In what I think of as either the apotheosis or the nadir—maybe both—of my stint as a prep-school feminist, I once followed Gloria Steinem into a bathroom to get her autograph. It’s actually even worse than it sounds: first, I lurked outside the stall she was using, then I intercepted her when she emerged, before she could wash her hands. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that this encounter, with its misguided and supremely awkward assertiveness, perfectly encapsulates my entire foray into gender politics.

But I’ve got ahead of myself; let me start at the beginning. In the spring of 1991, the coed boarding school that I attended in Massachusetts, the Groton School, offered senior girls the chance to take a self-defense class. I was a sophomore, but I went to the class’s graduation, which featured the girls fending off and beating up “attackers” in heavy padding and helmets. Back in the dorm afterward, some other students and I chatted with a teacher about gender issues at our school.

As it happened, our dorm had been the site of two unsettling incidents that year. One, which had occurred in the middle of the night, involved a male student entering the room of a female student who’d previously been his girlfriend and staying after she told him to leave; though none of us besides the two of them knew what had transpired, when the boy was subsequently expelled there was such widespread anger toward the girl that she ended up voluntarily leaving Groton.

The second incident was when boys in an adjacent dorm put human shit into a pan, brought it into the kitchen in our dorm, turned on the burner, then departed as the smell permeated the building.

To be fair to Groton, neither of these events reflected the kind of place it usually was. Situated on an enchantingly beautiful four-hundred-and-fifteen-acre campus of brick buildings and a Gothic chapel, the school was a blend of high-minded ideals, preppy traditions, and generally wholesome adolescent mischief. Every student was required to take Latin or Greek, play three sports a year, and attend chapel five times a week and classes on Saturday mornings.

As a half-Catholic, half-Jewish girl from Ohio, I myself was neither particularly mischievous nor particularly preppy. I had a few close friends and no boyfriend, and while I was definitely kind of weird—likelier to spend a Saturday evening in the library reading The Paris Review than attending a dance in the student center—mine was, at least initially, an unobjectionable weirdness. I became an editor for the school literary magazine and was fond of wearing Indian-print skirts with black Chinese flats and wool sweaters belonging to my roommate’s father. There’s an acceptable identity I could have had, if I’d left well enough alone: I could have been bookish and dreamy and possibly mistaken for shy.

Instead, I went and got political. The night of the self-defense graduation, someone—I can’t remember who—came up with the idea of forming a feminist group for students, but I do know that, at that time in my life, accompanying my literary aspirations was an earnestness and idealism that I’ve lost as surely as I have my pseudo-ethnic wardrobe.

Groton’s chapel services featured sermonlike talks in which teachers implored students, and students implored one another, to act with honor and integrity, and I took these admonitions to heart. It wasn’t that I didn’t know that forming a feminist group might be off-putting to other students, male and female alike. It was that suspecting it would be off-putting served as evidence that I ought to do it; to shirk this opportunity for moral upgrade would be an act of cowardice. Awash in privilege, living on a campus swarming with healthy, attractive, mostly rich teen-agers, I somehow believed that life should probably be difficult and I should probably suffer: not quite like Jesus—nothing that intense—but maybe like, you know, Susan B. Anthony. I conflated doing something unpopular with doing something important.

Thus armed with little besides erratic social skills and the vague conviction that Groton could be more hospitable to girls, we—mostly I—formed the Group for Female Awareness, a name that makes me cringe to type even now. But we—I—didn’t want to call it the Groton Feminist Group because of the willful tendency, widespread then and persistent still, to misunderstand what feminism is. What if other students thought we didn’t shave our legs? We couldn’t, of course, call it the Female Awareness Group because of the unfortunate acronym. And so we became the G.F.F.A., an appropriately unwieldy moniker for a group that never found its footing.

Was Groton sexist? For the first ninety years of its existence, it had been an all-boys school, and it retained a certain masculine energy—a raucousness at meals, a bawdy kind of joking, the enduring popularity of a particular kind of sharp-tongued senior boy. But is that sexism or is it just adolescence? Once I had become the self-appointed gender police, it hardly mattered. I believed my duty was to ferret out examples of boys misbehaving and girls being mistreated, and ferreting these out wasn’t hard because I soon became a magnet for such misbehavior and mistreatment. It turned out that a lot of what being the head of the G.F.F.A. entailed was sitting at lunch in the dining hall, listening while a boy made some offensive joke because I was present, because I was head of the G.F.F.A., and then acting outraged; it was weirdly like I was practicing to be a guest on a cable-news shoutfest.

Oh, sure, the group did other things besides affording me opportunities to get on my high horse while eating tater tots and pizza. We held occasional meetings, though they were never attended by more than a handful of students; we organized a bus ride to a pro-choice rally; I appropriated a bulletin board in the mail room of the schoolhouse on which I posted articles related to feminism, magazine ads that I found sexist, and the aforementioned Gloria Steinem autograph, which I’d procured during a summer internship in Washington, D.C.

But, as I bumbled through my new role as an on-campus activist, it was increasingly hard for me to shake the realization that being an activist wasn’t what I wanted. Though the attention could at times be heady, it was also sour—not like the unequivocal admiration another girl might elicit for being great at field hockey or having a magnificent mane of blond hair. Furthermore, I discovered that activism was tiring. Did Gloria Steinem, I wondered, ever wake up feeling that she wasn’t in the mood that day to carry the banner of gender equality? There was something reductive and tedious in the endless conversations that I found myself having. Two girls in the grade below mine gave a joint chapel talk outlining the many ways in which Groton wasn’t sexist at all. These were girls I had once liked, girls I’d been on the soccer team with, and I remember thinking, as they spoke, that they were just trying to ingratiate themselves with boys and that now I officially loathed both of them.

It was during my junior year that the fliers appeared, taped to the wall next to the staircase leading up to the dining hall. A Male Awareness Group had been established, these fliers revealed. Its founders were anonymous. Its goals were—well, no matter what its stated goals were, clearly the whole thing was meant to get laughs, and naturally, humorlessly, I took the bait.

As the student body buzzed, I wrote a petition explaining why the very notion of such a group was insulting; because this was the early nineties, I probably used phrases like “the male gaze” and “patriarchal hegemony.” That weekend, I went around to the girls’ dorms collecting signatures. Hurrying from room to room, I summarized the contents of the petition instead of giving prospective signers the chance to read it, a decision that I look back on as unconscionable on my part, even in the context of a ridiculous situation. But, back then, I thought that time was of the essence—I needed to tape my petition next to the staircase as soon as possible!