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."

We weren’t radicalised. We were the people who hadn’t been groomed.

Interesting way to put it

No. And it also overlaps with the marketisation of mental health that exploded with so-called positive psychology (those facile posters of glowing sunsets and bridges stretching into misty lakes...) The early warning signs of our obsession with self-actualisation - "You can be whatever you want to be!"

They irritated me even then. No, I/you really can't be! Not everyone is born or able to become an Olympic skier / CERN physicist / happy mother of three etc.

It struck me as a deeply unhealthy narrative even then, and I think research has since really confirmed its potential to do some serious damage when misapplied.

It's exhausting to life in a world of endless choice and opportunity, particularly when much of that is illusory: advertised, but not accessible. As long as you can be whatever you want to be but aren't managing this... you're a failure, resentful of society and/or disappointed in yourself.

I think trans ideology represents the awful zenith of a very self-destructive trend. It doesn't get more extreme than "you can literally choose your sex".

And it all always, from the very start, ignored the paradox that if I "can be what I want to be" (ie. have the right to absolute self-actualisation), others have to give way to some degree. Because society only functions through compromise and negotiation. All rights and no responsibilities means... no rights either, in the end! Or rights for the more powerful, able and motivated to assert their superior worth (but not the plebs).

Which, again, we see in the way this movement takes hold more strongly in the aspirational educated middle-classes.

It really is a fascinating sign of the times. Some kind of tragic metaphor for future historians and writers.

Yes. And the internet supports this self-obsession and competitive marketing of one's "best self". Selfies, curated social media, collecting likes...

Ugh. We're doomed, we really are.

Very interesting post. Absolutely agree.

It also makes me think how shallow, limited and childlike much of it is - a deeply dumbed down version of 'actualisation' that is about removing effort, accountability or the social consideration that comes with maturity.

That you can take what you want at the expense of others IF you can justify it (with a lot of downloaded slogans and thinking) - you can be the exception to the rules that bind others and avoid the boundaries you dislike
That there are other ways to frame negative behaviours and inappropriacy that shift responsibility on to someone else - a stranger abruptly re cast as a carer or support worker
Downloaded thinking without it having passed through anyone's head or critical thinking on its way.

It's very limited understanding of what for hundreds of years has been the focus of philosophers, artists, all kinds of fields of humans, based on reading and shared knowledge, and a lifetime of evolving. This is kind of the quick cheap download and it doesn't work. Hence the constant then seeking for the next quick brightly branded 'fix'. A replacement for thought, effort, willingness to struggle and work, and a capacity to develop wider understanding of self and relation to society.

I feel like I should start a bingo card now. I've actually been on MN for years. I'm so old, I used to post on the feminism threads before they changed and became dominated by the trans issue.

I've posted under different names over the years, but now whenever I post on the feminism threads I can tick off the following comments on my virtual bingo card: 'Not a woman.' 'Not a feminist.' And now that I picked the name oxfordfeminist, I'm getting the comments, 'Not in Oxford.' 'Not an academic.' This is super predictable and happens on thread after thread. If I don't think the way women are supposed to think (according to the implicit 'rules' on the MN feminist threads), I'm not a woman! It's just an example of inflexibility and unexamined assumptions.

There's no way of proving that anyone on MN threads are who they say they are, unless they decide to out themselves (which we're not obligated to do). So people can think what they like, but maybe if you think someone like me can't possibly be a woman or a feminist or an Oxford academic, you need to expand your ideas. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they don't look remarkably ordinary in real life! Or remarkably like you and the other MNers posting on this thread.

Women and feminists and Oxford academics don't all think alike. This is partly why it's so difficult to make change happen at Oxford. The uni is literally run by the academics and staff, who vote in Congregation. They say that achieving consensus at Oxford Uni is like herding cats, and they're not wrong.

If the thread were more sympathetic, I'd stick around to debate, but it's not. I just want to make the point that there are plenty of decent women in the world who don't share the majority view on this thread. If I met you in person, I'd be happy to have a robust one-on-one debate, but not on threads like this, where it feels like an enormous echo chamber.

Cutted-up pear, Sistine chapel, Mexican house thief. LTB, no is a complete answer, did you mean to be so rude?

The only allegation people can legitimately make is that I spend far too much time on MN. Sometimes I go against my better judgement and jump into the anti-trans threads. I need to stick with the vast sections of MN where women don't attack and dehumanise each other.

Wishing you a nice day.

I find it very interesting that you felt the need to post all of that, to try to justify your apologist stance for a man who is probably making a lot of students uncomfortable, at the very least. Rather than just answer the few straightforward questions other posters have asked you.
Yes, quite interesting.

So @oxfordfeminist are you going to answer the questions that people have patiently been putting to you? Because otherwise this is a lot of words but which say little for your credibility We've all come across the 'I'd answer if x or y conditions were met' excuses before.

Do you just ignore questions in your 'academic' life, also?

Anyway, are you going to address any of the questions that have been posed to you here?

My academic interests are all in areas where Oxford has not made any significant contribution so I tend have no particular expectations of people associated with it. Some people see as a source of magic pixie dust.

Actually, novels where the protagonist(s) went to Oxford have to do a lot of extra work for me to read past the first few pages. It is meant to be a shorthand for charming and clever. But no.

Even though some of my best friends etc etc etc.

@oxfordfeminist welcome back. As a professional at an elite university you did not answer the simple question posed earlier about blackface/cultural in appropriation being acknowledged as wrong but Matt Rattley being allowed to where prosthetic breast having to be tolerated. Why is that?

If your bingo card requires you to then say this is ‘super predictable’, predictable is enough of a word in its own right. I would have scrolled by a ‘beyond predictable’. Why the super?

Anyhow looking forward to you responding with a simple answer, not an unnecessary essay, on the comparison to woman face/blackface/cultural inappropriate closing/presentation vs a man wearing fake rubber boobs having to be tolerated.

It may be that women on here are surrounded by courageous women who risk their personal safety, their careers & their wellbeing in order to fight the imposition of such a dangerous to the young and to women ideology.
There are also countless women who recount their fear of consequences for speaking out about safeguarding their children and protecting them from the belief their bodies are flawed and a sex change is the cure.

What we rarely see - except from a certain type of male poster - is someone who claims to be a woman and an educator of the young posting to openly support a man exhibiting a sexual fetish in an unprofessional and sexist way. He's objectifying a woman's body in a manner that should be unacceptable to all responsible adults.

It's not surprising that some posters think you're one of those regressive men stuck in the pornified 1970s where women were subjected to porn on display in offices, garages etc. Society was meant to have moved on from these regressive attitudes to women. Sadly it seems that Oxford Uni is still fostering them.

@oxfordfeminist this is not an anti trans thread as you suggest. It is a thread about a man wearing fake rubber boobs to teach students in an elite university/in the workplace.

Being sex realist and not pandering to men who think they are women or women who think they are men is not anti anything.

It is pro reality and pro truth. Which hopefully will mean we return to ensuring safeguarding for all is ensured.

Isn't it though. Almost as if OF can't answer the simple question, or knows if they do answer they beclown or be-lie themself.

You know what stood out to me though? "Oligated". US English. Creeping into UK dialogue these days via online discourse and businessese, but jarring in an Oxford academic. (And I know a lot of them!)

I don't think this bloke has said he's trans, has he?

This thread is about misogyny and harrassment of women via the manifestation of a fetish in the workplace.

He's just a mentally ill perverted man who enjoys making women uncomfortable. Why should he be indulged? Why don't women matter?

@oxfordfeminist feels this thread has not been sympathetic.

I suggest she goes and has an open, questioning conversation with her colleague Matt of the Big Boobies and sees how long it takes for him to become unsympathetic.

My money’s on about 3 sentences, which is why no one dares ask him what he’s playing at.

Let’s try applying the same standards and expectations to men as women and see what happens?

It certainly makes me glad to be a Cambridge feminist!

The capture is huge there too but at least three female undergraduates had the courage to start a women’s society.

No. Feminism is about improving the lives of all women and girls. "trans" is the complete opposite, men pretending to be women to destroy all dignity and safety for women and girls infiltrating what should be single sex spaces. Feminism cannot include "trans" ideology.

Back in the 1960s we used to say, of this sort of "you can be/have whatever you want" idea,

"Learn to play three chords on a guitar and you too can be one of the Beatles."

With the understanding that no you bloody well couldn't. Just as there was no chance you'd have the posh lifestyle that was often portrayed on the telly.

Back in the 1950s my mother was a Youth Employment Officer, and spent a lot of time sadly trying to get it through to aspirational Youth that if they wanted to be high-flying secretaries rather than being in the typing pool it would be necessary for them to be able to read and write and do shorthand, with knowledge of French an advantage, and that almost nobody who wanted to be a hairdresser got a job doing it and if they did they would usually spend a couple of years sweeping the floors not cutting hair.

quoting to highlight because this is exactly what it's about!!!

What a lot of words just to say you are a traitor to your own sex.

Last time I checked women were not a collective or a hive-mind and were allowed their own opinions.

It’s the putting Men’s wants before Women’s comfort and safety that’s makes her a traitor to her own sex.

But seeing as you brought up different opinions, maybe you can be the first to answer the question asked on the attached thread?

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5402604-5402604-jkr-asking-similar-questions-to-what-i-have-been-asking-for-years-on-here

Thing is, OxfordFeminist won't tell us what her opinions are. She can't - or won't - engage with straightforward and obvious questions which would explore these, unless we are "more sympathetic". Or whatever hoop we'll be presented with next. Goodness knows what she is like as a tutor or a researcher or anything academic (if in fact she really is).

Many of us have had enough of people ignoring women when they question things, and of telling women how they are allowed to speak.

An 'echo chamber'......

where you haven't been deleted, or banned, just robustly disagreed with - with a lot of explanations as to why, and what on, and why these issues exist - all of which you've ignored.

It's a mystery why on a women's rights forum there would be a strong majority view being expressed to you that this does not work for all women, which means that women have a responsibility to ensure that all women's needs are not trampled by men. Even if they don't (today) have that need themselves. Because one day they might. Their daughter might. Their sister might. Their friend might. It's that capacity to think of all.

When you want to throw aside women to indulge men - in this case a very grotty man with very grotty behaviour, who is laughing all over his face at all this bull protecting him from what someone would have said loudly and clearly to him in the first minute 20 years ago - it is sexist. And it's quite odd. It's bizarrely misogynistic. It shows a really worrying lack of capacity to feel for or care about anyone other than men expressing fetish and inappropriate sexual behaviours using non consenting women participants. For some reason your belief system involves not only ignoring and excluding women who cannot exist in spaces with men behaving like this, but actively trying to nag women into abandoning their rights, self respect, common sense and any grip on appropriate boundaries.

On a women's rights forum.

And you're surprised women aren't running to appreciate your 'different opinion'? Really?