Confronting a Culture of Conformity

Damian Kanner-Betitti FLAT HAT OPINIONS ASSOC.

GRAPHIC BY MONICA BAGNOLI / THE FLAT HAT

To quote Sophia Petrillo from “The Golden Girls,” “Picture it.” While I’m not going to start telling a story about Sicily, I will tell a story about breaks — spring break to be exact. The purpose of this article is not for me to whine, although that will definitely be a portion of it.

During spring break a couple of weeks ago, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing: I was taking a break. I was in my room at home after getting back from a five day trip in Savannah, Ga. It was about 11:00 p.m. on the Saturday before the restart of classes, and my family was planning to leave my house at 5:00 a.m. the next day so that we could get back in time for my sister’s work shift. This is when I got a ping from my Outlook email. It was a notification from Blackboard reminding me of my 800 word precís, take-home quiz and paper that were all due the week directly following spring break.

It’s not about the difficulty of the assignments. Instead, it’s the principle of them even being assigned that I object to. By its name, spring break should actually involve a break. If I had done all of my assignments that were due the first few days I got back to the best of my ability, I would have had about three days of a break, which isn’t even enough time for me to correct my sleep schedule, much less recover from my midterms.

This brings up two questions that need to be answered: Is spring break just not long enough? Or are professors being unrealistic in their expectations?

To the first question: I wouldn’t necessarily mind having spring break be two weeks long. Anytime that I can sleep until noon is good for me. However, it brings with it two problems.

One, unlike winter break, spring break is in the middle of the semester, so if it was made two weeks long, I’d probably forget how to do school even more than I did over the course of a week. Two, it would push our already later-than-normal last day of classes and graduation dates even farther back, and I genuinely think that once May hits, we should depart Williamsburg as quickly as possible to avoid the humidity.

GUEST COLUMN

Some professors may say that that belief runs contrary to their job descriptions — students need to stay on schedule and if that involves some unfortunate deadlines, so be it. However, I would argue that they should be a little more lenient so that the overall quality of the work improves. After all, most students probably aren’t going to be doing work over spring break, so all professors are doing by insisting on these deadlines is subjecting themselves to punishment when they have to start grading those essays or assignments. If they push deadlines back a week, students will produce work of a higher caliber, which should be the goal of all professors: to make sure that their students can put forward their best work.

However, the most important argument is one that we must return to: breaks are supposed to be breaks. Allowing any professor to assign work that infringes on that rest is nothing but an act of disrespect against the students of this institution. If you are going to assign a paper over a break, or a test that is due right when students get back, you are basically deciding for them. You are saying that they don’t deserve or just can’t have a break that we all desperately need, especially given our stress culture. At the very least, we have earned a break after working so hard during the first seven weeks of the semester. Making students do work over break isn’t fair to anyone. It deprives students of their opportunity to hit the reset button or even to have the opportunity to enjoy themselves because all they are doing when they are at the beach is thinking about the paper that they need to go and start writing. It subjects professors to reading work that will inevitably be done in an even more haphazard, disorganized and lazy way than it would even be done normally because, again, any work done during spring break will be inherently subpar due to students’ motivation being at nil. Why should we continue to make ourselves part of this practice that doesn’t bring out the best in either party?

It’s time to put the break back in spring break. MollieShiflett’26isanundecidedmajorwhowill probablyendupmajoringinhistory.SheplaysontheGold Women’sClubSoccerteamfortheCollegeofWilliamand Maryandisanavidfanofmostsports,exceptgolf.Email Mollie at mrshiflett@wm.edu.

Dining hall food: Gas or Pass

from Sadler because they’re so good after a few days out of the dining hall. Try letting the fruit ripen — it gets so juicy and will be great especially when it warms up. Also putting veggies on a pizza and adding a vinaigrette can work for a caprese pizza. The cooked broccoli is also good in the soup sometimes.

Item 4: Salads and lettuce wraps. Grab a protein so that the salad has some substance and then pick a theme based on a sauce. You could go vinaigrette with tomatoes and cucumbers, southwestern with stuff from the taco section, simple caesar with chicken breast or whatever else you can think of. If you want to get more protein, just double it up and wrap it in a lettuce leaf to have a pretty good lettuce wrap. I haven’t tried this, but you could even grab a bag of chips, break it up and put it in the salad instead of croutons.

Item 5: Caf’s Mediterranean section — enough said. Go crazy with the gyro.

Author’s Note: Fitness culture has been critiqued at length; there has been extensive discourse around the manynegativeeffectsthatstemfromit.Somethingthat islessoftendiscussed,however,isthemythsthatfuelthis cultural mindset. In this piece, I wanted to explore the waysthatpeopleinteractwithandinterpretthesemyths. When students looking for a workout enter the College of William and Mary’s Student Recreation Center, they are presented with a series of choices. Some of these are straightforward. Weights or cardio? Upstairs or downstairs? Fitness classes or sports? Looming over all of these options, however, is a more personal and existential choice, one between individuality and conformity: evaluating your motivation for hitting the gym. Understanding this choice is, in my opinion, the key to forming a healthy relationship with exercise.

This conformist mindset, fueled by insecurity rather than strength, is all too common. It's a powerful motivator but is unlikely to bring the all-encompassing, lasting change that excercise is supposed to create.

Contemporary gym culture is built around a number of promises. Chief among these is the idea that the gym is a temple of self-improvement, where confidence, status and sex appeal are all attainable via exercise, assuming you work hard enough. This premise is repeated ad infinitum in books, movies, magazines and TikToks alike, but it has its obvious limitations. For one, most people can’t achieve the unrealistically high standards that are idealized. For another, achieving these standards doesn’t guarantee psychological benefits. The central problem with gym culture, however, is that the pursuit of these goals is cast as an exercise in individuality and self-expression, when in reality it represents rigid conformity to externally imposed standards.

I’d argue that this pursuit of conformity is what’s responsible for most of the negative things associated with gym culture. For instance, conformity invites a competitive mindset: if you accept the premise of “getting in better shape will make me better,” then you accept by default the premise of “someone in better shape than I am is better than me.” Essentially, by viewing exercise as a means to an externally defined end, people accept that their current selves are flawed and must be changed to match the standards which they are told to emulate. This conformist mindset, fueled by insecurity rather than strength, is all too common. It’s a powerful motivator but is unlikely to bring the all-encompassing, lasting change that exercise is supposed to create.

None of this means that going to the gym can’t be a positive experience or have positive effects. I know plenty of people who genuinely enjoy exercising. For me, going to the gym can be the difference between a good and bad day. The question is, then, how is it possible to form a healthy relationship with exercise in the face of the pressure to conform? In my view, fitness culture is sort of a paradox — only by rejecting external pressures to conform can we achieve the type of success that they promise. This is where the other side of the equation comes in — celebrating individuality is essential to combating the toxic aspects of gym culture.

I think the food here is good. YEAH, I SAID IT! Maybe I am just overly accepting of circumstance and not picky, and maybe I just don’t have a good measure of comparison because I’ve never had another university’s cafeteria food, but there is actually some good stuff here. The deal is that you’ve got to get creative! Instead of just picking whatever one station has, you have to scope out all the stations and see what you can make with everything. Here is what I intensely enjoy from the dining halls:

Item 1: Spicy sweet tofu in the vegetarian section in Sadler. Especially when over rice/quinoa with a sweet potato, it’s gas. Also, adding seeds for texture and nutrients is great and makes me feel like a bird in a good way. I get genuinely sad when there is none of that kind of tofu. It's hot and good, and all you have to do is add some salt and pepper, and you’re good to go.

Item 2: Anything in the panini press. I highly recommend using the bagels next to the ice cream machine for sandwich bread and seasoning from the vegetarian section. Also, adding greens and peppers to sandwiches helps balance them out and add volume. Again, just try different stuff from all the sections to make a great panini. Just make sure to use the paper with the panini press because I’ve ruined the panini machine before by forgetting — I’m sorry.

Item 3: The Sadler pears (when ripe) and other fruits and veggies. I take a bag and steal a bunch of pears

The deal is that you've got to get creative! Instead of just picking whatever one station has you have to scope out all the stations and see what you can make

Item 6: For dessert, mixing Sadler ice cream with cereal or a crumbled cookie from the dessert section is unreal. Also, granola with fruit and yogurt never goes wrong.

Honorable mentions: Anything in the Caf’s fridge with oat milk, certain foods from the Tribe Truck (I’m especially excited for the poke bowls!), cotton candy at 6 p.m. in Sadler, Sadromas food, the variety the “W&M Free Food Fans” GroupMe provides and those goofy hit-or-miss Swem snacks. We all hear over and over that the food here isn’t good, but that’s such a tired and boring take. There is a way to enjoy it and keep it exciting; you just have to put in a little bit of effort. I enjoy the dining experience here, and I don’t care what you say. Make the freaking lemonade from the freaking Sadler lemons. IzzyAnderson’25isaprospectiveEnglishmajor, presidentofSkateClubandanactivememberofDad JeansComedy.Shelovesskateboarding,musicandtime withpeopleshecaresabout.Thoughshedidauthorthis article,Izzy’sopinionhassincebeenchanged;shewas in a bit of denial. Contact her at icanderson@wm.edu.

So what does all this mean? For me, it means viewing the gym as a form of self-expression and agency. A healthy approach to exercise involves adaptation, trying new things and, apparently, a lot of stretching. It means holding yourself accountable while also being able to forgive yourself for missing a workout. It means that physical health is founded on mental health. Mens sana in corpore sano — sound mind, sound body. Finally, and most importantly, it means not listening to people like me who tell others how to think in the gym; true individuality is the result of independence. The College strives to uphold the pillar of flourishing, declaring on its website that it seeks to “empower those who live, learn, and work here to make choices toward a healthy and fulfilling life.” In my opinion, the most important choice you can make in your years here is to choose individuality. DamienKanner-Bitetti’25isaprospectiveEnglishmajor andAmericanStudiesminorfromArlington,Va.Inadditionto theFlatHat,heisabenchwarmeronClubBSoccer,aDJfor WCWM90.9andanexecutivememberofStudentsofHipHop Legacy.Emailhimatdskannerbitett@wm.edu.