To kick off the fall semester, the MIT student fashion magazine “Infinite” (a piece of work in itself) hosted a feminist “Performative Male” contest to make fun of men trying to get laid.

“The performative male is professing his commitment to feminism, sporting a sustainable tote bag, and listening to Clairo, Mitski, and Laufey, among other things. He doesn’t really care about the gender pay gap; it’s all for show. And women.”

We will leave aside the suicidal insanity of dating women under the same HR/Title IX jurisdiction, handing them the power to destroy you at any time in the future. Or why feminists even need men for sex when the have each other. Instead, let’s harken back to a simpler time when MIT coeds Roxanne Ritchie ‘79 and Susan Gilbert ‘78 screwed their brains out then published “A Consumer Guide to MIT Men.”

The article was a sex survey of 36 men the two claimed to have had sex with, and the men were rated according to their performance. They named names and shared intimate details, serving up both high praise and scornful critiques.

It made national news. While the MIT museum seems to have purged its archives of the story, the Harvard Crimson did a retrospective a few years ago well worth reading.

The Beaver was in grad school at the time and remembers it well. Five-star performers started handing out cards with capsule reviews and their phone numbers, seeking additional customers. Mortified losers had no recourse but to suck it up.

The rest of us got a good laugh, wondering who was so desperate as to sleep with morbidly obese Roxanne Ritchie. But hey, it was MIT in the 1970s when there were few coeds as hot as the gal who won the Performative Male contest and the Lecture Series Committee still showed XXX porn films in Kresge Auditorium every registration day trying to slake the lust of all the lonely nerds.

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