COLUMN: Object of my obsession

From Ron Lin's, "Intellectual Pornography," Fall '00 From Ron Lin's, "Intellectual Pornography," Fall '00It doesn't matter if a woman is bald, bow-legged, incontinent, disease-ridden and laced with explosives -- odds are that if she has breasts, she's received an unexpected e-mail, an unsolicited phone call or a photographic collage depicting a second-person perspective of her daily routine. I mean, so what if I "hang out" in the girls' bathrooms in the Quad? Are you telling me that I'm the only person in the whole wide world to ever confuse the varsity women's soccer team lockerroom with Rosengarten? Who hasn't wanted to scale the exterior walls of the Alpha Chi Omega sorority house and camp outside a window for a night? So what if I consider a hot Saturday night a pair of binoculars, an old sock and a camcorder? Penn makes it easy. Indeed, the University gives us much more than an education in the arts, business and engineering. The week we arrive, we're handed a facebook complete with the full names, photographs, schools and even hometowns of just about everyone in our class. That amounts to more than enough information to effectively coordinate a multi-pronged excuse to start a conversation with someone you've never met. But there's more. The Penn Web designers clearly had our curiosity in mind when they introduced the online directory to the student body. With powerful querying capabilities, one can search by first name, last name, department and e-mail. Better yet, you can refine the search and limit it to just students, avoiding pesky delays caused by irrelevant -- and often wed -- grad students and faculty. You don't even need full names -- first letters do just fine. Certainly, after getting the basics from the directory, one can easily maneuver through a general search through Penn Web for any matches with a subject's name. Wharton makes the return on such efforts considerably rewarding, as everyone who takes OPIM 100 conveniently has a homepage replete with resume, bio, invaluable inside jokes and maybe even a picture of a cute puppy. Girls love puppies. There is even a tacit school policy for including Social Security numbers at the top of every homework assignment, exam, lab report and generic form we ever submit to the University of Pennsylvania. The wealth of data that can be extracted from a mere blue book after an exam is phenomenal! Credit histories, birth records, driving records and even the prospects of opening a bank account under a subject's name. Sometimes, it's just too easy to get to know all this stuff without ever introducing yourself. If only getting Facilities Services to fix my sink was this easy. Because of fear of eye contact and the portending removal of the veil of anonymity, we resort to technological means for acquiring data about our curiosities. This of course means no more restraining orders and no more hooded men in black sweatpants "jogging" about wherever a woman goes. All you need is Telnet and the simple "finger" command to extract the location and time the object of your obsession last checked her e-mail. Then just ICQ her to ask what she's wearing. So, I conclude from all this that Penn presents its students with a proliferation of resources for learning astounding volumes of information about fellow students. Disturbingly, males appear to take advantage of these resources far more frequently than females. Perhaps this is just a demonstration of a male tendency to be more resourceful, and Penn is merely doing its best to churn out qualified young professionals capable of finding innovative solutions to information disparities -- in the end paving the way for a successful career in consulting. I find this fact -- or whatever you may choose to call it -- quite distressing. But the solution is clear. Women of this great University should seize upon the resources bestowed upon them and make a more concerted effort to turn the tables on their pursuers. Think women's lib. Think gender wage equality. In front of our monitors, those furtive explorations into another's life are more than one-sided, gratuitous forays into a world of obsession and girls' panties. It's a lesson in resourcefulness that would make any recruiter drool.