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The New York Times recently took a compelling look at the effects of increasingly female-skewed enrollment in the world of college dating.

Women have made up the majority of post-secondary education for a while now, but the Times reports that certain schools are feeling the vas deferens deficit more than others; at places like the University of Vermont, which is 55 percent female, crazy sh** is happening. Women are hitting on men! Pigs are raising tiger cubs! The falcon cannot hear the falconer!

At such schools, notes one student in the article, "Girls feel pressured to do more than they're comfortable with, to lock it down."

Well, taste my pain, New York Times. Where I went to school, there were seven women for every one guy.

Sometimes literally.

Bennington College, a little liberal arts school in Vermont, has produced Carol Channing, Brett Easton Ellis, me, and more sexually overconfident young men than you could wag an exhausted vibrator at. The college's Web site puts female enrollment at about 70 percent (it should be noted -- these are the same stats that list three American Indian kids in the ethnic makeup of the student body every year, and I never noticed any of them running around campus).

Bennington Boy Syndrome
Factor in the fact that 10-plus percent of these guys are gay, and another 20 percent are flat-out undatable (I'm looking at you, guy who did a bunch of acid and then drove to Tom Robbins' house), and you're looking at less of a "dating pool" than a "Dixie cup full of Sea Monkey water."

When my guy friends from home would visit me at school, they and their manparts were set upon with a fervor rarely seen outside of George Romero movies. Bennington became legend with my high school buddies as a place where any guy could go and get laid with minimal effort.

We called it Bennington Boy Syndrome -- four years of being aggressively hit on launched a lot of these guys into the world with an ridiculously inflated sense of their own sexual currency.

So, great for guys, but bad for us? Well! It's complicated. The Times seemed to think the most adverse effect of wang dearth is that girls have to go to third base faster ... and that guys become more interested in treating the student body like a sexual Old Country Buffet than having a girlfriend. But in my experience, plenty of us ended up in satisfying, monogamous relationships (inasmuch as the phrase isn't redundant). The only real victim I can think of is sisterhood.

Women Be Trippin'
Whether I was single or with somebody, I found that female friendships were consistently strained by the Dark Ratio. A lack of boys doesn't make women turn slutty -- it makes them cannibalize each other.

For a homely gal with all the personal warmth of a watersnake, I did OK, guy-wise. I had a cute boyfriend for most of college, but when we broke up for six months, I had to work like a fat boxer in one of those movies about a fat boxer who has to get in shape for one last fight.

Look -- I'm not one of those girls who doesn't easily make friends with other women. In fact, I reserve special loathing for girls who say they "just get along better with guys." But when I was with my boyfriend, I found myself acting like a jealous goblin who thought every girl that befriended him was trying to get in his pants. Because half the time, they were.

One girl in particular -- a big gal with whom I'd bonded over a Battleship drinking game and seemed to be at least on friendly terms with -- took excessive pride in assembling a cadre of capital-G Guy Friends. She decided to annex my boyfriend early on, and got weirdly bitchy on me. I thought that she'd just resented me for taking up so much of his time, until he drunkenly confessed that she actively pestered him to break up with me. Ha ha, neat!

There were also the girls who wrote him long letters during summer breaks, made him mix CDs (REALLY?), and gave me the kind of evil eye that warrants the defensive powers of an amulet.

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad ...
And when I was single! Boy. I remember having a standoff with another girl, the two of us literally sitting on either side of a guy's bed, willing the other to leave with an intensity that must have been a little boner-wilting. I hooked up with guys I never would have if I weren't confined to a secluded mountain hamlet with only a fistful of B.A. candidates for warmth. (Hi, Electronic Music Fan! Here's looking at you, White Kid With Dreadlocks! Thanks for the laughs, Probably Has Autism Dude!)

In summation? Going to a school where there aren't that many guys isn't the worst thing in the world. I mean, it definitely fostered a kind of sexual aggression that encouraged tequila consumption (You know why Betty Ford drank so damn much? Because she was a Bennington girl, that's why.) But you also tended to focus a lot on your studies and friendships instead.

Of course, it doesn't hurt for women to be on the other end of la chasse. A girl who goes to a mostly female liberal arts school doesn't just graduate with an appreciation for Tom Waits, the ability to glaze ceramics and congealed romantic optimism. She also learns important pick-up skills that will -- hopefully -- get her laid well into her lonely, bitter golden years.

Julieanne Smolinski is an editor for Lemondrop. She graduated from Bennington in 2005. Her parents are very proud.