‘I get together with my friends and try to change it’. Young feminist students resist ‘laddism’, ‘rape culture’ and ‘everyday sexism’

Abstract

Contemporary alarm about ‘laddism’ reveals what feminist research and activism has long-recognised; universities, like other social institutions, can be dangerous places for women. Research in the US and, more recently, the UK reveals alarming rates of violence, against women, the cultural and institutional norms which support violence and gaps in institutional responses. In the midst of this contemporary alarm about the university as a hotbed of laddism, there is a risk that the university – a site of potential empowerment and liberation for women (and men) – becomes re-positioned as a danger zone. The limited focus on danger and safety belies the potential of universities to enhance human freedoms through intellectual endeavour. We argue this progressive potential should remain centre-stage, as should university-based resistance to everyday sexism and laddism. This paper analyses accounts of young women feminists (n = 33) in UK and US universities. It explores their use of feminism and features of the university environment to resist and challenge oppressive cultures and practices. It argues that, despite encroaching neoliberalism and enduring sexism, universities continue to provide environments for engagements with feminism, enabling young women students to use feminism to resist and challenge sexism and to envision their feminist futures.

Keywords:

• Laddism
• rape culture
• feminism
• activism
• university
• campus
• sexism

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Annmarie Vaccarro and Finn Mackay for their extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. The language and terms used to describe post-school education differs in the UK and US. Our focus in this article is on higher education in universities (in the UK and US) and colleges (in the US). To avoid complication, we use the British terms – ‘university’ and ‘higher education’ – to include both British and American institutions.

2. In an ironic twist, gender equality legislation is implicated in this; Universities in England and Wales are required to ‘pay regard to their existing responsibilities in relation to gender segregation’ (p. 13 Prevent Duty Guidance).

3. Women’s centres are campus based organizations at most US colleges. They strive to ensure equal opportunities and gender equality by providing support and resources to women staff and students (Kasper, 2004).

4. We are thinking of, for example: Emma Sulcowicz’ performance art – Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) – in protest at New York Columbia University’s response to her allegation of rape by another student, and the tremendous media and critical ripples it generated; the British National Union of Students surveys to address violence, harassment against students, development of a Zero Tolerance policy and the resulting media and institutional responses; the use of Title IX to challenge various aspects of gender inequality and discrimination in universities.

5. We recognise that men and people of other non-binary genders can and do identify as feminist. However, given that the main constituency of feminism has been women, we focused our study on women’s engagement with and use of feminism to challenge the misogyny and sexism they experienced. We did not limit our study to women-born-women, but no trans women were forthcoming in our sampling process, despite attempts to include such women, perhaps indicating that such women are not well represented in university feminist networks.

6. A website developed in the UK by Laura Bates whose aim is to document everyday examples of sexism as reported by contributors around the world. By its third anniversary, it had collected 1,000,000 entries (Bates, 2015).

7. UK University feminist societies are generally established by groups of students, are open to other students and operate as relatively independent bodies. Some are affiliated to the university’s Student Union, although some of our respondents reported their SU was resistant to the establishment of a feminist society. It is believed that student feminist societies have multiplied (see e.g. Pearce, 2014) in recent years although we know of no reliable empirical evidence that supports that claim.

8. Interviewees’ names have been changed to protect their anonymity.

9. SlutWalks were identified by the respondents as contentious; the majority who mentioned them expressed uncertainty about their political value and cultural focus. SlutWalks have been variously critiqued for foregrounding whiteness (see Black Women’s Blueprint’s, 2011) for reflecting a neoliberal individualist consumer culture in which sexuality is commodified (Mendes, 2015; Miriam, 2012) and also, along with Pink Chaddis in India, as a form of ‘feminism lite’ which, although not transformative, ‘operate[s] as a space clearing mechanism for other analytical possibilities to emerge’ (Kapur, 2012, p. 3).

10. Although the young women in this study were passionately concerned about the various forms of violence against women, they spoke relatively little about lad culture, referring more often to ‘sexism’, ‘misogyny’, ‘gender inequality’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘oppression’, ‘objectification’, ‘rape culture’, ‘slut-shaming’ and ‘gender expectations’. We observe that the term ‘lad culture’ suggests a novelty and a homogeneity which potentially detract from the enduring nature of sexism and ask whether it is strategically useful to adopt a new term, to suggest a reincarnation of an age-old phenomenon, in order to capture public attention and shine the spotlight anew? Or does focusing on this new term detract from the enduring nature of patriarchy and, simultaneously, risk reviving a narrative which depicts women as powerless victims of preying masculinity?

11. These valuable experiences of groups and communities may differ from experiences of contemporary feminism on social media. However, our respondents had rather limited engagement in online feminism. This is a topic for future research (see Connelly, 2015).