FridgeMagnet
Administrator
Even in the 90s when I was a student, during the lad resurgence, you wouldn't have thought you could get away with publishing that sort of thing publicly. However, I could see the backlash growing.
Go on... rape her... she won't report it... [UniLad magazine article]
- Thread starter LiamO
- Start date
stethoscope
Well-Known Member
Yep, totally agree with this.
In some ways we see more progressive attitudes (openness and tolerance to sexualities, less direct discrimination), whilst we also see objectification and the pervasiveness of sex (by which I mean not some sort of prudish outlook on sex, but that despite whatever advances women have made, we seem to still be held up more than ever by standards of beauty/attractiveness to men) and then we've got a student generation entirely bought up and subsumed in consumerism and capitalism (which doesn't even seem to be clever in its trading in sexual imagery now, just overt/blatant). I think I preferred the 80s and 90s tbh.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
Do you know what assertion means?
I am discussing this, several posters have discussed this, and backed up their statements with facts. You're the one that 'doesn't believe statistics', you're the one who's not interested oin discussing this, only in continually restating your own flawed statements when you've been shown to be wrong - and quite gently I must point out.
Das Uberdog
remembers the alamo
no, what we've established is that none of you want to have an actual discussion about this. i haven't denied any of the stats you've posted.
when my Mum was in school she wasn't allowed to take woodwork, she had to take home economics. in her first year at secondary, she was given a career aptitude test and told she should consider a career in typing or being an air-hostess. before she got a decent lecturer who encouraged her to go forward, no-one in the world had ever suggested to her that she, as a working class girl, should even consider going to university. she was sacked from one of her uni jobs as a waitress for refusing to abide by their 'no bras' policy. when she started as a nurse she still had to truss up like a pretty doll with those daft card bonnets nurses used to have to wear (and which she organised a boycott against)
all of these things are literally incomprehensible for kids of my generation to comprehend... for people to think that nothing has improved in general attitudes is seriously not correlated with reality
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
They did. Attitudes were different.
Das Uberdog
remembers the alamo
what on earth are you talking about? do i actually have to pull a definition of 'assertion'?
i never said the rates were going down, i said i wouldn't be surprised if they were, again. i know you've expressed being uncomfortable with 'long' paragraphs but can you actually read at all?
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
How old you? It's a genuine question.
Only many posters on urban have experienced things like your mum did and in some cases still do, so perhaps that might encourage you to understand how many of us can post that things haven't always improved.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
The closest to internet posts we had in the 80s and 90s was probably small press fanzines. I have to say that I never saw anything like this crap in any small press thing - and that includes all football fanzines, which wouldn't tolerate anything like that.
Hmm. Maybe things have got worse.
Hmm. Maybe things have got worse.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
There's no need to descend into personal attacks.
It's very difficult to read long paragraphs on a bulletin board, and many people with learning disabilities such as dyslexia find it easier to read shorter paragraphs.
stethoscope
Well-Known Member
Aye, that and most of the other research/reports I've seen the last 10 years still don't make for particularly positive reading - re. sexual violence, reporting and clear-up rates.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
I think it sends a clear message that whatever is supposedly being done to improve things isn't working, and part of that is public perception to the crime of rape.
I think the poster campaign in Canada that Idris talked about - Don't be that guy - should be used over here. Cinemas, bus stop adverts, tube posters, half-time game advertising, the works.
Kaka Tim
Half Arsed and Slapdash till I Die
Nor me!
And of course they;re were plenty of shit attitudes to women amongst students back in the 80s - but to come out with that sort of Unilad shit in a fanzine or similar would have probably have resulted in a public lynching.
Maybe part of the trouble is that addressing the reality sexual violence doesn't fit easily into the post feminist/'ironic' 'new lad/laddette' world view/discourse/zietgiest malarky.
purenarcotic
Conveniently Pocket Sized
Sure.
This won't be in epic detail, purely because I can't squeeze an entire module's worth of work into a forum post, but hopefully it'll be a decent overview. 
For starters, when you actually break down the stats of GCSE results, you find that it is considerably more complex than a simple 'girls outdo boys'. You have to take into account the differences in results between ethnic groups, socio-economic statuses and so on. Although girls do outdo boys in most cases, your socio-economic status is far more likely to affect your ability to achieve well at GCSE level.
You then have to look at the issue historically; this whole 'boys underachievement' thing seems to be quite new. It's suddenly exploded over the last few years, with a real air of panic about it. However, as early as the 1920's people said of boys: 'they're not slower than girls, it's just their age'. In 1923, the Board of Education wrote 'it's well known that most boys, especially in the period of adolescence, have a habit of healthy idleness'. In the 1940's again it was perceived that boys were behind girls and again, the excuse was made that it was 'just their age'. Throughout the ages, this idea that boys are underachieving has existed; it is nothing 'new' whatsoever.
From all the stuff over the ages, four main discoures have emerged relating to boys and education and underachievement:
1) 'poor boys' - notions that men have been victimised through feminist agenda (this has its theoretical basis in theories surrounding men's rights).
2) 'boys will be boys' - notions that psychological, and physical masculinity is something boys are born with, it is innate. This has led to theories of requiring more competitive sport and 'target setting' because these appeal to 'boys needs' and that also we need to give boys status to confirm their masculinity (this has its theoretical roots in evolutionary psychology).
3) 'Problem boys' - notions surrounding the 'laddish' culture and ideas that boys naturally adopt anti-social behaviours.
4) 'At risk boys' - boys are somehow disconnected from society, they have low self esteem and feel alienated from education
(Both 3 and 4 have their theoretical basis in ideas surrounding individualism).
This has led people to believe that schools have become feminised and are feminising, and that strategies to improve this need to be about reparing the male agenda, by having targets, reward systems, male role models etc.
But are boys brains really different to girls brains? Do they really think in a completely different way, or is this a social construction? Are there really different 'learning styles' for gender? Well teachers certainly appear to think so, with comments from teachers saying that boys prefer the quick, active lessons, while girls are quiet and prefer group work. But research by Coffield (2004) concluded that they could find absolutely no empirical evidence to suggest that implementing these gender based learning styles made any difference whatsoever. Sukhnadan (2000) believes that differing learning styles are more likely to be influenced by individual characteristics and abilities over gender.
Schools where social constructions of gender are less accentuated, tend to have a much reduced gap between the achievements of girls and boys.
It's also worth noting that despite all this moral panic, men still hold the majority of top exec positions, earn the highest wages etc etc.
There is considerably more to this topic, this really is the very basic outline, but hopefully it gives you an idea into some of the ideas around it.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
Prodigy 'Slap my bitch up' video reactions exemplified this in my mind. Most of those that were outraged quite obviously hadn't seen the video all the way thought as they were rallying against 'male on female' violence. The video itself was depicting 'female on female' violence and certainly to me seemed to clearly asking the viewer to be examining their attitudes to violent behaviour against others regardless of gender.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
I ignored the rest of your two cents because you haven't bothered to check your facts. Paddick is running on a 'make the police investigate rape properly' as his central policy. He was asked to do a review of how rape was handled - found that reports had increased by 18% over 5 years in the early 2000s, but that the proportion recorded as rape had fallen by the same amount because the simplest way to improve the clear up rate is to record the complaint as 'no crime'. He was made to tone dowh his report and then Fedorico buried it.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
trashpony
Hag
Also, rape is so much about power that actually I would expect the incidence of rape to increase as women gain economic power.
I'm glad you've come to that conclusion youself and without the arguments of the women on this thread.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
I just wish to point out that the internet has been around since at least 1995 when it became commercialised. Various technical aspects were worked on before then, since packet switching and TCP/IP, but restrictions on commercial traffice carriage were lifted in 1995, thus making it available to the world.
So yes, the world had internet and internet publishing in 2001.
toggle
wobbly
sorry, but bollocks.
i remember seeing a documentary about pre ww2 women farm workers and from the descriptions they gave, rape by the men they worked with was almost to be expected. few discussed it at the time because of the expectation they would be told it was their fault.
the idea that ordinary women were chapheroned is bizarre. you think working class young women were chapheroned on their way to work?
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
i'd also say that this type of thing (rape and violence etc as "erotic") is quite widespread in goth/techno type subcultures ... very different from the people that unilad is appealing to (I think)? i got put off listening to that stuff recently as some of the videos (especially those made by fans) are often really fucking dodgy.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
Yes. My partner thinks this is all about the male psyche being under pressure. Girls doing better at school (according to the media, whatever the detail says), young women doing better in the workplace, and fewer decent jobs around to allow them to take a 'provider' role (43% of main breadwinners are women, according to one media report I read recently).
Patriarchy is as damaging to men as it is to women. Expected to be an alpha-male but living in a system which allows very few to be alphas, not allowed to show emotion or admit weakness. There are a lot of angry, frustrated men around, with their only power being their physical strength.
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
there was some very dark stuff around class, violence, prostitution, misogyny etc in those times as well. the idea among the middle and upper classes that these women were different, that they weren't quite women, and that type of thing. not really sure what i was going to say with this but it links in with the common attitudes around the Jack the Ripper case etc.
To come back to the culture issue,
I think that the cultural and social changes in the 70's and 80's re:gender and sexism (and racism and homophobia) in part contributed to the creation of a space where it seemed safe to perpetrate an ironic middle class 'mock' appropriation of a caricature of working class sexism (and racism etc) within wider society that is displayed by the success of comedians like Jimmy Carr etc and as successfully skewered by Nathan Barley with Sugar Ape and the episode where he shags the model he thinks is 13. Unfortunately this safe space and the attitude it has fostered has looped back to make the reality as bad as if not worse than before, also bolstered by a genuine conservative backlash against it.
I think that the cultural and social changes in the 70's and 80's re:gender and sexism (and racism and homophobia) in part contributed to the creation of a space where it seemed safe to perpetrate an ironic middle class 'mock' appropriation of a caricature of working class sexism (and racism etc) within wider society that is displayed by the success of comedians like Jimmy Carr etc and as successfully skewered by Nathan Barley with Sugar Ape and the episode where he shags the model he thinks is 13. Unfortunately this safe space and the attitude it has fostered has looped back to make the reality as bad as if not worse than before, also bolstered by a genuine conservative backlash against it.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Not just Jimmy Carr but Frank Skinner and David Baddiel too. Both of them contributed to this 'new lad' bullshit back in the early 90's.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
For a lot of working class and lower middle class women in service, not only did they need good references, they also required a good 'character'. To be dismissed without a good character effectively meant the end of their ability to work in that sector. Any allegations of rape made by a servant against a man, whether of that household or not, would have been career suicide.
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