gender

Tonight, retiring Barnard political theory professor Dennis Dalton will march in the anti-violence demonstration Take Back the Night for the last time after more than a decade of involvement, a farewell he discusses with teary eyes. But this year, he will participate in the march’s entire duration—something that he and all other men were not previously allowed to do.

V-Day isn’t just an issue of belittling the non-partnered among us. It symbolically institutionalizes traditional gender and sexual paradigms which often serve few of us and hurt many more of us. We would do ourselves and our national holiday of love a great, loving service by seeing through its limitations and reinventing it.