Biggus Titus of Oxford University

[Forecastsayssnowbutthereisnosnow]

Sadly, not a Monty Python sketch.

Matt Rattley, a large bearded bloke who wears giant fake breasts, appears to be happily working at Oxford Uni.

I was really hoping this wasn't true but there is even a youtube video with him talking while wearing the giant breasts and red lipstick, applied to a degree any circus clown would be accused of overdoing it. The video includes a slide stating he works as a lecturer and tutor in the Biochemistry Dept at Oxford. He's also on LinkedIn.

I mean, how obvious can it be that this is a sexual fetish which he is involving unconsenting students and staff in???

Dr P on X has been (correctly) very robust on this case:

""This is Matt Rattley saying, "I can do whatever I please and nobody can stop me".

This is highly antisocial, abnormal, boundary-violating, paraphilic behaviour.

And we should not be afraid to say so."

The academicalilly intemalectuallic super-complimacated Oxobrigian position, apparently, is that suggestions of appropriate attire for appropriate situations is "everybody will be forced to wear uniforms" - who knew such simplistic all-or-nothing hyperbole was the cutting edge of modern deep thought?

This is a great scenario to think about.

TBF I got the impression that Lady is interested exploring the issue in more detail.

I hope you're still here @Lady1576 .. If so, did you get the chance to read the link I sent to the blog written by an AGP? I found it particularly interesting that the man who wrote it found himself disgusted at how his fellow AGPs didn't care about the impact their fetish was having on women. I have no idea if he stayed strong in this resolve and gave it any more thought, or if he succumbed to his sexual urges and things escalated in some way. Either way, his thoughts at the time that he wrote the blog seem genuine - they are certainly helpful when considering AGP motivations.

@BonfireLady I think that his additional thrill would have been having a woman union official represent him in some kind of faux victimisation claim against his boss, who was also a woman.

I've always found that dealing with the issue, not the personality, gives a clearer perspective. Stan could have been the kindest man who loved his Mum and trees and bees.

His bollocks were still hanging out of his mansplainy wide apart legs when talking to students and staff.

All this "but I would share a coffee however he was dressed" is just so much guff. The issue being wearing huge rubber tits and deep cleavage in an educational setting. Fine for Foo Foo"s Palace in Blackpool but not a University.

What Goldhill did was overt unwanted sexualised behaviour, and an action which involved a student non-consensually (I gather he put his tongue in her mouth, uninvited).

It's nameable, recognisable, and legible as sexual harassment (nowadays - 15-20-30 years ago, it wasn't quite so easily recognisable).

What this tutor at St Hilda's is doing is more generalised and not directly acting on/against any specific person. We don't really have a language of sexual harassment for this sort of behaviour.

But the parallels are obvious: it's sexualised behaviour, involving general non-consensual people acted upon.

My language here is clumsy (I really should be writing a couple of lectures!) but also because we need to find a public language for this, and non-conforming men (eg leather queens on Pride Marches) have pushed so many boundaries we have trouble naming this generalised behaviour as sexual harassment.

But we're starting to.

Does that start to get to the nitty-gritty of what you mean @murasaki ?

Oh definitely. Sadly thrills can be found in all sorts of different ways.

My own experience of being on the end of dupers' delight wasn't a sexual one. It was more akin to the additional thrill you describe above. It was someone in a position of significant authority who was deliberately showing (to me) that he could manipulate the two other attendees in the room on the subject of gender identity. TBF he might have got a sexual kick out of it for all I know but I got the impression at the time that it was more about showing me what kind of influence he had. I've been in another other meeting with him (on a related subject - this time it was safety in sports, single-sex v mixed-sex) where he got away with lying, brushing it off as a simple mistake. No idea if he was smirking then too but I would assume so.

In the case of Stan, it sounds like you handed his scantily clad arse to him in style 👏👏

As for the delightful man in my case, sadly he's still at large wielding his influence. I'd love to think he'll get his comeuppance one day, but he's a slippery fish and unfortunately I suspect not. Perhaps I could borrow you if I ever have to meet with him again 😬😂

Mumsnet is a good place for mothers/parents to get useful information on further/higher ed.

How many mothers will be happy to pay fees for their daughters to be validation fodder for this prick?

What @murasaki said resonated with me - my ex's abuse was mostly very subtle, very insidious, so easily deniable, it was designed for no-one else to experience therefore recognise. I've often thought there's more of an honesty (it really doesn't feel like the right word but I can't think of a better one) in a shouter or puncher.

Thinking further re @murasaki 's posts, I think also because it's not immediately obvious that this man has DONE anything to any other specific person.

Our thinking about sexual harassment is within a legal framework, where someone does something to someone else which infringes their rights/person (is that Torts? I know nothing ...)

This man is "just" wearing something. So we need to find a way to name his behaviour and define it as sexual harassment.

Does public display of sexual fetish cut it? AGP on plain show? This is what we probably need to work towards. Maybe akin to the way that sexual harassment comes under both employment & equality law: it creates a hostile work environment. This man's grotesque fetish wear create a hostile educational environment.

But anyone who's see Ric Bierstein's Speechless (on the BBC iPlayer) will see how the TWAW #bekind etc etc etc mean that speaking out in public about this stuff is severely punished.

The fact that no-one at Oxford feels free to say loudly 'look at that man wearing massive fake tits, why is he doing that? At best it's a massive distraction from his lecture' i.e. tell the truth is a form of coercive control in my opinion. A climate of Orwellian fear.

There could theoretically be posters on this thread right now who would have been excluded from Oxford because of their sex, in their lifetime.

My grandmother was in the first cohort of women to graduate with full Oxford degrees.

Shame should absolutely be a thing again. Men should absolutely be sham d for expressing their kinks in public especially when the ‘public’ element is a massive part of the kink.

💐

Please don't think I'm comparing my (thankfully very limited) experience of being in a room with the nasty fucker I mentioned above with being in an abusive relationship.

My experience is related to protecting my daughter in a place where she shouldn't be at risk. Obviously that's very different from being in an abusive relationship. However, your words resonate with my experience because the man in question in my case is very calm, softly spoken and articulate.

Thankfully, I no longer have to deal directly with him but it's taken a considerable amount of time and effort for me to limit and mitigate the impact that he unfortunately continues to have. His reasonable and ostensibly caring demeanor mean that I can't imagine anyone who regularly interacts with him at his place of work would believe me.

I'm now wondering if he too could get away with wearing fake plastic boobs. It might be a stretch, given his job role and where he works, but he does seem to like fancy dress in a professional setting. So far he's not shown any visible signs of "identifying as a woman", so hopefully he won't be trying this look out any time soon.

Having said he might struggle, the lecturer on this thread doesn't appear to have any boundaries that one might reasonably expect to be in place in a professional setting that is managing risk effectively e.g. the inset day mentioned above by a PP when children were present. It's bad enough that a lecturer is doing this with students there but at least they are adults. Having children present is an extra level of no... you'd think.

This ⬆️⬆️⬆️

I wonder if it is more than a coincidence that the other man who made the headlines was also in a education environment. https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/11/11/oakville-teacher-prosthetic-breasts-ontario-school-board-dress-code/

That whilst I agree with all the comments about how this impacts on women working with him, but that is it also influenced by being in a situation where young people / children are (by the school / unveristy) put in a position of having to accept what is being imposed on them.

If it was a work place, or a business that interacts with the public, I am fairly sure employers would have stepped in.

And if that is true what does that say about places of education.

Yes. That's spot on.
Using children and young people as the targets for your fetish is quite deliberate. It's also why adults who work with the young are relentlessly targeted with the insistence that they must be kind and accepting of the sacred caste in order to neutralise any challenge from them. Just look at how difficult it was to get rid of that man from the Canadian school? I'd hope it would be easier in a UK school but I'm not certain.

It seems from the Toronto judgement that it is discrimination to ban one employee from wearing frankly ridiculous and rather offensive fancy-dress accoutrements.

So surely the way to prevent him from wearing them is to ban everyone from wearing such frankly ridiculous and rather offensive fancy-dress accoutrements? If a rule applies to everyone, man, woman or little green bug-eyed monster, it's not discrimination against an individual.

From a quick google it looks like the parents sort of rebelled after this.

And then whether let go or felt best to go went to another school and turns up dress in normal male clothing.

This may also have been because one newspaper thought to follow him around (I know I dont really support news papers hounding people) and through photos showed that when going out shopping, etc., etc., he never wore the false breasts.

So really creepy he felt able to do it at a school.

Edited to add and really worrying that the school went along with it.

Tutorials are tiny, if he is a tutor then in will be him and one or two students, at most three. Imagine being a teenager stuck in a room with just him and those fake breasts. It’s beyond offensive to female students. Can’t imagine the male students finding it ok either.

Agree with this.

Surely St Hilda’s or Oxford must have commented? Boundary setting seemed so innocuous a few years ago. It now feels like part of the whole Queer Ideology where boundary setting is a positive thing meaning I will do what I want, present how I want and you will be deemed a bigot if you do not like my boundary.

Matt Rattley needs and intervention from someone who can genuinely help him.

The Toronto twerp complicated the issue by claiming "she was born intersex and struggles with a medical condition called gigantomastia which has resulted in excessive growth of breast tissue", which seems, from photographic evidence to the contrary, to have been a straightforward, old-fashioned lie. There have been three hundred cases of gigantomastia in total. Ever.

Please could you share the link that this quote is from?

It would be useful to have it. Unfortunately a male claiming to be a woman suffering from an "intersex condition" is an excuse that will be used for a long time to come in the UK, I'm sure.

There will be lots of males whose sex with their employer is recorded as female e.g. because they have a GRC or because they used a passport as their ID on the application form, where their gender identity has been recorded as their sex. Given they will clearly look male, this will undoubtedly be an excuse that will be offered. No doubt with a sob story about how they've really struggled all their life because so many people think they are men.

I imagine the education sector would be an attractive place to work for anyone who fits this description. Far too many schools, colleges and universities seem to falling over themselves to accommodate people's gender identity as factually true. This would include staff who are allowed to enter students' toilets, changing rooms and residential accommodation. Edited to add that while claiming to be a woman with an intersex condition obviously isn't the same as openly identifying as a transwoman, the net result (that these males will be allowed into female students' spaces) will be the same.

Please don't think I'm comparing my (thankfully very limited) experience of being in a room with the nasty fucker I mentioned above with being in an abusive relationship.

Not at all @BonfireLady , and I'm not trying to one upwoman or whatever, I think I was just comparing the insidiousness of BBT with his painted red smile but he's not actually 'doing' anything to the more overt rainbow dildo monkey/Grayson Perry/Adam Graham/Wayne Cousins - understanding the psychology behind it from my limited point of view.

The more people who are aware of how these fuckers' minds work, or might work, the more chance we have of safeguarding for those (all of us, at the end of the day) who need it.

❤️

The more people who are aware of how these fuckers' minds work, or might work, the more chance we have of safeguarding for those (all of us, at the end of the day) who need it.

Hear hear 👏💪