33 Comments

University of Bristol - Stonewall Diversity Champions members.

What. A. Surprise.

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Of course they are. Like so many others. I'm old enough to remember when universities were seats of learning where free speech and critical thought were actively encouraged, not censured.

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Same here. Even my now 'home town', the formerly robustly socialist Manchester has its own University embroiled in an 'Inclusive language' row.

I think this would be an interesting (read: horrific) and revealing (read: bloody obvious) exercise to record all negative stories in the press - such as this Bristol Uni example - and see if the organisations marry up to the list of Stonewall Champions.

A list, incidentally, that I counted two months ago as approximately 2,450 members long.

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Yes, I put the list into a spreadsheet a while ago. Not a brief document.

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We do regularly punish ourselves, don't we?

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It really bothers me that there is a serious allegation of rape in a women’s prison facility and there is no way to verify it. Maybe with a formal FOIA request, but that hardly eases my mind. Anything can happen to those women and we won’t know a thing about it.

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Absolutely, EW. If it hadn't been for the whistle-blower anonymous staff member nobody would be any the wiser. And it's telling that the only media outlet reporting was a small local radio station. These poor women are in serious danger.

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They are making that abomination of a book into a tv show

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JFC. So typical of the industry to jump on the bandwagon but making TV out of sissy porn..?

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I am shocked by the extracts from that book. Smutty, Mills & Boon for fetishists. At least if more journos read it, more people will wake up to the fetishists running this show?

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I'd like to think so but I've got a horrible feeling cheap porn will be deemed 'stunning and brave' when the cocks being waved around are 'girl cocks'.

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I thought people waking up to the fact that this is a fetish would start the beginning of the end of the argument, but you are saying they will embrace and defend the fetish...............this never ends then.

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It's one thing for the book to be shocking, smutty and fetishistic, but it also appears to be utterly dreadful writing. So there are clearly two issues about how and why this drivel was short-listed. And both are utterly incomprehensible until one factors in that it is written by a male fetishist. Then, like so many other examples currently, we see the Men's Rights Movement laid bare in all its repugnant wonder.

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Exactly this. If a bit of purple prose and bodice-ripping floats people's boats, I say go to it. But this book reads like it was written like a randy 16 year old who is yet to develop a relationship with any sort literature that doesn't involve pictures. So we all know how it found its way onto the longlist.

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You could have stopped that sentence after the word 'develop' and it would have made even more sense!

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Well, I'm a horrible old cynic! I can imagine all the dick-pandering and naïve 'sex work is work' / 'don't kink shame' lib fem types defending this wankery to the max. But, as you say, hopefully, most people watching with horror from the comfort of their sofas will have something to say!

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Did anyone else notice that in amongst all the congratulatory tweets to the 'author' was one Kate Mosse? Ugh

https://twitter.com/katemosse/status/1369726496718393347

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Yes, ugh! But as she's the Director and co-founder of the women's prize, I suppose it was inevitable.

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Ah... The wagons circle...

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One of us needs to volunteer to read it in full. Bags not me.

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Not me either! The passages I scanned through to find the quotations in the piece were more than enough. (Apart from the misogyny and sleazy porn it's appallingly badly written. I mean really amateur, clunky, bad writing. Makes EL James look like Dostoevsky!)

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Next stop - The Nobel Prize for Literature!

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Oh, Mole, don't even joke!

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Yes, perhaps I should not!

I had an unpleasant manifestation of a possible dystopian future event there, as soon as I clicked 'Post'!

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I also wonder if any female author would ever be taken seriously again after posing in their bra and pants, performing fellatio on lollipops, all over social media...??

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Women and men are raped, robbed and abused by other men all the time and everywhere. Do they think that will work against those already objecting to it, having already experienced it and who are already more than a little aware of the risk posed to them by male pattern violence just for daring to breathe? Sending their “brown shirts”to do the dirty work against women and allies alone in are they? Stunning and brave ....indecent.... cowards. So what’s new? This is what kills and deprives women of our rights and ensures neglect of us and our children with men gobbling up all the resources for and to control for themselves. I’m so glad this is mentioned. Do women get their needs funded equally? Another reason we are simply erased... to hide the ever present inequality in resourcing to women. These TRAs and MRAs are no friend to women or progress and so steeped in their male privilege they don’t see it or care but continue to simply appropriate, steal or attack us and our bodies, labour, reproductive labour, resources and time. Women are not considered human or allowed to have human needs. Is this Hate Speech in Scotland now?Because the condition of women and children is actually Governments responsibility as well. Does this fact escape them and their dirty little minds?

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