20 August 2014

teaching yobs to be ‘confident feminists’

● According to Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, writing recently in the Independent, there is “growing abuse and harassment of young women and girls”. For her, as a socialist, the correct response to something undesirable is (of course) “government action”.
According to the Children’s Commissioner there is clear evidence that violence in young relationships is growing. The British Crime Survey shows girls aged between 16-19 are most at risk of domestic violence – over 10 per cent had been experienced [sic] violence or abuse in a relationship.

“Whore, bitch, slag, slut,” – these are the insults one teacher says she hears levelled at teenage girls on a daily basis. She described girls being “heckled if they dare to speak in class, their shirts forcibly undone, their skirts lifted and held by groups of boys” ... The [National Union of Students] are worried about an increasingly abusive culture on campuses with jokes about rape and ‘innocent’ groping seen as fairly commonplace.
Cooper doesn’t consider the possibility that dumbing down, pseudo-egalitarianism, and the sexualisation of culture, may all have contributed to the aggressification of relations between young people. Instead, her glib solution is to have more teaching of sexual behaviour in schools.
... Labour is committed to introducing compulsory sex and relationship education into schools – teaching zero tolerance of violence in relationships. Our children and teenagers need sex and relationship education that recognises the realities and helps them build the resilience to cope in an internet age. That means teaching them to respect themselves and each other and the importance of equality in relationships.
But if aggression has become the norm, does it help to teach “zero tolerance”? And if proletarianisation, which tends to follow from hatred of the bourgeoisie as preached by the Left, leads to dumbing down of sex roles, is it any good asserting that “we need our sons growing up as confident feminists”? The only effect may be reinforcement of a kind of hypocrisy in which lip service is paid to feminist ideology, while in reality grim blokeyness is the only kind of masculinity practised, even if it is not allowed to be explicitly espoused.

Oxford Forum should be given funding.