I remember coming for a visit to Saint Mary’s College my senior year of high school and thinking there was no way I would be attending a small, Catholic, all-female school that enforced parietals. Incidentally, I chose to attend Saint Mary’s, and I can say now at the beginning of my junior year that almost all the things I thought I would hate about Saint Mary’s—its small size, the single gender—are the things I love most about it.

However, one subject has become more disagreeable to me as I’ve gotten older. Saint Mary’s College and Notre Dame, as well as many other Catholic and Christian schools, enforce parietals. On weekdays, male students must exit a female dorm at 12 a.m. and vice versa. On the weekends, the cutoff moves to 2 a.m. Though I have never been given an official reason for parietals, I assume they are part of the Catholic tradition of Saint Mary’s College and Notre Dame.

Perhaps the schools feel as if they do not enforce parietals they are somehow condoning the actions of any students who spend the night in dorms of the opposite gender. Parietals may have also been established as a safety precaution to keep unknown individuals from trespassing in dorm halls. However, I believe parietals really serve to create a harmful, unsafe environment for all students in the Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s community.

First, parietals set up the expectation that if a male and female student are in a dorm room together at a certain time, the only thing they could possibly being doing is sexual. In college, it’s not that unusual to stay up until 1 or 2 a.m. studying or even perhaps just *gasp* platonically hanging out. True, maybe this doesn’t happen in most cases, but having parietals sets the expectation that something sexual happen will happen, not just in the minds of the campus faculty or ministry, but in the minds of the students themselves. Parietals create an entire campus wide mindset that men and woman cannot interact without sex being involved which hurts gender relations.

Secondly, parietals force students to make a decision under a time restraint. Though parietals exist, they certainly do not stop co-ed sleep overs. In fact, they may have the effect of forcing two people into one. Let’s play out a scenario: a guy goes over to girl’s dorm room and she is not sure how far she wants to take their relationship. As midnight draws closer, the two will be forced to decide if he will spend the night or go back to his own dorm. The girl may not want him to leave at that moment, but may not be completely comfortable with spending the night because “spending the night” comes with its connotations and expectations. In this way, parietals force a couple to make a decision that will place one or both of them in a highly uncomfortable spot. Once parietals pass, the male or female student is essentially stuck in a room for hours with a person they may or may not want to be with all night. That person cannot live easily without facing repercussions even if they truly want to remove themselves from the situation. It would be easier and safer for everyone involved if students could enter and leave dorm rooms without time restraints and without repercussions.

Thirdly, the existence of parietals shows an assumption that all students are heterosexual. This is not the case. If one of the main goals of parietals is to prevent people from having sex, they do not accomplish it, they only accomplish in *maybe* ending some sexual encounters between male and female students. But obviously, if two men or two women want to have sex or spend the night in each other’s rooms it would be almost impossible to stop them. Parietals only affect one form of sexual encounters, and even in that their influence may be small or even harmful. If colleges really wanted to ensure their students’ safety they would get rid of parietals and perhaps implement a sign-in sheet that way at least we would know who is in the building.

Parietals may have been established as part of the Catholic tradition or as a safety precaution, but currently they just serve as a possibly harmful burden to students.