As a timely reminder of just what kind of culture our students are stepping into this week, the National Union of Students (NUS) has released a report which found that one in four students experience unwelcome sexual advances. University, we assume, is a place of self-discovery - intellectual, political, emotional - so why, when wider society appears to be making progress, however incremental, on institutional sexism, do campuses full of our brightest and best appear to be going backwards?
In my first year of university, the two walls of the corridor leading to my halls were entitled the 'Wall of Fame' and the 'Wall of Shame.' The former was plastered with photos of the 'Lads of the Month' - male students who had succeeded in bedding a lot of women, and the occasional woman who had achieved the ultimate accolade of being deemed 'one of the lads'.
On the opposite wall was a poster promoting a club night in Leeds called 'Tequila'. This club featured heavily in the media last year after it released a promotional video on the theme of 'violating a fresher'. It was promptly shut down on grounds of crime, disorder and public safety "linked to highly inappropriate and sexually suggestive advertising campaigns." Sadly, during my time, it was very much in existence, and the poster depicting a woman bending down in a way that implied she was giving a blow job, accompanied by the tagline 'Tequila: Come and Swallow' served as a constant reminder.
I was bombarded with 'lad culture' in its most flagrant, one-dimensional form before I could even begin to consider the impact this behaviour was having on the people I met in those first, heady weeks. This attitude was literally my wallpaper: it was entirely normalised. It's no wonder the 'banter' which filled my Halls was centred around making women feel like they could only excel at sex or at emulating men. Few people spoke out against it, because to do so was to defy a shared foundation of university life - and, as is the wont of 18-year-olds away from home for the first time - we all wanted to be liked.
It was pretty bloody confusing, too. If you weren't having sex then you were an outcast in a student microcosm that essentially centred around it, but if you were having sex, you were a 'slut'… and this was kind of a good thing? Unless, of course, you attempted to exert any kind of authority over your own sexuality, in which case you were regarded as a threat. If you got angry - chastised your new flatmates for rating their fellow freshers out of 10 - you were just ‘getting your knickers in a twist’.
During Freshers’ week, more than at any other time in my life, I was made to feel uncool and excluded for not buying into misogyny. And this is the problem. University is a pretty unique environment - those first weeks and months are an exercise in keeping up appearances. Haven't been out this week? Poor you. Haven't found your housemates for second year yet? No wonder! How do we expect both men and women to transcend sexist behaviour if it is assigned as the cool norm?
This kind of behaviour can seem impenetrable and irreversible - but attempts are under way to make progress. Oxford and Cambridge's plan to introduce compulsory sexual consent classes for undergraduates is a good way to de-construct lad culture from the inside. The campaigns of individual universities to tackle rape culture and sexism are also positive.
The frequent reports from the NUS on lad culture are a step in the right direction, too, but as far as students are concerned, the statements of an official body will only ever be a small action against a large problem. What we really need is people who are part of lad culture to start undermining it from the inside.
With the benefit of hindsight, I hate myself for not ripping down the posters on those walls, for not taking a stand against the 'just a joke' decorations that greeted me every day. If you have teenagers starting university, tell them - when they hear something sexist (or homophobic or racist, for that matter) to say something, because they can be sure that other people present are wishing they could do the same thing.
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Guest posts
Guest post: Freshers' week - how can we tackle misogyny on campus?
11 replies
MumsnetGuestPosts · 25/09/2014 13:06
OP posts:
Seriouslyffs ·
25/09/2014 18:12
Wow. How depressing.
I was at university in the late 80s. There was lots of sex and I remember 2 instances of 'was that informed consent?' amongst my peer group. The men were pretty much shunned afterwards.
DD1 will be off to University next year and tbh I don't know what to advise her. She had a miserable experience a few years ago when she challenged racism on her first day at a new school and never found her feet afterwards- she was then seen as sour and priggish. 
The lectures and a top down approach to cenging sexism sound good. Individual students shouldn't be put in an environment where they have to expose themselves by removing posters- the warden should remove them immediately and issue a formal warning to the bill poster.
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