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Lad culture thrives in our neoliberal universities
Originally published in The Guardian “Now she’s dead but not forgotten, dig her up and fuck her rotten,” so chanted this year’s freshers at Nottingham University, in an incident hot on the heels of the revelation that the LSE men’s rugby team had distributed a freshers’ leaflet full of racist, classist, homophobic and sexist slurs. As the academic year began, these episodes were reported as emblematic of student “lad culture”, defined in a National Union of Students (NUS) report as a competitive male chauvinism disguising itself as “harmless banter”. Isabel Young and I co-authored this report, which showed how such sexist…
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‘Normal birth’ and ‘breast is best’ – the neoliberalisation of reproduction
Originally published in Cost of Living In July this year Sir Marcus Setchell, recently retired surgeon gynaecologist to the Royal Family, made his first public statements about the birth of Prince George. Jenni Murray, interviewing him on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour almost a year after the event, asked him whether he had been entirely necessary. His answer, that although what happens in labour is ‘an entirely private matter’ there are certain situations which might require a specialist to be in the room, prompted much speculation in the papers. The implication was clear – was The Duchess of Cambridge’s delivery really…
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‘I am a victim of nothing but my own bad choices’: Women Against Feminism and neoliberal individualism
Originally published in The F Word A group called ‘Women Against Feminism’ has recently been making the news. Now up to almost 20,000 likes on Facebook, the initial buzz was around its Tumblr where (mostly very young) women post photos of themselves holding messages about why they don’t want to be feminists. There are a variety of reasons, all of which seem to rest on bottom-line misunderstandings of what feminism is – predictably, not wanting to be seen as a man-hater is perhaps the most ubiquitous. But, almost as frequently, these young women cite “not being a victim” as the cause…
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What’s driving the new sexism?
Originally published in the New Statesman “Rape, rape, rape.” Last week saw news of police investigating a group of young men, believed to be members of Cambridge’s drinking society The Wyverns, who had been videoed chanting this while marching down Oxford’s high street. This came days after it was revealed that Premier League chief Richard Scudamore had exchanged emails with senior colleagues in which women were referred to as “gash”. These incidents gave grist to recent discussions about whether sexism has become particularly vicious – for instance, Zoe Williams has described a “new nastiness, something gleeful in the anger…that amounts…
Alison Phipps 