Fetish Parties and Folx: The Oberlin Archival Internet Rabbit Hole
by Ben Rosielle, Contributor
People always gesture towards the good old days of Oberlin, but were things really that different back then? And if they were that different, does that necessarily mean they were better? The most straightforward way to find out is to go digging through the web, the most easily accessible and (probably) exhaustive archive of Oberlin’s past. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been obsessed with discovering little tidbits of what Oberlin used to be like, using a combination of Wayback Machine snapshots, old Review articles and various intended and unintended archives of our school and town’s history all available on the internet.
The picture of Oberlin’s past that I’ve gained from this search makes me a little wistful for tangible and intangible things we’ve lost along the way, but has also made me appreciate how little some things have changed about our student culture. There’s a certain comfort in knowing that the same discourses and tensions that circulate around Oberlin today were more or less just as present in the past. Perhaps we’ve gotten a little bit more insular and prudish — less fetish parties, nude viola playing, and trollish letters to the editor — but we haven’t lost the spirit that propelled Oberlin students of the past to complain about our music scene, our administration, and whatever was happening in the world.
Perhaps I’m biased as a student journalist, but archives of student publications (specifically, The Review) provide the most reliable source as to what was going on in the lives and minds of Oberlin students, staff and townies of the past. In letters to the editor from the ’60s onwards, you find complaints about the divisiveness and futility of student activism alongside equally spirited defenses of activism, much as you do today. Almost everyone expressed hatred for the college president, at least eventually. No matter the decade, there were Review op-eds complaining about student radicalism, then eventually “PC culture,” though I can’t find any using “woke” as a dirty word.
In Grape articles from 2016, one finds unironic usage of the term “folx” in articles about Harkness basement shows or sex acts in Mudd. Sure, there were a lot of derpy 2016 millenial-isms, but what struck me more than seeing the word “folx” in the wild and the Tumblr-inflected writing was the frankness with which Grape writers were writing about their masturbation techniques and favorite campus sex spots. As an example, my favorite “vintage” Grape selection would be a digital artwork titled “4 Sex Positions to Try Out With Your Forest Clown Lover,” which depicts exactly what you think it would, in rather graphic detail no less.
Another Grape article from 2016 expresses distaste (and perhaps a little envy) towards the “Hipster Elite”: cigarette-smoking, Franzia-drinking, apathetic tattooed and/or pierced cool kids who dress “normcore” because they don’t want to look as rich as they really are. Does all this sound familiar?
Perhaps our journalism has gotten a little trite and self-absorbed. Gone are the days where Oberlin’s values were freely and publicly debated in the press. Perhaps people are too scared to do or say anything that might stir controversy or cause offense. This isn’t a jab against “wokeness” or “PC culture,” but an observation of a broader shift in what’s considered acceptable or safe to publicly say and do. In fact, letters to the editor complaining about “political correctness” and “diversity initiatives” are as old as political correctness itself, as evidenced by a look through the archives of The Review.
The Oberlin of yesterday seems to have had more outrage, more obsession, and more outgoingness. There were more genuine and visible institutional connections between faculty, townies and students. Faculty wrote a lot more articles in The Review, and townies would go to house parties or hang out at co-ops. It's hard to imagine the latter happening today without Campus Safety coming and banning the offending party from stepping foot on school grounds. Do I endorse putting clown porn in the pages of The Grape, or inviting townies to parties, or ragging on other people’s art projects in The Review? Probably not, but it’s hard to imagine any of these things happening today.
Comfortingly, Oberlin students have always been concerned that we (somehow) aren’t weird or radical enough, that Oberlin has a reputation to live up to and that our campus culture has failed at upholding it. On some level, this is the very concern that brought me down this rabbit hole in the first place. People are always dissatisfied with the Oberlin that is, and it’s the process of breaking out of this dissatisfaction that builds the Oberlin we want.
Why spend time digging through Oberlin history? In the ongoing discourse in which the identity of our school is gradually shaped and reshaped, you can gain insight on what worked (and didn’t work) in the past, why things changed, why things are the way they are today. Instead of scrolling on Instagram, consider procrastinating on your finals by going on a Oberlin history rabbit hole instead. The institutional memory of our school is an important thing to preserve, and bringing the archive out of the recesses of the internet and into our collective knowledge is a process that you could be a part of.
I’ll leave it off with my favorite snapshot of Oberlin history. Back in the ’90s, a student-rented house near Mickey Mart had been christened “Banana House,” on account of its (you guessed it) yellow appearance. Banana House was notorious for its fetish parties, forever memorialized in the pages of The Review. There were townies, gimp masks, people being tied to crosses and whipped, and undoubtedly all sorts of stuff that the historical record leaves to our imagination.
These parties were often part of a seeming Oberlin tradition of scaring prospies during All Roads season. In a Review article from April 19, 1996, the paper’s editorial staff asks why students play up Oberlin’s reputation as a place for free-wheeling weirdos for prospies, even though the reality of Oberlin is far more drab and mundane than they make it seem. They write:
“Why can't every week be like All-Roads? Why should we wait for the prospies in order to throw a good party? If you were really radical, or really serious in foiling the administration, you'd go to class in your leather and whips, eat lunch naked in Wilder Bowl. There are so many possibilities, we know you're creative, now prove it. Dare ya.”
It’s this quote that embodies all the allure of the Oberlin archive, the Edenic, liberated fantasy of Oberlin’s past rubbing up against the suggestion that it was full of the same quotidian frustrations and ennui that we experience today. I’m not one to make an authoritative judgement on what’s wrong or right, what’s true or false, but hopefully you have judgments of your own. There’s so much more to Oberlin’s history that I don’t have space to touch on, so feel free to do some digging yourself. Oh, and let me know if you can find the location of Bug House.
