Flair, we need to talk (bis)

(For my English-speaking readers, please do forgive me this entry in Dutch. A translation may be coming at a later time.)

Beste Flair-redactieleden,

Duidelijk kan ik het niet laten en ben ik een recidivist, dus bevind ik me weer in jullie digitale compagnie. De eerste keer dat ik jullie schreef, hoorde ik zelfs geen roze krekel tsjirpen in het gras, hoewel m'n schotschrift druk gelezen en gedeeld werd, vaak met jullie magazine er bij getweet en getagd. Misschien mag ik nu wel hopen op een reactie?

Het was vermoeiende werkdag vandaag, en tevens een dag rondzwemmen door diverse mediakanalen waar het jammer genoeg weer bijzonder hard rook naar het hardnekkige zweet van seksisme ('s ochtends ergens op een affiche het logo van 'Jupiler: Zielige Macho's Weten Waarom'; 's middags me mogen verheugen in de "opinies" van Guido Everaert en Marc Didden die ik moest inhalen en die medium speelden voor Louis Majors "die wijven moeten zo veel complimenten niet maken"; en 's namiddags een injectienaald verdriet in het hart over een vrouw die eerlijk vertelt over hoe genormaliseerd ongewenste aanrakingen, intimidaties en schoftengedrag anno 2015 nog altijd zijn). Ik stond aan te schuiven in de supermarkt toen ik op de radio reclame hoorde voor jullie superkekke 'Mannenvertaalwoordenboek' die blijkbaar bij de nieuwste editie hoort van jullie magazine.

Ik voelde al nattigheid hangen, en de vooruitblik op de website, nadat ik thuis de obligate avondboterham had gegeten, bevestigde dat alleen maar. De Flair-mythe van "de man" als een homogene groep debielen die nog niet eens juist kan praten of niet begrijpt dat "de vrouw" een soort infantiel wezen met een prinsessencomplex zou zijn, is nog steeds, al meer dan 25 jaar, springlevend.

Het ergste is: ik ben er zeker van dat jullie die onzin zelf niet eens geloven. Dat hebben enkele redactieleden onder jullie me zelfs persoonlijk verteld, tijdens een gezellige cafébabbel ergens in het najaar van 2013. Het is "ach, onze lezeressen lezen dat graag". Ik ga even voorbij aan het lef dat je eigenlijk moet hebben om zo neer te kijken op je eigen lezerspubliek, maar is het nog allemaal om te lachen als de eerstvolgende keer dat een man bekent aan zijn date dat zijn ex gestoord was, dat daarop een uitgebreide ondervraging volgt over zijn eigen trouw. Misschien dat die man wel denkt "ja, klaar, weer iemand wiens verstand compleet van de rails gaat".

Of nee, wacht, ik hoor het al komen. Het is ludiek bedoeld. Het is met een knipoog. Alleen is dit soort "humor" al uitgemolken sinds Al Bundy voor het eerst de sullige en verslagen huisvader speelde in 'Married with children', en worden mensen elke dag zo hard gebombardeerd met stereotyperingen rond m/v dat het niet mooi meer is. Clichés papegaaien kan iedereen.

Ik weet dat er op zijn minst enkele redactieleden zijn onder jullie die zichzelf toch wel als feminist beschouwen. Welaan dan, schaam jullie. Schaam jullie van onder het mom van een fijnere wereld te willen creëren voor vrouwen, jullie nog altijd geen enkel stereotype in vraag durven stellen met meer diepgang dan een soepbord (een vrouw met maatje 40 in een mooie jurk en mascara stoppen is niet het summum van gendergelijkheid), en damn you om steeds weer opnieuw "de man" te vernauwen tot een achterlijke seksmaniak. Af en toe krijgt zo'n exemplaar zelfs toelating om jullie lezeressen in te lichten over hoe ze hem, de Casanova-come-lately, het beste kunnen behagen.

Zelfkritiek binnen gevestigde media-instituten is nog altijd een heikel punt. Jullie zijn er niet alleen mee. Ondertussen ben ik wel verdomde blij dat er alternatieven zijn voor jullie eindeloze stroom aan roze getitelde stukjes over hoe je af moet raken van cellulitis. Er is nu al een tijd een machtig initiatief als Charlie: divers, actueel, met inhoud, en bijna volledig voor en door slimme vrouwen. Daarvoor doe ik mijn hoedje af. Misschien kunnen jullie er nog iets van leren, indien het tij van de geschiedenis jullie niet inhaalt.

Student life and sexism, revisited

A frat bro in the United States sends an e-mail to his bros how to 'lure rapebait' and apologises after the outcry. The @EverydaySexism channel was littered with demeaning and predatory remarks from British male uni students as freshers' week started. In Belgium and the Netherlands, a lot of student associations have long carried a reputation for boorish sexism in the name of 'tradition', with associated hazing rituals that some consider pointless and humiliating.

Last year, I already wrote a piece on sexism in student life, but I feel the topic is worth revisiting because of my personal experiences. I'm going to be focusing on Belgium here, but I suspect that a lot of what I'm saying will be true for the Anglo-Saxo and German-speaking world as well.

 

First notions

When I was 18 and started my first year at the university, my mind was filled with preconceptions about student life and student clubs. I thought the people involved with the club that was officially affiliated with my study program seemed nice enough, but never went to any of the events with a harder edge. Like most people, I only signed up because they offered a discount on our required reading list.

If you'd have asked me to make a semantic field around 'student club', it would have contained the following words: alcohol, hazing, humiliation, abuse of authority, sexual degradation, bullying, sexual predation, stupidity, pointless rituals and partying.

 

Formative years

Due to circumstances, I became close friends with one of the club's board members in the next academy year, and he slowly introduced me to everybody else. To my astonishment, I was proven wrong about most of my preconceptions (the alcohol and partying thing was totally true, though, and I have zero regrets about either).

In the following years and as I further matured as a person, I got involved in student life more deeply, and eventually spent four years on the board of my student club, one of which as president, overseeing the day-to-day affairs and planning of a club that counted some 800 members and a hard core of about 50 very active members.

As for many people, my university years were formative for the rest of my life. I developed some - hopefully - life-long friendships, gained more perspective on things, and developed skills that would prove to be essential for my professional life. My study program gave me insight and knowledge, but it was my time at the student club that taught me the most about human relationships, power, empathy and responsibility.

 

Rose-tinted view?

You might say here that I'm seeing things through rose-tinted glasses here. I mean, what about the stupid traditions and humiliations of freshmen? For one thing, our club didn't really do hazing - our study program tended to attract people who were revolted by or scared of the practice, and as a club, you're supposed to be there for your potential members.

Of course, during the 'cantus', arguably the most traditionalist aspect of Flemish student life, people who went out of bounds were invariably punished for it. But here's the thing: nobody was ever singled out for disproportionate punishment, and the nature of power dynamics during a drunken sing-along fest is always a subtle play between leader and audience, not a one-man show where a tin pot dictator rules the day.

Our mutual familiarity also ensured that we often knew where invisible boundaries were, how we could rile each other up or prank each other in good nature. To some, it may sound horrible that forced a fellow student to douse themselves in a cascade of beer, but we knew each other. He knew what punishment he was setting himself up for, the audience knew, and we'd shared drinks, food and stories many times before.

 

Youth organisations

At the end of the day, a student club is not that different from any other youth organisation. Practices and traditions between chapters vary wildly, but they all provide a context for people to gain a sense of belonging, have fun and develop skills that are important later in life.

So why are student clubs saddled with this highly negative image? Is nothing true of all those wild, lurid tales of excess and abuse? Let me get to that in a moment. As I pointed out at the beginning of this post, before I entered student life, my perception of student life was negative, too. I considered this in my years within the club, as well, and here are my hypotheses for this negative image:

- Sensationalism and alarmism. If it's got to do with young people and sex, you can bet the media love turning it into an overblown story about 'kids these days', a tradition that stretches back to the Sumerian civilisation. A good deal of slut-shaming may be involved as well.

- Fetishisation of students. As much as high school is sexually objectified in the US, so is university in Flanders. For many men, female students are either a fantasy throwback to their own university years, or a fantasy of something they could never have.

- Ignorance of higher education. The majority of people never went to university and has no clue how student clubs are run or work, or are even openly hostile towards the display of intellectualism and freedom they provide.

- Exclusion. Some clubs are exclusive in nature, or conversely, some people are afraid of signing up because of prejudices like I had, resulting in a weird form of mockingly jealous resentment.

- Visibility. The most extreme student clubs are also the ones that are most visible in the street. They don't even need to be extreme to be visible: during the 'cantus', a lot of people wear the typical worn lab coat, ribbon or cap in the street, and a cantus happens to be one of the most rowdy activities, so the association is quickly cemented to outsiders' eyes.

 

So what about the horror stories then?

As I've noted before, student associations are highly heterogenous in nature. Some have hazing rituals, some don't, some cling to sexist traditions that other clubs frown upon, some have a reputation for producing power-mad little tyrants, some are very accepting and horizontal.

There is no point denying that student life has a sad history of sexism. One need only to read some song lyrics from the official 'codex' used at the sing-drink festivities to understand this. There's also no point in denying that indeed, bad or indifferent leadership can give budding sexual predators the chance - if they aren't already in power themselves - to manipulate and humiliate young people.

This really is a point that student associations have to address. Be as it may that I've always tried to curb excesses - and so did many of my friends and fellow members! - there have been moments between individual members or members with some social clout that were clearly not okay. Stupid and sexist comments. People too drunk to resist advances (both male and female). They were the exceptions rather than the rule, but I still regret not having the clarity of mind then that I do now.

 

What to do?

Student clubs have made progress in the past decades. For example, most cities have a system of charters, procedures and controls for hazing rituals, and the steady influx of women and minorities has taken off a lot of hard edges. Within and between clubs, there are big debates about what aspects are worth retaining, and under what form, and what aren't.

More progress could and should be made. Tradition was and is never a good excuse for behaviour that is little more than power abuse and discrimination. Senior leaders in the student community should definitely be more vigilant, and not hand-wave away criticism as the bile of a few bitter people.

Many young people love to experiment and push boundaries, in all possible ways. A healthy, vibrant student club can provide a safe context, with like-minded people, where that is possible, whether an inexperienced student wants to start dabbling in politics, is curious about trying out new types of beer, or really looking for romance. It's all possible.

 

Take note

It would serve critics not to discount the lived experiences of many people like me. For us, our student time and our involvement with a student club was a formative experience in a good way, turning us into the resilient adults that we are today. Obviously, many student communities have glaring issues to address, but let's stop this confirmation bias that so many people have about student life.

Student life and sexism

I posted about this on another forum, too, but I also wanted to share it on this blog. It's a reaction to the outrage on this article:

Last week, the Everyday Sexism Project received a message from a student about to start her first year studying physics at Imperial College, London.

The message included a forwarded email, which she said had been sent by the Physics Society to all first year physics students. It read "Freshers' Lunch...This will be mainly a chance for you to scope out who's in your department and stake your claim early on the 1 in 5 girls."

For female students to be sent an email from a university society marking them out as sexual prey before they’d even started their course seemed extreme and inappropriate. But a few days later, we received another email, this time from a freshers' week volunteer. He wrote of his distress at the "horrific normalisation" of sexist attitudes and sexual pressure during the week’s festivities.

He described a group of excited male first-years who told him about “slut dropping”. The process, they explained, involves driving around town with friends in the early hours of the morning and offering a lift home to a young woman they deem a “slut” (usually a woman in a “post-club state”). After asking her address, they drive as fast and as far as possible in the opposite direction before forcing the woman out of the car and using a camera to film her “standing by the side of the road as they drive away”.  It’s difficult to know how widely this has occurred but the concept is reminiscent of a disturbing new trend of ‘slut-shaming’. On one occasion, the first-year added, it had taken the girl eight hours to get home. When asked how he knew, he explained that they were ‘friends’ on Facebook.

Another message came from a student distressed about the inclusion of a “Slag ‘n’ Drag” themed club night as part of the freshers’ week festivities at the University of York. The university’s student newspaper, Nouse, describes the event as “the one night of Freshers ‘…where a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it’”. It goes on to say that “the girls rock out in their best bra and French knicker combo [sic]”.

A quick Google search demonstrates that such events, where male students are given the opportunity to dress in a humorous way whilst girls are expected to dress sexually or arrive scantily clad, are far from rare fixtures on freshers’ week schedules. Themes range from ‘Tarts and Vicars’, ‘Rappers and Slappers’ and ‘Geeks and Sluts’ to ‘Golf pros and Tennis hoes’.

The Lancaster University Students’ Union website boasts an event entitled “Slut-droppers vs Moshers” and the Women’s Officer at the University of Sheffield Students’ Union wrote an open letter to complain to local club Carnage about a “Pimps and Hoes” themed night, which she said seemed to be “exclusively aimed at students”. This hasn’t stopped a “Pimps and Hoes” event being advertised on the University of Derby Student Union website, or the similarly inappropriately named “Cherry Popper presents…” event appearing on the University of Wolverhampton Students Union site, while Dundee University Students’ Union proudly announced its own “CEOs and Corporate Hoes” themed night.

Perhaps the intention is light-hearted. But it is sobering to consider that these fresh cohorts of new students, perhaps amongst them the CEOs of the future, both male and female, are being sent the message by their own universities that men are CEOs, Pros and Geeks – powerful, talented, intelligent, whilst women are condemned to derisive sexual valuation alone.

Meanwhile, female first-years at the University of Kent were “horrified” when their freshers’ week culminated in a show by a hypnotist who allegedly made them perform lap dances and told them “When you wake up, you will think he touched you up just now.”

When we asked about freshers’ week experiences on Twitter, responses came thick and fast:

“At our [Student Union]…girls had to suck the choc off a kit kat chunky placed between a blokes [sic] legs”.

“Contest where girls had to dance on stage. Most cheers win. Girls encouraged to take off items of clothing. No guy version.”

“I think sex acts are a big 'funny' thing at uni. My friend was asked to deep throat a hotdog for free drinks.”

One woman wrote to tell us that the sexual pursuit of female freshers was nicknamed “seal-clubbing” at her university, effectively highlighting the worrying dynamic of vulnerability added by the fact that many students are experiencing their first week away from home. Pressure to take part in sexual situations and ‘make a joke’ of serious issues impacts male students too, with one particularly disturbing report we received reading:

“Flatmate quit lacrosse team when given team 'rules' stating that members don't date - that was what rape was for.”

Another wrote: “men's hockey team had fancy dress party at Student Union bar. Theme was rape victims. So awful its [sic] unbelievable but its [sic] true”

A 2010 study conducted by the National Union of Students revealed that of a nationwide sample of 2000 female students, 14% had been seriously physically or sexually assaulted, 68% were subject to sexual harassment and nearly a quarter had experienced unwanted sexual contact whilst at university. Given the severity of these statistics, it might be time to try a new theme for freshers’ week.

Author’s note:  The third paragraph has been amended to clarify that there has only been one reported incident of 'slut-dropping'.

Student unions and associations all over the world seem to have a serious (image) problem with this. Allow me to weigh in with a little experience from inside such a union - I was a member for four years, and on the board for three years, one year of which as president. Of course, you may also take my opinions and experiences with a grain of salt because I'm a man, and maybe doubly so because I'm from mainland Europe (though I doubt the latter really matters).

- Media love, love, love to report in the grossest and most sensasionalist terms about young people and sex. Whether the take is that young people risk disease, sexual predation or a prediliction for unhinged experimentation, there's always an undertone of apocalytpic fervour about it. That's not to say excesses don't exist or some trends can't be worrying, but their proportional occurrence is usually overstated. For instance, a few years ago, local media reported a craze where girls would insert vodka-soaked tampons into their ladyparts to speed up alcohol absorption. The story was widely debunked afterwards, but it stuck with many people as an example of "degenerate youth".

- Student life in particular seems to carry that twisted undertone of being young and getting to have as much sex as you can or want, while for the majority of students, it's anything but. Most sudents are somewhat shy, not that experienced and yes, curious, but most guys certainly aren't embryonic rapists waiting to hatch from their Nice Guy shells, and neither are most girls okay with being objectified for the sake of social acceptation. I don't doubt that what the article says is all true, but in my experience, stuff like that was not the norm, and mostly occurred with student unions that were already populated for the largest part by guys (most unions here are co-ed), or unions that had a seedy reputation to begin with, and thusly only attracted seedy people. Not that it makes it okay or that it shouldn't receive any scrutiny, but I do want to point out that it's not the norm, at least where I'm from.

- Since 2002, the student union I was part of annually hosted such a 'pimps & hoes' party. One of the reasons for its success was that most of the girls who came felt comfortable with it was because they knew the majority of people there personally and as such, had a good idea in advance about which guys could be trusted and which were sketchier. The union kept doing it every year because of the huge success. In 2005, the union restricted it to members only (and only if they were dressed up), or early ticket buyers. We'd done this because the 2004 edition had attracted a lot of wrong people, mostly mid to late 20-something guys, not dressed up, who'd come to ogle scantily clad girls and did not know anyone there. I'm not denying that the whole party theme is open to criticism, but I'm saying that dress-up parties like that don't have to be a raunchy free-for-all. Since 2005, creepers never really had a chance, though I don't know what it has been in the last few years since I'm not a student anymore and too old to attend anyway.

- If you're in the middle of it, it's sometimes really hard to see your own privilege. I think we did a lot of good things (no hazing rituals, going out our way to make people feel welcome and not being exclusive), and my predecessor (who was a woman), myself and my immediate successor clamped down hard on the old school sexist attitude of a lot of guys, but I do also see that we let people get away with things that were definitely not okay. That's the flip side of that comfortable context: some people feel more at ease and less judged for experimenting and 'going wild', but some people are pressured into going farther than they really want, and that's not cool.

- I'm not sure whether there is an upsurge of misogyny in student life or not because I'm not part of it anymore, but it wouldn't surprise me. However, I think the fundamental discussion after this article should how society/media seem to be judge, jury, accused and defendant when it comes down to creating attitudes like that: create the impression student life is going to be all about no-consequences sex, then shame everyone involved for doing it by breathlessly reporting on the excesses of that attitude.