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."

I do think we have dumbed down as a society over the past 10-15 years all under the umbrella of tolerance and live and let live.

I have been thinking about this recently. Young girls in the gym wearing barely there gym sets outlining pretty much all of their physique. People going to the supermarkets in pyjamas or dressed in scruffy clothes and sliders.

No I am not dressed in business wear all of the time but I aim to dress appropriately for the occasion if anything to show I understand the occasion deserves some respect or if I am helping out with a job that I am equipped to be of use.

I suppose I am saying the live and let live attitude allows people to stop thinking critically about anything other than what they want. Apologies for the slight derail here. I hope it makes sense.

My god we are now on page 32 of this thread, it's unbelievable.

How have we got here in society?! A bearded bloke (and not a very neat, clean beard either from the pictures) is wearing giant fake rubber breasts to his work. This should never even have become a thread. A senior manager should have had a quiet word the first day he strutted in with his rubber breasts and low cut top and had a stern, quiet word with him.

It's actually almost comical at how an apparent women feminist (!) is tying herself in knots defending this perversion. It's satire.

Only sadly there will be young females who feel uncomfortable and upset at being exposed to this. I know I would be. Thank god I was at university over 20 years ago, I'd have been supported to make a complaint about this if it had happened in our lecture hall.

Jesus, honestly. The lengths men go to for their sexual kicks is never ending.

Actually, I’d like to see that. How everyone would laugh!

Ah, missed the excellent image from @FlirtsWithRhinos

@INeedAPensieve to be honest I have got more and more frustrated over the past few years with seemingly intelligent and educated people tying themselves in knots to defend people who think they are ‘in the wrong body’. The general conversation goes along the lines of ‘well how does it affect you?’

Well if as a society we are now expected to simply accept peoples version of who they are then what next?

Buy a walking stick and expect us to believe you are disabled when the truth is you are not?

I actually think that is already happening. People are increasingly wanting their way of identifying to be an overvalued characteristic. (Credit to Mia Hughes for that description)

Where do the boundaries move to next? The term fat shaming was weaponised. We now have a huge problem with obesity and the co morbidities that go hand in hand with that. Fat shaming is not a nice term admittedly. However in the world of ‘be kind’ we now have people who are ill because the do gooders didn’t want to listen to anyone concerned about the epidemic of overweight children who are now adults. Sometimes being cruel to be kind has its place.

That video bothers me. Half of me thinks, yeah great. But half of me thinks, really? How does that work then?

And the third half of me thinks that was a nasty putdown of a student who raised a valid point that needed to be properly addressed. How do social workers - an assorted group of people with the usual set of prejudices and biases - get to know what's inside and outside the normal range? And what about the difference between "not normal" (unusual) and "harmful"? Even if the student was middle class and smug doesn't mean it wasn't a valid question or that she deserved to be "put in her place" just for asking it.

Especially in a theory class. That's exactly the place to ask what we mean by "normal".

I hope that students learn to make those judgements in the course and that's part of what it's for. But the judgment is never going to be 100% and to say that a student who questions her own ability to do it shouldn't be a social worker at all strikes me as dangerous. It easily flips into "I'm a social worker so I know what's normal".

The 'normal' question is another way of putting what I wrote upthread. It's arguably not 'normal' for a man to have breasts of any size; rubber, surgical, hormone induced, whatever. But this is now accepted. How to police how large a set of fake breasts a man is allowed to sport? IANAL so perhaps there is a way of writing a dress code that a half decent lawyer couldn't drive a coach and horses through.

I think part of the issue is we did have dress codes years ago but often unwritten. Then ‘dress down Friday’ - some stipulations as to what as acceptable/unacceptable. For me then the whole capture of organisations saw people writing policy to trounce these societal norms and understandings to specifically ensure people identifying as the opposite sex had their overvalued characteristics pandered to. Sadly in all of this pandering to men we have seen the abuse and mutilation of vulnerable young woman dressing up normal anxiety around woman hood under the suggestion they might actually be male. Top surgery sounds so innocuous when the term should be double mastectomy of healthy breasts. We have utterly failed as a society.

And the third half of me thinks that was a nasty putdown of a student who raised a valid point that needed to be properly addressed. How do social workers - an assorted group of people with the usual set of prejudices and biases - get to know what's inside and outside the normal range? And what about the difference between "not normal" (unusual) and "harmful"? Even if the student was middle class and smug doesn't mean it wasn't a valid question or that she deserved to be "put in her place" just for asking it.

That's a good point. The trouble is that when people say "What's normal anyway?" they often think they're making some clever-arse point, namely that we're all different, normality is socially constructed, there's no such thing as normal, just social convention etc. Whereas the lecturer's point is that kind of thinking gets you to the stage where you tolerate all sorts of horrors because, hey, there's no such thing as normal.

In fact, I'd argue that that's exactly where we are with rubber-tits man because we are now accommodating stuff that is far beyond the range of what used to be regarded as normal on the basis of, hey, nothing's normal anyway.

So my sympathy is largely with the lecturer, while also conceding that "What's normal anyway?" is a valid point, particularly when it comes to ethnic minority communities that may have a very different set of cultural traditions.

"Oxford academic who's a beardy bloke with comedy fake tits" would have been rejected as an Alan Partridge interviewee 30 years ago for being too ridiculous.

Yes and social workers are as prone to cult like, illogical, non-evidence based sheeple thinking as others, as the Rachel Meade case highlighted. It should be the case that the safeguarding framework prevents ideological bias getting in the way via checks and balances. It's not working, clearly.

Agreed. I very much want the bank to accept my self-ID as a millionaire and pay off my mortgage with my imaginary millions. I don't see why that's any more unreasonable than Biggus Titus wanting everyone to pretend he's not acting out a fetish in the workplace.

Yes, this question should have been an opportunity for the lecturer to help the students to understand what 'normal' looks like. If the students' job is going to be to have a grasp of what is normal, surely it's part of the lecturer's job to help the students to understand what is normal and what isn't.

Just saying "you should have this ability" without any assistance in gaining this ability is profoundly unhelpful. It seems to me that the lecturer thought this was too difficult to answer, and took the easy option of a nasty put down of a student asking an awkward question.

I've got a question about the full length door design but I don't want to go off topic on this thread. Would it be okay to quote you on a new post?

I think you've misunderstood. It wasn't a genuine question. It was basically "Well, who's to say what's normal these days anyway?". It's that kind of 'so open- minded your brains have fallen out' hand waving that people like OF demonstrate.

And I would assume that this is indeed included in the training.

I don't think I've misunderstood, I just don't like the answer. Even if the quesstion isn't "genuine" that answer shuts down critical thinking rather than opening it up.

Who would dare to ask "so... are lesbian couples normal parents?" after that? That discussion is now closed to all those students.

Yes, am at work so juggling stuff a bit.

That makes me realise how ironic the "Well, how does it affect you?" is.

It's intended - at least in part - to demonstrate the selflessness of the asker and selfishness of the person being challenged.

But, truly, it's the other way round; the question betrays such an egocentric outlook.

It's basically saying, "If it doesn't affect you [ie. the individual, the self, so - by extension - the logic goes, me], then it can't be an issue."

And this exposes two things about the speaker: 1) their difficulty conceiving of (or accepting) how much others' experiences and perspectives may contrast their own ("It doesn't affect me, therefore I can't see how it could affect you!") and 2) an inability (or refusal) to recognise the wider social consequences - to understand the complexity of the social contracts (buying but also selling; taking but also giving) which are necessary to a functioning, healthy society.

And it suggests that, if they see 2) at all, they see it through the blinkered lens of 1): "I am giving, by being 'inclusive' in this one, particular way." And that's not really an understanding of 2) at all, because understanding 2) requires recognising that rights aren't a neatly cutted-up pie but must be negotiated (and women aren't rights-hoarding dinosaurs, Lammy 😠).

I do find it interesting to see when OF disappeared. I'm wary of saying this - who knows what's happening at their end - but in general terms, it's such a clear pattern among visitors using those same old lines. If they come back at all, it's usually when enough time's elapsed since the last difficult question that it can be more safely avoided. And often tellingly soon after a much, much easier post for them to challenge has appeared, as the moment they focus on that, conversation's carried even further from the issue they want to avoid.

I know it's rough to be in the minority here, but I find it so hard to understanding visiting here knowing the kind of perspectives expressed and persisting in opposing these... but doing so so obviously inadequately. If I'd come along wanting to change hearts and minds, I'd be diving right into debating the most challenging and popular questions. And OF claims to be able, and want, to do that - calling for academic rigour early on, and more recently, nuance.

To call for this but then not to recognise or even model it kind of suggests a visitor never really wanted to debate and came for a different reason entirely, or don't have any answers anyway - or that they suspect, on some level, the weakness of these answers. Or, maybe, they think answers just aren't necessary - which takes us back to this being a kind of religious dogmatism, with tambourine-wielding evangelists...

Whatever, it just seems to undermine their cause. I sometimes want to take over and try to argue it for them. I mean, the blackface thing is fascinating, and not entirely straightforward. There are some strong arguments that it's not an appropriate equivalence, from a historical, logical and ethical perspective. I think we could steelman (is that the word?!) it here pretty well tbh, in a way our visitors just don't seem prepared even to try...

I'm really tempted to engage with some of the questions, but it's such a hostile and one-sided space here, it feels like a self-destructive exercise from my point of view (in that I'm just setting myself up to be attacked). As I said, I'm very happy to chat about this with people one-on-one, but the MN feminist threads have a strong trend of belittling/insulting language ('you're like Aunt Lydia! you're a handmaiden!', 'you're a traitor to your sex!' etc). So it feels like a defeatist exercise.

About blackface, I would say that race and gender are very different issues, and in some ways it's a big red herring (not to mention downright racist) to conflate the two.

I decided to respond to the 'you are not who you say you are' issue as that's more straightforward. Very simply, I am who I say I am. But responding in that way could be seen as self-defeatist too, because there's no way of proving that on MN without outing yourself in real life.

I used to try to argue in good faith on these threads and explain the rationale behind trans-inclusive feminism, but I don't do that any more, because the issue is so emotive and it inevitably turns into a massive pile-on.

You can criticise me for that, fine, but even relatively resilient people need to look after their own mental health.

Please note that I haven't accused anyone on this thread of not being a feminist. To me, feminism is a broad church, and intelligent women can espouse a diversity of views. I hate dogmas of all kinds, and I'm endlessly careful not to impose a dogma on my students.

I posted on this thread not to say 'I teach at Oxford, my point of view is ultimate truth' but to say, 'I'm at Oxford, I'm actually a colleague of Matt R, and this is how I see things.'

Feel free to disagree. I don't have the time or capacity to reply to all the comments, nor do I have all the answers. My main goal is to point out that feminists don't need to 'other' one another.

What do you think about the students who feel othered and creeped out by Matt's massive fake tits? They'll definitely exist.

What do you think the University's responsibility to them is, to have a place where they can study without feeling they are being used as an unconsenting participant in a fetish?

About blackface, I would say that race and gender are very different issues, and in some ways it's a big red herring (not to mention downright racist) to conflate the two.

To compare is not to conflate. Though I can see how someone who doesn't wasn't to engage could mix the two up and add an accusation of racism to avoid having to explain what they believe to be the difference.

There was nothing red-herring nor racist about the academic paper discussing drag and blackface linked upthread , which I assume you didn't have time to read.

I don't see it as a fetish, sorry.

I would return to the point that this lecturer should be judged on the basis of what they say and how they teach, not on what they're wearing.

Ok @oxfordfeminist if you do not see a man wearing oversized rubber breasts as a fetish please could you describe how you see it?