Ever year around this time, hundreds of collegiettes will be asked the question, “Will you go to formal with me?” This phrase uttered by fraternity men to unsuspecting undergrads also carries a subvert question with it, “Will you spend countless hours and extreme effort on painting a cooler for me, too?” If you’re at all familiar with the recent “tradition” of cooler painting, you know that this is a very loaded question.
Girls become giddy over the opportunity to spend a weekend at the beach with their friends and escape the mountains for just a couple of days. Maybe if you’re lucky enough the formal you get invited to will be at a somewhat “classy” beach that might make even your parents jealous. But as soon as the fun idea of relaxing at the beach fades from the mind, the reality of the job to be done sets in. And yes, the job I am referencing here is the full-time commitment of cooler painting.
To paint a cooler successfully one must research everything their date has ever loved including but not limited to: specific types of alcohol, sports teams, music preferences, favorite TV shows and movies, pop-culture idols, fraternity symbols, and much more. For some girls this is where the headache begins, how do you make a perfectly personalized cooler for someone you were only set up with or have only known for a few weeks? The challenge is surely not for the faint at heart. Some have even gone as far to say that cooler painting is the “last legal form of female oppression” and on some levels, I have to agree.
(Death by cooler, Katy Huis)
Sure it’s fun to have a bright and colorful cooler to show off to your friends and maybe even relatives but do guys actually realize how much work a girl must do to accomplish this task? Or maybe they do realize and simply don’t care because hey, she gets a weekend at the beach it’s the least she can do, right? Wrong. Not only does the cooler painting madness create an insane amount of competition between guys to have the best cooler but it also creates a sense of competition among the girls painting coolers too.
It’s time to just face the facts on this one. Yeah not all guys want a cooler to take to formal but the majority does. Not every college woman is an artist and not every cooler is going to look like it came straight from an Etsy shop. Some girls tend to be more creative than others but should you feel bad if your cooler isn’t as exact as someone else’s? Absolutely not. No matter how many layers of Mod Podge and Minwax you paint on that baby, the fact of the matter is that the paint won’t stick forever.
(Passed out into paints, Katy Huis)
A nice change of tradition here might be to actually get to know the girl that guys are asking to formal. Does every guy know their date’s favorite band, 90’s reference, type of beer, fashion designer, color, and astrological symbol? It is certainly unclear to me why the focus of the girl’s free time is spent on creating something that the guy will immediately fall in love with but that the guy has perhaps never considered making formal as equally special for the girl he is taking. This is where the paradigm shift should change. Guys have every right to ask their formal dates to paint them a cooler but shouldn’t be surprised if she says “yes”, somewhat reluctantly.