Men of Harambee moderates a conversation about the College’s hook up culture and dating scene
Wyatt Smith
Features Editor
“Right now we’re trying to establish College of Wooster’s booty call hours,” announced Peter Jeffy ’14. “When do the calls start?”
The audience, comfortably arranged on couches and folding chairs before him, shouted back:
“One!”
“Twelve!”
“After the U.G. closes!”
“Three!”
After some further debate, Mamoudou N’Diaye ’14, Jeffy’s fellow moderator, concluded “the hours of 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. — on any night — is booty call o’clock.”
This exchange was part of Chill vs. Chill, an open discussion of dating at the College, hosted by the fraternity Men of Harambee last Thursday.
The event covered a range of topics, from consent to the friend zone to the proper etiquette when you run into last night’s one-night stand in Lowry. Jeffy and N’Diaye weren’t there to lecture, rather they engaged their audience by asking for opinions on each subject, using a pre-planned outline to move the conversation along.
“A lot of people were confused on why it’s called Chill vs. Chill, like ‘isn’t that the same word? Isn’t that the same thing?’” said Jeffy, towards the beginning of the event. “Well no, let me explain it … If you text somebody late at night ‘hey do you want to chill?’ some people might think ‘oh yeah, we’ll watch a movie, talk about life, look at the stars.’ Someone else might have a different understanding, like, you know.”
Chill vs. Chill was held in the basement of Douglass Hall, with the newly renovated lounge’s furniture arranged into a semicircle around the two moderators. The attendees — overwhelmingly female except for the Men of Harambee — packed the space; late-comers had to drag over more chairs.
“We needed it to be a discussion,” N’Diaye later reported. “We decided that Douglass basement is more inclusive and more conducive to having people actually talk to you, having to talk.”
N’Diaye and Jeffy intentionally kept the mood light, starting the evening by sharing their own embarrassing dating stories. They then asked for volunteers to lead a game of “Never Have I Ever” to further loosen up the crowd, before proceeding with the planned discussions.
The moderators had no trouble eliciting audience participation. Quite the contrary. They often had to remind the attendees to speak one at a time. N’Diaye, per usual form, seemed to know the name of everyone in the room. Yet every couple of minutes there would be an observation or question that provoked such a response that N’Diaye and Jeffy could do nothing but wait for the laughter and side comments to die down.
Twice, particularly blunt comments made N’Diaye so uncomfortable he momentarily climbed out a nearby window.
The Men of Harambee organized this event to fill a perceived need on campus.
“It isn’t [the Men of Harambee’s] responsibility to talk about this. It’s the responsibility of any student group,” N’Diaye said. “It seemed that nobody was doing it and we wanted to have an open discussion with students that could be comfortable but also let people get to know that there are people on this campus who actively think about these things, and Men of Harambee was that group.”
The fraternity is looking to continue to hold similar discussions, either every year or every semester.
N’Diaye suggested that future events could be about more than just dating — he mentioned race relations, cultural sensitivity and how best to share an opinion as possible topics. However, N’Diaye emphasized that he will “want to maintain that light, fun tone that we kept.”
Jeffy and N’Diaye concluded the evening with holistic dating advice, such as “make them laugh,” “show interest” and “communicate.”
Audience members added “have fun” and “don’t go looking, let it come.”
Jeffy managed to get in the last word:
“Go chill with someone.”