Rape culture, lad culture and everyday sexism: researching, conceptualizing and politicizing new mediations of gender and sexual violence (original) (raw)
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Is there a link between ‘Lad Culture’ and sexual violence against women in the UK?
This dissertation will question whether lad culture has impacted upon attitudes towards sexual violence against women. In order to research this topic, I will conduct several interviews and focus groups with females between the ages of 17-22 who may have experienced lad culture. I will also run a focus group with a group of typical ‘lads’ to get an unbiased view of the subject. Finally, I will analyse the discourse and images within popular ‘lad’ magazines such as ‘Nuts’ and ‘Zoo’ along with social media websites like ‘The Uni Lad’ and ‘The Lad Bible.’ Despite post-feminist scholars suggesting that ‘lad culture’ can be a form of empowerment for women, my argument will state that ‘laddism’ represent women as dehumanized sex objects. Therefore, ‘lad culture’ conditions men to view women as items to be ‘conquered’ and thus trivializes and normalises sexual violence and harassment. Likewise, women who are not deemed ‘fit’ by lads face ridicule and dehumanization within magazines and websites, often leading to sexually or physically violent threats. Furthermore, the dissertation will argue that women who react to sexist and derogatory comments face negative backlash and are accused of “not getting the joke” or being “uptight.” Overall, the dissertation concludes that laddism negatively represents women and attempts to justify and trivialize sexual violence against women.
Male rape, masculinities, and sexualities
This paper critically engages with the different layers and dynamics of discourse pertaining to sexual violence, hegemonic masculinity, and male rape in the UK. This is achieved through the use of empirical data surrounding police officers, male rape therapists, counsellors, and voluntary agency caseworkers' attitudes toward, and responses to male rape victims (N = 70). The data were collected using interviews and questionnaires. The primary data not only give suggestions of how male rape is perceived and responded to by societies, state and voluntary agencies, but also give suggestions of how male rape victims may embody their 'broken' masculinities, considering that male sexual victimisation is embedded within destructive and painful taboo and stigma. Perhaps the most severely under-reported and under-recorded, male rape is one of several forms of sexual violence that goes unrecognised and unnoticed in academia and in western society. This paper, therefore, critically explores male rape discourse. It critically examines male rape from a masculinities and sexualities perspective, explaining how male rape is closely connected to hegemonic masculinity. The paper argues that taboos and stigmas of homosexuality and male rape challenge and contradict hegemonic masculinity. It also argues that prevailing and powerful discourses relating to hegemonic masculinity make male rape invisible, denying its existence and worth, whilst maintaining and supporting heterosexuality, patriarchy and harmful gender expectations of men. Male rape, then, is actively 'forgotten'.
‘Lad culture’ and sexual violence against students
Gender based violence in university communities: Policy, prevention and educational interventions, 2018
This chapter explores the issue of sexual violence against students in relation to the concept of ‘lad culture’. Adopting a more nuanced approach to the understanding of campus sexual violence and the masculine cultures that frame it, the chapter places such issues within the institutional cultures of neoliberal competitively driven universities. The chapter discusses the results of a 2013 study conducted by the National Union of Students (NUS) in the UK showing that many of the behaviours associated with lad culture, including sport, heavy alcohol consumption, casual sex and sexist/discriminatory ‘banter’, constituted sexual harassment. It theorises sexual violence and laddish masculinities in order to better understand them and develop effective interventions. It also considers how power and privilege, as well as patriarchy, neoliberalism and carceral feminism, intersect in student lad culture.
The Dark Side of Men: The Nature of Masculinity and its Uneasy Relationship with Male Rape
This theoretical and conceptual article critically examines the issue of male rape in England and Wales, United Kingdom. Bringing different studies together from disparate disciplines reveal that men's experiences of rape and sexual assault are similar to women's sexual assaults and rapes, although there are some gendered differences as to how men deal with these crimes, particularly in regard to men's willingness to report to officials and masculine ways wherein some men frame their experiences. To understand men's experiences of rape and sexual assault, the theoretical frameworks of symbolic interactionism and hegemonic masculinity are used. I argue that men draw on "masculine" behaviors to cope with their victimization, and hegemonic masculinity constructs and shapes men's experiences of rape. The analysis in this article is vital to understand how men respond and cope with rape, and it encourages further theoretical and empirical research on this neglected issue in England and Wales, United Kingdom. This article contributes theoretically to discourses on unacknowledged and unreported rape, and also to a broader literature on non-reported crime.
Girlhood Studies, 2021
In 1983, Andrea Dworkin addressed the Midwest Men’s Conference in Minneapolis. She discussed the rape culture in which we live, noted the similarities between rape and war, and, following the title of her talk, asked for a “24-hour truce in which there is no rape.” And she asked why men and boys are so slow to understand that women and girls “are human to precisely the degree and quality that [they] are” (n.p.). Every sexual assault begins with the dehumanization of the victim. And sometimes, after the violation, after the pain and the fear, comes the institutional dehumanization visited upon the victim who seeks medical or legal help. Two recent memoirs bring to the surface rape culture, evident in the young men who raped these girls and the systemic dehumanization they suffered when they sought justice. Chanel Miller’s Know My Name (2019) describes the aftermath of being sexually assaulted, when she was just out of college and still living at home, by someone she met at a fraterni...
What Is Rape? Social Theory and Conceptual Analysis
Transcript Publishers, 2018
What exactly is rape? And how is it embedded in society? Hilkje Charlotte Hänel offers a philosophical exploration of the often misrepresented concept of rape in everyday life, systematically mapping out and elucidating this atrocious phenomenon. Hänel proposes a theory of rape as a social practice facilitated by ubiquitous sexist ideologies. Arguing for a normative cluster model for the concept of rape, this timely intervention improves our understanding of lived experiences of sexual violence and social relations within sexist ideologies. Cover and introduction uploaded as pdf. Transcript Verlag / Columbia University Press
Male Rape: The Unseen World of Male Rape
This research explores the phenomenon of male rape and how the police recognise it, together with uncovering male rape myths in a local police force. Whilst male rape research is expanding, it was found that the police have a lack of knowledge, understanding, awareness, and specialised training of male rape. Therefore, police officers' attitudes, ideas, views, perspectives, and beliefs on specific topics pertinent to male rape are discussed. This project also seeks to comprehend gender expectations and stereotypes of men, so as to comprehend the prevalence of male rape, the negligence of male rape, and the under-reporting/recording of male rape. Moreover, because male rape is a part of sexual violence, feminist theory is used as a foundation for this project, since feminism seeks gender equality. Ultimately, this research emphasises the need for the police to adequately manage male rape victims and take male rape seriously, without any negative attitudes, ideas, views, perspectives, and beliefs.