Much like how in the Underworld films, completely unbeknownst to society, a secret war is being waged between vampires and werewolves in the shadows, in Australia, a vicious, largely secret culture war is being fought between various newspaper columnists, social media figures and Sky News TV show hosts.
For every actual news story that happens, there are weeks of meta-news as various culture warriors attempt to contort reality into some sort of symbol of the particular agenda they are trying to push. Naturally, this produces some very bad takes. Sometimes, though, a take so bad comes along that you have to stop and gasp. Today, we have been blessed cursed with one of those takes.
Enter ‘The war on St Pauls is a war on the West‘ by Daisy Cousens.
If you’re unfamiliar with Daisy Cousens, she’s a conservative talking head mostly known for a deeply perplexing obituary for cartoonist Bill Leak that was published, deleted, edited and re-published by The Spectator in a flurry of activity.
If you’re unfamiliar with the “war” she is referring to, it’s the investigation following a series of very damning allegations about the University of Sydney‘s St Pauls College.
The college has recently been accused of having an entrenched culture of misogyny and toxic masculinity, thanks to a history that includes a number of students forming a ‘pro-rape’ Facebook group, reports of brutal ‘hazing’ rituals that allegedly lead one student to attempt suicide, and a large number of incidents showing a complete disregard for the wellbeing and personhood of female students at the university.
Sydney comedian Cameron James wrote a piece for the Guardian detailing the disgusting culture he witnessed there, as summarised below:
“They called women ‘holes’, and told us about parties where college girls were basically bullied into hooking up with them if they wanted to stay. An image I’ll never forget is of one of my oldest friends screaming ‘slut’ in the face of a woman he’d apparently hooked up with. Screaming it with real rage. And the look on her face as the other boys laughed. I spent the night on this campus about 10 years ago and I didn’t sleep because I was genuinely scared to hear that something horrific had happened while I was sleeping.”
The college was excoriated by the Vice-Chancellor of USyd, who accused the college of harbouring a “deep contempt for women” and, just last week, Ivan Head resigned as warden of the college amid the fiasco. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
You might be a bit confused as to how scrutiny of a college in which all of this has taken place constitutes a “war on the West” and, I’m sorry to say, the article itself will do absolutely nothing to alleviate that confusion.
She begins this extremely tenuous hypothesis by asserting that the college itself is a bastion of “the West“:
“In a move that will surprise no one, the leftist media has once more targeted, cornered, and attacked an elite institution of the West. The most recent punching-bag is St Pauls College; home to some of the most adept young scholars in the country.[..]“St Pauls College is one of the last remaining bastions of Western cultural masculinity. And no, I don’t mean the ‘toxic’ kind the feminist press keeps bleating about. I mean the single-minded male drive to learn and to excel in order to protect and to provide.“The College is the embodiment of individualism, personal autonomy, hard work, trial and error, incentive, competition, and the constant battle to reach and exceed humanity’s greatest potential.”
It’s not really clear from her writing what makes St Pauls more West-y than, say, any other college, but she does seem to imply that it’s because it’s an all-boys college? Yeah, I’m not sure either. (Needlessly pedantic side note: exceeding humanity’s greatest potential is impossible, that’s what greatest potential means. She’s technically talking about superpowers, which there have been no reports of.)
So, rather than just natural attention applied thanks to a series of allegations and an awareness of the culture at St Pauls from other USyd students, it appears she sees the investigation into the college as an ideological attack. She goes on to say that she believes this is the case because the college represents the opposite of “modern leftism“:
“It has produced some of Australia’s finest lawyers, politicians (the name ‘Gough Whitlam‘ springs to mind), judges, doctors, surgeons, actors, and Olympians. Not to mention wonderful husbands, fathers, and friends.“As such, St Pauls College represents the antithesis of modern leftism. It is the direct opposite of the flagrant mediocrity the left wing media seeks to propagate. And let’s not forget, it’s an all-boys college. The easiest of targets in today’s politically correct climate.”
I think a quick, less obfuscated summary of these two paragraphs might just be ‘everyone hates them because they are rich’.
If you’re not baffled enough by her bizarre reasoning as to why people would be appalled at the shit that happened there, prepare to be baffled at her reasoning for why people shouldn’t be that appalled:
“In September 2015, a survey of University of Sydney students entitled Creating a Safer Community for All: Sexual Harassment and Assault on Campus was conducted. It found three quarters of incidents of stalking, sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape reported by respondents happened, in fact, off campus. It also found of the remaining twenty-five percent of incidents, there was, ‘no significance in difference in rates for location of any type of behaviour, thus all figures will be reported for the University campus generally‘.“In other words, students are no more likely to be sexually harassed at St Pauls College than anywhere else at the University of Sydney, including on the main campus. Not only that; the survey indicated those at a heightened risk of unwanted sexual behaviour were LGBTQ students. Not, as the media would have us believe, female damsels in distress, dragged into college dorm rooms by drunken frat boys. Also, the highest proportion of incidents fell in the “stalking” category, rather than sexual harassment or assault.”
Her first argument hinges on the idea that any harassment from St Pauls students would only happen within the bounds of the college proper, which her own point about most instances happened off campus.
Secondly, there’s the bizarre implication that somehow being LGBTQ would disqualify someone from counting as a woman who was assaulted. Are lesbians not women? Bisexual women? Transwomen? I’m really not even sure what point she’s trying to make other than ‘Who cares, they’re mostly queer.‘
Lastly, stalking is still a form of harassment, and a pretty horrifying one, as anyone who has experienced it could tell you; this doesn’t seem to disprove anything.
She closes out on this utterly mystifying point:
“St Pauls will survive. While the Facebook post in question was sexist and in truly terrible taste, nobody died. And with the general public’s trust in the mainstream media at a rather low level, will any reasonable person actually buy this most recent branding of St Pauls? Probably not.”
There you have it, folks, everything is OK as long as nobody dies. I would suggest that not tolerating institutionalised misogyny is probably a more important facet of this intangible idea of ‘the West’ than, say, a college, but I’m just spitballing here.
Source: The Spectator.
Photo: USyd.
