Co-Ed Uniform

My heavy eyelids drooped as I tried unsuccessfully to beat back the pounding of my head that rang incongruously against the caffeine buzz from pounding at least three Red Bulls during last night’s all nighter. No one said college was going to be easy, but exam week was kicking my ass. I had tried to find the center of the venn diagram that was “easy” versus “lucrative” and settled on a Marketing BA. But I had neglected to mentally prepare for the horrors that were the general education classes. I just wanted to get through this final exam and get to summer—where I could unload and forget about everything I had gone through that semester.

The night before I had needed to complete a twelve page research paper on the history of specific brand trends. I’m not sure whether anything I wrote was coherent, but I turned in the paper on time, and that’s what mattered. Now I had one final session to get through, and thinking about the great feminist writers we studied all semester was the last thing I wanted to be doing right now.

I had taken this class because I thought it would be an easy A, and I thought my professor was out to get me. She was always telling me that my thoughts were reductive, my ideas were surface level, and asking me to dig deeper. I always just wanted to get out of there so I could get to my latest sorority fundraiser event. But despite the antagonistic professor, I had managed to eke out a 96 in the class so far—I guess it was an easy A after all.

Now as long as I didn’t fall asleep, I would be able to pass this class with an A and never have to think about any of this again.

I sat in my desk and watched the classmates file in. Everyone looked about in the same condition as me. Bleary-eyed, overpriced matching sweatsuits, and messy ponytails. Caffeine shakes and that sporadic blinking indicative of an Adderall bender. Glasses, no makeup. Ready to be done with it.

We were all seated and waiting for the exam to be passed out. Our professor stood up with an evil glint in her eye, as if she was excited to watch us stress through the next three hours and ultimately fail. Why did this have to be an in-class exam? What about feminist studies needed to be ingrained in our memory? Wouldn’t it have been more fitting to simply do a project or try to make the world a better place somehow? My sorority had raised thousands of dollars this year to increase literacy in rural areas. Wasn’t that better than memorizing all these useless names of old women who were irrelevant? It felt hypocritical to me.

Everyone had taken their seats when the classroom door opened one last time. I jerked my head to look, as you do when a disruption happens and joined everyone else in gasping.

It was Riley Stone, the loudest, most obnoxious feminist in class. I didn’t know anything about her except that she was constantly participating, constantly in class, constantly refuting things the professor said. Constantly undermining my own interpretations of the material. An annoyance, a feminist studies major. I always wondered to myself what her long term plan for her career was. What kind of job can you get as a “feminist scholar”? The only occupation I could possibly think of for her would be writing things like blog posts about “The Top Rom-Com Characters from the 90’s That Should Be Canceled.”

But today, on exam day of all days, for whatever reason, she had shown up to class completely naked. Her eyes blazed with defiant confidence, daring us to say anything. Boys in the class started snapping photos on their phones for social media, and Riley didn’t blink. If anything, she turned her body out just a little bit to face them, showing them that she was unafraid.

Our professor voiced the question we were all asking.

“Riley, what are you doing? Is this some kind of ploy for attention? You know I can’t allow you to take the test like this.”

“Why are we even taking this test?” Riley asked.

Our collective heads whipped back and forth between her and our instructor, trying to piece together what this battle was really about here.

“This school is a scam. It’s a fake, hypocritical institution, that doesn’t care about women’s rights.”

Our professor rubbed her hands over her face, barely interested in engaging. She sounded so bored, that one could be forgiven for thinking that something like this happened regularly in her class.

“And what does showing up to class naked hope to accomplish here.”

She crossed to the other side of the classroom and sat down at her desk. Her white skin under the bright fluorescent light of the classroom looked more clinical than sexy. I couldn’t look away from her. Something made me so deeply uncomfortable, but it wasn’t her body. It was the sounds of the sneers from the men I could hear across the room. I could feel their delighted disdain. I felt like I was having an out of body experience. Why was this happening? It clashed with the specific, academic, professional atmosphere I was here to experience. The secondhand embarrassment was physically painful.

But Riley didn’t even seem to be feeling firsthand embarrassment.

“Riley,” our professor said. “If you don’t leave right now, I am going to have to call security and write you up. Causing a disturbance of this level could get you expelled.”

Riley didn’t blink. She looked back at our teacher like “Fucking do it, see if I care.”

“Oh no,” Riley told her. “What am I going to do without a piece of paper telling me I sat through four years of pointless lectures?”

The phones were still pointed at her. I could see someone next to me was livestreaming the moment. Dozens and dozens of people were joining the stream. Her numbers were rising.

The marketing director in me clicked. She was doing this to make a statement. The cynical side of me guessed that she was trying to go viral in an attempt to jumpstart her career into a cutthroat world of viral online content.

The sympathetic side of me realized that she was doing whatever it took to feel seen and that somehow she had gotten through this journey in this school, slogging through this material, objectified by everyone around her, reduced to her physical form. And as a reaction, she was forcing us all to admit it. Baring her body so that the physical form was all she had.

I got it. Everything everyone had been saying in the dusty books. Everything our professor was trying to rant about in front of the class.

I wanted to stand next to her. I wanted to protect her and make her feel less alone.

I unbuttoned my top.