insideMAN

Is hatred of young men on campus just made up for click-bait headlines, or is it real?

by 6 Comments

On Friday the Independent posted an article, by an anonymous writer, demanding that “white men should never hold elected positions at British universities again” and that “being a student union president should no longer be a place for privileged white boys to swing their dicks around”.

Many people’s initial reaction was to check the date to see if it was April 1st already. But wind-up or not, the article actually  just expressed in blunt terms attitudes towards young male students that have become all too common. Here Spiked Online writer, Ella Whelan, describes what she saw first hand while recently studying at the University of Sussex.

****

Increasingly, students at UK universities are encouraged to act like children. Student Unions now give advice for everything from cooking to sexual relationships (the latter now being a compulsory workshop held at some of the top universities). Its seems that mistakes are now unacceptable at university, and not with regards to studies. Students are allowing their peers to police their private lives, from what music they play in the student haunts to the type of conversation that is and isn’t allowed between members of the opposite sex.

‘Palpable hatred of young masculinity’

The infantilisation of students in the name of protection has come at a great cost. My own alma mater Sussex university has recently introduced a series of Sexual Consent Workshops which seek to educate students on the proper way to conduct relationships without breaching consent. This is predominantly aimed at young men, as the potential rapists waiting to be educated, the main targets being sports clubs and anyone prone to drinking, flirting and geezer-style behaviour.

This is not only a huge problem for guys, but equally a terrible insult to women. What students unions seem to argue, is that young people can’t be trusted to have sex; women are too vulnerable and weak to make it clear what they want, and men are too boorish to understand the fundamentals of human interaction.

This palpable hatred of young masculinity amongst student activists and radical feminists in student politics is extremely fashionable. Last Friday The Independent ran an article, which was later pulled, by an anonymous writer calling for all white males to be banned from union elections.

Earlier in the week a campaign was called to pressurise The Gardenia, a late night cafe in Cambridge, to close after allegations of predatory male behaviour running unchecked. The Gardenia campaign is not a critique of some idiot overstepping the line, it is part of a wider attack on young men at university.

The two-word warning…

Lad culture and laddish behaviour is a new term to me. I started University four years ago, and have only heard these types of slogans come about recently. On Wednesdays the sports socials would tour around Brighton drinking heavily and making lots of noise, there would occasionally be the odd time in which you had to nudge a lad who was standing too close, but confident in my ability to give the two word warning to anyone I didn’t fancy, nights out were always great fun.

(Incidentally, the most persistent and annoying advances often came from PC poetry events and indie gigs at the Green Door Store, which often housed the loudest daytime feminist supporters.)

Flirting, meeting drunk strangers and sexual relationships at university are nothing if not messy,  spontaneous, and fun. Activists whose attempts to try to curtail young people from making mistakes claim to prevent rape, but all it does is treat individuals who are supposed to be adults like kids.

Rape is not a natural outcome of laddish behaviour, and a suggestion otherwise is extremely dangerous. What tends to be the underlying view in this type of feminism is a fear and distaste for working class boys who are laddish, like football, like a drink and generally don’t say please may I before they lean in for a kiss. In my experience, if you are unsure enough that you have to ask, the answer should be pretty clear.

‘Die Cis Scum’

I went to a university in which certain loud groups in student politics wore Die Cis Scum badges and marched around against rape culture on a Tuesday morning. The majority of students took no notice and continued to get pissed and do what they wanted.

However there is a danger in ignoring a pervading trend of censorship at university. Young lads seem to have been targeted the most under censorious student unions; Spiked Online’s recent rankings of UK universities attitudes to free speech found that there had been a total of twenty six bans of The Sun, twenty one bans of the Robin Thicke song ‘Blurred Lines’ and eight bans of ‘unruly sports teams’. The implication often made that all men are predisposed to be pigs is pathetic and untrue.

Sexism is not about simply being ‘nasty’ to women, and feminism is not about being sympathetic to women. The way to deal with the broader problems, which go far beyond petty squabbles over language, is to debate and discuss them freely.  If there are really people out there who today believe that the coarse comments of a few drunk lads are the real problem, then things are far worse than we thought.

By Ella Whelan

Photo: Flickr/Bryan Ledgard

Ella is a writer for Spiked Online and a research coordinator for Spiked Online’s Free Speech University Rankings.

The associated Down With Campus Censorship Campaign is running an upcoming tour of debates in Bristol, Cambridge, King’s, LSE and others. To find out more, visit the campaign website here.

You can also read more of Ella’s writing on her website here.

 If you liked this article and want to read more follow us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook
Also on insideMAN:
  • Paul Mills

    Being a young man at college can be scary and challenging – first time away from home, finding out who you are and settling into a whole new peer group and environment. Mix this with alcohol, drugs and hormones and you probably have the fastest and potentially bumpiest learning curve on the planet. This is of course true for boys and girls.

    Ella, you make many good points.

    The one that I zoomed in on was ‘ If you are unsure enough that you have to ask…. the answer should be pretty clear ‘ . Can I beg to differ? For me, and this is also true for many males, the quest towards clarity is anything but clear: Is she just being friendly? -how can you tell the difference? Does she fancy me – surely not goddesses only fancy Gods….. etc, etc . This is almost as true today at 49 as it was 30 years ago when I was at college! – and this is after 22 years of developing social skills and awareness under the skilled and caring tutelage of my beloved.

    So, universities need help in realising the folly of their approach and thinking and S U’s need help to recognise that they are there to serve students of both genders – not to dictate to and victimise those who are going through the most formative experience of their lives. If we fail in this the future for the education of young males at higher levels, looks very bleak indeed

    paul

  • Tim Alford

    Won’t be long before summary justice and kangaroo courts are a feature of our universities, like in the States. This is not hyperbole, there are NUS womens’ officers who will make it so, unless challenged. Centers of enquiry and open debate are becoming bastions of ultra-conservative orthodoxy.

  • Nigel

    Well done for this and indeed the campaign against censorship. I recall a report from one university where a campus sports club was banned. But the YouTube recordings showed it was an actually ribald but good natured exchange on a bus between a feminist soc. Group and some of the said team. There was a bit of hoo ha as a result of the obvious double standard in the treatment of the ( male) sports guys. 
    Perhaps a trivial example but this double standard moved onward in north America, propelled by a classic “moral panic” the end was Universities acting in prosecution of serious crimes ( or rather  alleged) and expelling or withholding degrees as punishments. Inevitably there are now a crop of legal cases against Unis. and anger from the police as these kangaroo courts also wrecked any prosecution cases. The casualties were both the individuals and the idea that Universities had any care for their male students. 

  • Nigel

    The reports about “laddish” behaviour in Universities in the UK and the growing replication of the “moral panic” in recent years North American Universities is a reminder of the dangerous tendency we in the UK have in following on our American cousins. The genesis of the stateside moral panic was a series of report on the early “noughties” on “Dating” abuse. These were replicated a few years later both in magazine “polls” and some serious attempts at research.

    The entirely un-scientific poll conducted through the NUS actually reports significant experience by male students of “laddette” behaviours, this is all the more surprising as the poll and its wording were clearly designed to encourage female respondents. This surprising data about males reminded me of the large scale reports done in the UK as a research response to the “Dating Abuse” research done in North America. Both in the content of the reports themselves, which in common with most done in the America showed often higher experience of abusive behaviours by young men than young women.

    Out of the academic research there is one key thing. That young men appear to have lower expectations about how they will be treated than they expect to treat females (this actually is shown by their tolerance of abusive behaviours towards themselves). In a way this shouldn’t have come as a surprise at all because our Anglophone cultures’ generally reflect a more protective attitude to girls and women and a much less protective attitude to males, indeed an expectation of being a protector in adulthood..

    Another important theme of the research is both sexes apply this differential. There is still a considerable measure of agreement among young people that males should be tough and females be protected.
    So the research found young women simply expect young men to “take it” and the young men expect to “take it”.

    The good news from the research is that the message about young women has got through and both sexes generally accord females them greater respect and regard it important that they don’t experience any abusive behaviours.
    A likely consequence of this differential, in the greater value given to females is that the same behaviours appear to be more emotionally troubling for the young women than the young men. Clearly the constant message to “suck it up” will build a presumption that unpleasant or unwanted treatment is simply “something that happens” rather than something young men have a right not to experience at all. However that isn’t to say the young men are not affected or they may under report their upset as part of the general “suck it up” culture. One wonders if this isn’t behind at least some of the much higher suicide rate for young men compared to their female contemporaries.
    Of course this may also be concerning as the result at some point may well be some very frustrated young men losing patience with the double standard they will have experienced.

    The large scale reports I refer to are below. I find it particularly poor that despite these being available they are not often cited for policy. For instance a Bristol University research paper is often cited but it was one done subsequently to the much larger report referred to below which was deliberately an attempt to have a sample that is representative of all young people. The smaller sample report was on young people in the care of councils and so a very small and specific population of young people. By definition an atypical population of young people.

    If one looks at the data and tables in the research reports cited below it is very clear that a there is a more complex picture than a “predatory male” model. Both in terms of violence and controlling behaviours but also in feeling forced or coerced into sexual behaviours. This is commented on as “surprising” by the authors as it doesn’t fit within the theoretical paradigm used to frame the research. Perhaps because research funding is within the Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy, the authors’ interest in doing further research on precisely the surprising findings with regard to young men’s experience and the surprisingly high level of abusing behaviour the young women themselves report towards their male partners has not been followed up.

    It is this sort of information that should drive education rather than a specifically political “cherry picking” ideology.

    Young People’s Attitudes Towards Gendered Violence. August 2005. Michelle Burman and Fred Cartmel. University of Glasgow. Published by NHS Health Scotland.

    Partner Exploitation and Violence in Teenage Intimate Relationships. Christine Barter,Malanie McCarry,David Berridge,Katy Evans. October 2009 . Bristol University Published by NSPCC

    Attitudes of Young People Towards Domestic Violence. 2007. Department of Health,Social Services and Public Safety. Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency.

    Domstic Violence in Adolescent Relationships. Nina Shutt July 2006. Safer Southwark Partnership.

    • Inside MAN

      Thanks for that thoughtful comment and those sources Nigel. I remember looking into the 2009 NSPCC study when it came out, as it was one of the key sources underpinning a government anti-domestic violence campaign targeted at teenagers at the time. The report cited not dissimilar rates of victimisation experienced by both teenage boys and girls, yet the government poster and TV advertising campaign solely depicted teenage male abusers and teenage female victims. Dan

  • Nigel

    Thank you Dan. The NHS research was particularly carefully done and free from the Bristol Unit’s habit of using quotes from small focus groups to spice up their findings. I commend it to any serious student of this issue. In the light of the subsequent events the Bristol Units follow on research on young people in the care system identified a problem with young women and men being abused by older men. This finding wasn’t in the first research looking at the representative population of young people, where typically a male parter is just a bit older. However policy for education in general  has been influenced by the latter special population  which , as we have learned, is describing some rather specific circumstances of “grooming” and rings of abuse preying on young people in or on the edges of the care system. 
    It seems to me really quite dangerous to so continually mis-represent young men’s actual experiences and build educational and policy interventions on these mis-representations.
    The finding that young men are generally remarkably tolerant of abusive behaviours against themselves may change if their forbearance is itself used as ammunition in their vilification.  Persistent application of a double standard must fuel frustration and suspicion.