It's Not Polite to Stare

So as many people who read my blog are aware I attend an all girls undergraduate college. Being part of an all women's community has several advantages such as being able to go braless in my building when walking to the kitchen, not feeling pressured to look my best everyday in class and not worrying about how my peers will react to me if I voice my woman's perspective on any issues brought up. However this type of environment ,like any, has it's share of downsides. I'm not going to complain and focus on all of them today but I would like to talk about one that I have come to refer to as the "Rooster in the hen house" effect. Or simply girls freaking out whenever they see a boy somewhere they didn't expect to.
Now I call it the "rooster in the hen house effect" because of a TV show I watched in which a man dressed as a woman was found to be a man and all of the women started screaming "there's a rooster in the hen house" to alert everyone. The "rooster in the hen house" effect at Hollins doesn't involve screaming and running away but it involves casting glances at, staring and sometimes even whispering when a man is spotted in the dorms or cafeteria. Now I'm not saying that everyone does this because I have plenty of friends on campus who have never done this but I noticed it happening a lot more than usual the last time I brought my boyfriend to visit. Every time he's visited Hollins to see me he always says he feels like an alien because everybody watches him like he's going to explode. I never noticed it until the other night.
After we had been on a movie date to see the remake of Evil Dead I had to participate in the housing lottery and he came with me to have some extra time together after our date. Upon sitting down in the cafeteria he began asking me why the girls at the table across from us kept pointing at him and whispering. My reply was "You're hot, that's why," thinking it was only a one time incident. Then I noticed it kept happening and it wasn't as if my peers were trying to hide it, we could even hear what some of them were saying. Hollins has, to it's benefit, an unusually high acceptance of various peoples so I was truly shocked when this was happening. They pointed and whispered and stared at my boyfriend like he had five heads making him very uncomfortable.
While I have never experienced the problem this badly before I would like to inform everyone that it is indeed very rude to stare. It makes it even worse when the person already feels like a foreign entity. While again, a lot of women at Hollins do not do this I would like to make it known that when a man visits campus he shouldn't be made to feel like an outsider. He shouldn't have to worry about being stared at or talked about just because he's the only man in the room. On that note, I would also like to thank the women around us who greeted him and said hello and actually acted as if they had some sense. I know they're aren't a lot of men running around campus but I hope in the future that my peers act a little bit more mature about it next time.