WHAT A CREEP!

AS a 24-year-old, I missed the worst days of casual sexual harassment.

But that’s not to say we should overlook serious infractions today, just because things used to be worse.

Lloyd Evans’ confessional in the Spectator – the most ill-judged piece of journalism I’ve read in a long time — proves that we still have far to go to achieve real gender parity.

I highly doubt that when Professor Ypi gave the lecture, she expected an audience as large as the one she has since received.

But now that the Spectator piece has gone viral, her name will forever be associated with a lecherous 61year-old man bemoaning his uncontrollable sex drive rather than her highly lauded work on ‘Global Justice and Political Agency’.

The article was workplace harassment, pure and simple, because after all Ypi was only doing her job. But now the whole country is talking about a dirty old man unashamedly leering over her.

Yes, the sexual impulse is real. But what is dangerous is implying that libido is an untameable beast.

Evans’ claim that he was so aroused by Ypi that he couldn’t hear her plays into what my generation call ‘rape culture’. This is excusing ‘lesser’ instances of harassment which, down the line, can be a gateway into sexual violence.

I want to call Evans’ article nonsense but that would trivialise just how pernicious it is.

And frankly, it’s a sorry state of affairs when I have to explain why he’s such a creep in the first place.