I discussed this with a friend who goes to a large State University and he said he has noticed a similar trend and largely agrees with me.

When I was first a freshman in college I noticed lots of chicks constantly walking around with cups of coffee to classes, yet almost no dudes did this. For some inexplicable reason I found this humorous—“laughing” at them, not with them--and it made me view girls as being kind of goofy. It took a really long time for me to figure out why something seemingly so mundane--18-22 year old women walking around with hot caffeinated beverages in paper cups on a college campus--was so amusing.

Well, I finally figured it out and I think I can put it into words.

Firstly, they don't need the coffee. In college you can sleep for 12 hours a day if you need to and still get your work done and go to classes--there's an immense amount of down time. Sure, sometimes you might need a pick-me-up because you didn't get as much sleep as you might have wanted to, but that is rare. Because of this, it's completely unnecessary to drink coffee every single day and bring it with you to every class.

Additionally, if they actually NEEDED this caffeine to get through the day, they could just get it at the cafeteria. It's the same fucking coffee, and you're using your meal swipe for breakfast/lunch anyway, so you end up saving the 3-5 dollars you spend for the one you get at the coffee shop on campus.

So it's pretty clear these girls aren't buying coffee because they need the caffeine--so there has to be some other motivation: they want to be taken seriously. At this point women--especially the ones in college--have been raised on feminist platitudes for nearly two decades. For years women haven't been able to live to their own potential--they were just baby and milk factories (or so men thought) not too long ago! But now--NOW--in 2017 they're a force to be reckoned with in the workplace and can have "real" lives. Girls aren't dumb-dumbs anymore--they're smart and NEED to be taken seriously. College is just the first stage of this grand, new world women have been exposed to within the past couple of decades. It's the first stage of their professional lives, the ones which they have been denied since the beginning of time--until now.

Paying 5 dollars for a paper cup with some brown liquid in it is the perfect symbol of how these platitudes have incubated themselves into the minds of women. It tells everyone else that the consumer—the coffee drinker—despite being an 18 year old undergraduate, works SO hard and her studies are SO important that she just NEEDS the caffeine to get through the gauntlet of rigorous materials, papers, and exams that college students are thrown through.

And of course, this is exactly where the humor is in the whole situation. Because we all know college isn’t very serious—in fact, it’s the opposite: a complete fucking joke. Realistically, it’s a glorified daycare program for semi-adults. As long as you stay on top of your shit enough, you can still get wasted 4 days a week (if not more) most weeks and do reasonably well. It’s not a job, it’s not stressful, it’s not something you need to drink coffee for. The real kicker, though, is the fact that even the chicks buying the coffee don’t take it seriously—you’ll see them walk into lecture hall, open up their MacBook Pro, put down their coffee, and then pull up Safari and look at fucking shoes for an hour and fifteen minutes, and they do just as well as boys do in the class—and that’s what makes it all so hilarious: they spend actual money to give off this professional “I need to be taken seriously and this is important” appearance, when no one can really take them seriously because the whole charade is just too ridiculous and completely laughable. On top of that, you just know that coffee is going to loosen up their bowels and by 12 in the afternoon they’re firing off a rancid mud rocket made of this morning’s bagel and yogurt into the toilet—which is a whole different scenario that I’m not willing to get into; I’ve taken up too much of your time.