Printer-friendly versionA curious convenience of going to an Ivy League school is how easy it is to evaluate social issues by walking into the gym. For example, go to the first floor of Pottruck and hop on a treadmill (or more fashionably, an elliptical) - really at any time of any day - and you will find yourself sitting on sociological pay dirt: droves upon droves of Penn students, some of them possibly underweight, running themselves into a state of exhaustion.
You don't have to pay the cost of admission to see the show: Penn has been nice enough to window the place entirely, giving even the casual passerby a glimpse into the strangeness of this cardio-manic subculture.
What, then, is the culture from which this not-quite-ostensibly problematic subculture stems? According to Sonia Pascal, the head of Penn 4 Choice, these issues of body image are rooted in "an overall attitude of uber-competitiveness"- an attitude that extends throughout the school.
"It is clear that our work-work-work approach in the classroom has resulted in a correspondingly thin-thin-thin attitude toward physical appearance," she says. "An environment has been created in which having a 'perfect body' is seen as a near prerequisite to working out [on the first floor of the gym]; 'working out' has effectively become synonymous with 'putting oneself on display.'"
Not everyone seems to believe that this "first floor syndrome" actually exists - or at least not with such a negative connotation. Gloria Gay, Associate Director of the Penn Women's Center, sees the "popularity of working out" on campus as nothing more than healthy stress relief.
"Across the board," she says, "men tend to be more physically active than women. We commonly understand and accept that this activity is their way of dealing with stress." She then points out that "women have historically been more inclined to talk through their troubles," which, while certainly useful, "leaves their stress-relieving mechanisms somewhat unbalanced." In her opinion, "an increase in working out" is the way in which many girls "balance out this solution."
Yet while Gay believes that the "scene" of Pottruck's first floor is not quite the overt indicator of the unhealthy or the dangerously-competitive that some make it out to be, she agrees that this competitiveness "absolutely does reveal itself in other channels of the University."
What might some of these other channels be? Pascal places part of the blame on the culture of Penn itself. She describes "a lot of empty rhetoric regarding the virtues of community" at the school, which she further describes as being "a very decentralized institution" where "the idea of 'caring about your fellow student' has become a fractured one." Pascal also considers the presence of the "Penn curve" to be an influential factor in the shaping of students' collegiate psyches, creating a "pressure cooker" of comparative thinking in which everyone's lens becomes a mirror, and mirror, a lens.
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I have been waiting for someone to step up and point something like this out. Our daily concerns as individual students are very much related to the environment of our university and the overall student body. I would like to point out, however, that resources on campus are fairly visible -- from big signs on locust walk, to massages and candy in houston hall, to emails about the RAP Line. It is the students decision whether or not to they choose to seek help. Intellectualizing their problems or deeming them "stupid" is really their problem, not the university's. Still, encouraging a dialogue here at Penn about stress-management and quality of life, especially accepting imperfection and HAVING FUN is very important.
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