The UniLad Saga by Nick Bryans
Forget cotton, this t-shirt is made of 100% Bantz! Oi, and indeed, oi.
At some point the banter bus has rolled in, and the stereotype of the ‘mainstream’ student became an intoxicated sex-pest with a basic grasp of the English language. Now that the UK has somewhere in the region 4,000 different universities, any arsehole and his uncle can go, which is why your average campus has now a healthy proportion of Skins-idolising eejits. I realises I may sound like a hand-wringing, Daily Mail reading, ‘kids these days!’ bore, but to embrace popular university lifestyle in the current climate, is akin to traipsing around the streets with a flashing dickhead indicator above your head.
I blame Tony Blair.
Anyway, this has culminated in another WEB BASED SCANDAL this week, which further pushes my call for internet access to require an IQ test. I mean, I’d almost certainly fail it, but I wouldn’t have to read tripe like UniLad. They felt the full wrath of the Twitterati this week (it’s alright readers, I punched myself in the face after I typed ‘Twitteratti’. Relax), when it was accused of trivialising rape. The swines.
UniLad is a website which tries to condense the most uneducated and carnal forms of the male mind into one simple and handy site. All the usual suspects are here; Larry the Lashtronaut, The Bantersauras Rex; if they’ve got a nickname that makes you question the central tenets of evolution, they’ll be ‘readers’ of this fine dot com. It is a site that brings together laborious and archaic internet memes, pictures of BOOBS, funny Photoshops and interesting and engaging discussions, such as ‘Would you fuck the Queen?’ . It’s the relentless pursuit to stimulating minds that the web itself was invented for. These cheeky chappies have however got in choppy waters this week, for publishing an ‘article’ in which they didn’t so much as trivialise rape, more suggest ‘ahhhh, go for it, the odds of escaping conviction are on your side’. The article in question included the choice quote:
“If the girl you’ve taken for a drink won’t spread for your head, think about this mathematical statistic: 85% of rape cases go unreported. That seems fairly good odds”.
Surprise suprise, people went ape-shit over this. Which is baffling, as you’d think that the brutal subjection of a woman to prolonged sexual assault would be the source of light-hearted humour. UniLad was forced to quickly back-track over this article, and released a piss-poor apology, where they stated:
We would like to make a public apology as it appears that some of the content previously published on this site has caused some distress.
The content in question was un-called for and should in no way have been published, and we can assure you it will never happen again. Any grief this may have caused you, we apologise for. We took things too far.
Any flippant comments that may have been said during discussions, I also apologise for, it will not happen again. We are certainly going to be cleaning up our act on unilad.com.
We do appreciate where you are coming from with your points, hence forth, an immediate change in material.
Thank you, and sorry once again.
UniLad.com will be re-launching in a few weeks.
Phew, they’re re-launching. That’s cool. I’d worry where else I’d have to look for my ‘cats that look like Hitler’ YouTube clips.
Despite the apology, this opened a metaphorical can of worms for the site, as their apology, somehow, seemed to come at the chagrin of their boorish, knuckle dragging ‘reader’ship, who felt that this was another case of nanny-state, liberal lefty, PC gone mad. And how better to calm down fallout concerning rape humour, than with MORE RAPE HUMOUR! According to their Facebook reader comments:
- “Rape = Suprise Sex” (39 likes)
- “I called that Rape Advice Line earlier today. Unfortuately, it’s only for victims” (63 likes)
- “Whoever complained should be raped” (13 likes)
- “When people ask me what I do, I tell them I test rape alarms. It sounds better than saying I’m a rapist” (13 likes)
Ladies, form an orderly queue.
So this insight into the minds of GEEEZZEERRRSSSS made people worry about the severity that your average man-on-the-street thinks about rape. Do some in society just not see it as a big deal? Do some people consider it a bit of a laugh? Do particular people with a chauvinist mindset consider it to have a certain chic to it?
Here’s the thing. I have socialised with your average wannabe lad. The big time Charlie. The keyboard warrior. The small-minded hero. They talk and talk and talk and talk, but never act. These are the sorts of people whose night out consists of an ill-fitting Topman t-shirt and stone island jacket combo, a superfluous number of pints, followed by a barely remembered trip to a garish provincial night-club, kebab, vomit, bed. All for the sole purpose to make a pithy Facebook update the next day, something along the lines of “OI OI! Top nite lst nite! Wht I remememeber ov it ne way! LAAAAAD!”, followed by similarly irksome shite from the other members of the posse. These people require enough booze to kill an army just to talk to a girl, let alone force themselves on them. The thoughts emitted from these types on ‘UniLad’ comment threads are not deep seated beliefs about wishes to subjugate women, but some false chivalry from a throng of pathetic individuals with low self-esteem, desperate to appear hard and wild during a game of ‘I have never’. These men are as threatening as a puddle, and would like to just meet a nice girl who they can spend time with a feel infatuated by, and their sheer inability to attain this leads them to playing into this masochistic social convention.
But the problem with rape, is that it can’t just stop there. It can’t just be swept under the rug. We can’t just provide some urbane social quip and think, “boys, pfft. What silly billys. What will those sheepish fools say next?!” There are some areas which humour cannot alleviate the severity of the situation. Few areas, mind. But they are still prevalent. Whatsmore, it goes without saying, that rape is one of them. There are few things that can happen to a human being outside of murder, if any, as bad as rape. It’s sexual brutality on an incomprehensible scale, that can effect victims their entire life, and lead many to turn to suicide for release. It’s not an issue that can be brushed off. It’s not an issue where trivialisation can be put down to peer pressure or social convention. It’s a horrible fucking thing that should be dealt with the most delicate of delicate approaches. UniLad and its fans’ tongue-in-cheek ‘bantz’ may be intended as light humour, but it isn’t light humour, so maybe they should just shut the fuck up, yeah?
UniLad, as stated, will return in a few weeks. And I just can’t wait for further example of big busty babes and pictures of sporting injuries. But perhaps, some good can come of this. And perhaps this can be the catalyst for people to realise that there’s some areas you just don’t make off-hand humour about. And rape is one of those areas.
Lol, Mug. #TopBantz
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© 2012
It’s OK, they’ve just started taking credit for age-old internet memes. Not quite as bad the old stuff. Bit of dishonesty never hurt anyone.
twitpic.com/8gxv5f
Have you seen this study regarding the language used in lads’ mags?
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/aboutus/news-events/news/mags.aspx
The problem is that they may try argue it is just “banter” and it may be true that many of them “talk, but never act”, but they are legitimising the attitudes of rapists.
How many people reading Unilad think they are just having a bit of banter and taking the piss and how many feel like they have found a community of people who share their views on women?
Whilst there are lots of piss-poor “universities” about, I think it’s unfair to saddle them with the blame for lad-culture. The Bullingdon Club and similar groups elsewhere existed long before Teeside Poly came along. At worst all they’ve done is expand a problem that was already there – the internet has just made it more visible.
I went to a former polytechnic which shared a city with a more prestigious university – in my experience, kids from the Uni were much more raucous than those from the Poly, primarily cos their richer backgrounds meant they had more money to spend on drink, drugs, etc.
Alcohol-fuelled, single-sex groups of adolescents away from any supervision are never going to advance civilisation.
The media are as much to blame as anyone – listen to almost any radio station on a early Friday afternoon and you’ll hear dipshit DJs asking Kev from Basildon how many bevvies he’s going to get. On sunday mornings no-one will be granted airtime without declaring that they’re recovering from a hangover.