Have you ever listened to the lyrics of Mystikal’s ‘Shake ya ass’? For the uninitiated, it is a song that can cause even the most ardent feminist to become a frenzied bacchanal on the dance floor. But, “shake ya ass, show me what you workin with. I came here with my d*ck in my hand. Don’t make me leave here with my foot in yo’ ass”, hardly alludes to someone who believes in gender equality. And Mystikal, a word of advice: you may be hankering for some action but at least hold something a little less conspicuous. A glass of champagne p’haps?

It is all too easy to dismiss these disturbing lyrics with the trite excuse that it’s ‘just hip-hop. After all, rap music and hip-hop have long been mired in controversy for their blatant misogyny, which emerged in the 90s, when lyrics that trafficked purely in lewd language flourished into a hip-hop sub-genre. Yet songs laced with crude and brutal expressions of sexism shows no sign of budging. Juelz Santana’s “There It Go (The Whistle Song),” was a chart hit that is as close to a street harassment anthem as a song can come, with lyrics like “move your thang/there it go/I don’t need to ask I proceed to grab“. Such lyrics are as indefensible as those songs which spew vulgarities “Imma beat dat p*ssy up” and implore women to ‘bend over’.

Vulgar glorification of pimping and female-ownership hasn’t prevented artists such as Snoop Dogg and Ice T from gaining mainstream acceptance. Snoop Dogg is, after all, a man who has walked women in dog chains and dog collars across concert stages and spouted lyrics, which explicitly advocate violence against women.  “Can U Control Yo Hoe“, isfull of some real clangers:  “You’ve got to put that bitch in her place/Even if it’s slapping her in her face … This is what you force me to do.” And yet such raw misogyny is overlooked by his apparently colourful charisma and quirky dress sense.

Chris Brown is one of the best examples of this “cultural amnesia”. Having violently abused his girlfriend, Rihanna, to the extent that she had to be hospitalised, he is now not only considered musically relevant, but has also subsequently won an MTV Music Award, and has a sold-out tour. Most worrying of all, a large proportion of Brown’s fan base are teenage girls, who, during his Grammy performance, sent tweets out to the tune of: “I’d let Chris Brown beat me up any day”. Despite the fact that he’s purring that, “No is not an option. Are you ready, I’m a take what’s mine”.

Consider the gross double standards. Eminem was pressurised to apologise for his homophobic lyrics. And so he should be. How, then, can we allow misogynistic lyrics to be treated differently? All the bass in the world cannot disguise Tyler’s disgusting message, from ‘The Creator’: “We go skate, rape sluts and eat donuts from Randy”. Songs such as these subscribe men to a distorted guideline of how to measure their masculinity. They propagate the myth of women as a monolith: a sex object that can be used and abused in any form to satisfy the sexual desires of a man. When men are taught that sex is a commodity, and women are taught that it’s an emotional experience, you’re not going to end up with a functional market or indeed a set of norms for establishing relationships. Instead, you have a recipe for anger and entitlement.

Undoubtedly music fuels misogynistic attitudes by contributing to the belief that women’s bodies should be sexually available, but it does not create that perception alone. It begs the question, then: why do musicians around the world feel confident that audiences will sing along to lyrics that demean women? The sentiments behind that music do not exist in a vacuum. They thrive in religious texts, the lack of female legal protections, daily street harassment and social attitudes towards women.

Of course, rappers are not the only proponents of misogyny in popular culture. They are far from the first. The music industry has been saturated with a sprawling jungle of misogynistic imagery, from country musicians bemoaning a “no good woman” to craggy faced rock stars boasting of their latest conquest.

Rap and hip-hop music are, in principle, forms of oppositional culture that offers a message of resistance, empowerment, and social critique. But this intentionally avoids analysis of explicitly misogynist and sexist lyrics. To overlook the lyrical content is like eating a sandwich without the filling. Granted, gangsta rap is all about bravado, self-regard, macho posturing and, tenuously, fun. But that does not excuse the content. It is, in many cases, simply a mantle for misogyny.

YES! – Charlotte Cooper-Beglin

In Wadham, my college, there’s been a spurt of overtly ‘political’ motions this year. The SU has deliberated topics as the Israel-Palestine situation, the propriety of Julian Assange speaking at the Union given his accusations of rape and the arguably transphobic attitudes of the British press involved in the Lucy Meadows case. We’ve also seen a controversial candidate for Treasurer condemn such “bureaucratic and ideological motions” and argue (in a quote from Cherwell) that “SU money is for everyone, not just those with an agenda.”

So is it right for the JCR to be a political body? I believe so. Firstly, how on earth could it not be? Even in its most basic form, it is a body designed to represent the interests of students and to allocate the resources afforded to it as it sees fit according to the students’ wishes. This in itself is a political task; often the judgements we accept as received wisdom have implicit values and assumptions in them, and even if the JCR was used to the greatest economic benefit of the whole student body, this decision in itself embodies its own political principles.

Politics doesn’t have to mean narrow party political allegiances either. When we vote to reimburse women for the morning after pill, for example, we are politically endorsing principles of reproductive freedom.

It’s also hard to draw the line between issues that affect us as a student body and high politics. National political debates are often discussed through the prism of university life. Israel-Palestine was raised through a discussion about pressuring the university to support the BDS (Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions) movement in order to not use our funds to support oppression, and also involved discussion of how this would affect Israeli students, and of the academic and cultural impact of such a decision on Oxford students. Similarly rape culture, victim-blaming and the Julian Assange case were raised through discussions of the Un- ion’s programme, the incidence sexual harassment among students, and Wadham’s zero-tolerance motion.

Having said this, I don’t want to limit this to an argument that the JCR is implicitly political in its everyday workings, true though I think this is. I also believe that it’s a good thing that JCRs can have their own political identity, such as Wadham’s radical/left-wing/feminist identity.

Sure, there’s a lot that frustrates me about student politics. It can be over- intellectualised, naïve about the world and involve just a minority of students. But there’s also much that’s great about it. It’s likely that our time at university will be the most time we ever get to dedicate to politics. Historically students have played a role in some of the biggest protest movements, and we shouldn’t just embrace an apathetic stance. JCRs are also in many senses unique as their small size means anyone can attend and have their voice heard. As a small body of students living together in these circumstances, yes we should be tolerant, open-minded and independent, but we shouldn’t shy away from politics. To confront political issues big and small in such an open and participatory democratic forum with the people we live with is an opportunity we shouldn’t pass by. Whoever said life and politics were separable anyway?

NO! – Alexander Rankine

A JCR fulfils many roles: loving community, welfare support, representative in rent negotiations, den of college egos and source of angry clean up exhortation emails thereafter. To say that it should never act in a way possible of being con- strued ‘politically’ is too high a bar to set. Rent arguments are political, how the food budget is spent is political. JCR elections are pretty political.

By a ‘political’ JCR then we shall mean one in which agendas irrelevant to the direct interests of members are pursued. For instance, where does your JCR take positions on the following matters?

Firstly, financial considerations, ranging from the allocation of the budget to issues relating to what col- lege charges members for food and accommodation.

Secondly, the way JCR members act towards each other. Are certain forms of behaviour or language otherwise legal in the world outside expressly condemned by the JCR as a whole (rather than merely in the JCR during meetings)?

Thirdly, issues loosely relevant to Oxford University as a whole: should Julian Assange, Nick Griffin or Psy have been allowed to come to Oxford events to speak?

Finally, issues of generic importance beyond the cloisters. Does this JCR support nuclear energy? What is this JCR’s position on the coalition government’s deficit reduction strategy?

For each question award 0 points if your JCR never does this, 1 if sometimes, 2 if often. Less than four and your JCR isn’t really doing its job. 6+ and it is getting into political territory.

You will notice that as the points go up, the JCR’s power to directly affect the lives of its members diminishes. The JCR normally plays an important role in rent negotiations, it has some limited power of influence over its member inter-personal conduct. On the other hand, the Oxford Union does not really care what your JCR thinks. The world does not even know that it exists.

The amount of ideological verbiage at JCR meetings is also likely to increase with irrelevance. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Some students feel passionately that certain issues, even if only loosely relevant, need an airing. And the level of political debate in most JCRs is actually quite high, much higher than in most student contexts, and definitely much higher than parliament. Opinions idiotic, hackneyed or inflexible are shown up if a few wise people deign to come to JCR meetings. To hear the brightest in college hold forth on public policy is definitely one of Mill’s ‘higher pleasures’ (sorry, prelims again). Then again, maybe that’s just because Corpus has Nick Dickinson.

There is always a danger that as the JCR divides itself over unimportant matters that something more important than the fight for Marxism- Leninism or the compulsory skin branding of JCR members with their privileges, relevantly ‘checked’, is lost. Unity. Just because a majority backs something, the irritated minority feels aggrieved that their JCR represent opinions they do not themselves support.

This in turn directly affects the core welfare competencies of JCRs. There is also a manifest loss of JCR credibility if it devotes a great deal of time to passing judgement on the wider world. JCRs should spend more time navel-gazing. 

I am a fairly proud secularist and atheist so I was struck by a certain irony when Rowan Williams granted me an interview, Richard Dawkins having only mocked me when I asked him for one. He told me that I couldn’t pronounce the paper’s name – “Its Cher-well, not Char-well or however you say it” – and said that “everything he had to say had already been said.”

So I interviewed the ex-Archbishop. I thanked him for his kindness in visiting my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand after its devastating earthquake, but also challenged him with Voltaire’s great poem on the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. “Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice/Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?”

Rather than re-hash the old cliché of asking a theologian for a solution to the problem of evil, I ask him where in literature can he find the best place to grapple with these questions.

“It’s an interesting place to start, because scroll back to the New Testament and you find Jesus himself saying, ‘do you think those who died in the disaster were any more wicked than those who didn’t? Of course not.’ And then you scroll back the book of Job, which is almost entirely a passionate protest against the injustice of god; so you can’t say it begins with Voltaire. But in modern literature, the classic place for this is in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.

“Dostoyevsky took great pride in saying ‘I’m going to put a better case against God than any atheist can’ and laying out the horrors of murder and child abuse. And he would just say, ‘well there isn’t really an explanation. What I’m offering you is not a theory, not an explanation; I’m offering you a story about people who can live with it’.

“That’s one of the things literature can offer you,” Williams explains. “it doesn’t say here are the answers to your problems; it says here is a story about people living with certain kinds of conflict and tragedy and you have to think; if they can do it, can I?”

As Williams is an expert on Dostoyevsky – he learned Russian to read the author in the original – I ask him to elaborate on what makes an infamously misogynistic drunkard with a lifelong gambling addiction still one of the greatest of all spiritual writers.

“He doesn’t come from the traditional background of the Russian intelligentsia, he’s a young radical who is imprisoned and then has his horrendous near-death experience chronicled in his great prison novel The House of the Dead. It gives you a very poignant picture of someone struggling with the very diversity of human experience, the absolute failures and horrors of human experience, having his nose rubbed in the unmanageability of the world.”

“So when he comes out with some kind of renewed faith, as he says, it’s a faith that’s been through the crucible; it’s been burned pretty severely; it will never be about glib happy endings.

“He has this double attitude towards the people of Russia; he has a great mystical faith in the innate spiritual wisdom of the Russian peasants, but he is also well aware that the average Russian peasant is a slob perfectly capable of drunkenness, rape and murder. The fact that he has these two eyes focusing on each side of this paradox constantly makes him aware of the uncompromisingly tragic, he sees a little bit further into the dark and this makes him bigger than perhaps even Tolstoy.”

He points out that one thing all religious writers must grapple with is the simultaneous salvation and futility of faith and grace. He mentions Catholic authors Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.

“In both of them they must grapple with an awful paradox; how is it that you can think of divine grace as absolutely real, and yet not feel it making any difference to you, not dealing with your compulsions, your failures, your dark side.”

As someone deeply suspicious of religious faith, I find myself often more in sympathetic with one of Dostoyevsky’s greatest sceptical characters, the dour intellectual atheist Ivan Karamazov. So I put to him the question; what if we choose to read Dostoyevsky as an atheist?

“Of course his novels are structured so that you can read them this way. He never gives you a meek let out either way, and one of his greatest messages is to say that there’s never going to be a single image, a single gesture a single story that is going to settle the question.”

Williams is clearly very taken with religious authors, so I ask him slyly whether there any actual correlation between religious faith and literary ability? He laughs. “God doesn’t say to a poet ‘well done, you’ve behaved and believed very well, and now I’m going to make you a great writer, abracadabra.

“I don’t think there is; quite often people who become Christian don’t become great writers, they become worse writers; the mature Wordsworth writes terrible stuff, because he’s become a rather conventional Christian. Siegfried Sassoon is perhaps another case; his later Christian poetry has none of the edginess of what he wrote in the war. But you can take someone like W. H. Auden whose a much more interesting case; his convesion to Christianity allows for poetry of hard, but accepting, self-awareness and a sense of absolution mysteriously granted in advance.

“There are many people without religion who write brilliantly, and many with faith who write badly.

“But the very best poets, no matter their faith, are those who push the envelope, who are behaving as if our human experience were framed in something much more mysterious and unmanageable, which is something to do with religion.”

We move onto something that many secularists have a striking objection to: the religious education of children. What, I ask him, is his take on teaching children religion from a young age?

“By all means tell children bible stories early on; whether you’d like to admit it or not, they are part of the mental furniture of our civilisation, you need to know why and how this story shapes so many others.

“They are not stories about divine intervention, but about how people’s utterly chaotic and unexpected and bumpy personal histories somehow attach to the purposes of god, but you are left to make your own judgement.

“Here’s a story about someone who was bought up to be king of God’s people, but then murders, betrays, fornicates his way around the Holy City, whose own sons turns against him, then you have the heart-breaking passage where David weeps over the son who betrays him and you think, this is a picture of humanity that is pretty comprehensive and pretty nuanced. I’d tell people stories like that, simply to show how a story should be told.

“But the purely religious question is a harder one. I think it’s important to give children a sense of what it means for someone to say they are religious. Show them people who are praying and ask them what they think those people they are doing?’. The purpose of education is to open people’s minds to the varieties of human experience. We can’t be so tactful and restrained that we dont expose children to this kind of thing.”

I ask him where is the best place to start looking for answers if we are struggling with faith.

“The most important thing to know is that this takes the time it takes; you can’t force yourself to its conclusion. But what you need to do is find people of faith that you trust. They can be living, or they can be writers from an age ago; but you must find people who are not interested in taking the easy shortcuts; it’s a journey that we must all take in some way. You may not find you end in the destinations they do, but it’s vital to at least travel with them.”

He ends by talking about his debate against Richard Dawkins in Cambridge.

“There’s one thing that Dawkins passionately insisted upon – and if nothing else he’s a very passionate man – he says, ‘here’s this world with all its complexity and beauty and majesty; why do you want to complicate it by throwing God in?

“I didn’t think of the response at the time, but this is what I would have said. Take Bach’s St Matthew passion, or a Mozart symphony; does it complicate it to say it was written by Bach or Mozart?

“There’s a huge creative imagination holding all this together; it doesn’t complicate it to say there’s a God involved. Bach’s passion lies in the heart of Bach, and the world lies in the heart of God.”