gender / sex / sexual assault

Is student life becoming more sexist?

Jender10 Comments

Amy Masson, women’s officer at Sheffield students’ union… has noticed that promoters are using ever more sexist language to sell their club nights to students. “Because the club trade is in decline, clubs are getting more aggressive with their marketing strategy and are using overtly objectifying images to try and fight for that smaller slice of a smaller pie,” she says. “They are handing out flyers outside the student unions that promote sexual assault on nights out. The attitude of the promoters is that you will go on a night out, find intoxicated young women and have sex with them.”

 

For more, go here.

See also our previous post.

10 thoughts on “Is student life becoming more sexist?”

  1. Woah, I followed the links in the article linked.

    Some of them are totally toxic – I’d be very dismayed to discover any of my students read this sexist tripe:
    http://www.unilad.com/index.html

    Seriously, it is so dreadful, it is the kind of thing I might write if I were trying to come up with a ridiculous parody of a misogynist. Oh dear dear me.

    Is it actually real, or a (bad) joke?

  2. My university recently had a similar situation in which there was a student guide handed out which gave tips on how a guy should handle girls. Of course, there were girls involved in the situation as well claiming that the guide was just a harmless joke. At what level should we say ‘ok its a tasteless joke’ (assuming the people involved are sincere about it being a joke) and at what stage should we just condemn it, joke or not?

  3. To Stoat: As a student I’m fairly sure its a half a joke. My friends and I frequently parody the kind of behaviour that gets written about on the site… I’m just not sure how others would take it!

  5. hello anonymous! I have a number of things in response to that article- I’m also aware that what I write might offend people, so I have to be careful about the way I go about this:

    ‘No. You cannot unlock some secret double-not-racist achievement by just being regular racist.’- If you do not believe that coloured people are inferior to you based on their skin colour, then you are not a racist. A similar argument will work with the issue of sexism, but I do admit that I am a person who has a sense of humor which may offend others.

    ‘Here’s the thing about jokes. They only work when they’re aiming up.’- based on the author’s taste. but not everyone’s. Certainly not the kind of people she’s talking about, and especially not the kind of decent, kind, caring people that I am friends with who just happen to enjoy a ‘terrible’ (relative to the rest of a PC society) sense of humour, which includes both coloured people and girls.

    ‘and you keep doing it for fun…’ – I don’t, actually, and neither do the people I hang around with. I care about the people I’m around and I try not to offend them. If they are and they give me a chance, I will explain my beliefs on humour and its respective ‘ism’ and they usually accept my explanation. If they still disagree with me then I offer a sincere apology. My desire in humour is to make people laugh and achieve some kind of solidarity with that person, not to push them away! So at worst my humour can have some ‘ist’ or ‘ism’, but not me as a person. so I am not ‘pretending to say racist things’ I know I am saying them!

    ‘ if you really believe that all people are created equal, then when you see that drastic racial inequalities exist in the real world…’
    I also think her last argument trades on a slide in meaning: There is a difference between me thinking that people of different colours are fundamentally inferior, and people of different colours being treated as inferior by culture. I see the second, not the first. ‘so congratulations! you believe in racism!’ Yes I believe it exists (but I do not agree with it) and I believe that it’s very, very bad.

  6. I posted the article in response to your query ” I’m just not sure how others would take it!”. People take it as sexism, and if you don’t change certain behaviors in light of the awareness that other people are hurt by those behaviors, then I don’t know how I could ever possibly convince you to do otherwise.

    Bonus: just because it happens to be the most recent article up at womanist-musings, here is a response to “If you do not believe that coloured people are inferior to you based on their skin colour, then you are not a racist”. http://www.womanist-musings.com/2012/10/the-dictonary-and-marginalised-people.htm .

  7. I’m really sorry if it looked like I took it personally, I was curious if people wanted to start some in-depth discussion about the limits of our humour. On the other hand mate, your link doesn’t seem to be working!

  9. I think it is a little far fetched to say that student “party” life is getting more misogynistic.
    Slut shaming, using sex as a marketing technique, dressing provocatively for nights out, getting drunk and doing something stupid are no new phenomenons. Are they? Western culture has had this “young lifestyle” for many years.

    What is new however is all the attention media is drawing to it, the Facebook pages dedicated to these trends, the Everyday sexism blog etc. People are more openly starting to address this, sometimes as an issue, and sometimes as something completely natural. Millions and millions of people have access to such articles, blogs and pages, and their perceptions are frequently willingly or unwillingly changed by them. Here we should probably ask ourselves, how much good does it actually do young people when the Guardian publishes an article on slut shaming and misogyny. How likely is said article to influence young men positively instead of to lead them to think that if so many of their “bros” do it, it’s natural for them to join in as well?

    – MT

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