists and activists have advocated for the sanctioning or disbanding of final clubs. Now that we have it, new debates on gender and inclusiveness have come to the fore.
Yes, I Said Yes, I Will, Yes
I used to feel all shivery-shuddery, all filled with wild, ragged hope when I walked through Harvard Yard. After a Lamont all-nighter, the pink mist just starting to clear. In the years since, that feeling was replaced by frustration, criticism, rage.
Sex and the Social Network
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.
Bite the Hand That Feeds You
It’s funny. The better I do here—the more confident I feel, the more my work is recognized—the scarier public dissent becomes. I worry I’ll lose what progress I have made, what honors I have accrued. I worry my home will reject me.
Gender Gap
Virginia Woolf sat in the library at Oxford imagining the books that Shakespeare’s sister didn’t publish. Sometimes when I walk deep in Widener’s belly, I feel the incredible pressure of the books that are not there.
So We Belong
Think now of your organization’s practices. Maybe they fit the definition of hazing. Maybe they don’t. Maybe you have some nagging doubts.
The First Rule of Final Club
Are we going to deal with our problems in the open like the deep thinkers, empathic listeners, slightly sloppy kissers, and resolute p-set buddies we are?
Do You Think I’m Pretty?
Sometimes, however, we forget this more structural critique and talk about consent as an individual process—not asking “What kinds of power are operating in this situation?” but only “Did you or did you not say yes?”
Four Dollar Wine Critic: Drunkentines / Sex Noises
I want to be known, and loved, and intellectually and sexually adored constantly by everybody. I want each party to be a glimmering climax where I utterly belong. Enter Valentine’s Day weekend: a playground of hungry hearts and lonely bodies.
Straight, Gay, or Lying
Some days it feels like a liability. To shuffle around gender pronouns. To scan a space mentally before I enter it. To wonder: Who will hate me? Who will say they don’t hate me but tell a joke that makes me feel like I should not exist in the world?
Okay, Cupid, Alright, Already
Ah, senior spring—when some of us solicit people we’d hardly ask to pass the salt in the d-hall for sex. Eyes swipe right and left; rigid social divides melt like snowflakes. The season is ushered in by First Chance Dance: a freshman tradition lost to us by act of hurricane, the dance—and with it, the freshman-fall-free-for-all-sex-hungry-nostalgia— has been resuscitated. Tickets cost $20, which means to get my money’s worth I need to consume the equivalent of 25 glasses of wine.
Comp Me, Baby, One More Time
The way we structure community here doesn’t just affect us in this place, at this moment. It affects the kinds of powerful, scarily driven, sleep-deprived, sometimes demagogic people we as an institution are putting out into the world.
Four Dollar Wine Critic: Thanksgiving!
If you were on I-95 anywhere between Providence, R.I. and Secaucus, N.J. last Wednesday evening, you knew there was a lot of traffic. What you didn’t know is that this traffic consisted entirely of my extended family, aka every second-to-fourth-generation Portuguese-Italian who can trace their roots to the Greater Newark Metropolitan Area. Including me.
