The First Rule of Fishbowl: Do Not Talk about Fishbowl

Public nudity: the final frontier. After this, it’s all a breeze: forgetting to lock the bathroom stall door, dropping your towel between the shower and your dorm room, losing your bikini bottoms in the wave pool at Six Flags.

In the English-speaking West, our language reflects a protectiveness we have of our own nudity: being literally or figuratively “exposed,” “baring all,” being “stripped” of your possessions, your rights, your dignity. There is a marked association between vulnerability and nakedness, against which we guard with clothing, single-sex bathrooms (in most places) and the FCC. In some way, modesty and privacy equate safety.

But as we know, college is no place for any of those things.

The infamous “Fishbowl” event every spring is a chance for seniors to get three sheets and two cheeks to the wind in an evening that starts with free beer and ends with a naked run across campus. Participants gather in Cro and start to drink away the layers.

A great deal of planning goes into this incremental striptease – each layer must be its own outfit. What happens to keys and cell phones at this point is one of the mysteries of Fishbowl, but let’s be real – if you don’t have any clothes in which to keep them, you probably shouldn’t be using either. Let’s not get TMZ too excited.

More pressing than the question of how to layer is the question of how extensively to do so. Some have been counting down to the big streak since freshman year, and for this select population I apply the Nude Beach Rule: those who really like to be naked in public probably shouldn’t be. (Nothing personal.) Others say coyly, “I’ll see,” which means, “I’m’a get drunk first.”

Then, there are those who say flat-out that they’re keeping their (under)pants on, or that they aren’t attending at all. In at least a few cases, this is in avoidance of the first Fishbowl archetype. One student was quoted as saying, loudly, “I just don’t want to see that much penis!” Indeed, the genitalia of neighbors and classmates are not easily un-seen.
But are we to imagine that Fishbowl consists of staring at boobs and giggling about dicks? As childish as this sounds, the alternative is simply a kegger minus pants – jeans and bras piling up along the walls as guests converse politely over the snicker of the fleshy, pink elephant in the room.

Still, dressed or undressed, many social engagements at Conn seem equally fraught with pointing and snickering about one thing or another. In such a small population, it’s hard not to have at least a few salacious tales at hand. Walking around campus as a subject of even one of these is an exercise in embarrassment and exposition. At any given floor party, your salaciostory gets passed around like Solo cups, and some intimate happening becomes common knowledge.

In light of the everyday chatter of our campus, how much more revealing is it to run stark naked and screaming beside five hundred other people? Or, for that matter, to stand around even half-naked, ogling and being ogled? I think we’ve done worse.

It must be noted here that Fishbowl is a spectator sport, and one of the most popular on campus at that. While I remember peering out of Branford freshman year at the blur of naked people in sneakers, carrying little bundles of clothing and whooo!ing at intervals, more disconcerting was the sideline loitering that happened in front of the library my sophomore year, mere feet from the action.

It’s just this sort of spectatorship by the sub-senior community that shatters the sanctity of Fishbowl – at its very core, a bonding experience. Seniors look on one another as equals in a shared exposure, commonly bare and collectively vulnerable in a mad, drunken dash over sidewalks and between trees they’ve shared for four years. Who are the rest of us to interrupt, much less to pretend we understand? In the last gasps of their undergraduate careers, the reckless abandon of seniors is beyond reproach.

So don’t watch – you’ll ruin it.