“The pursuit was set to begin at the college’s gates and the foxes, selected for invitation based on their attractiveness, were given obstacles to avoid or face “a mauling” from their pursuers.”
There has been a whole load of uproar recently surrounding some pretty disgusting behaviour at Oxford. I hear about both the Pembroke controversy and the St Hugh’s debacle, I hear everyone’s two cents on it and rightfully I hear it condemned.
However, the issue is not localised to lads chanting in a back room of some grand establishment. This is the tip of the iceberg. This clownish tip that splashes its way through the media, draws attention away from the big, ugly iceberg it belongs to; a culture dangerously neglectful of consent which we are all a part of.
Yes, every nice (male and female) student of Oxford can be morally outraged by this behaviour. We love to identify the bogey man, the nasty misogyny and make clear that it is far and away from us, and then run off to our ‘Golf Pro’s and Tennis Ho’s’ party.
The Pembroke and St Hugh’s perpertrators have not miraculously emerged with this disrespectful discourse; tellingly none of the recent controversies shocked me. There seems to me to be two entrenched and dangerous ideas surrounding gender that facilitate these seemingly anomalous cases of barbaric sexism.
1. First is the normativeness of men. Men are the status quo, the zero; women are the sidekick, something a little different. As such men are human beings capable of honing every kind of facet – free agents. Men’s issues are simply people’s issues. Women tend to be identified as ‘something other’. The amount of categorised things labelled ‘women’s’ well outweighs ‘men’s’. And this exotic breed, the ‘woman’, is categorised more often than not, as the sexy sidekick to the free agent male. Golf pro’s and tennis ho’s, CEOs and corporate ho’s – all of these insinuate men can be professional, flourishing humans valued on a variety of bases, whilst women are reduced to appearance, to pretty objects to cheer from the sidelines. Think of pioneering careers as doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs. The amount of times ‘doctor’ is assumed to denote a male is absurd. Then consider careers traditionally seen fit for a woman: nursing, nannying, becoming a maid, teaching and secretarial jobs. All of these cater to the pioneering jobs, there to serve and make the sculpting of a path easier for the free agents above. But this categorisation goes further than sidekick. Now consider how many porn videos could be found hyper-sexualising these traditional ‘female roles’: ‘Sexy teacher seduces unruly student’ or ‘Innocent babysitter seduced by father’. It is not just bad boys at university making women passive and sexy. It is an idea that manifests itself everywhere. It is what inspires young men in clubs to grope, builders to whistle and encourages girls to keep quiet and accept this norm as our lot in life.
2. The second entrenched idea adds to this dangerous culture: women as sexual challenges for men to win. The idea that men chase women has been quite unmoving since Victorian courtship. However, now it occurs at the corner of clubs on Friday nights amidst considerable degrees of intoxication. In these engagements classically, the woman says no, to show that she is ‘lady-like’ and continues to act coy until she relents. This is all well and good if the girl knows this unclear game and does actually want to talk to the guy. However, this dynamic seems to have made it near impossible to say ‘no’ and have anyone respect this. We ‘have a boyfriend’ or ‘are on our period’ strangely frequently on nights out because if a girl says ‘no’ from her sexy tower it just makes a more exciting climb for the boy. We are all affected by this. Girls are raised to be ‘good’ (whatever that means) and are often uncomfortable openly approaching guys or admitting to enjoying sex and sometimes feel that once something has gone so far after a night out that they have lost agency and owe the guy something for fear of being a tease. Whilst boys often will continue to be the cheeky chappy at the bar after a girl has made some attempt at rejecting his advances and sometimes will take things further afterwards without looking for signals that this is what the girl really wants and is comfortable with. It is not the case that if she does not say no, she means yes.
If the relations of men and women hold on to these ideas; women will continue to be generally restricted to sexy sidekicks; to being passive and aesthetically beautiful objects suited to serving. And crucially, genuine consent is too often lost because these sexy objects are held as conquests for the free agents to achieve. Girls are made aware that they represent sex by every leering man in the club and on the street and because of this supposed responsibility and this passive role, there is a great acceptance and silence surrounding this culture. ‘I shouldn’t have brought him back if I wasn’t going to go through with it’; ‘I shouldn’t have gotten so drunk and lost control’; ‘My shorts were quite short when he whistled at me’. These guilty sentences are the everyday discourse of women ashamed of not reigning in responsibility for a sexuality pinned upon them. Women are not the instigators and yet all too often rape and abuse are women’s issues for them to internally deal with. This is victim blaming within a rape culture that engulfs us all.
Women’s issues are people’s issues, and the more awareness we have of these dangerous norms the more we can tear our brains away from mindless acceptance of entrenched culture. When we imagine a male upon hearing ‘Doctor Smith’ we are, on a more subtle scale, a part of the bigger picture caricatured by St Hugh’s/Pembroke lads. Innocent yet sly fresher foxes are passive, sexy sidekicks ready to be conquered, just as assuming a male ‘Doctor Smith’ automatically holds the male as the opposite – the free agent. I may be starting to sound like a broken record but these recent scandals are simply two conspicuous manifestations of these dynamics among the hundred occurring around us everyday. Look for them and don’t accept them where you personally do not want to.
Little will change immediately but if we recognise the bogey man in ourselves then he becomes exposed and hopefully less harmful. For when he lies unexposed as we conveniently point our fingers at others outside of our everyday context, he has the opportunity to seep into every crevasse of society.