Blog Page 4

How cinema has taught us to see Autumn

Amalia Dasgupta
-
0
How cinema has taught us to see Autumn

Every October, as the days rapidly shorten and the need for layers starts to become a hassle, many of us find consolation in the familiar promise of a ‘cosy autumn film’. Everyone has their favourites, from nostalgic rom-coms like When Harry Met Sally… and heart-wrenching classics such as Dead Poets Society to the spookier feelings of Hocus Pocus. But what do all these autumn specials have in common? Many seasonal rewatches do not actually take place in autumn. For instance, Fantastic Mr. Fox perfectly captures that ‘fall feeling’, but does not mention the season at all, and many consider the Harry Potter franchise quintessential autumn films although they span entire years. So, what is it about these films that makes you want to curl up at home while the leaves fall outside?

Film has manufactured a recognisable autumn colour palette, perhaps the most obvious tool filmmakers use to signal the season. Burnt orange, deep burgundy, and highlights of gold are integral to autumnal scenes, flashes of warmth as the weather gets colder. Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox is bathed almost entirely in these colours, with the greatest ode being the colour of the main character’s fur. Similarly, the most easily remembered scene from When Harry Met Sally… is the iconic Central Park sequence where the characters are surrounded by autumnal oranges and yellows. Autumn in England is often depressingly grey — looking out of my window in Oxford at this time of year is disheartening and a reminder that the time for shorts and flip-flops has well and truly passed. Seeing a dead leaf on the ground, however, somehow has the opposite effect of reminding me that summer is dying, instead bringing me a warm feeling and a desire to eat a pumpkin. This romanticisation of decay lies at the heart of the autumn we see on screen, where the bright colours of a tree’s swan song are saturated to the maximum. This use of colour in film is thus perhaps not a reflection of autumn as it is but rather one of an autumn that is bearable to its viewers.

Texture and lighting play a similar role in creating an autumn feeling. Scenes that convey an autumn feeling are unusually tactile, full of tweed, dusty pages and wood panelling. The costume designers of Dead Poets Society, for instance, leaned into the East-Coast prep school aesthetic with heavy blazers, coats and patterned knitwear, which pair nicely with the woody interiors and old books created by the set team. The low natural light means that much of the film is aglow with candlelight and warm lamps, which push the warm autumn colouring even further. The scene in the cave, lit entirely with candles, is a clear example. This desire to create warmth indoors is perhaps innate to us, and films reminiscent of this season call on this instinct, reminding us to make our homes a respite from the dreary outdoors.

The true warm feeling we get when we watch a beloved autumn film, possibly for the tenth time, cannot, however, be explained by aesthetics alone. There is something inherently nostalgic about this season, which returns us to our familiar routines and environments, while the year comes to a close. This intersection of change and continuity lends itself well to nostalgia, making us conscious of time passing while trying to recreate the experiences of years gone by. Returning to Oxford unsurprisingly makes me want to watch Harry Potter just one more time, a series which reminds me of my childhood and beginning a new school year at my own Hogwarts. Autumn is clearly a time for comfort and reflection, a fact the film industry has learnt very well and pumps into new releases at this time every year. Hollywood understands just how profitable this feeling of nostalgia can be.

The commercialisation of seasons has been growing as a business. Any supermarket at this time of year will have an array of autumn scented candles, knitted throws, and three aisles of Halloween decorations. The palette, texture, and candle-lit glow of autumn films are accessible to your own home with a single shopping trip. These films did not give our society a hankering for warmth in the cold, but they provided the way this warmth should look, and this look can now be sold to us. Hocus Pocus, which has now become a cult autumn classic, was initially a commercial and critical flop upon its release in 1993, losing nearly $17 million. With a poorly timed July release date, a tone watchers found awkward, and poor reviews, there was no way to tell what it would become when it was released. Its status as a fixture of this season was built through repeated TV airings and its presence on streaming sites, demonstrating that the industry can manufacture tradition through pure determination. Similarly, across social media and streaming sites, companies and individual influencers create autumn watchlists and vision boards, pushing us to build these films into our seasonal routine. This cycle of creating an on-screen vision of what autumn should be, whether teary, romantic, or spooky, and then providing all the tools to recreate it for ourselves, is perhaps the strongest reason for an endless list of films that fit the ‘autumn genre’, an intangible feeling that filmmakers have managed to manufacture. I’m not immune to this, having my own watchlist for this season and a preference for autumn-flavoured coffees, but it may be worth wondering whether our vision of autumn is our own or one cinema has ingrained in our memories.

I no longer want to be an astronaut

Zoë McGuire
-
0
I no longer want to be an astronaut

The Millennium Prize Problems are a set of seven famous unsolved maths problems collated by the Clay Mathematics Institute, each with a $1 million bounty. They range in respective subfields – for instance, P versus NP asks about computational complexity classes, while the Riemann Hypothesis, perhaps the most famous, seeks to characterise the non-trivial zeroes of a well-studied function on the complex plane.

The very fact that these problems exist contributed in no small part to my desire to become a maths researcher. For me, and I’m sure for many others, the dream of solving one of these ‘unsolvable’ problems carries more significance than just the cash reward. It’s only slightly about the reputation and fame it would bring. To the mathematician, the beauty of the problem and the satisfaction of conquering it are impetus enough. Indeed, when the first (and, until recently, only) one of these problems fell in 2003 at the hands of noted recluse Grigori Perelman, he declined the money and the Fields Medal – the maths version of the Nobel Prize – that came with it.

Perelman’s solution to the Poincaré conjecture was to young mathematicians in 2003 what Apollo 11 was to aspiring children playing with toy rockets in 1969. It proved these challenges are not insurmountable – after all, if Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, why shouldn’t I be able to?

The second Millennium Prize problem gave way just this September. The Navier-Stokes problem, a problem of fluid dynamics, was solved.

By OpenAI.

It’s worth acknowledging the ongoing dispute about the publication of this solution. Allegedly, OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) gained unauthorised access to research by Australian mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic staff member Levent Alpöge, who were independently working on the problem while using advanced models of Anthropic’s own large language model (LLM), Claude. This has understandably opened up a wider conversation about plagiarism and the ethics of using AI in research. But while this is certainly morally dubious, it’s not what concerns me. Regardless of whose solution this was, it was certainly found using heavy AI assistance.

Just last week, OpenAI dropped 372 papers covering various well-known unsolved problems in mathematics and computer science. As someone in the unfortunate position of soon applying for a PhD in maths, it seems to be harder than ever to get one’s foot in the door. How can I, a bright-eyed but inexperienced undergraduate, compete with thousands of machines trawling through the sum of all human knowledge in parallel?

The irony in this situation is not lost on me. Mathematicians and computer scientists have developed tools capable of stealing the jobs of millions of artists and writers worldwide, and now our chickens are coming home to roost. That said, though, while perhaps a generation of future software developers and quant traders may find themselves a few hundred grand shorter each year, the prospective maths researcher will not suffer as much financially. It’s notoriously underpaid, and is out-earned by a large proportion of jobs that don’t even require a degree.

The mathematician doesn’t study maths because it pays well. To quote Poincaré himself, the mind behind the first Millennium problem to be solved, “he studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful”. Even if it no longer pays, the artist can still paint. The author can still write. The mathematician’s very canvas is stolen from them, and they don’t even have the satisfaction of knowing they could have done a better job – anyone with a semblance of taste is disgusted by AI art and would refuse to read an AI novel. But it is brilliant at maths.

I don’t have a way to spin this in a positive manner. I don’t like being bleak, but I can’t see a future for me in maths anymore. Any unsolved question will soon be munched up and spat out by a computer, and there’ll be nothing left to aspire to.

The stars are going out, and I no longer want to be an astronaut.

Beyond litter and emissions: The environmental costs of loud sound at music festivals

Leandro Landolina
-
0
Beyond litter and emissions: The environmental costs of loud sound at music festivals

The music festivals of the summer have packed up and moved on. Stages and sound systems have been dismantled, litter cleared, and land reseeded. While little now remains to suggest that thousands of festivalgoers descended on the outdoor spaces that host open-air festivals, a less obvious question lingers: what impact did all the noise have?

Many of the environmental costs of festivals are already widely acknowledged. With audiences travelling from afar and large sound systems and lighting requiring significant energy, festivals emit substantial amounts of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. They also produce and send tonnes of non-recyclable waste to landfill. Similarly, camping equipment is often treated as single-use – for example, at last year’s Reading Festival, over 55 tonnes of tents were abandoned.

The venues themselves can also suffer due to the pressures of music festivals. Heavy equipment and large crowds compact soil, reducing the water and oxygen that can reach roots. In fact, campaigners in Finsbury Park argued that the two hazardous trees Haringey Council felled in advance of the electronic-music festival Krankbrother in 2025 had reached such a state of ill health due to excessive trampling from previous festivals.

Yet there is a rarely discussed type of pollution without which music festivals simply could not function: loud sound. Though we can see speaker cones vibrating and metal fencing rattling, loud sound is sometimes overlooked as a pollutant since it is more or less invisible. However, as acoustic ecologists often point out, sound is an important part of our environments and can actively shape relationships between organisms, rather than simply being background noise. This, in turn, means that sound itself may disrupt ecosystems.

Of course, open-air festival sites are also habitats, and the organisms that inhabit them reside not only in the landscape, but in the soundscape too. In fact, scientific research suggests that the drastic changes to the acoustic environment that music festivals cause can be harmful to nearby organisms. For example, loud low-frequency sound has been associated with stress responses in some organisms, including those in aquatic habitats. Further, loud music can significantly reduce bat activity, potentially fragmenting important habitats. Similarly, loud sound may reduce nestling survival rates, while one study suggests that the resulting reduction in biodiversity may persist even after an event finishes.

The tricky trade-off is that what drives wildlife away is part of what festivalgoers come for: the visceral thrill of loud music pulsing through the body. Indeed, festival sound systems are designed to enhance this very experience, comprising massive subwoofers capable of producing loud low-frequency sound. The challenge, then, is to preserve this experience while reducing its ecological impact.

Festivals have already begun reducing waste, improving public transport, and switching to cleaner energy.  Noise should become part of that sustainability effort too. Moving forward, more research is required to identify which species are the most vulnerable and at what times of the year, which frequency ranges cause the greatest disturbance, how long effects last, and whether events of shorter duration are safer. With this information, festival organisers would be better equipped to stage acoustically sustainable festivals.

The solution, then, is not to cancel music festivals nor to strip away the powerful sound that makes them exciting. Instead, we must understand the effects of loud sound well enough to reduce unnecessary environmental harm, a particularly important objective since festivals take place in vulnerable ecosystems that are already under increasing stress due to climate change.

Decluttering Your Bookshelves: How Selling Old Books Benefits You and the Environment

External Contributor
-
0

Student rooms often have limited space. Between textbooks, lecture notes and titles bought with the intention of reading them one day, shelves can quickly fill up with books that may never be opened again. When the end of term arrives or it is time to move accommodation, deciding what to do with unwanted books can feel like another task on an already long to-do list.

Rather than leaving them to gather dust or throwing them away, selling books you no longer need can be a practical way to free up space, earn some extra money and make a more environmentally conscious choice. It also gives books that are still in good condition a chance to be read and enjoyed by someone else.

Why Sell Your Unwanted Books?

It is easy to end up with more books than you need at university. A textbook might be essential for one module but rarely opened after the exam, while novels and non-fiction titles can build up as reading interests change. Although some books are worth keeping, others may be taking up valuable space without serving much purpose.

Selling unwanted books gives you an opportunity to reclaim that space while recovering some of the money you originally spent. With student budgets often stretched by rent, food and travel, even a little extra cash can be useful. It could go towards everyday essentials, social plans or the next set of books you need for your course.

Online book-buying services provide a way to sell books that are suitable for resale. Students can check which titles are accepted and compare services before deciding how to pass on unwanted books. WeBuyBooks is one service to consider, offering a student book-selling service for those looking to sell books they no longer need.

The Environmental Benefits of Selling Second-Hand Books

The benefits of selling unwanted books go beyond a tidier room and some extra spending money. Selling them can also help make better use of the resources that went into producing them. Book production requires raw materials, energy and water, from manufacturing paper to printing and binding each copy. Passing a readable book on to a new owner gives it the chance to be read for longer rather than being discarded.

Second-hand books can also provide a more affordable alternative to buying new copies. This is particularly relevant to students, who may need to purchase course materials alongside other reading. When an existing copy meets someone’s needs, buying second-hand can help reduce the demand for a newly manufactured replacement. Selling books you no longer need helps keep them in circulation and gives other readers the opportunity to use them.

Reselling books does not eliminate every environmental impact associated with publishing. Packaging and transportation still require resources, and the overall benefit depends on factors such as delivery distances and whether a second-hand purchase replaces a new one. Nevertheless, extending the useful life of books is a practical way to make better use of products that have already been made.

What Should You Do with Books You Cannot Sell?

Not every unwanted book will be suitable for resale, but that does not mean it needs to be thrown away. Start by sorting your books into those you want to keep, those you could sell and those that might be better suited to donation or recycling.

Books that are still in good condition but have little resale value may be welcomed by charity shops, libraries or community book exchanges. You could also ask fellow students whether they need any of your old course materials. A textbook that you no longer need might be useful to someone taking the same module. Remember to check donation requirements before dropping books off, as not all organisations accept every type of book.

If a book is too damaged to be reused, check local recycling guidance to see whether it can be recycled. By selling or donating readable books and recycling those that have reached the end of their useful life, you can reduce waste and help make better use of existing resources.

A Clearer Bookshelf and a Smaller Waste Footprint

Decluttering does not mean getting rid of everything you own. It is about deciding what you still need and finding new homes for the things you no longer use.

For students, a book clear-out is a good opportunity to make more of the resources they already have. Whether you sell unwanted titles, donate them to someone who can use them or recycle those that are beyond repair, small decisions can help reduce waste and keep books useful for longer.

Before your next house move or end-of-term clear-out, take a look at what is on your shelves. The books you no longer need could be just what another reader is looking for.

Oxford’s obsession with being busy is pretty performative, right?

Finbar Dinnen
-
0
Oxford’s obsession with being busy is pretty performative, right?

A culture of busyness?

Soon, it’ll be that time again. You’ve hit Week 5 of Michaelmas, found a minute to breathe, and now you’re looking at the blurry image of your family at the other end of a video call. You’re rattling off the items on your calendar: the work due next week, the society events you’re heading to, the time slots you’ve meticulously booked for your hobbies and your mates. It’s a smooth recitation at this point – after all, you did have the chance to rehearse it earlier with that friend you bumped into on Broad Street. And the only question you were asked was: “How are you?”

At Oxford, it seems like we get used to talking about our lives as nothing more than a summary of the things we’ve accomplished lately, or at least are just about to. The longer your list, the better you must be doing, because to be busy is to be making the absolute most of your time here – and who doesn’t want to be doing that? 

What this actually creates is a culture of ‘busyness’ in which having a full diary – regardless of what with – is valuable, and downtime is dangerous. It’s an attitude that has managed to pervade everything from our everyday conversations to the way in which we (and the University) present ourselves online.

For one, the popularity of Oxford ‘day in the life’ content means we’re never short of reminders that reinforce this mindset, even from official channels. Examples of the typical student day on the English Faculty website cite “my busy day” and wall-to-wall activity, where even the smallest lulls are filled with something worth mentioning. YouTube videos offering a glimpse into life at Oxford and attracting millions of views paint similar pictures of days with little blank space on the canvas. Cherwell’s own depiction makes no bones about an “intense” lifestyle and “long to-do lists”.  

You might be quick to dismiss this as content produced for its entertainment value, and there would be some truth to that; no one clicks on a five-minute read about a midday lie-in. But in doing so, you might also miss the important truth that the things we say about ourselves often reflect the way we talk to each other. The language of these students sharing their schedules is used thousands of times each day, in coffee shops and colleges, kitchen catch-ups and corridor chitchat. If it’s one that reflects the same romanticisation of hurtling from one thing to the next, then the case for a cult of busyness is clear. 

Oxford students aren’t alone in this either; a culture that prizes constant productivity seems to be an almost universal university experience. Last year, London School of Economics student paper The Beaver published a piece on the ‘performative busyness’ there, describing an attitude of “relentless hustle” that will ring familiar to the reader who knows all too well what it’s like to define success by the sheer volume of studying they’ve managed to pile up. American accents are saying the same at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where The Daily Cardinal writes that “rest starts to feel unearned unless it follows exhaustion”. Just like in Oxford, to have free time means to fall behind – whether academically, socially, or even simply in how much enrichment you’re extracting from your university experience. 

This is the crux of the issue, and, importantly, the reason why the belief in busyness is more than just a performance. Having a lot to do earns you respect, yes, but these writers suggest the motivation is more intrinsic than simple social currency. Students are busying themselves not only because they worry that their peers will find their level of activity inadequate, but because of the far more dangerous fear that they aren’t doing enough for themselves and their futures.  

What is left, then, is a way of talking in which ‘making the most’ of your time is causally conflated with taking on as much as possible. If plans with friends or recreational pursuits must be considered ‘things to do’ to meet this high and rising bar, then so be it. We’re busy, and we’re proud of it. Some of us are so busy that we decided to spend the summer vac writing about it. 

Where has this come from? And what’s keeping it up?

Naturally, some of this reflects the fierce competition between students. Sixty-two per cent of undergraduates get straight to work in high-skilled jobs after they leave Oxford, concentrated around industries like finance, consulting, law, and technology. Many of these will be competing directly with one another for a small number of opportunities at a handful of top firms, where any edge on a CV could make all the difference. You can’t afford to feel like you’re wasting precious years that you could spend adding to this at university, especially given the spectacular range of ways to do so that we’re so fortunate to have at our disposal. 

Another look through Cherwell archives confirms this: at least part of our desire to be busy comes from an awareness of just how talented the people entering the same job market are. An article debating whether Oxford works too hard describes one student’s acute awareness that here, you might find “your neighbour is a world debating champion fluent in 5 languages or your college mum has already been headhunted by NASA”. Better get working if you want to keep up with that. 

University is a uniquely difficult place to manage these expectations; much of your workload is organised on your own time, and there’s no clear limit on the amount you need to do, even before all the extracurriculars come in. There’s no ‘9-to-5’, no office to clock out of at the end of the day, and no space to leave your work behind. 

Still, despite the stereotypes, Oxford students are often at pains to demonstrate that they do know how to have fun, and competition is far from the full story. The desire to ‘be busy’ extends beyond flashcards and job applications, into the activities intended to be more exciting than productive. The implication is that the more you do, the more you get out of your time; busyness is valuable because it shows you’re taking every opportunity you can. This gives you cause to be suspicious of your spare moments, to worry about the things that will rush past you if you dare to spend a minute standing still.

Economists will be familiar with the term ‘labour theory of value’, which holds that the true worth of a good is determined by the total amount of labour needed to produce it. We risk applying the same logic to our time at Oxford, worrying that we can’t be having the best experience possible if we’re not doing all we can – a dangerous value system when the list of fun pastimes is practically endless. Besides, the theory has been rejected by mainstream economics for over a century. 

So why are we so preoccupied with being busy? The best argument, perhaps, is that university represents a golden window for young people, one in which it’s really possible to pack each day with the things that excite us. Our daily workload isn’t bound by a convenient time window, but neither is our chance to explore beyond it. We live within minutes of our mates, surrounded by societies, sports teams, and student productions. And it’s not just that we can busy ourselves, but also that we should – ahead of us lies an increasingly difficult working world, above us the hefty amount we’ve given up to be here. We have a precious period on our hands that we can’t afford to waste. 

More than that, this is a precious period made available for just eight weeks at a time, adding to the feeling that such opportunity is remarkably fleeting. The lengthy holiday awaiting at the end of each term seems to be a green light to reach breakneck pace in those two months, a whispered suggestion that it’ll be over before you know it and that there’s plenty of time to be tired later. 

So, is it bad for us? 

The fact that time at Oxford is brief and full of chances to do exciting things is not a particular revelation, nor is the insightful observation that we try to take as many of them as we can. Neither is a new theme to a University which is famous for attracting students ambitious and talented across a huge range of disciplines, including but never limited to academia. The reason we talk of a ‘cult of busyness’, then, is not because the lives of students look drastically different – it’s because the conversation has changed. 

Instead of recognising that we’re able – and willing – to be so busy because so many interesting things are happening in the community, so many incredible people around us, we’ve begun to treat the Oxford experience like a burden. We see busyness as a standard we’d be wasteful not to reach. We’re rattling off hobbies to reassure ourselves that ours is not a fortunate position we’re letting fall by the wayside. These things aren’t, and never have been, the bar for belonging in the university community – what’s changed is how we talk to ourselves. This doesn’t mean we’re any less aware of how much we’re getting from our three, four, maybe six years here; that much, at least, is the same. The ‘cult of busyness’ arises solely from that negative attitude towards it, one that frames busyness more as a bare minimum than a remarkable result. It exists only insofar as the language we use to describe what we do, the way we perceive other people telling us what they’ve been up to. In fact, we’re making the same choices about how we spend our time – busy culture or not – and explaining it differently. You wouldn’t be part of a society, go to an event, or make plans with your favourite people just to avoid an idle evening; so why talk about them like a tute sheet with a looming deadline?

Language that puts a premium on productivity can only be unhelpful if it warps the activities meant to bring us joy. It attaches the pressure of necessity to opportunities that should excite, turning things a younger you might’ve dreamed of into another job to be done. Oxford is worse than anywhere for a pressure like that, precisely because it’s so rich with great people to meet and interesting things to do; treating it as a task can make it seem like a mountain. 

Nevertheless, it’s a mountain firmly of our own making – and not one we need to climb. By reminding ourselves that we’re so busy because of the abundance of once-in-a-lifetime experiences we’re fortunate enough to have in our handful of years here, we can reframe the conversation. Without losing any of the achievement that makes university worth the sacrifice, we can cast off the ‘cult of busyness’ and start to look more lightly at how we spend our time. And a simple “how are you?” can go back to being just that – a friendly question, not an interrogation of accomplishment. 

‘Burning Down the House’: A review 

Joe Hayes
-
0
‘Burning Down the House’: A review 

During the odd ‘in-between’ space that is Week 0, I searched for a show to give me something to do, amid the random dilly-dallying and the odd collection currently occupying my time. It was in this rather dull moment that the Breach Theatre and Schwarzman Centre production, Burning Down the House, stumbled across me.

Upon assessing the general idea of the piece, I was hooked; Professor Kirsten Shepherd, fellow of St Catherine’s College, approached playwrights Ellice Stevens and Billy Barrett in 2021 with the idea of merging academic research and theatre. It is this play which aims to uncover the untold, previously neglected inspirations for Henrik Ibsen’s prolific A Doll’s House. Admittedly, I sat down in the Schwarzman Centre with certain expectations. The space used for the performance, after all, was the very same space used for my own lectures, and so my mind had already associated the show with academic excursions and a research-informed uncovering of the past. Seems relatively straightforward, no? Yet what unfolded onstage was something surprising, striking, and altogether a performance that left me with more questions walking home than I had entering the theatre. What was initially, for me, a historical recovery became, instead, an investigation into the instability of storytelling itself and how, throughout history, artistic endeavour has come at the cost of violent exploitation. For a production concerned with uncovering the past, Burning Down the House had a remarkable way of forcing the present into uncertainty. 

The production began with a rather rusty Henrik Ibsen, played by Peter Clements, ambling onto the stage and taking a seat to tell his own story. The slight foggy mist traipsing through the air hinted at what would come next, a literal interruption. Laura Kieler (Jacoba Williams) burst into the theatre, unsettling the audience with a reckoning scream. Clements’ Ibsen halted whilst Williams’ Kieler was confrontational and ultimately unforgiving. Already, my attention darted around the stage, and it was chaotic – yet it is within this chaos that Director Barrett begins to push the questions onto the audience. Kieler’s interruption, whilst theatrical, also removed the authority from Ibsen’s own narrative control.

From here, shocking truths unravel as competing versions of history collide, subsequently separate and clash once more before the eyes of the audience. In a small physical space, the intensity of the performance was consistently astonishing and played with the audience’s own sense of stability in the theatre. One narrative seemed to establish itself, and then another emerged to challenge it. Throughout this Punch-and-Judy process, I was left little chance to comfortably settle into any single version of events, and it was this perpetual uncertainty that I found most compelling.

As the abstract house structure shifted around the stage, repeatedly constructed only to be manually dismantled once more, I became increasingly aware of the deliberateness of storytelling, in that the stories we inherit are carefully shaped by those with the power to tell them. The actors moving the house around the stage became, to me, a metaphor for the forces through which historical narratives are built, often at the expense of those who they claim to represent. Ibsen refused to call himself a feminist, which now feels disturbing after witnessing the devastating immobility of Williams’ Kieler. She stood helpless amid the relentless movement, her stillness exposing the painful contradiction lying at the crux of the production: the woman who inspired Ibsen’s arguable magnum opus can no longer control her own story. Indeed, the visible presence of the actual crew during this made it feel much more visceral, suggesting how the narratives we inherit are continually founded, broken down and then reshaped. 

An aspect of the performance I found to be especially intriguing was that of Sophie Steer. Throughout the production, though she mainly played Suzannah Ibsen, the wife of Henrik Ibsen, she also mastered multiple other roles. Steer told Cherwell that “it felt like the show had a brilliant bedrock”, which is certainly true. The way in which Shepherd’s thorough research informed the foundations of the script, in my opinion, allowed it to become more experimental and, at times, almost surreal. Steer’s performance was simply magnetic; her capabilities as an actress held my attention, even though the production seemed to depend on erratic movement and consequent disorientation. Her rendition as both Kieler’s Uncle and baby was poignant in what she referred to as the “nightmare section”. It is within this scene that instability climaxes – reality becomes warped, and meanings become somewhat meaningless; thus, it becomes hard to gain a sense of what is going on. Language could no longer communicate effectively, but rather primal noise operated within this medium of theatrical disorder, as though the characters’ experiences were too overwhelming to be captured by ordinary speech. This resulted in Steer flickering between both the enraged uncle and the bewailing child in a moment of culminating tension during Kieler’s labour. For Steer, her method was to go in “strong and wrong”, and she told Cherwell that she “found” the uncle and the high scream of the baby. It’s almost ironic, since within a production centred on Kieler’s lack of agency, Steer’s audacious performance was rooted in her own creative freedom. The result of such a show was truly arresting. In a moment’s notice, Steer transformed herself from a figure of authority to one of complete dependence, shattering any distinction between power and vulnerability. Her incisive control over this felt particularly fitting within a production concerned with the denial of agency. It was here that instability became a feature of identity and not merely of narrative or staging of that matter. 

Ultimately, Burning Down the House was far from what I had first expected. Barrett’s production seemed obsessed with dismantling our conceived understanding of history; the chaotic staging, quickly shifting performances and refusal to offer certainty in any shape made for a deeply unsettling, yet equally fantastic, experience. In terms of what struck me most, I believe it to be how the production continues past just recovering a piece of forgotten history. Instead, it continues to question the very ways in which stories become forgotten, and who causes this to happen. That night, I left the Schwarzman Centre feeling truly befuddled, unsure what to really think – it was all quite bonkers to be honest! Yet I think that’s where its brilliance lies. In telling the neglected story of Laura Kieler, who was denied any control of her own story, it left me wondering how this is not solely contained to the 19th century. After all, the forces that silenced Laura Kieler have hardly vanished – they have taken different forms.

Why ‘No Bad Memories’ is my album of the year

Willow Jopp
-
0
Why ‘No Bad Memories’ is my album of the year

After a lovely evening celebrating one of my best friends’ birthdays on 15th October, I returned to my room filled with a sense of hope for the future that I hadn’t felt in quite some time. It had been around a week since I’d returned to Oxford for my final year, but the dread that once accompanied this change had slowly given way to an understanding that this would be a particularly beautiful period of my life. I knew I was living through a moment I would look back on fondly, and, perhaps due to my drunken state, I found myself completely in love with my surroundings and the people in my life. As I sat on my windowsill, I received a notification about the release of an album that I had been excited for for the past few months – The Avalanches’ No Bad Memories. Listening to it, it felt as though every feeling I was experiencing – nostalgia, a childlike joy – had been meticulously assembled into one album, and I fell for it instantly. I didn’t expect how perfectly my personal happiness would fit an album so preoccupied with the sounds of old advertisements and obsolete electronics, filled with the relentless optimism of a world that believed the future could only get better. 

How do you describe The Avalanches to somebody who has never listened to them before? They are an Australian ‘electronic’ group (I use inverted commas because the term feels inadequate in this instance), somewhere between Daft Punk, Nujabes, MGMT, and DJ Shadow, yet vastly different from each. Their music comes from exploring what happens when disparate, unrelated sounds are placed alongside one another. Since the release of their beloved 2000 debut album, Since I Left You, they have been making infectious and danceable tunes by compiling countless samples, sound effects, and audio clips, and have garnered a passionate fanbase, myself included.

No Bad Memories, their fourth album in their 32 years together as a group, is no different. Like its predecessor, 2020’s We Will Always Love You, it is, at its core, a concept album. But while their previous album looked to space and the future, No Bad Memories looks to the familiar, preceding each track with distorted jingles or glitchy ads for a myriad of fake products, each with its own aesthetic, making the album experience feel like flicking through vintage radio stations or Saturday morning TV. Its sounds sometimes overwhelm or outright sabotage one another, but somehow this makes the album feel even more alive. The ‘core’ tracks themselves are bouncy, fun, and make use of Mort Garson-esque synths, colourful guitar, pulsing bass, and glittery pads. The myriad of features are a testament to the friends The Avalanches have made across their career, with frequent collaborators like Jamie XX, Panda Bear, and Rivers Cuomo alongside newer voices like Portraits of Tracy. The feeling of friendship that is so integral to the album is part of what makes it so enjoyable for me. The lyrics talk about being together forever, having all the time in the world, and giving everything you have to those you love, creating a joy and sense of fun that felt genuinely refreshing to hear. Contemporary music is often expected to justify itself through the seriousness of its themes, but No Bad Memories doesn’t need to offer a manifesto. It knows it can be excessively cheerful and still be worth taking seriously. Its nostalgia is an attempt to recover the pleasures that remain buried within the discarded sounds of the past. 

The role of advertising in No Bad Memories, the language that permeates it like a computer virus, is part of what elevates the album above an average dance album. TV and radio commercials are obnoxious; every product wants to occupy as much of your attention as quickly and efficiently as possible. On No Bad Memories, as strangely comforting as they sound, adverts bombard you, constantly interrupting each other with promises of making you better, faster, more beautiful. Advertising is always in love with the future. Every product promises a better life just around the corner. The strange thing about hearing these sounds now is that so many of the futures they once promised have become obsolete. The phones, software, and products may be gone, but their jingles remain, still insisting that tomorrow will be better. The album is fascinated by the commercial machinery that shapes our desires, but it is also fascinated by its sounds. It is at times dizzying and confusing, but in the age of AI, data scraping, commodification of social media interaction, and marketing from big companies trying to come off as humane, No Bad Memories is imagining techno-optimism.

Artist Richard Hamilton famously described Pop Art as “popular”, “transient”, “expendable”, “mass produced” and, ultimately, “big business”. These are precisely the qualities No Bad Memories celebrates and subverts at once. Like British Pop Art of the 1950s and 60s, The Avalanches assemble music using the most recognisable sounds of the modern world – the language of advertising – turning them into something both hopeful for the future and nostalgic for the past (or as my mother put it when she listened, “a collage of joyful loveliness”).

This is why No Bad Memories has stayed with me: it has taken the disposable sounds of a bygone, more optimistic age, and turned them from music intended to sell into music which makes us feel something. I don’t necessarily think the album is arguing that the past was a better time, or that the future will be. It is simply finding beauty in the sounds that were once left behind. The future may not be as bright as those old adverts promised, but while listening to No Bad Memories, at least, the music makes it feel that way.

CUSP’s Dan Stock on the memories behind ‘English Country’

Evelyn Shepphird
-
0
CUSP’s Dan Stock on the memories behind ‘English Country’

On Friday, CUSP, a Milton Keynes-based indie rock band, released their debut album, English Country. It recalls guitar bands from the ‘90s, but with a clear indie streak. Richly coloured with soaring strings and a utopian imagination of (unsurprisingly) the English countryside, the record is emotional without losing its energy. I got the chance to sit down with Dan Stock, singer, songwriter, and guitarist of CUSP, to discuss making his debut album. 

Dan is a lovely, passionate, and clearly very clever interviewee. CUSP’s Instagram sees him as a tall, thin man with an affable face. His haircut recalls a pre-Beatles, 1958 George Harrison, and his dress sense is at once Richard Ashcroft and ‘70s Bruce Springsteen. More than that, he was clearly born to be a musician; early in the interview, he recalls being “obsessed” with songs, leaving out more popular childhood fanaticisms like ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Lord of the Rings’: “I’ve been writing songs for as long as I can really remember. I was learning other people’s songs – the Beatles, or, like, Arctic Monkeys – I’d learn the songs but then re-write the words.” I had never heard of somebody doing that before. “It’s a good cheat code!” defended Dan. “Because you think – how do you learn anything? You start by copying, don’t you? So it’s a really playful way to learn, and there’s no rules, as well. I think it means that I learned how to reverse-engineer songs. I find that I can write songs really easily, and I think that’s because I have loads of material in me from being a kid.”

His ten-thousand hours of writing practice as a child have paid off on this record. The opener, ‘English Country’, is a driving, melodic piece with a hell of an opening line: “Congratulations on the engagement / do you still hate my guts?”. Full, rich instrumentals underline Dan’s vocals, which sound a bit like Richard Ashcroft in his lower register. ‘English Country’ establishes a pervasive theme of the album, that of England as a utopian space embodying freedom, happiness, wellness, and love. Rooting these dreams in the land itself both recalls the ‘Cool Britannia’ of the ‘90s, when clear influences like Oasis and the Verve held the throne, and extends that sense of English pride and identity into musicianship in the 2020s. 

Slower tracks, like ‘Edge of Tears’, maintain that theme. ‘Edge of Tears’ is a remarkably vulnerable title which is offset by a pretty musical enmeshment of some almost folk-y techniques with distortion effects common in ‘90s rock and 2000s indie. Dan earns the Verve comparisons with some soaring strings on this track. Those, along with the steady drums, counterbalance the heavy lyrics. The titular line, ‘I’m on the edge of tears’, is a lovely, soft, and honest confession. The best line, ‘Is anybody home? / Except that old depression / that takes the wonder out of walking ‘round an English garden’ continues to establish that sense of English identity within the record.

I asked Dan if the creation of that English identity was a priority when making the record. “I think it was natural, because that’s my experience. And I think it goes back to where my influences come from. My influences were American – Springsteen, or Tom Petty, or Dylan. And their songs were about specific places, so I kind of want to do that.” Though I had asked Dan if he was a big reader earlier (“I don’t know if I have the attention span for novels,” though he noted he likes reading poetry), Dan referenced literary history by way of music: “Van Morrison – he’s inspired a lot by William Blake, who will take the idea of England and mystical England, and dreams, and mishmash all of that together. It’s kind of my attempt at that – it’s the idea of the English country.” 

Dan emphasized how much of an impact Bruce Springsteen had on him, “Bruce taught me everything about life. I just lived inside that music as a kid. It gave me an imagination – when I was a kid, I went on holiday to Jersey, between here and France – I was on holiday there and listening to Bruce Springsteen, and he was talking about Jersey, and I didn’t know he was talking about New Jersey in the States, so I was like – ‘Oh! He’s talking about Jersey! And here I am in Jersey!’ So it’s just amazing, your imagination. 

After he mentioned it, I could see some threads of Americana within the album. Lines like ‘I carry a gun and a bible in the glove box’ on ‘Forever, Forever’ (a track more on the indie-pop side than anything, though included in Spotify’s ‘All New Rock’ playlist) sound more descriptive of America than England. I happily noted a reference to Dylan’s ‘Blood on the Tracks’ on ‘Love is a Dying Art’. ‘Temporary Sky’, which is an almost overwhelming song, has the singer taking advice from “the Americans”. 

Musically, ‘Temporary Sky’ has an intense build. While not as dramatic as some of the other instrumentals on the album, the strings and guitars trading melody and the incessant drum feel immensely cinematic, and profoundly hopeful. The song feels like running towards something, which, of course, implies running from something else. Another pervasive theme within the record is the tension between a negative perception of one’s identity and an irrepressible optimism and hope for the future. 

“Something I find really cool is when the singer beats himself up,” Dan explains. “Like, Elvis or Springsteen, or Alex Turner, or someone like that: I’d always look at the singer as a god. So when they’re beating themselves up, or showing frailty: I think that’s really cool.” Tracks like ‘English Country’, ‘Human Nature’, and ‘Shadow Boxing’ (the album’s great closer) foreground imperfection within the speaker. On ‘Human Nature’ in particular, both Dan and Tom Smith, a feature, sing “I’m gonna get my shit together / by this time next year / I’m going to show you who I can be / I just need a little time”. While confessional, that sense that the singers are, even if imperfect, trying to get better, is extremely endearing. 

When I pointed out that many of these songs are “quite sad”, Dan laughed. I asked if putting out such a vulnerable piece of art into the world was at all frightening. “You can’t think about that,” Dan said. “As a creative in any form, I just think you can’t let that go into your brain. It just happened that the things that were quite vulnerable and the most honest, and probably the things that I wouldn’t say out loud, tended to be the things that moved me. When I’m then writing, and lines come, and I feel physically moved, I just follow that feeling. It tends to have that same effect on the listener. So you just have to trust yourself.” 

I had to try to see if the breakup songs had any basis in reality. “Well… yes and no. It’s not a preconceived thing. People really only want to hear love songs. But there’s a song of mine that comes to mind that I wrote about when I was solo, and I got dropped by a record label, and that broke my heart. I wrote a song about that through the lens of a romantic relationship, but it wasn’t romantic. It was between me and this sixty-year-old boss of a record label. But I could get these lines that were really weighty and meaningful, and true to me, even though I wasn’t singing about a girl.” 

I thought ‘Caledonia’ was the standout track on the album. Romantic, imagery-heavy lines slot nicely alongside catchy juxtapositions in the first half. The second half, however, features the best instrumentation on the entire album. The sweeping strings of the first half fade out into delicious, distorted, incessant guitar riffs. Dan’s voice soars out over that vital, lively instrumental drive. The second half of ‘Caledonia’ is, I would argue, a real example of a renaissance of rock music. 

Not every track was exactly as watertight as ‘Caledonia’: though largely forgivable, certain instances of awkward lyricism pop up in ‘Human Nature’ or ‘English Country’. I found ‘Help Yourself’ and ‘Forever, Forever’ to be largely more indie-pop (or country-pop!) than indie-rock, though overall these aren’t mortal sins: ‘Help Yourself’ recalls country-pop ballads at their prime: romantic, catchy, and grounded in reality. Ultimately, all the tracks work very well together. English Country, as a record, is more than the sum of its parts. 

“I always think in terms of albums,” Dan said, “I would always write albums – that’s the art form. With us, it definitely feels like more of a slow burn. We decided we wanted to make a full-length piece of work. I believe that hopefully, once people hear it, things will continue to grow. For me, it feels like the first of many. It’s very much just scratching the surface of what we want to release.” 

I asked Dan about the start of the band – who else is in it, and how long had they been together before releasing this debut? “We actually got together just before COVID, and that delayed us, which was a blessing and a curse. The good thing was we had a lot of time to write and make music, because we weren’t playing shows. So even though we’ve been together as people and musicians and friends for a long time, we haven’t really been out in the world gigging as a band for as long. The band is me, Dan, singing and playing guitar and writing songs, and then we have Adam on the bass, Jack on drums, and we’ve just added Joey recently, in the live setup, on acoustic guitar. 

“Me and Jack, the drummer, had been playing together for a long time now. We know each other locally – we’re from a town called Milton Keynes. There’s not much culture going on here. It tends to be the kind of place where, when you’re eighteen, you leave and you go to uni in a big city, so when we got to around that age, there’s not really many people left in the town. I don’t want to say we were the only people our age into that kind of music, but we kind of are. So we gravitated towards each other, and got really lucky.” 

I wanted to ask about the cover art for English Country, which is an odd, sort of surreal photo of somebody doing a headstand with a guitar between his legs. “There’s actually a story behind it that no one really knows,” Dan explained. “It’s a picture of my girlfriend’s dad, who passed away, when he was in his twenties. When we met – me and my partner – a couple months after, he got diagnosed with cancer, and he was in his mid-forties. He then deteriorated and then passed away, but this image, their family found. He was the biggest music fan I’ve ever met, but he kind of lived a quiet and normal life – he focused on raising a family, and he had a job that he probably didn’t love, but that put food on the table for his family. 

“He loved music more than anyone I’ve ever met. We also had very similar taste. Me and the family found this picture, and it really stuck with everyone, because – why is he on his head with a guitar between his legs? No one knows,” Dan said, with a smile in his voice. “And then when I was thinking about the album art: one day, for Christmas, I got my partner those pictures made in a frame that we have at home. And I was just sat there, and I looked at that picture, and I was like, ‘that looks like an album cover’. And then I realized that all of those things in the album about freedom and what music can do at its best – the joy and sadness – was kind of expressed in that image. And I think the image alone looked quite iconic even without the story. So I love it because there’s so much packed into it. It is incredible; it’s also surreal for them, and for us – the fact that he would have loved that so much. Because he loved records so much himself.”

‘English Country’ has been very well received in the indie rock world before and since its release. Excitingly, for the band, Oasis’ Noel Gallagher complimented a track of theirs (‘Coming up Roses’; not on English Country) whilst on a podcast. “Somebody’s paying a lot of money to record shit like this.” Noel, characteristically irreverent, remarked. “It sounds like it was done in the nineties. It’s good though. The guitars are all great.” 

I wondered what Dan thought of the review. “It was amazing. When I knew he’d be listening to it, I was kind of bracing myself to be ripped to shreds, because it’s Noel Gallagher. I don’t know if he’s mellowed in his old age, or what… if it was the nineties, it might have been different. It’s not that he was sweet; it’s like he gave a slight backhanded compliment. ‘How did these peasants afford this?’ That it sounds expensive, and the guitars sound great – you hear in his voice that he’s kind of surprised, because I don’t think he has much faith in new bands, so it was a massive compliment. And we’re lucky that Bonehead in Oasis commented on Instagram; that was unexpected. It’s nice.” Bonehead commented ‘Tune’ on an Instagram post about ‘Forever, Forever’. And Noel wasn’t right about the band spending a lot of money to record the album – the band “pulled favors, basically”, and “did it really cheaply”. 

It seems like CUSP is well received by more than just old gods of Britpop. Dan reflected on a great festival season, where CUSP played Isle of Wight, Truck, and Y Not. “The funny thing is when we were making the album, we weren’t really thinking about singles or songs for festivals. I love it for that, but then when it comes to playing festivals, it’s kind of hard, because some of them are quite sad songs.” ‘Forever, Forever’ apparently did very well on the festival circuit. 

When promising even more new music next year, Dan said, “I just want to make music that connects with people in that way. So rather than this first album, which was quite dark and sad in places, I want to make big songs, or songs that are immediate, and work live.” 

CUSP is on tour for the rest of the year, starting in Manchester on the 22nd of October, and ending in London on the 7th of November. “If it was up to me and no one else, we’d kind of decide what we were playing the night of.” Dan said. “Very Radiohead.” I noted. “Yes, the others are making me stick to a setlist. I did an acoustic gig, and I just took requests from the crowd, and it was my favourite gig in a long time,” Dan remembered. “Because I was relearning the song in the moment, and I didn’t know if I’d remember all the words, and I loved the uncertainty.” 

I’ll be in London for the November 7th show, and though they don’t play it often, I’m holding out hope for ‘Caledonia’. “We’ve got the staples, and then there’s a bit of a revolving list.” Explained Dan. I may have a chance. Dan is looking forward to the tour and said he’s excited to get out into his community. “In 2026, the people that buy tickets to watch small bands are incredible. Normally, you see the artists you love, and tickets are so expensive for big gigs, aren’t they? Even leaving the house, for a lot of people – there’s so much to compete with, with social media and TV. So to go out and watch a band is an amazing thing. So I have a lot of gratitude.”

Ultimately, English Country isn’t a challenging record, but it is catchy. There are some standout tracks – notably ‘Caledonia’ – but generally the record stays within the boundaries of indie-pop-rock: it is both danceable and likable. While generally playing it safe, its relentless hopefulness is endearing enough to forgive weaker elements of certain tracks. CUSP certainly has potential, and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for any new releases.

Sport Spotlight: Sam Fitzgerald

Gavriella Epstein-Lightman
-
0
Sport Spotlight: Sam Fitzgerald

Sam Fitzgerald only took up cycling during his undergraduate degree, and yet he’s now President of Oxford University Cycling Club. He first joined the cycling club at Cambridge, where he studied engineering, before moving to Oxford to pursue a DPhil in Renewable Energy.

Cycling at both Oxford and Cambridge offers the opportunity to explore the surrounding countryside – the club’s weekly cycle rides take place between the Cotswolds and the Chiltern Hills. Cyclists enjoy venturing out into the countryside and exploring nearby villages. 

Alongside these leisurely weekend rides, Fitzgerald tells me that the club trains for more serious competition. For the first time, it now has a club coach and is moving towards a more formalised training plan to prepare for competitions. 

Fitzgerald’s cycling journey has seen its fair share of unforgettable experiences. “I have been hit by a car crossing the road in Spain,” Fitzgerald recalls when I ask if there are times things went wrong. “I had to try to explain to the police what had happened in broken Spanish.” 

A highlight for Fitzgerald was the Lincolnshire BUCS race last year. “In Lincolnshire you race with hundreds of people by the side of the road, playing music, like a party by the side of the road,” he tells me. “Oxford was fourth overall – we came very close to getting a BUCS medal together.”        

But cycling races rarely have that festive feel. They often take place deep in the countryside, and while there might be people from nearby villages watching on, often “it is just you and the countryside”, Fitzgerald says. He describes races as a mental struggle as much as a physical one. “You’ve got to be aware of who to follow, who to chase. You’re also aware of the pain in your own legs as you catch up with those ahead.” “Having the crowd there distracts you and allows you to push to a level that you didn’t think you could,” he adds. “In the Lincolnshire race, my power levels were higher than they have ever been before or since. That can only be attributable to the crowd support.”

Oxford University Cycling Club was founded in 1873, making it one of the oldest student cycling clubs in the world. At the time, cycling was a new sport and a novel, exciting mode of transport: a technological invention which opened up new worlds for its intrepid adventurers. From novel Victorian invention to modern university sport, Oxford’s Cycling Club has endured. Fitzgerald is excited about what is to come. 

No Greek life doesn’t mean no rape culture

Ruya Oral
-
0
No Greek life doesn’t mean no rape culture

CW: sexual assault, sexual harassment, drugging

In November 2024, The Cornell Daily Sun broke the news of a sexual assault reported to the Cornell University Police Department, alleged to have taken place at the university’s Chi Phi fraternity house. The case was brought up again in the student publication on 18th September 2026, after the victim, identified as ‘Jane Doe’, filed a civil complaint against the university, the fraternity chapter, seven current and former students, and related organisations including a campus bar and several university sororities. She claimed to have been gang-raped by several men belonging to the fraternity, who knew she was too intoxicated to consent and further coerced her into taking ketamine and other drugs. Part of the evidence cited in the complaint is an image taken from a Snapchat group chat, wherein one of the defendants encourages other fraternity brothers to join in the assault by directing them towards “free pussy” on the premises. None of the 57 members of said group chat have yet come forward or claimed to have intervened. 

According to the lawsuit, after an initial suspension of the fraternity chapter’s activities, the university’s investigation resulted in two of the accused being expelled, while the rest were “offered a chance to mitigate conduct by submitting essays”. The Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office has since reopened a criminal investigation into the case, though District Attorney Matthew Van Houten claims the victim’s initial report contained no accusations of non-consensual behaviour. Doe will be allowed to present her case before a grand jury, two years after she was allegedly forced to leave the university following the university and local police department’s inaction. Cornell allegedly refused to refund her tuition payments, though she reportedly felt she would never feel safe enough to return to the university. At the time of writing, the five students who remain at Cornell are on track to graduate in the next year. Many have high-profile jobs lined up. 

Every news and social media platform I have browsed in the last week has been flooded with further details and reactions to this story. Some respond in anger, some in disbelief. Some have found the strength to share their own experiences with collegiate rape culture. None of the stories ends happily, and with the horrifying rollback of protections under Title IX under the current US administration, it’s hard to believe that this or any subsequent ones will. 

There is no doubt in my mind that there are men I know, men I share social and academic spaces with, who are reading about this story and pompously thinking to themselves: “Well, that’s the kind of thing that would only happen in America”. While it is undeniable that Greek life has fostered a particularly vicious culture that permits, if not glorifies, gender-based violence (as well as elitism and racial discrimination – whether Greek life should be allowed to retain its current standing without serious reform, or whether total dissolution is called for, is a separate yet increasingly urgent conversation), the building blocks that create this toxicity are plainly reflected in many prestigious UK universities, including Oxford. 

A 2025 Office for Students sexual misconduct survey found that nearly twice as many students reported sexual harassment at selective universities compared to ‘low tariff’ universities. In recent years, Oxford in particular has faced backlash for the mishandling of sexual misconduct cases involving students and staff associated with the university. Though institutional malpractice certainly both emboldens perpetrators and weakens victims, it’s easy to look at official statistics and famous faces and forget that unhealthy sexual attitudes often emerge casually, unremarkably, and without any big names to blame. 

When I was in high school, I knew this guy – let’s call him John Smith – whom everybody in my year affectionately called ‘Consent Smith’. The nickname emerged from an instance where he had engaged in some consensually dubious sexual acts with a girl whose identity is unknown to me, but was very public information for most of my classmates. Strangely, though, none of them seemed to recall the origin story when they referred to him this way. It was always said with a laugh and a playful punch on the shoulder, and received with a smirk and eye-roll. I’m ashamed to admit it, but the normalcy lulled me into silence, as I imagine was the case for many of my peers. None of the hush-hush behaviour that typically surrounded criminal conduct, behaviour that suggested people knew what was happening was wrong, was present here – it was completely out in the open. It was funny.

Since starting at Oxford, I have borne witness to countless cases nearly identical to that of John Smith. Variations of ‘rapist’, ‘molestor’, ‘nonce’, and ‘paedophile’ are shouted across hallways, in tones anything other than accusatory. The addressees may be completely innocent, or they may be people publicly known to have displayed sexually inappropriate behaviour. Those that claim to have been sexually harassed at the hands of these friendly ‘molestors’ are told not to flatter themselves. He does this to everyone, they say. Don’t go thinking you’re special now. The plausible deniability is strengthened by the implication that his friends wouldn’t be joking about it if it were serious. Of course, what these people consider ‘serious’ is anybody’s guess.

As women, we are conditioned to think about sex as private, if not illicit and shameful. The casual violations we face every day that we are told to shrug off – but often end up internalising instead – only exacerbate these negative associations. This is part of the reason why, according to a 2021 investigation, 83% of the 3.4 million acts of sexual violence committed every year in the UK go unreported. ‘Locker room talk’ is so clichéd it almost feels removed from reality, but the Chi Phi text chain proves that, amongst men, sex is talked about as a winning game where the opposing side never stood a chance. Fraternities, as well as, say, rugby and football clubs, are able to reinforce this model of thinking through ritualistic synchrony and cyclical violence. As long as hazing is a requirement for men to join masculine social spheres, they will view casual acts of violence as social rather than violatory. As long as other men continue to reaffirm this behaviour as unserious, funny, something to bond over, 2.8 million Jane Does who are never heard from will continue to emerge.

Perhaps the most effective tool we have at our disposal against casual sexism is casual feminism. Whilst it is our hard-earned prerogative to call for radical change, calling out misogynistic and sexually inappropriate behaviour we perceive in our day-to-day interactions is equally important to driving institutional change. One of the greatest resources that Oxford has available to promote casual feminism is collegiate feminist societies. Despite its century-long history as a women’s college, St Hugh’s has only had an active Feminist Society for just over a year. Co-founders Eleanor Suh and Alex Cutmore say carrying the legacy of the college’s history was part of their reason for setting up the society. “It’s important to honour our history,” Alex tells me. “Keeping alive what notable alumni, like Emily Wilding Davison, fought for is one of the central aims of the society.” Eleanor agrees, contending that “Oxford has a very male history in a lot of ways – FemSoc is one way of counteracting that.” 

However, it is important to both the founders that FemSoc is a space that allows for communication between students of all genders. “In our experience, the men who attend FemSoc meetings tend to have the right attitude. We are yet to have anyone in attendance who only showed up to make a joke out of everything,” Alex says. “It’s up to the individual space to decide their own guidelines regarding who can attend, but I believe that FemSoc is first and foremost a political space, rather than a representative or social one. The primary factor that should draw people to the society is that they are feminists, not that they are women. To me, it is imperative that all people are welcome – we should be united by our politics, rather than our identities.” I ask them whether they think a tangible stigma inhibits men from contributing meaningfully to feminist discussions. 

“I have had conversations with some men who believe they cannot come to FemSoc, even though they identify as feminists, because of a belief that the space isn’t for them. They don’t want to ‘speak over women’.” Eleanor thinks this is a weak excuse. “You can come and just listen! I’ve found that many men intellectually present as feminists, but don’t apply the principles of feminism to their own lives. Part of our objective as a society is to make feminism practical and visible, and not have it sidelined as an abstract, academic ideal. Having a male attendance at meetings where we explicitly discuss topics like sexual assault is necessary. I find it very upsetting when people think they are not allowed to participate in feminist spaces, because having people voice their varied perspectives is what leads to tangible progress.” 

I wonder what their experience with rape culture has been, and what role they think the society plays in combating unhealthy sexual attitudes. “Rape culture in university spaces is mostly upheld through humour,” Alex asserts. “What makes hazing in social spaces centred around drinking and sports so powerful is that nobody takes it very seriously. They are means of socialising that are well-integrated into college life. Greek life has an added element of having to pay to become a member, which compounds the corrupted power dynamics, but in order to participate in many collegiate societies here at Oxford, you have to implicitly agree to not interfere with the rituals of that particular social sphere.” FemSoc is both a foil and an accessible alternative to these social spaces. “I believe that FemSoc is a passive threat to rape culture. It’s not just a deterrent, but a way of acknowledging that there isn’t a monoculture at our college.” People who condemn these male-dominated rituals do exist and, using the society as a vehicle, are less afraid to make themselves known, she says. This is a remarkable advantage for all the female members of the college. “Even if you don’t come to meetings, just knowing that FemSoc exists, that there are like-minded people around you, can be comforting.”

Alex and Eleanor agree that despite the positive impact that FemSoc has had on their lives, as well as those of all its members, it is difficult to quantify whether there has been a tangible decrease in sexism in college spaces. As hard as we fight back, we cannot be responsible for the bulk of the necessary changes – that must come from men themselves. What the Cornell case reveals is not that there are some deranged men, or that educational institutions are ill-equipped to respond to reports of sexual violence, or even that the justice system frequently fails victims of sexual violence. All this, we have long known. What it has successfully, awfully brought to light is that for every seven men who commit unimaginable acts of sexual violence, there are 50 men who watch silently. There are 50 men who will later joke about it. I want to be ambitious – I want to say I hope this is where the cycle breaks, and men start speaking out against each other. But let’s start with immediately achievable goals: I hope this will urge the men I know to have the decency not to laugh.

1...345...2,611Page 4 of 2,611