Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Blog Page 1234

The Campaign: updated college harrassment policy

Anna Bradshaw
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The Campaign: updated college harrassment policy

At the end of Michaelmas, the University updated its harassment policy and procedure, something for which students have been fighting for years. The new policy is much better than the old policy, with a clearer process, a better focus on welfare, and guidelines for staff members who receive disclosures.

However, changing the University’s harassment policy does not change colleges’ policies. This is why OUSU has set up the Harassment Policy Working Group, chaired by Alice Vacani, to coordinate student action and get colleges to update their own policies. Lots of the members of the Working Group come from OUSU’s campaigns (especially WomCam and It Happens Here), but it is also open to any interested student.

We will be running sessions to equip students with the tools needed to understand the new policy, and to fight for better policies in their colleges. We will also be coordinating student feedback on the new policy, and on areas we think need improving further.

Getting this policy right is absolutely central to protecting students, as is getting the University and colleges to stand up and say clearly that harassment, bullying, discrimination and sexual violence are not tolerated here. Currently, these are serious problems. For example, 68 per cent of female students experience harassment during their time at university (NUS Hidden Marks, 2010). 59 per cent of BME respondents to a CRAE report have felt uncomfortable or unwelcome at Oxford due to their race (100 Voices Report, 2014). Laddish ‘banter’ that makes oppressed groups the butt of a joke is far from rare.

College policies are often difficult to navigate and may be unfamiliar to students. On top of this, colleges’ policies are largely inconsistent and there is no obvious minimum level of provision. This makes it even more difficult for students who are already dealing with harassment to come forward and get results. We need to use the momentum that we have now, from the University’s updated policy and from a strong and growing intersectional student activist community, to push for this work. Colleges need to update their policies, and we need to move into a culture that sees the constant evaluation and updating of these policies as necessary.

You can see the new policy here: http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/eop/harassmentadvice/policyandprocedure/

Get in touch with the Harassment Policy Working Group by emailing the chair, Alice, at alice.vacani@ hertford.ox.ac.uk or me at women@ ousu.ox.ac.uk.

Why ‘quiche’ hurts and other things able people should know

Chris Pike
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Why ‘quiche’ hurts and other things able people should know

Just over a year ago I wrote an article for this very newspaper on my reflections as an autistic student at Oxford in my final year. I wrote about making that coming-of-age journey from uncomfortable, socially awkward freshling to active, involved and confident finalist. It was pretty nice to write, all things considered, and I get the feeling it was pretty nice for able people to read. To quote the last line of that article, “Having a disability at Oxford is really, really tough. It’s also turned out to be really fucking amazing.”

I know what my motivations were for writing that article: to send a message that “it gets better”, that lovely liberal buzz phrase to make us feel all warm and fuzzy.

But now I’m not convinced that that was the message I sent out. I was, perhaps, telling the able people of our student body that they were doing everything right. And what message does that send to the disabled person who is made to feel unable to get involved in a sports team or a society, or to go to a particular event or club night, or even to feel like they’re a valued member of the student body? It’s all very well for me to say that I feel like I’ve had some good successes while I’ve been here. But it’s also the case that, from the moment I got here, I’ve been made to feel like I have to apologise for my disability. And that, in case anyone is in any doubt, is ableism: a method through which society disables me and others by making us feel like our disabilities are only our weaknesses and never our strengths.

This isn’t to say that every able member of the student body is an ableist; I’ve had friends who have supported me in ways I never imagined before I got to university. But that’s only part of the story. The ways I’ve been made to feel – the exclusion, the erasure, the criticism – came from able people who felt uncomfortable around autistic voices and faces, and so they wanted to pretend I wasn’t there.

I don’t have space in this article to give every example of this ableism, so I’ll give you just one. It’s about how I’m made to feel within our LGBTQ social scene. This little world is dominated among the student body by the attractive, the loud, the socially confident, the neurotypical. And many of those same students exclude those who don’t have these qualities from their social groups, their drinks events, their ‘reserved’ spaces in nightclubs, even the language they use: for example, the massively overused ‘quiche’ to refer to anyone or anything hot, cool or fabulous (read: confident, loud, attractive).

I’m sure they have no idea what they’re doing; it can be hard to see the damage done by regularly repeating the name of a pastry. But every time that I hear it, I’m just reminded that I’m not quiche. I’m autistic; I just can’t be quiche. And while I wish I had the privilege of not caring about such a ridiculous fact, I do. Because these people have turned our queer spaces into quiche spaces. I want the LGBTQ scene to include me. But it doesn’t.

I don’t wish to single out these people: these same qualities are seen almost as regularly in other ‘worlds’ I’m involved in: the political world, the feminist world.

Sometimes, it’s the same people in all the worlds. I’m glad to be involved in those things; they’ve taught me a lot and I fight for things I care about through them. But it exacerbates these problems even further: because remember, these are the people who claim to be “good guys” and “intersectional feminists”, who claim to care about disabled liberation. When those people are not only some of the loudest people in the student body, but also those who claim to represent and support disabled people, it has made me question whether there is any hope of disabled people being able to speak up about how being disabled at this University actually makes us feel.

That’s what motivated me to write this article. Most importantly, it’s a plea, made as an act of hope. I may not be able to find anyone like me – anyone who makes me feel like I’m not alone, who’s felt the same frustration and anxiety – on the dance floor of the Plush Lounge, or in the lecture theatres of OUSU Council. But maybe someone will be out there reading this article who is also angry, and maybe even wants to do something about it. I’m speaking out, and I just hope that I’m not the only one who wants to, or feels able to do so. To the disabled people reading this: you’re brilliant. We need you.

Of course, that wasn’t my only motivation. It was also written for those able people who aren’t guilty of this ableism; for you, I hope that this article will simply mean you will (continue to) do what you do. To make me feel welcome, included and valued. Thank you.

Interview: Evan Davis

Ella Richards
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Interview: Evan Davis

Evan Davis takes two months to get back to my email request for an interview. When his PA gets in contact, I’m immediately daunted: I had never thought news journalists would have an entourage.

My concerns are further heightened when he texts me later to confirm a venue. In many ways, it encapsulates the laid back but clearly high-powered man I met — he later tells me how he’d “rather not wear a suit and tie if everyone was happy with it, but it is easier to be neutral and fit in by wearing a suit”. He is disinclined to make strong public statements, yet is also now the face of one of the BBC’s biggest brands, Newsnight.

Starting out at the Institute of Fiscal Studies, he made his journalistic name as BBC’s Economics Editor and by fronting Dragons’ Den. It is perhaps unexpected that Davis now finds himself in what, for many, will always be Jeremy Paxman’s seat. Speaking after his first few weeks in the job, Davis tells me it “is still quite new. I’m still bedding in and working out how to structure the new day”.

Davis’ appointment at Newsnight sparked new-found newspaper interest in the 52 year old interviewer. “Can Evan Davis save Newsnight?” and, “What would Paxo think? Newsnight’s tattooed new host steps out in ripped jeans” were two of many choice headlines in response to his appointment.

I wonder if settling into the job is as difficult as the papers suggest. “The first week had that warm glow,” he tells me. “But by the second week there were people starting to say ‘He’s not as good as Paxman’ and grumbling, but it is starting to settle down. You are never going to please everybody, so you should never look for 100 per cent.”

If such comparisons are frustrating, they are nothing new considering the adversarial style of his former co-host of Today, John Humphrys. Davis describes his style as “convivial and friendly” and defends his interviewing techniques as “explaining and trying to understand”.

Describing his own interview style, he said, “Sometimes the interview might be about trying to find out where you’re coming from, or showing the audience something about your character or it might just be about entertainment. I go into most interviews with an open mind in an attempt to give that person a space for them to describe what they are doing, or to give them enough rope with which to hang themselves if they deserve that.”

This perfectly captures Davis’ approach. Welcoming and refraining from judgement, he is in many ways the opposite of the older, more aggressive interviewers, Paxman and Humphrys. “Tough-questioning, adversarial journalism is a great British tradition. I’m a fan of that style of journalism, it scores up a lot of great successes, it is theatrical and engaging and it also keeps people on their toes in a really brilliant way.” However, as might be expected, Davis thinks it has its limitations, “Paxman and Humphrys were so damn good at what they do and lots of other people felt that that was the gold standard of what you had to do, but we are not all Paxman and Humphrys and, more to the point, we shouldn’t try to be.”

Russell Brand’s explicitly anti-establishment position and discussion style in many ways clashes with Newsnight’s trademark tendency to interview the suit-wearing, media-trained politicians of today’s era. Davis, however, shies away from the establishment label. “I have a program on Radio 4 called The Bottom Line, which is ‘the Chief Executive program’ where I am conversational and friendly with Chief executives, but I hope I am not just an establishment figure.

“I hope I would treat radicals like Russell Brand just as I would treat the Chief Executive of Unileaver. I think it would be crazy to think that just because you are polite to people you are in some way complicit with them; to think that would be stupid.”

Even if Davis feels secure in his own burgeoning trademark style, presenting Newsnight in 2015 also means coming into the brand after a series of journalistic scandals, most notably pertaining to the program itself. Newsnight’s decision in 2011 not to broadcast an investigation into accusations of sexual assault against Jimmy Savile rightly hit the headlines.

I ask Davis about reinventing Newsnight. “What do you say about the Jimmy Savile scandal? It obviously wasn’t a great period in Newsnight. It was interesting to me when I was thinking about leaving Today for Newsnight that when I asked people what they thought of Newsnight, no one mentioned it. The Newsnight brand turned out to be stronger and less tarnished than I thought.”

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Similarly, Davis thinks that the Leveson Inquiry, which followed the 2011 phone hacking scandal, “hasn’t changed the way journalism is done at the BBC, but the BBC doesn’t do the kind of journalism to which Leveson was really oriented so I wouldn’t have expected it to. Nor do I think that it has done as much to change the newspapers’ behaviour as the phone hacking convictions.” He points out, “There is a heck of a lot going on in the life of newspapers at the moment, and worrying about Leveson and press regulation is not at the top of their list: the commercial imperatives and their loss of revenue is a much bigger worry.”

If newspapers are under threat due to dropping circulation figures and diminishing revenue, the BBC has also seen its lifeblood license fee cut in real terms over the last few years. Although Davis tells me, “all these issues are way over my pay-grade,” he has an obviously astute and clearly thought through approach to the discussion. “I see the BBC not as some Leviathan organisation that serves itself – maybe some of the people that work in it think that way, but I don’t. It’s not the BBC’s BBC, it should be seen and treated as an agent of the public. We are an agent, we are not an empire.”

Even without budget cuts, the mainstream media is challenged in the Twenty-First Century by the growth of social media. I ask Davis how he thinks journalists should react to the prevalence of sites such as Twitter. “Twitter is important, we all read it and we look at it and we all take a certain sense from it. You have to contain yourself from putting too much weight on it as it is not a representative sample. Twitter is not a mirror of the population at large, it is slightly skewed to a certain portion.”

Moreover, Davis accepts that, and as is his trademark, analyses the decline of mainstream providers in economic terms, “With the explosion in social media, independent blogs, you would expect a different role from what might be termed ‘old media’ and you would expect it to shrink a bit. That’s an economic phenomenon, just as big supermarkets replace little grocers and little grocers replace market stalls. It’s always a painful stage but it’s expected.”

Davis himself doesn’t tweet regularly – “partly because I find that I have to think too hard in order to know what to say, so that I don’t get a slew of people responding telling me that I’m not meant to have an opinion because I’m at the BBC”.

I ask him about a specific tweet that caught my interest: in July 2014, in light of the Australian swimmer, Ian Thorpe, coming out as gay, Davis tweeted, “Well done ‪@IanThorpe. Your life is about to get a whole lot easier.” He tells me, “That tweet came from a very personal perspective.”

Although he finds it “curious that people take an interest in my homosexuality,” he tells me, “if people want to comment it is not for me to tell them what should or shouldn’t be interesting. If you asked me whether I was interested in whether a random celebrity was gay or not, I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t.”

As the interview draws to a close, I ask Davis about his own experience of coming out. He explains, “I wasn’t fully out at Oxford at all. I came out in my second year of university in the States. Being gay at Oxford at the time was still a bit of a feature. I remember doing an interview with a guy who was running the gay society and the interview was very much about his homosexuality. It was more of a feature than it is now but Oxford was still a tolerant and liberal place.

“If I were going back to Oxford again, I would say come out as soon as you can, you just make your life so much easier, which is why I said that to Ian Thorpe.” He tells me, “I realised I was gay before University. I was clear about it before college and keeping it a secret is a thing that kind of builds up and not being open about it horrendously complicates your life and becomes really annoying. It’s not a little thing, it is quite a great difference between you and a lot of other people if you are dating guys.”

Having not come out during his time at Oxford, Davis explains, “There are two phases in coming out: the first phase is self-acceptance, which is quite a big step, and a lot of people take a very long time to get there, and you are not going to be out to other people before you come out to yourself. The second step of telling people generally was much harder. I found it very hard to tell other people before I told my family, although that is perhaps not the same for everyone.”

I am struck by how honest Davis is about his own experiences and by how open and conversational he is in discussing his Newsnight role, as well as heavier topics such as Leveson or the license fee. He is as friendly and modest as his interviewing persona suggests, which I suppose is why he was chosen to fill Paxman’s shoes in the first place.

As he tells me, “I was never tempted by tabloid journalism. You look at someone like Robert Peston and he gets stories every week. For me, journalism was never about talking to Deep Throat and getting a story – I’ve never got a story in my life”.

Picks of the Week HT15 Week 2

Cherwell Culture
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Picks of the Week HT15 Week 2

The Oxford Book Club’s Hilary Term Sale, Saturday, 11-4pm, Java & Co

The Oxford Book Club is back with its first sale of Hilary term. With a relaxed, coffee-scented atmosphere, and some playlists so relaxing you might fall asleep, upstairs at Java & Co is the place to be on Saturday if you want to unwind after a stressful 1st Week. Oh, and you can buy some books too if you like. 

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NT Live: Treasure Island, Tuesday, 12pm, Phoenix Picturehouse 

Robert Louis Stevenson’s story of murder, money and mutiny is brought to life in a thrilling new stage adaptation by Bryony Lavery, broadcast live from the National Theatre. If you couldn’t make the first showing on Thursday, head to Jericho’s Phoenix Picturehouse for an encore performance. 

The Woman in Black, Monday-Saturday, 7.30pm, Oxford Playhouse

Acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, The Woman in Black delivers a chilling theatrical experience. A lawyer obsessed with a curse he believes has been cast over him engages a sceptical young actor to exorcise the fear that grips his soul. It all begins innocently enough, but soon the borders between make-believe and reality begin to blur… 

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The Dumb Waiter, Tuesday-Saturday, 9.30pm, Burton Taylor Studio

Harold Pinter’s modern classic of fear, hidden authority and black humour will be coming to the BT on Tuesday, in a new and particularly claustrophobic production. If you like eccles cakes and questioning authority, you’ll love this. 

Deep Uncover feat. S.O., Tuesday, 10pm-1am, Cellar

With familiar faces from Deep Cover DJing, world-renowned hip-hop artist S.O. comes to Cellar before he heads to his US tour. S.O.’s style brings a fresh twist to hip hop, as his lyrical precision reflects both his passion for the genre and his love for Jesus, making him the most talked about name on the Lampmode label, and possibly the first Christian MC to grace the stage at Cellar. 

Theatre Ad Infinitum: Light, Wednesday-Thursday, 8pm, The North Wall Art Centre

Inspired by Edward Snowden’s revelations and the ensuing debate on state surveillance, Theatre Ad Infinitum’s Light presents an Orwellian future, when a totalitarian regime monitors the thoughts of its citizens through implants. Blending anime-style storytelling and a pulsating soundscape, this is a nightmarish tale of love, betrayal and technological power. 

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Blackwell’s Presents: Michael Morpurgo, Friday, 7pm, Sheldonian Theatre

Do you like horses? Do you like war? Then you’ll love Michael Morpurgo reading his acclaimed novel War Horse to the accompaniment of John Tams and Barry Coope playing music the former specifically wrote for the National’s award-winning production. 

LiveFriday: Heaven & Hell, Friday, 7-10.30pm, Ashmolean Museum

Explore William Blake’s visions of Heaven and Hell in this special edition of LiveFriday with a programme of live music, performances, workshops and tours throughout the Museum and find out how Blake has inspired writers, artists, musicians, and scholars through the ages. 

Milestones: Edward Bond’s Saved

Fergus Morgan
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Milestones: Edward Bond’s Saved

The Royal Court Theatre has a long history of breaking new theatrical ground. With John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in May 1956, it crystallised the sentiment of a generation into one character: Jimmy Porter, the original ‘angry young man’. In January 1995, it produced Sarah Kane’s infamous Blasted, which features explicit scenes of rape, suicide and cannibal­ism. It was in November 1965 though, with Edward Bond’s Saved, that the Royal Court truly made its mark on British theatre.

The critical vitriol Saved received was scouring, and it was largely directed at one particular scene. Scene VI to be precise. “My only emotion was cold disgust at being asked to sit through such a scene,” The Telegraph proudly confessed, pointing to its stiff upper lip. “One of the nastiest scenes I have ever had to sit through,” muttered Punch. “A systematic degradation of the human animal,” said the Times, try­ing to act all clever.

Come on, admit it. You want to know what happens in that scene. Okay, I’ll tell you, but be warned, it’s pretty horrible. The scene depicts a group of youths in a park, with an abandoned baby in a pram. Out of boredom, the boys begin to harm the infant. In an masterfully conceived atmosphere of escalat­ing horror, they progress from spitting on it, to pulling its hair, to punching it, and ultimately, to stoning it to death. Yeah, grim, I know.

Yet to characterise Saved purely by its ability to shock and disgust would be inappropriate. That same attitude was prevalent in the critical reactions to Kane’s Blasted three decades later and look how stupid it seems now. It’s much more impressive to pretend that you ‘under­stand’ it.

Saved is a play about violence. It depicts the appallingly unimaginative lives of a group of working class south Londoners and, although the baby-stoning scene is the most horrendous example of their emotional barbarism, it is the everyday life of these people that offers the most thought-provoking social comment. It is a life entirely devoid of sentiment or affection. The play’s true violence is in the ceaseless arguments, the meaningless conflict between characters.

Bond’s play was not revolutionary in this. It did what many good plays do: it pointed out a problem in society and directed the public’s attention towards it. What Bond’s play did was lift the physical horrors of Greek tragedy and, much later, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and prove that they had a place on the contempo­rary stage. There was bound to be friction, as there would be with Blasted, which took things to another level entirely, but ulti­mately, dramatic integrity sides with Bond and Kane.

Attitudes at the time were far from Cherwell-levels of enlightenment, however. Initially, Saved was denied a license by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, who deemed it unfit for public consumption and The Royal Court was prosecuted when it tried to find a loophole. The debacle exposed the absurdity of censorship law and provoked a long debate that eventually led to its abolition in September 1968. So, good on you, Ed. Top stuff.

Saved is rarely revived. The Royal Court brought it back in 1984 and the Lyric Ham­mersmith did so in 2011. It was even on at the BT Studio back in 2013 (odd how a London revival is so often followed by an Oxford one), when our very own Francesca Nicholls stated that it had “absolutely no meaning”. Oh FFS, Francesca. Come on. 

Frankenstein, Godzilla and now Norman Foster

Ollie Johnson
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Frankenstein, Godzilla and now Norman Foster

If you found yourself in Pyongyang, there would probably be more immediate things running through your mind than how re­pellent the skyline is. The North Koreans may not be all that concerned about it, given all the other pressing concerns of being a North Korean. Like the lack of food. And water. And, I suspect, the overbearing presence of an apocalyptically militant dictatorship.

But if you took a glance around you, walk­ing down Pongwha Street, you’d see the ugli­est building ever made. In fact, probably the ugliest man-made thing ever: the Ryugyong Hotel. It is remarkable to think that the building was designed by someone with eyes. It’s cer­tainly no friend to those blessed with the gift of sight. Critics have said it looks like a super­villain’s crack at a Holiday Inn, but it more closely resembles how a five-year old draws mountains; one massive triangle surrounded by two smaller ones. It rends the Pyongyang skyline asunder by virtue of being clad in a particularly annoyingly iridescent glass and by being 800 feet taller than all the other buildings in the city. It looks like an arrowhead, which should point to a massive neon sign floating in the sky reading, “I was a dreadful mistake.”

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No other word can describe it than ‘mon­strosity’; the architectural counterpart to Godzilla. Indeed, our modern context of what ‘monstrosity’ means has moved from the pages of literature to the movie screen, and now to the buildings that surround us. The monsters of the modern age are chimeras of glass and steel, that rise hundreds of feet into the air. They scrape the sky, and our reti­nas. They impress upon the way we think and feel. Why else do you think all the Somerville freshers look perpetually shell-shocked? It would be impossible to feel any other way if you had to live in Vaughan accommodation, a building that boasts an exoskeleton made of concrete and regret.

Vile skylines are a global issue. London gets off comparatively lightly. The Shard is actually stylish, though balanced by be­ing woefully small. It needed to be taller, because now it seems like a remembrance monument for expectations not quite met. Dubai went the other way with the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest build­ing that also uncannily resembles the equipment used in IVF.

Could you describe what the Tokyo cityscape looks like? I don’t think anyone could. It’s difficult to know what would be worse; to be affronted by a few very ugly buildings, or sur­rounded by many mildly ugly ones. Tokyo sits in the latter category. It has a skyline so bland and non-descript that I can imagine that’s what it must be like to live on a Monopoly board.

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Psychogeographers would say that what surrounds us has tremendous influence on our minds. They’d have a field day with the Ryugong. Enclosed as we are by droning towerblocks, or one-off ar­chitectural aneurisms, it is hard to feel any­thing but hopeless. There’s very little to find inspiring or uplifting in a building called the Walkie Talkie, which looks exactly as confusing as its name suggests. Did anyone ask for a building resembling a handheld, two-way radio transceiver? I refuse to believe anyone has ever looked at a walkie-talkie and thought, “I’d like to live in that.” But what if we flip the question around. What do our buildings reveal about our own collective psyche?

Moral degeneracy. Our crumbling societal standards have clearly echoed into the bricks inside which we live, producing the mon­strosities of our modern architecture. What with £1.99 two-litre White Ace ciders, over two-thirds of marriages ending in divorce, dropping church attendance and this new-fangled electronic pornography, no wonder our buildings have become repellent. We became the monsters, and our buildings simply followed.

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Oh, to hark back to the days of the Empire State Building. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore, all solid and reliable, smelling of law and order from 1931. That’s what a self-respecting building looks like – a monolith of dependability, caked in 200,000 square feet of limestone. It only took two weeks to draw the building designs as well, from the foundations through to the Art Deco-inspired top 16 floors. It’s not like these modern sordid buildings, with their prurient pro­trusions and their voyeuristically transparent glass walls.

The skylines of today are amal­gamations of fear and wonder that pervert our minds and transform the human race into the immoral rogues we now are. Powerless to resist their perni­cious auras, we now worship diligently at the phallic shrine of the Gherkin. I remember the days when architectural mar­vels were something to be proud of, a reassuring sign of humankind’s in­genuity, and not a perpetually wail­ing reminder of how far we have fallen from the heights of our prelapsarian, pre-Norman Foster days of architectural innocence. 

Oxford’s most-loved Japanese

Benjamin Berry
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Oxford’s most-loved Japanese

We hit up Oxford’s favourite authentic Japanese eatery for its first Sushi Thursday of term. Put off by college’s stodgy-sounding offering of beef bourguignon, we found a delightfully fresh alternative in Holywell Street’s Edamame. The early evening sushi night on a Thursday seems, from the size of the queues, to have become an Oxford institution, and rightly so.

On arrival at Edamame – the restaurant takes no bookings and has limited space so an early arrival is advised (we arrived at 17:30 and by 17:45 there were queues out the door) – we were promptly given a menu of the evening’s fare.Thursday night’s menu is restricted to sushi or sashimi, yet there is an impressive variety of styles to be tried. As a party of three, we decided to share a selection of the sushi on offer and picked five sushi dishes and three sides.

We began our feast with the eponymous edamame beans and went on to choose a Gunkan set (mixed fish sushi wrapped in seaweed), a more classic nigiri set, a tuna and salmon sashimi dish, and a Makizushi special set. This selection gave us the chance to try different sushi styles, as well as a variety of fish–the Gunkan set included salmon eggs and the nigiri featured octopus for the more intrepid gastronomes.

The sushi itself was excellent, and the freshness of the fish, particularly the tuna and salmon sashimi, was evident. Edamame makes all its sushi on site and this certainly comes through in the food; this said, the homemade nature of the nigiri resulted in a lack of cohesion between the rice and salmon, causing some crumbling issues. The Makizushi set was a special – be sure to check the walls for these, they are not made obvious on the menus – and the strongly flavoured seaweed wrapping, as well as the crunchy pickled radish in this dish, provided an interesting taste not to be found in high-street sushi chains.

As well as the edamame beans, we had side dishes of spinach and sushi rice. While satisfying and delicious, these dishes were a little overpriced at £3 each, given their size. Those seeking a more authentic experience should try fish flakes on the spinach, something we were too cowardly to do. The sushi rice had the perfect sticky texture and tones of vinegar and it provided a good dose of carbs to thicken out the otherwise light meal.

To kick off Hilary in style we ordered a tokkura (150ml jug) of sake, which is served in small, traditionally painted ceramic cups, as well as cups of green tea and an oolong cha. While sake is most probably not to everyone’s liking, it once again made our experience more authentic and was a nice touch.

Overall, Edamame offers a great eating experience conveniently located in the heart of Oxford. While there are cheaper restaurants to be found, Edamame does not compromise on quality or freshness for what is essentially a well-priced meal. A great find for sushi lovers and ‘shinnichi’, but be prepared to queue.

Bar Review: Wadham

The Bar Review Team
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Bar Review: Wadham

Walking in through a sea of Nike Roshes, ironic sweatshirts, and pictures of Beyonce, I wasn’t really sure what Wadham bar would be like at all. Entering through the front quad, I thought the bar, like most college bars, would be tucked away in some underground cavern just off the main quad.

Alas, 15 minutes later, I was still lost in the complicated maze that is the back end of Wadham. Having finally found the right staircase, I walked in through a quad which had a somewhat tragic resemblance to a Floridian retirement home.

Walking in, the place essentially looked like a corridor which, as if by accident, happens to have a bar. To be honest, the whole thing looks a bit like an accident and this is not helped by the sparse number of blades above the bar and the random assortment of old photos hanging on the walls.

With the bar on the right-hand side and the booths on the left, the weird chasm in between initially made me think that this was a bar for the most hacky of hacks who were paranoid that someone would overhear their conversation. However, there isn’t actually glass between the booths, so you can hear the next table’s conversation on the politics of dildos.

It also means that the acoustics are a bit odd and so it’s easier to hear others’ conversations than your own. It was also fairly small and it not particularly full (even on a Tuesday), so I guess even Wadhamites themselves aren’t that fond of it. On the bright side, the bar was admittedly very well stocked and had an excellent range of liquors. Approaching the bartender, who was reading the paper and looked a bit bored, I asked if Wadham had a signature drink.

Looking somewhat confused as to why I was talking to him, he told me that it was a tequila and pineapple juice. Being both a fan of pineapple juice and tequila, I was looking forward to what I expected to be some kind of variant of a tequila sunrise (especially since I paid a decent amount for it).

I have great memories that all involve tequila sunrise, so the pressure was on. What I got was a shot of tequila which had a chaser of a shot of pineapple juice. It was alright, but realistically, for the price I paid, the tequila should have been better quality.

There’s nothing exceptionally terrible about Wadham bar but it just feels like no one really cares, like it’s a little bit too much of an effort to do anything really well.

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆  (1/5)

Every page of The Sun is toxic

James Elliott
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0
Every page of The Sun is toxic

Presumably a number of JCRs were yesterday rushing down to newsagents to re-subscribe to The Sun, thinking Page 3 was no more, when The Sun announced it was staying. Whatever would have replaced Page 3 it would have been one more page that The Sun could fill with the rest of their vicious poison, and applauding it for dropping one of its least offensive pages would have been the political equivalent of playing ‘Blurred Lines’ because Robin Thicke had agreed to skip the first verse.

Far from being a misogynistic blip in an otherwise well-meaning and liberal publication, Page 3 is by far one of the least pernicious and toxic parts of that paper and we should focus on the whole of its politics, which have always been incredibly reactionary.

A friend of mine and a disabled people’s rights campaigner put it quite well, saying, “I don’t want to scrap Page 3, I want to burn every copy of The Sun that tells me I’m a scrounging waster who lies to get her sick pay handouts from the government, I want to burn every copy of The Sun that tells my immigrant friends that they’re ruining the country and don’t deserve basic human rights.”

This is the paper that smeared the victims of Hillsborough, libelling the dead with accusations of urinating on other supporters. This is the paper that attacked a transgender parliamentary candidate, writing, “being blind, how did she know she was the wrong sex”. This is the paper that runs endless stories about disabled people ‘scrounging’ the social security that is their right. The campaign for students’ unions to boycott The Sun purely on the basis of Page Three always had this problem: after ‘victory’, it would still be full of misogyny, victim-blaming, lies and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Look out your window at a country with over a million people using foodbanks, two million people having had their benefits stopped by a draconian sanctions regime, and one in five people, over thirteen million, living in poverty. This is the austerity Britain moulded by papers like The Sun.

Let’s not pretend that the absence of Page Three would have changed The Sun in the slightest. It’s a reactionary publication and the JCRs like Teddy Hall which do without The Sun are better off without its poison polluting our spaces.

We need to change our views on BDSM

Rhiannon Gibbs-Harris
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0
We need to change our views on BDSM

I met Tina in a popular pub which is usually busy by night, but during the day we were the only ones there. Tina is in her mid-twenties and is currently completing a Master’s Degree. She also happens to be in a ‘Daddy relationship’.

Most of us tend to associate BDSM with the stereotypes of PVC, whips and masks, but we don’t tend to focus on the actual relationship aspects. Daddy relationships involve a ‘Daddy’ and a ‘Little’. In simple terms, the Daddy treats theLittle as a child and the Little treats the Daddy as a parent. This can involve the Daddy choosing the Little’s clothing, having the Little do the chores, and the Daddy financially supporting the Little, although this is not always the case, unlike in ‘Sugar Daddy’ relationships.

Tina lives with her boyfriend, Hugh, and they have been together for about three years. A typical day for her involves getting up at six, making a full cooked breakfast and a packed lunch for him, getting dressed in clothes he picked out for her the night before and then, after he has gone to work, working on her thesis for her master’s and doing chores (such as cleaning the house, doing the grocery shopping, and doing the laundry). After Hugh returns home she makes him dinner.

Although this sounds a bit like a day in the life of a 1950s housewife and not that of a BDSM practitioner, Tina calls her boyfriend “Daddy”, acts like a child around him and they engage in ‘age-play’ which is when she roleplays being an actual child.

Tina began our interview saying that she absolutely did not want to be named (Tina is a pseudonym) because of the social stigma still surrounding BDSM practices. She says she once revealed her sexual lifestyle to a friend, who immediately told her she was mentally ill and needed psychiatric evaluation. This fear of persecution seems to be very common among practitioners of the more intense parts of BDSM.

And whilst some might find this behaviour disturbing, Tina argues that she has never felt happier. Before this current relationship, she felt that she was bored of sex and considered herself to be “asexual”.

She met her boyfriend through mutual friends and after a month of dating, he suggested a Daddy relationship. Tina decided to give it a go and currently enjoys sex significantly more than before. Identifying as a feminst, she says, “This relationship helped me feel far more confident in both my personal and work life. Before I met Hugh, I would never have considered even applying for an MA but now I’m studying the thing I love and I’m getting better grades than ever.”

Because of the rise of books such as 50 Shades of Grey and the popularity of stores like Ann Summers, people seem to have become more aware of BDSM.I personally think it’s sexist that the only media depictions (and I include this article in that) are of submissive women and there are barely any of dominant women. However, I really don’t think that Tina’s lifestyle encourages misogyny, because it makes her feel happier and more confident in her life, allowing her to achieve her goals. What can be wrong with that?

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