Over the last week there has been a lot of excitement and comment generated by the misogynist abuse directed at two female debaters who were attending an event at Glasgow University Union. The university paper has been covering it, and so have national news outlets including the Huffington Post and the Guardian. The behaviour of a few individual members of GUU is absolutely appalling, but, sadly, not all that shocking. As has been seen recently women who speak out in the public realm are subjected to abuse not for their opinions but because they are women. It is, quite frankly, pathetic that we are still in this state in 2013.
However, the problem of misogyny seems to be endemic in the GUU, as detailed in this blog post by a former Glasgow uni student. Reading her words (which I encourage you to do, although I know I have already been quite link happy in this post) really made me feel sorry that she and other students like her had suffered in this way. I’m not going to discuss what happened at the GUU debate, that has already been done extremely well (see links above, and Google) but I have been thinking about the mindset that seems to have been betrayed by these men.
The things shouted at the women (‘get that woman out of my union!') are very telling. These appear to be privileged young men from wealthy backgrounds who feel able to dismiss anyone who isn’t exactly like them out of hand. This got me thinking about the greater environment of universities and how they are can very easily become places where a specific elite call the shots. Anyone who doesn’t fit the mould can be made to feel very uncomfortable.
I’ve been to three unis in two countries (Oooooooo! Get me!) and I have to say that I, thankfully, was never made to feel uncomfortable because I was a woman. I was never even made to feel uncomfortable for being British when I was studying abroad. I was, however, in England, made to feel uncomfortable about my accent.
I don’t have that strong an accent, but it is there. I did my first degree at Manchester (a place where Northern accents I assumed would be commonplace) but I still was once told in a seminar that I was ‘a chav’ because of how I talked. I was also aware that some societies were closed off from me because of either disproportionate joining fees or astronomical equipment costs. Those people who’d taken a proper ‘gap year’ (rather than a year out to work in a call centre, which was what my ‘gap year’ was) and gone travelling exuded a self-belief that came from the experiences they’d got. Then, when it came to my final year, there were those who could be set up with jobs or internships through existing family connections. They were the ones least concerned (particularly about revising. It makes sense. If you don’t need a 2:1 why bust your gut?) about the future.
There was a clear class of people far more comfortable than the rest of us. I’m not saying by any means that those from wealthy backgrounds were all dicks (you can be a tool regardless of where you’re from) but I can see how those young men in Glasgow, brought up believing that they were entitled to be there, came to the conclusion that they were above others. They were the best, the privileged, the elite and they could talk down to anyone they wanted. This sense of entitlement is there in British universities and anyone who doesn’t fit in with the clique is open to abuse. It’s not right, but it’s a world view held by people like this.
And it’s only going to get worse. With the increase in fees certain universities will become more and more homogenised as only a small section of society can afford to go. The original idea of university (to open your mind and expose yourself to new thinking, people and ideas) will suffer if everyone who goes there is from a similar background. The ideas held by misogynistic spoilt brats will be more likely to go unchallenged if they rarely come across someone whose lived experience is different from their own. Of course, I don’t think for a moment that everyone who is lucky enough to come from a comfortable background will think like this, but the evidence is that there is a portion that does.
We are on the verge of further segregating universities. Incidents like what happened at GUU will increase, and it won’t just be women who suffer. It will be everyone who doesn’t already enjoy the comfortable life of the elite.
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