Harpooning ‘whales’, Fat Girl Rodeo... and why women are as bad as men at my sexist uni
SCANDAL-ridden ‘drinking societies’ at Oxford and Cambridge Universities have been around for centuries – but their reputations have never been lower.
One study has suggested almost half of female students at Cambridge have reported being groped, pinched or touched, a drinking society from the same university has been filmed marching down a street chanting ‘rape’, and a boycott row has engulfed the Oxford Union whose president is accused of rape.
I learned about these elite societies during my days as a naive, unworldly fresher at Cambridge when I dated one of their members.
The evidence was all around me in drinking games that entertained men but demeaned women. Yet so many women – particularly those new to university – agreed to take part.
Most recently there has been ‘whaling’, where young men compete to find, bed and ‘harpoon’ the ugliest girl in a bar or club.
Then there is Fat Girl Rodeo, where boys grab a curvaceous young woman, threaten to rape her, and hang on as long as they can as she desperately tries to throw them off.
Thank goodness I’ve never been a victim of either of these ‘games’, though their existence proves that drinking societies remain puerile and disgusting, and often regard women as playthings who exist merely for sex and entertainment.
Sadly, my fellow females don’t seem to be doing much better. While male societies call themselves The Epics, The Cobblers, The Tribe, or The Speakers, female societies include The Harlots, The Ho-Hoes, Gymslips and Slags, and a host of other innuendo-derived titles.
The names tell you everything you need to know about the sexism, attitudes and expectations that define drinking societies as much as they define current student culture.
The girls who meet these expectations are the girls, already blinded by alcohol, who stand up and confess to such things as taking part in a threesome or sleeping with a lecturer and are then given a ‘drinking fine’ – an alcoholic drink as punishment. Why
‘They think women exist purely for sex’
do the women admit to these things, or agree to spend an evening dressed in tiny pink hotpants and a sports bra; or allow guys they’ve known for three hours to drink tequila shots out of their belly button as they lie submissively on a curry-strewn table?
One explanation may be that, for that moment, when you stand halfnaked on top of a table and down whatever lethal alcoholic concoction you’ve been given, you’re the centre of attention.
You’re accepted as one of the party people and something exclusive to the ‘cool kids’ at university, which is what you want to be.
In fact, you are merely part of the show. The next morning you wake up, mortified that you exposed your slightly too flabby post-Christmas holiday stomach to the diners at Curry King with a horrible awareness that you’ve successfully and simultaneously established yourself as both a ‘good-time girl’ and a complete idiot.
Would you want future employers seeing your behaviour? Or your mother? Would you even want a photo up on Facebook?
Then there are traditions such as the Cambridge Pitt Club’s one of sending anonymous invitations to a dubiously selected handful of first-year girls. There was also uproar over the actions of The Black Cynets at Oxford, who invited the college’s prettiest freshers to a ‘fox hunt’ where they would dress as foxes and be hunted by drunken and predatory males. It was cancelled after provoking a furore.
Such activities feed the public a damaging image of our universities. The Pitt Club, The Wyverns and the notorious Bullingdon Club at Oxford present a picture of smug, self-regarding students revelling in port, cigars and striped bow ties. All them are male. Of course, there are double standards. It goes without saying that a banterous twentysomething, bow tiesporting male student can take his top off and chant loudly while downing a bottle of wine without raising an eyebrow. But for a female student to do the same thing is quite a different matter. Some women might shrug off the resulting stigma or the ‘reputation’ they have sprouted overnight.
But what about the rest of us? Such sexist antics – and the women who are lured into indulging them – make it hard for us to be taken seriously in the country’s leading seats of learning.
It is too easy to say, ‘If you don’t want to do it, then don’t’. There are occasions when I and many of my friends have done exactly that.
We’ve watched while our peers have stripped or downed dubious-looking alcoholic beverages believing ‘it’s just a bit of fun’.
But the consequences for all young women can be much more serious.
I have one friend who now refuses to socialise with a college drinking society having once been encouraged by them to strip and show off her slightly larger-than-average breasts to the rest of the room. I have another friend who continually worries about her ‘reputation’ preceding her on the rare occasions when she goes on proper dates after she earned herself the nickname ‘the college bench-press’.
These girls could have said no, but the peer-pressure surrounding them would almost definitely have subsequently labelled them as that worst of all epithets – boring.
Oxbridge drinking societies are marked by stories like these. Scarily, they are regarded as normal. They are also ‘normal’ across the rest of the country. Go to Leeds, Manchester, Reading, London or any other university in the country and you will find some sexist behaviour in the university’s drinking culture. It’s become a
given in an age where websites such as uniladmag.com have more than 500,000 likes on Facebook, and in which ‘fancydress’ is code for women wearing as little as possible.
Yet what makes this sexism worse for Oxbridge women is our sense of injustice. It is not fair that, having been at these universities for almost as long as some of their most famous drinking societies (the Pitt Club was founded in 1830, women started at Cambridge in 1869), we are not given the same social opportunities.
The member of the elite drinking club I dated went to £80-a-head dinners. He met influential, interesting, talented and clever men from all over the world, purely because they were ‘old boys’.
He built up a hefty network of contacts that guaranteed that he would be safe from unemployment.
Have I been given any of these opportunities? Of course not. Am I going to be? Not unless I’m a scantily clad guest of one of these drinking society dinners. Where is the Plath Club at Cambridge? Or the Thatcher Club at Oxford?
At Cambridge there is the Beard Society and The Misfits. However, the former is a very small group named after the classicist Mary Beard and the latter is better known for having members that are very good at finding boyfriends from among the upper echelons of the university rugby team.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want young women to emulate the scandalous behaviour of the boys.
In fact most of us at university would simply prefer that their wild nights of drinking didn’t have to involve us.