Friday 15th August 2025
Blog Page 659

Simply the breast: fashion frees the nipple

-
0
Simply the breast: fashion frees the nipple

In the 2018 US Open, French player Alizé Cornet was penalised for removing her shirt, revealing a momentary flash of sports bra after realising her top was on back-to-front. In December 2018, Tumblr announced a blanket ban on pornographic content, including, specifically, any content displaying ‘female-presenting nipples’. Although the prospect of ditching one’s shirt and merrily heading off into town isn’t necessarily my idea of a comfortable day out, the controversies surrounding female toplessness certainly beg the question – just why is the female nipple quite so offensive?

Delve through the Instagram of just about any former Love Island contestant and you’ll be sure to find at least a few snaps where a faint outline of nipple can be detected (and this isn’t limited to the women: ‘cool Paul’ loves a tight t-shirt). On the men’s posts nobody seems to bat an eyelid. On the women’s? One uncovers hordes of comments reading some variation of ‘bit nippy love? *Insert wandering eyes emoji.*’

Now, more than ever, increasing numbers of women are giving ye ol’ trusty middle-finger to the notion that bras are a compulsory element for any outfit. For many, they are a means of practicality and comfort – for others, they are a needless inconvenience. Celebrities and mere mortals alike have continued to declare themselves in favour of ‘freeing the nipple,’ a campaign born out of Lina Esco’s 2014 film (entitled, as you could probably guess, Free the Nipple). So where does fashion, an industry that’s entirely centred around its relationship to the human body, come into play in all of this?

Put simply, fashion has always been a huge fan of boobs. The 90s saw a young Kate Moss posing fresh-faced and bare-skinned, smoking on the beach – more recently, Kendall Jenner took to Marc Jacobs’ runway in a sheer top that left little to the imagination. Predictably, the following day saw uproar across the Internet, partly in response to the very presence of nipples on the runway, and partly in light of Jenner’s adolescent age. Plenty of other labels regularly make nipples a focal point of their fashion shows: Anthony Vaccarallo’s inaugural Saint Laurent collection and Jean Paul Gaultier’s AW18  #freethenipple show in Paris are but two examples.

Could it be that fashion is normalising exposure to the female body? The whole purpose of the runway is to inspire and predict trends before they occur in the ‘real’ world; in dissociating breasts from a pornographic or erotic context and resituating them within daily fashion, arguably designers can help to dismantle the idea that female toplessness holds exclusively sexual connotations. This movement away from conservative fashion is already evident in consumer behaviour: underwear has become outerwear, sheer tops are no longer feared, and one underlying message is clear – the way a woman dresses need not be a marker of her behaviour or worth.

Equally, we must recognise the darker side of designers’ fascinations with the female body. Upon a simple Google search of ‘kendall jenner nipple controversy’ (top-notch investigative journalism), I was met with news that I hadn’t banked on: the fact that women across the globe are getting plastic surgery to make their nipples look like Kendall’s. It’s easy to say that KenJen’s statement look can inspire boldness in other women to do the same. But such a simplification ignores the fact that Kendall embodies what is deemed ‘conventional’ beauty. The glorification of her body does nothing to honour the average woman, who in reality encompasses a whole range of different sizes, races and ages. As is so often the case with the fashion industry, displaying only a single body type can in fact do far more harm than good, and cause young girls (and even grown women) anxiety over not fulfilling conventional standards of beauty.

Kate Moss has spoken out about her early experiences in the modeling industry, revealing that she often felt uncomfortable when being asked to pose topless. Whilst photos display a carefree, seemingly liberated young woman, the bitter reality is that she felt peer-pressured into nudity in order to be successful. With recent allegations of sexual misconduct filed against photographers such as Mario Testino and Bruce Weber, Moss is certainly not alone in her experiences.

Looking to the future, then, is it naïve to believe that the fashion industry can ever remedy the issue of female objectification? Whilst breaking taboos is admirable and ought to be celebrated, let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is just one tiny part of a whole host of gender-related issues affecting both men and women in the world. Moreover, designers have a responsibility to think about the wider implications of what they choose to cast a spotlight on. By all means, let’s support any movements towards a more a liberated, open-minded runway. But if you’re looking for real, concrete examples of female empowerment, however, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere for now.

Enron Preview – ‘financial collapse made tangible’

Cesca Echlin
-
0
Enron Preview – ‘financial collapse made tangible’

It’s 2001. A Texas-based company worth more than a hundred billion dollars has declared bankruptcy. This move will unveil the corporation’s systemic accounting fraud and corruption, and will lead to the imprisonment of multiple employees. ‘Enron’, this high-flying company, hailed for being forward-thinking at the turn of the twentieth century, would fall.

Fast-forward to early 2019 and the tale of Enron’s unravelling is being brought to the Oxford Playhouse in a vibrant and slick new production by Theatre Goose and Sour Peach Productions. The twelve-strong ensemble cast engage in a performance by which the audience bear witness to an overwhelming barrage of multiple connections and networks, painting a portrait of the corporate world with all of its flaws.

Lucy Prebble’s play, Enron, premiered at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2009 to glowing reviews when the playwright was only twenty-eight. Prebble’s play traces the rise and fall of Enron frontrunner and eventual CEO Jeffrey Skilling (Jamie Murphy) in a narrative not dissimilar from a Classical or Shakespearean tragedy.

The succession of scenes I watched in the preview for Enron began at the play’s start. Director Emma Howlett creates the corporate world through ensemble work. One minute actors bunch together, chatting viciously in crowds, the next they are darting across to the other side of the room to find the next person. Such imagery of groups has the effect of making a lone actor on stage appear even more prominent – reminding the audience that, amongst the mass, there remain individuals with individual agency.

Such an individual begins the play: ensemble member Lee Simmonds performs a monologue, declaring that he is a “lawyer” who is “one of the few who makes money in times like these.” He explains to the audience how Enron’s story will be told: “you should you know it could never be exactly what happened. But we’re going to put it together and sell it to you as truth.” Their task of story-telling is overt, and Simmonds’ monologue gets the ball rolling with a captivating start.

We are introduced to the leading characters at a party in the offices of Enron – Howlett optimises the entirety of the stage to focus our attention on certain figures. Individuals dart from the background into the foreground, making their presence known both to their colleagues and to the audience. It is at this point we are acquainted with our leading man: Jeffrey Skilling. Jamie Murphy brings to the role a charm and restlessness that marks him as the golden boy one should look out for. We are also introduced to Andy Fastow (Alex Rugman), Skilling’s partner and Enron’s eventual CFO. Rugman’s awkward and eager-to impress Fastow excellently contrasts the polished and perfect corporate world he inhabits.

Skilling and Fastow are newer elements in the a much older equation, fronted by Enron founder Ken Lay (Jonny Wiles) and woman of the hour Claudia Roe (Abby McCann). Howlett informs me later that all of these main characters are portraits of the real people involved in, and some of them prosecuted for, the Enron scandal – except Claudia Roe. Through the character of Claudia Roe, Howlett continues, Prebble creates a “paradigm of what it means to be female” in the macho, hyper-masculine world of the Enron Corporation. McCann’s Roe is a force to be reckoned with – Skilling recognizes her from the pages of Vogue that she reminds him was “cropped from a profile in Forbes.”

A hotbed of competition and hunger, Enron also becomes a hotbed of sex. Soon enough, Skilling and McCann are in bed together. But just as Roe zips her skirt up, they are back to talking numbers: “I’ve been thinking mark-to-market,” Roe declares. A moment of possible emotional connection is conflated with matters of business – Skilling blurts out that he is leaving his wife, whilst simultaneously Roe declares that she might be getting a promotion. It becomes clear that these characters have real difficulty occupying any sense of self distinct from the one they occupy at work.

Together, Murphy and McCann have a chemistry that is electric, proving particularly intense in a later scene with Enron boss Ken Lay as they fight over the possibility of a promotion: each are sat at either end of a very long table, with Wiles as Lay sat in between them at the middle. Lay’s choice is obvious: go with the charismatic Skilling and change the future of Enron forever, or with Roe, her Texan drawl representative of the company’s roots in southern tradition. Skilling makes his last bid for power, selling Lay his modern outlook on the future of the company and its potential investment opportunities: “There’s a dignity to giving people something they can’t touch.”

This question of tangibility is one I am left thinking about long after the scenes are over. Despite what Skilling declares in the line above, what Prebble’s play makes possible is in fact tangibility: we, the audience, are able to see that at the root of financial failure is human decision-making. I myself find the world of finance completely alien to me at the best of times, but what Enron does is frame it in terms that we can all understand, and in fact, relate to.

I very much look forward to seeing the cast and crew in full force next week at the Oxford Playhouse.

Projections of time: film and fashion

Rosa Haworth
-
0
Projections of time: film and fashion

With the release of Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film Roma, a vast amount of critical attention has been devoted to the autobiographical nature of the piece. The film, set
in 1970/1, chronicles a year in the life of the Cuarón family’s maid during his childhood in Mexico City, and Cuarón and his crew painstakingly recreated his family home.

Yet surprisingly little attention has been given film’s costume – given that they were made and sourced with an equal attention to detail. Cuarón’s devotion to recreating the fashion of 70s Mexico involved him ringing up childhood family and friends to ensure that every item of clothing used on set was as authentic. The crew even replicated the clothes of Cuarón’s old neighbours when dressing individual extras. The lack of discussion on the film’s costume may be due to the distinctive colour palette of the film: black and white, favouring very pale, almost luminescent shades of grey. The costume becomes entirely incorporated into this colour scheme – if the word ‘colour’ can be used at all – and so does
not stand out in any way. But it is by no means lost; this exact replication of an earlier fashion, from the knitted jumpers and cotton shorts of the children to the simple chequered
cloth apron of their maid Cleo, is vital in recreating such a vivid image of the past.

The artist Annabel Nicolson’s 1973 performance of Reel Time, which connected a film projector and a sewing machine through a loop of celluloid, provides a striking visual representation of the intertwined relationship between film and fashion; a relationship that has existed since the beginning of cinema. When cinemas began to spring up in cities, towns, and even villages in the early 1900s, high fashion suddenly became visible on a widely available platform; now they were seen by anyone who attended the cinema, with short fashion films being shown before other screenings. The 1913 Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette, produced by fashion journalist Abbey Meehan, for example, showed all the latest fashions modelled in colour with a musical accompaniment alongside each gown.

Fashion has even altered the pace of Hollywood film production: during the 1920s and 30s producer Samuel Goldwyn was forced to get rid of thousands of feet of film, as the fast-shifting waistlines and hemlines of this period meant that a film’s costume choices could become ‘outmoded’ before the film’s release. Goldwyn eventually hired Chanel in 1931, providing her with a workshop and fashion tools in Hollywood so that she could create the styles that she believed would be ‘in fashion’ in a year’s time. Initially, films were recordings of everyday events, and so their costumes typically reflected the fashion of the time. Yet over the next several decades, costume became a means of transporting an audience years into the past through the imitation of earlier fashions.

Gone With The Wind (1939) is commonly labelled as the birth of the ‘costume drama’ with its recreation of the elaborate gowns of the 1860s and over 5000 individual items of clothing. The costumes here take on a symbolic function, too, as Scarlet O’Hara’s famous first outfit is a ‘Southern Belle’ style gown – the buttoned neck and white fabric suggesting innocence, but red details hinting at something more rebellious. This latter idea is then developed with a more suggestive, vivid green dress later in the film. The heavy-handedness of such symbolism, along with the almost melodramatic colour scheme of the entire film is jarring compared to modern modes of costume design, and the use of costume was soon to become integrated into more finely tuned colour palettes.

In The Birds (1963), for example, following Hitchcock’s demand that Tippi Hedren should wear a green dress when being chased by crows, costume designer Edith Head created
outfits of only blue and green for the rest of the film. In Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016), set in modern day America, stark images of poverty are interspersed with beautiful shots of the sleepy, empty expanse of the American landscape, and through costume the two are linked. The costumes are a display of cheap, colourful clothes. The staple outfit of the 17-year-old runaway protagonist Star, for example, is a canary-yellow, baggy vest top worn over an electric pink bralette and paired with blue denim hot-pants. Yet the result is not garish, and the colouring of the scenery itself seems enhanced, everything becoming part of an almost nostalgic, sun-baked saturation.

American Honey isn’t an attempt to recreate the past but a comment on present-day America. What is therefore interesting is the fact that, in 50 years – or even 10 – the costumes of American Honey will become a fashion of a previous era, an indicator of this decade, where mass-produced, cheap clothing dominates. Whilst preserved in the film, these styles will become outdated in reality, and this is where the ‘reels’ of film and fashion begin to run at different paces. In sci-fi films, costumes are as vital as futuristic buildings
or technology in signalling to the audience that this is an imagined vision of the future. The early sci-fi film, Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) features strangely dressed,
unhuman figures whose vivid coloured clothes are jarringly discordant with the background’s peculiar mix of clashing colours and sepia-wash. This was made before Technicolour, with the random array of colours being due to the lengthy process of hand painting the colours directly on to each copy of film stock.

This slightly clumsy use of colour in costume has given way over the past century to something much more finely-tuned. Costumes in later sci-fi films are just as bold and exaggerated, but have become fashion, distinct from simply costume. Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner makes use of a very sparse colour palette, and instead of creating a
completely new imagined fashion of the future, costume designer Michael Kaplan instead used film noir as inspiration: the film’s wardrobe consists of an exaggerated, futuristic
take on tailored suits, faux-fur jackets and trench coats. By incorporating this, the costumes are not gimmicky attempts at predicting the future, but almost timeless. The costume design in Blade Runner had a direct effect on 80s fashion, with Kaplan’s designs inspiring wide-shouldered looks in women’s fashion. Futuristic fashions are therefore no longer so unfamiliar; they hold dual positions on fashion’s rapidly changing timeline, simultaneously in the imagined future and in the present.

Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky once said that “one cannot conceive of a cinematic work with no sense of time passing through the shot, but one can easily imagine a film with no actors, music, décor or even editing” – time is what is at the core of cinema. The same can be said for fashion; without its continuous state of change, fashion would not be ‘fashion’ at all – it would just be clothes. So for filmmakers, such as Cuarón with Roma, costume becomes the easiest means of time-travel. How this relationship between fashion and film will change with further advancements in film technology, and as the imagined future ages of old sci-fi films are reached in reality, is something that only cinema will be able to show us.

Restaurant Review: Pan Pan

Darius Parvizi-Wayne
-
0
Restaurant Review: Pan Pan

In London, Korean food is truly having its moment in the sun. From street stands on Tottenham Court Road to the ever expanding chains of Bibimbap and On The Bab, Korean cuisine’s already significant position within the culturally diverse zeitgeist looks as if it will continue to grow in 2019. What about in Oxford? There is Jeong’s Dosirak, which, despite its pretty interior and authentic feel, is often overlooked within the maze of the Covered Market. So where in Oxford can Korean food really stand out and garner the acclaim it deserves? Simple: Pan Pan.

You may have not heard of it, and tucked away on St Clement’s Street in Cowley you may have not even seen it. I certainly had not, until one day I found myself critically hungover and craving Korean food. A quick Google search, and next thing you know I am stumbling into Cowley, alcohol steaming off my body. In the midst of my disorientation, I found Pan Pan to be a welcome refuge, and it’s Korean Fried Chicken to be ever so good. Crunchier than at Jeong’s, and packed with more flavour than almost anywhere else, my satisfaction at that moment was immeasurable.

Nonetheless, given that I was not in an appropriate psychological state to write a comprehensive review of Pan Pan back then, I decided to wait and then return. Slightly more clear-headed this time around, I discovered that, even if on that first occasion my brain was fuzzy, my taste buds had certainly not betrayed me. Pan Pan was and still is a fantastic little restaurant.

Firstly, let me explain that Pan Pan is not wholly a Korean restaurant. Part of its charm is its ability to harmoniously merge the foods of different nations into a long but relatively coherent menu.

From its splendid incarnation of a Taiwanese pork belly Bao to rich Japanese Yaki Udon, I was thoroughly impressed by the diversity on show.

However, since this review is inevitably based on my initial impression of Pan Pan, I had to make sure the Korean food would not let me down. Some Kimchi to start, a traditional side dish dating back around 2000 years. Nothing complicated: fermented cabbage, carrots, garlic and ginger, all lathered in spice. Tangy and punchy, 2000 years of tradition upheld.

Next, the main event: the Bibimbap. Bibimbap, like Kimchi, is a crucial staple in Korean cuisine, traditionally eaten on the eve of the lunar year.

A dish packed with ingredients, its very creation is symbolic of harmony. The darker elements, such as the shitake mushrooms, are representative of the North and the kidneys. The redness of the carrots and chillies symbolises the South and the heart, with the greenness of the cucumber represents the East and the liver. Finally the white of the egg is the centre, the stomach. Undemanding, unassuming and nicely balanced, Pan Pan did the Bibimbap justice. Crunchy carrots and cucumber, tender bulgogi beef and the heat of the chillies come together for a joyous combination. No petty refinement, no sprinkle of this or that, no huge flames erupting from charcoal grills that you may find in the capital where aesthetics occasionally supersedes flavour. Simple and, therefore, all the more fun, Pan Pan stayed true to a prolific culinary tradition that has often gone unnoticed in this country.

For a street loaded with real-estate agents and newsagents from the 1980s, Pan Pan is also miraculously intimate. Smiley staff, soft music, dim lights – I could have been here for hours. It really is a wonderful place, a restaurant where hangovers, rain and the general drab of winter can be put aside, supplanted by fantastically joyful food.

 

Recipe: Scallops with Celeriac Purée, Chorizo Oil, Fennel and Grapefruit

Alexander Krespi
-
0
Recipe: Scallops with Celeriac Purée, Chorizo Oil, Fennel and Grapefruit

Ingredients

  • 2 scallops (try to buy them as large as you can
)
  • Approx. 200g celeriac
  • 120g milk

  • 50g unsalted butter
  • 50g heavy cream
  • Pinch of nutmeg
  • 1/4 of a grapefruit
  • 100g fennel

  • 100g semi-dry chorizo
  • 100g olive oil

Method

CHORIZO OIL:

  1. Semi-dry chorizo.
  2. Cut into chunks.
  3. Place in blender and cover with olive oil. Blend until chorizo is fully broken up.
  4. Pour all into small pot.
  5. Render on low heat, bring to a simmer.
  6. Reserve.

CELERIAC PURÉE:

  1. Peel celeriac
  2. Cut into thin slices
  3. Heat a little butter in a high sided saucepan
  4. Add celeriac slices, cover halfway with whole milk
  5. Cook on medium-low heat, no colour on the celeriac
  6. Go until slices are fully tender — should be able to mash them with a fork — anywhere from 40-60 mins depending on thickness of slices
  7. Drain milk
  8. Add celeriac to blender
  9. Blend with butter, heavy cream until extremely smooth
  10. Add white pepper and a little nutmeg
  11. Reserve

FENNEL AND GRAPEFRUIT SALAD:

  1. Thinly slice fennel bulb (the white stuff), having removed the core. Preferably do this on a mandoline. 
  2. Cut segments out of grapefruit. Combine all together with a little juice from the grapefruit and olive oil
  3. Season sparingly with salt and white pepper
  4. Reserve

SCALLOPS:

  1. If scallops are bought with the orange roe attached, remove but to not discard this. They are edible and can be used in many seafood dishes.
  2. Scallops have a round side and a flat side.
  3. Ripping hot pan, good amount of oil.
  4. Flat side down for two minutes. 1 minute on the other. (That’s for a relatively large scallop, scale down searing time for smaller).

PLATING:

  1. Spread a bed of pureé on the bottom of plate.
  2. Place the salad and scallops on top
  3. Sprinkle a little grapefruit zest on the top of each scallop
  4. Drizzle chorizo oil around plate

Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde

Isabella Welch
-
0
Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde

Marcel Duchamp made tiny sculptures from moulded casts of his lover Maria Martins’ body – the curvature under one of her breasts, indentations from around her thighs. With her permission, even after she left him, he often carried around these intimate sculptures in his pockets, the indented negative spaces of where she no longer was. I went around the Barbican Modern Couples exhibit alone and in many ways, felt this negative space. The exhibit is not only about the famous muses of 20th century artists, but the symbiosis of a relationship as a functioning platform for the growth of intellect and inspiration.

A significant portion of this exhibition is comprised of artistic couples photographing one another, often naked, often in sexual acts. You feel like a voyeuristic observer and a third party, even in the most otherworldly photos. There is an image of George Tooker, Jared French and Monroe Wheeler all standing naked around a twisted tree on a sterile beach, one of them in a toga, that appears like a scene from a deserted post-apocalyptic
wasteland, and screams loneliness though they are together. There is another of a penis stuck through a gap into an alien world, blue and gray craters surrounding it, leaving you wondering about the transport of sexual conquest, the disembodied journeys of parts of the body to other planes. Dora Maar photographed Picasso posing like a minotaur, or in great chambers of tormented fantasies.

But even with all of these surreal photographs, some of those I liked most were from Natalie Clifford Barney. Once writing ‘I am a lesbian. One need not hide it, nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage,’ Barney opened up a salon in a pavilion with classical Doric columns and called it ‘The Temple of Friendship’, dedicating it to lesbian solidarity. There with Romaine Brooks, the portrait painter she loved, Romaine would paint portraits of the guests, and there is a simplistic set of photos of Romaine waking taken by Barney. This was accompanied with many early 20th century amateur intimate photographs of women, by other women, made only for the sake of a small moment of perfect expression. This exhibition shows that trying to capture someone’s essence for a photograph, to be held only by the photographer is one of the most erotic acts one could perform.

There is a subsection within the exhibit called ‘mad love’ about some of the most obsessive, twisted artistic passions. Leonora Carrington painted Max Ernst as the Bird Superior, twisting him halfway between human and creature, with the shadow of herself as the Bride of the Wind behind, and the ‘mad love’ section showed all sorts of distorted images of loves drawn through wringers of pain. The exhibit as a whole showed everything from modern Scandinavian printing artists to authors like Virginia Woolf and her lover Vita Sackville-West. This exhibit doesn’t treat one artist in a partnership as greater or lesser than the other, even though usually one is recognised in traditional history to be far more famous. It is a landmark of representation for those people usually just think of as props for more well-known partners who eclipse them. Every relationship is made up of halves, or is completely blurred to comprise one entity.

This exhibit sets a standard for a philosophy of love, wherein thinkers are each other’s perpetual inspiration, and even if they do not last forever, they last as long as those great streams of thought keep developing. The romances in the exhibit are all puzzles to be figured out, regarding how these influences fit together, especially when the couple works on a collaborative piece. Much art can be considered a beautiful testament to a single emotive moment, but so rarely is the cause of that emotive made so clear, nor is the call-and response of the artist’s emotions (demonstrated through a couple’s collaborative body of work) so clear. The entire time I walked through the exhibit I was sending excited messages to my friend, eager to talk immediately about the little snippets of stories I’d seen.

It is very hard to walk through the pieces without picking up a few little unforgettable details, and little bits of inspiration that the artistically-minded will potentially want to carry forward into their own relationships. It was easily one of the most meticulously researched exhibits I saw in 2018, with huge amounts of information available in every room, and I couldn’t recommend it enough. Although maybe don’t go alone – it might leave you wondering if you’ll ever have anyone to lounge around perpetually creating art and debating expressionism with.

Sackler family more involved than thought in opioid crisis

-
0
Sackler family more involved than thought in opioid crisis

A recent court ling reveals that the Sackler family, a major source of donations to Oxford University and owners of Purdue Pharma LP, were more involved than had been previously assumed in deceiving the public about the side effects of the opioid painkiller OxyContin.

The memorandum was led as part of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s ongoing lawsuit against the company and 17 associated individuals, including 8 members of the Sackler family.

The court ruling states: “They [the 8 Sackler family members] directed deceptive sales and marketing practices deep within Purdue, sending hundreds of orders to executives and line employees.

“From the money that Purdue collected selling opioids, they paid themselves and their family billions of dollars.”

Since 1991, the University has received over £11 million in donations from the Sacklers’ trusts and from the family themselves. Their donations have gone towards erecting the Bodleian Sackler Library and towards funding the Sackler Keeper of Antiquities at the Ash- molean.

The Sacklers also support a University lecturer and a teaching fellowship in Earth Sciences, and the family’s contributions have facilitated projects in paediatrics and neuroscience.

The memorandum suggests the Sacklers to be directly involved in developing a strong marketing strategy for OxyContin and its other opioids, repeatedly pushing for the prescrip- tion of higher doses for longer periods of time.

The marketing campaign targeted customers for whom opioid use was accompanied by great risk, such as the elderly and patients who had not previously been on opioids, without warning them of the additional risk of drug interactions, addiction, and overdose, the court ling suggests.

The suit also asserts that the Sacklers were aware of Purdue’s repeated failure to notify authorities of “pill mills” and reports on the illegal sale and distribution of OxyContin. According to the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, overdoses from prescription opioids accounted for 218,000 deaths from 1999 to 2017 nationwide.

When asked whether Oxford University will review its policy on accepting donations, and whether they will accept donations from the Sacklers in the future, a University spokes- person said: “All major prospective donors are carefully considered by the University’s Committee to Review Donations under the University’s guidelines for acceptance.

“The Committee considers the sources of an individual’s or organisation’s wealth and may reconsider a donor in the light of new information. The University monitors significant developments in the public domain and the Committee considers donors when potential donations are brought to their attention.”

Richard Sackler, who served as Purdue Pharma’s president from 1999 to 2002, is characterised by the Massachusetts Attorney General as the main driving force behind the OxyContin campaign.

It is asserted in the suit that in 1997 staff informed Richard Sackler that selling OxyContin as a “non-narcotic” in certain markets would provide “a vast increase of the market potential”, bypassing safeguards intending to protect patients from addictive drugs.

The idea faced opposition from Richard Kaiko, the inventor of OxyContin. Noting that products like OxyContin were among the most widely abused opioids in the US, he wrote: “If OxyContin is uncontrolled, it is highly likely that it will eventually be abused.”

Richard Sackler allegedly responded: “How substantially would it improve your sales?”

Purdue Pharma wrote in a statement: “[T]he Attorney General has cherry-picked from among tens of millions of emails and other business documents produced by Purdue. The complaint is littered with biased and inaccurate characterizations of these documents and individual defendants, often highlighting potential courses of action that were ultimately rejected by the company.”

A spokesperson for The Sackler Trust and The Dr Mortimer And Theresa Sackler Founda- tion said: “We support a range of educational, medical, scientific, cultural and community organisations. It is a privilege to be able to support such vital work and we continue to do so.”

Cherwell has contacted the Sackler family for comment.

Gillette’s advertisement is sharper than usual

Jan Eijking
-
0
Gillette’s advertisement is sharper than usual

Apparently it still stirs up controversy when a major brand launches a campaign promoting a kinder, more tolerant idea of what it means to be a man. Shaving company Gillette’s newest ad has changed its outdated slogan from “The best a man can get” to “The best men can be”.

The ad feels like a rollercoaster ride through everyday sexism: from bullying on the playground, mansplaining in the boardroom, to groping at the pub. The ad went viral, and received a tornado of praise and criticism alike which is, after all — a landslide victory for the advertising industry. But there’s more to it.

Responses to the ad tell us a good bit about where we currently stand in matters of masculinity.

Toxic masculinity may enter the annals of history as one of 2018’s biggest buzzwords — and it may be time for 2019 to move on. Suppose we all got the bottom line: we can actively decide whether or not we want to encourage certain ideas of what it means to be a man.

It’s in our hands whether or not we want to promote a culture in which a “no” is taken for a teasing “yes”, in which forcing yourself on someone else is being a real man, and in which we measure manliness by the number of drinks you can down on a crewdate. What a revelation: we don’t know everything better than women, it’s okay if we’re sad or afraid, and we can actually be something other than either “macho” or “pussy”.

The fact that we treat toxic masculinity as though it were some novel discovery of the dark side of gender self-stereotyping, rather than the millionth confirmation of that being a timeless problem, is telling. Whilst we comfort ourselves with progressive hashtags, there is something deeply conservative about our generation.

The Urban Dictionary reflects a sentiment that is in fact creepily widespread: toxic masculinity, it says, is “a term that far leftists use to try to manipulate real men into feeling shameful for being themselves and feeling like normal men do”. Far leftists? Real men? Normal men?

What’s so particularly left-wing about promoting a version of manhood that is simply open to the various ways of being a man, rather than so monolithic you can only either be (un)lucky to fit the norm or you’ll have to justify yourself every time you don’t?

The let-men-be-men argument (the ultimate Jordan Peterson move) is echoed in social media commentary across the board.

Award-winning actor and fierce Trump-supporter James Woods, for example, accuses Gillette of “jumping on the ‘men are horrible’ campaign” and calls for a boycott of its products.

Many men were happy to follow suit and have posted pictures of razors flushed down toilets or being otherwise disposed of. Far-right magazine The New American confirms how far-from-okay some are with a masculinity that isn’t rough and rowdy: “Men are the wilder sex, which accounts for their dangerousness – but also their dynamism.”

Similar responses are heard outside the Anglo-American world. Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant published an article with the title “Gillette replaces rough stubbles with guilty conscience — and not everyone is happy about that”. One of the comments reads: “Why doesn’t a sanitary pad company create an ad in which women are told not to exploit men and not always to play the little victim? Or is that sexist?” Meanwhile in Germany, a journalist tweeted that the ad was “an insult for millions of decent men who shouldn’t have to change anything other than their shaving brand”.

Ours is a generation that yearns for the recuperation of all that which postmodernism has so skillfully smashed: fixed categories, stable meanings, hard facts. While our Facebook feed may suggest otherwise, our generation is just as much about Jordan Peterson as it is about Pussy Riot.

The divide between the two runs deep and is, forgive the pun, razor-sharp. It’ll continue to be a daily task to point out that certain ideas of manliness are outdated and simply unacceptable. But that can’t change without normal men, real men, in fact: all men reflecting on their own behaviour, and taking their own share of responsibility.

Tony Hawk visits Meadow Lane Skatepark

-
0
Tony Hawk visits Meadow Lane Skatepark

Teens at Meadow Lane Skatepark were starstruck as professional skateboarder Tony Hawk visited and performed a number of tricks.

In advance of Hawk’s Oxford Union speech last Wednesday, the owner of skateboard company Birdhouse and namesake of the hit game “Tony Hawk: Pro Skater” reportedly performed tricks at the local park, including a Monty grind, a notoriously difficult trick named for skateboarder Monty Nolder.

The appearance preceded a speech at the Oxford Union, at which Hawk reportedly discussed gender equality in his sport and his experience of skateboarding as he gets older.

The Oxford Union Twitter account quotes Hawk as having said “When I found skating, I found my own voice, I found my own style, and I found a way to be creative… All the people that I found through skateboarding were creative, and they came from all walks of life. I felt at home among this band of misfits.”

Some hope that the high-profile appearance of skateboarder Tony Hawk in Oxford will help to stoke interest in skeboarding among the student body. Although Oxford City Council lists the city as having 4 skate parks, although there is at present no Oxford Skateboarding Society.

One student, discussing his attempt to set up such a club, says he has “tried so many times” but has not yet had any luck.

Oxford’s college inequality scheme branded “ineffective”

Joanna Lonergan and Libby Cherry
-
0
Oxford’s college inequality scheme branded “ineffective”

The University’s scheme designed to redistribute wealth amongst colleges, the College Contribution Scheme, is currently under “live discussions” among college heads, with a new version of the Scheme to be announced later this year.

Under the most recent Scheme (Scheme 6) colleges with taxable assets of above £45 mil- lion paid contributions into a fund from which poorer colleges could apply to for grants. 21 colleges pay the highest threshold of tax, which requires colleges to pay 0.36% of taxable wealth over £75 million.

The highest contributors to the scheme (St John’s, Christ Church, and All Soul’s) provided 38% of the total contribution in 2016/17, while undergraduate colleges such as Lady Margaret Hall, Harris Manchester, and Mansfield did not cross the threshold necessary to make contributions.

In fact, St John’s contribution before rebate would have covered the entirety of the grants confirmed in the year 2017/18 for 2018/19 – a total of £1.6 million and including those for housing allowances at St Anne’s, library expenditure at Kellogg, and graduate scholarships at St Edmund’s Hall.

Using the contribution formula, in 2016/17 the total amount of contributions called for from colleges would come to £11.4 million, a 15.3% increase on the previous year. However, the total amount of contributions from colleges is capped at £3 million per year, with colleges receiving a rebate pro rata when contributions exceed this amount. The central University also tops up the fund by £1 million.

Grant-eligible colleges still have to make contributions if they have taxable assets above £45 million, with these colleges contributing £42,299 in the year 2016/17.

Colleges are eligible for a grant from the fund if they have low taxable assets per student, or if these assets are “below a median or target value in one or more categories” by which college wealth can be assessed. Colleges are required to make “a convincing case for support” before the grant is permitted.

Out of the successful applications to the fund from 2013-21, the largest proportion (66%) went toward maintenance and refurbishment of colleges, while also being spent on scholarships, bursaries, housing allowances and teaching expenditure. St Peter’s College has been the greatest benefactor under the Scheme, receiving £1,163,500 between 2013-21.

Negotiations over the nature of Scheme 7 have been happening internally. Professor Andrew Barker, Principal Bursar of St John’s College said: “while discussions about a new scheme are still ongoing the College is not in a position to comment”.

Private Permanent Halls are excluded from the College Contribution Scheme, preventing them from applying for grants despite typically having smaller endowments.

President of Regent’s Park JCR, William Robinson, told Cherwell: “On the face of it, I can’t think how excluding PPHs from this scheme can be justified. We contribute to wider University life as much as any College, the only difference being our comparatively smaller size.

“Barring PPH access to this money is unlikely to redress the imbalance
in reputation and endowment that exists between us and much of Oxford, and this has a knock-on, compounding effect: we have less money to spend on our independent access efforts, and less to expand our size.

“While the rest of Oxford is able to continue to grow its student body and prestige through these grants, the potential to improve the situation, scale, and lives of our students our research output, and our reputation is curtailed by a lack of funding, while those that need it far less, given their long histories and large endowments, have access. It is hard to work out the thinking behind this scheme.”

Among the concerns raised by those affected by the Scheme is the impact it has on access. According to the University’s Admissions statistical report, colleges eligible for grants tend to take higher proportions of students generally classified as ‘disad- vantaged’. In 2016/17, 12.9% of Mansfield’s admissions were from disadvantaged areas, compared with Trinity’s 6.7%. In the same period, St Hugh’s took 19.2% from areas with low progression to higher education, compared with Queens’ 8.1% – the lowest of all the colleges.

Speaking to Cherwell, Mansfield’s JCR President Saba Shakil, said of the most recent scheme: “This directly affects the availability of a range of educational resources (from college library spending to research grants), as well as the cost of everyday living, and means that students who arrive at Oxford at a disadvantage are then further disadvantaged by the structure of the University itself.”

More broadly, this links to concerns over the equality of student experience between colleges.

Linacre’s CR President, James King, told Cherwell: “Students at Linacre are acutely aware that the wealth disparity between colleges results in a markedly different student experience.

“It is often awkward at our majority international graduate college when students with little prior knowledge of the college system discover that they have more expensive accommodation, less access to funding, and fewer facilities than others on the same courses as them. For example, DPhil students at Linacre can claim a maximum of £300 across the three or four years of their degrees for travel expenses, whereas students at Keble (to take one example) have access to £350 per year, over four and a half times more across a four year DPhil.

“Linacre is under great pressure to expand its student numbers as international postgrads generate profits for the University, but its facilities are increasingly unable to cope (from there only being enough pigeon holes in the porters’ lodge for about half the students, to having to turn freshers away from the matriculation bop because the number of attendees now regularly exceeds the legal capacity of the College bar and dining hall).”

Between 2013-20, Linacre claimed £551,003 from the College Contribution Fund.

King added: “It [the Scheme] has been extensively discussed by Linacre’s Governing Body on which I sit – our College has used it for essential repairs over the years.

“I would support a more equal redistribution of wealth between colleges, with a more progressive system of taxation, a lower bar for contributions (of say £30 million), and the inclusion of PPHs.”

Because they are reliant on grants being approved, poorer colleges often find themselves unable to plan their finances over the long-term and since grants are given with a speci c purpose in mind, poorer colleges can find it difficult to cope with unexpected expenditure.

King continued: “I think most Oxford students would be pretty surprised that Worces- ter and Keble are bracketed of cially as ‘poorer colleges’ able to claim for nancial assistance but Regents Park is not, due to the exclusion of PPHs from the scheme. In particular, Keble is able to claim for financial assistance from the fund despite having the resources to spend over £30m on building the H B Allen Centre, which is essentially a new graduate college exclusively for the use of its own students.”

Furthermore, some believe that no amount of redistribution can compensate for the difficulty in meeting teaching costs, experienced by almost all the colleges.

New College Bursar, David Palfreyman, told Cherwell: “The cost of delivering the Oxford Tutorial intensive undergraduate teaching is approximately £6,000-7,000 above the net fee/ grant income and the gap has to be covered from colleges’ endowment – but there is insufficient endowment across the colleges overall, no matter whether or not it is not spread equally/proportionally, to fund the current size of the UK/EU undergraduate population if undergraduate continue to be ‘properly’ taught.

“The rational long-term solution is to grow endowment through massive extra donations (as some US universities seem to manage), or to curtail the size of the undergraduate numbers, or to reduce the cost of the undergraduate teaching system – or a mix of all three; pending facing such reality a Scheme 7 is simply another bit of sticking plaster.”

Palfreyman also suggested increasing the total sum of the fund from approximately £60- 70 million to around £125 million. This would allow the proportion of the funds spent each year to remain the same, while increasing the amount available to be redistributed.

The last previous round of reforms came into practice in 2016. These involved raising the tax threshold and increasing the breadth of the tax bands to £9m, to make the tax more progressive and increase the proportion of contributions being paid by the wealthiest colleges. As a result of the reforms, the “tax paid by the colleges with the highest taxable net assets has increased as a proportion and the total contribution required of grant-eligible colleges has reduced by half (from £93.7k to £46.3k)”. In the year 2016/17, the total contribution by grant-eligible colleges was £42,299.

The University has been contacted for comment.

 

1...658659660...2,518Page 659 of 2,518

Support Student Journalism

Cherwell is Oxford’s oldest independent newspaper, established in 1920. We are entirely student-run. By supporting us, you will contribute to keeping our paper in print and online. Every donation makes a difference.

Donate

Explore

Follow us

More

Oxford Student Publications Limited © 2025 - All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy

Website by James Ashley