This week’s potential scandal

Deep breaths everyone. Let’s open with the statement that no-one finds rape funny. So let’s do that: it’s not funny. No-one likes to see or hear about anyone being abused in such a way. I’m not particularly interested if you think male rape is under-represented, or if rape law only protects women, or anything like that. This is not Reddit. Rape isn’t ha-ha funny, plain and simple. I’ve never seen an episode of Friends about someone getting jovially drugged, abused and dumped somewhere.

Similarly, I’m not one for making comedy sacred. Free speech is excellent, with the exception of television about videogames, and if you want to loudly announce to everyone on the 93 from Wimbledon how much of a bigoted twunt you are by telling an offensive joke to your friend then by all means please go ahead. But once we get above the nattering-in-a-pub level of joke-telling I feel we have some baselines set down, and at an institution that is so fundamentally racked by issues of gender divide, Hangman probably stumbled too far last week.

It’s gone downhill. While the Telegraph article that announced this story to the world was about as well-constructed as the drunken, rambling tweets that cited it (one proclaimed “Rape is hilarious, right? Imperial College thinks so!”) it was hard to summon the effort to laugh at the article. Hangman could hardly be defended.

So in the week between me writing this and it being published (editors willing) there’ll be various things happening – lots of people will have Opinions and Views and these may or may not involve the phrase ‘PC-crazy’ in a context other than a Starcraft convention. Let’s be clear, though – before we start having a debate on the topic of women, men and Imperial – that we exist in a man’s world, still. There are pockets of exemplary behaviour, and the department I’m in, in particular, has some great people who do everything they can to combat inequality and bad examples being set. But let’s not pretend, as many commenters online tried to, that men are in any way hard done by.

At the same time, jumping to the conclusion that we need an armed feminist society ready to kick ass, chew gum and live their lives in an independent, thoughtful and personally satisfying way seems like a knee jerk in the opposite direction. We shouldn’t need to do this. We shouldn’t need to get to the point where we have to have a fucking Union society to remind people that women are a group that needs representation. It is, to me, utterly unacceptable that Imperial would need to drop to this level.

On Twitter, from time to time, Mrs. Geek’s name pops up in relation to various things. She is a student at Imperial like myself, and through her eyes I occasionally get glimpses of how bizarre our community is. Oftentimes it feels like there are only two ways to pass through Imperial as a woman – either you get by being what Imperial’s male contingent expect you to be, or you shut yourself off from that world entirely and only communicate with other female students. Neither outcome seems favourable, and all the shouting and commenting I’ve seen since the article went live seems to only push towards these two outcomes.

(Incidentally, Mrs. Geek appears to have gotten through by doing neither of these things, one of many attributes I find admirable and worthy of great respect. Yes, this is your Valentine’s Day present. Yes it does count. Love you.)

So let’s bear something in mind, as we scrabble for what can be done at Imperial – we’re trying to build a community in which everyone is happy, treated equally, and in which jokes can be made if they are appropriate. Don’t be heavy-handed in our search for a solution, and don’t let personal prejudice against a minority affect how we treat the majority.