Everyone knows the feeling. After a night of partying, you wake up in the morning and realize you are not in your own bed, but someone else’s.
You are wearing the same outfit, but your hair, and if you are a girl your makeup, does not look as good as it did yesterday. And although you know it will be your most embarrassing moment of the week you still force yourself to get up and walk back to your room, which of course, is on the other side of campus.
As much as you try to avoid your peers, it is inevitable that someone will not watch you do the infamous Walk of Shame. Everyone has either observed someone else doing the walk, or has participated in the walk themselves.
But what is so shameful about this walk? Is it because you must pass what feels like everyone on campus in the same outfit as last night or is it because you are ashamed of who you stayed with?
Boys have it easy. This is because what most guys wear out to parties is no different than what they would wear on a day to day basis.
For girls it is the opposite.
Also it is not always easy to borrow clothes form someone you may never see again because in reality they may never get those clothes back. To solve this problem one senior girl says she always packs “flip flops, a generic t-shirt that is typical of weekend college students, and either yoga pants or shorts depending on the weather” all in a bag. She says that she never has to worry about what people will say about her because the outfit she wore out the night before is safely tucked in the bag she carried along all night.
While this is a crafty idea for girls to hide their actions from everyone on campus, it is also not easy to keep track of a bag at a party when people have been drinking.
What is it that makes leaving someone’s room in the morning a bad thing? Usually, the person went there to have a good time and if they leave in the morning they most likely succeeded in doing so.
A lot of guys said that when they left a girls place in the morning no one ever noticed. Other guys said they only worry about people seeing them walk when they leave certain girls’ rooms.
What seems to be the pattern on this campus is that any girl who leaves a boys room, and makes it obvious that she does so, should feel shame. Hence shame in the title.
If men can feel proud of what they did the night before, than so should girls.
Perhaps we should really celebrate the Walk of Shame and begin calling it the Walk of Fame.
After all, as students cross Red Square on Sunday morning, whether they are dressed in someone else’s clothes or their own recycled outfit, they are still the ones who had the successful night.
