I’m not a very brave columnist. A couple of Vision editions ago I wrote a column about the Willow ‘Cubicle of All Knowledge on All Men’, (the conference venue for any discussions of men), and was condemned as a sexist by an ignobly anonymous online comment. This dude or dudess may never know how many dangerously self-absorbed conversations and restless nights this inspired, as I can’t track him/ her down via his/ her IP address and plead not to be found guilty as an objectifier of men. 
“It’s unsettling,” I told my long suffering friend, “of course if I had written what I wrote about women it wouldn’t be acceptable… but it was about men.”
“Well,” he sighed, fighting off the urge to point out my own insignificance, “that’s because we’ve been swilling around in a patriarchy for however many millions of years, and we men don’t have an entrenched and damaging stereotype to fight in order to attain basic levels of equality.”
“Ah.” I sighed, “Yeah. I should have thought of that.” “On the other hand,” my friend added, “Mr/Ms anonymous had a point.”
And so it is with a bowed head and sweaty palms that I would like to apologetically breach another gender inspired topic.
It’s the University of York’s History of Art department. As a member of this department, I can confidently say HoA is just great. Who doesn’t like a good visual fondle with a painting? Fabulous. However, for my year group alone, scattered amongst its 70 odd lady students is a depressing total of 11 male undergraduate students. 11!
Odd, isn’t it? Clearly art isn’t innately feminine. Consider the number of male professors, or the “grand tour” lads who 100 years ago went leaping from the Colleseum to the Parthenon in order to become well educated purveyors of Westminster. Or the artists themselves who were historically, as Gombrich will tell you, all men.
Last year however, I studied the laddish Joshua Reynolds under the tutelage of the not-so-laddish Mark Hallett, surrounded exclusively by women. And I don’t have an answer for you. After pointing my finger and screaming, “AAAH, THIS IS WRONG,” I’m helpless, at sea in a world of hair, skirts and theoretical discussions of Foucault. But someone somewhere might want to give this a head scratch and tackle why it is that HoA is the go to subject for the, “Lol, you rubbish person” joke. In the past, I’ve had a chortle at my own expense, but today I feel the whisper of sexism rumbling on from kitchen to lecture hall. So I’d like to point both these things out, in the hope that a few of you lads will bow your heads, wipe down your sweaty palms, and plunge yourselves apologetically into the world of art.