Ping. An email flew into my inbox on Monday informing me that the fate of the Oriel rugby team hung in the balance unless I attended something called a Good Lad workshop. My reaction was summed up by the Cherwell editor looking over my shoulder, “So you’re a ‘Bad lad’ then are you?”
But my initial understandings of Good Lad were soon disabused as it fast became apparent the rugby team really might be discontinued. I did a bit of googling and – contrary to my expectations – this thing looked intriguing. Judging from the website it looked like Alcoholics Anonymous met post-match changing room chat. Begrudgingly I told myself I would give up an hour of precious pre-Lola-Lo’s time to attend.
And I couldn’t have been more wrong. My ignorance soon gave way to a pretty keen interest. There were 19 of us there, seated in a circle and the class was led by two cool doctoral students Will and Dylan.
Good Lad was set up a few years ago by a group of graduate and post-doctoral students who wanted to change the conversation about lad culture and gender relations. They’ve hosted workshops with the university football, hockey and rugby teams, 20 college sides, Vinnie’s club and even the Saïd Business School. Recently the campaign has become quite high profi le. The Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times have all run features about it, whilst it has received endorsement from the likes of McKinsey’s Dominic Barton and ex-Vice Chancellor John Hood.
Good Lad works exclusively with men, but doesn’t preach. Rather it’s about exploring gender dynamics and complicated situations we might found ourselves or our mates in on nights out. At its core Good Lad is about going beyond the bare minimum and exploring what’s the best thing to do in any situation.
We got the ball rolling with a couple of ice breakers. How acceptable was it to tell a girl she’s hot? Or to buy her drinks with the intention of chatting her up? Already there was some ambiguity in the room. We tended all to agree that neither was drastically wrong. The real sticking point came when we started discussing what was a lad? A couple of definitions were bandied around; association with alcoholism, immaturity, disrespect. You get the picture.
Soon we reached the crux of the workshop: the clash between a minimum standards approach and a ‘positive masculinity framework.’ To the uninitiated this was buzzword central but the gist was straightforward. Essentially the whole point of Good Lad is that a rigid, inflexible approach to sexual encounters, based around legal obligations really doesn’t get us that far.
Will, one of the group leaders, talked us through a few examples which started to problematise matters. First of all we were in a bar with our team. One of our mates started dancing topless, miming sexual acts in front of two women: what do we do? Next up we were in a club and see a friend groping a girl’s arse after she’s asked him to stop. Finally we found ourselves back in a girl’s room at the end of a night out. This particular girl seemed uncertain about having sex. What was the best approach?
Pretty key to all of this was thinking about the other people ‘in the room’. As Will put it, “you don’t have to take a survey,” but it’s worthwhile pausing to consider who’s actually in play. What was refreshing was the conversation had moved well-beyond the standard ‘don’t rape someone’ formula. At the start we were talked through some pretty shocking statistics; one in seven women report that she feels she’s been sexually abused. But as someone in the discussion pointed out that all too rarely registers as so few of us would ever put a woman in that position. Good Lad looked at this from a new angle. The assumption was less that all men are rapists and more that we could behave so much better.
As Josh Carpenter, one of the Good Lad cofounders, put it to me, “a lot of conversations/ workshops about gender dynamics focus on bare minimum responses like ‘don’t rape someone.’ Obviously, we all know better than that. But most guys want to be considered to be ‘good lads’ by their peers, respected by their teammates, and ultimately, satisfied with who they are as individuals.” The raucous debate which ensued in this Good Lad workshop seemed to vindicate that. There was a real acceptance that gender dynamics are complicated, that we’re not mind readers, but that the burden is on men to behave as well as they can.
So whether or not I was a ‘Bad Lad’ before I went to the class is still open to question. But I’d urge every college and university sports team to sign up for this programme. Walking out of that workshop I felt pretty sure this is one of those great, Oxford-grown initiatives we can justly be proud of.
