Why can’t more people be like Rory Foster? I love Rory Foster, I want him to be my friend, or maybe my dad or something. If more people thought like him then the world would be a happy place free from the vicious cycle of thoughtless, offensive people and the ridiculous over-the-top rules put in place to combat them.
This random man who I have in fact never met and probably never want to meet now that I have weirdly professed my love for him in print is thankfully not a strange obsession of mine – he, as the creator of the brilliant ‘York uni rate your shag’ Facebook page, is someone you probably love a little bit too.
This page, for those who didn’t see it, was not of the same crude and objectifying ilk as those set up by many other universities, nor the original one set up here at York, but a piece of simple and yet genius wordplay that innocently and quietly mocked all these other aggressive and failed attempts at humour with genuine wit.
Foster’s page rated shags just like all the others, but with the one subtle difference that “shag” here was referring to carpets rather than carpet burns.
The group’s death was the one tragedy of Facebook’s otherwise commendable blanket ban on all “Rate your shag” pages on its website, but its disappearance did not come so soon that it wasn’t able to remind us of some important lessons – lessons that tend to get forgotten in amongst today’s obsession with offence; creating it, taking it and trying to stop it happening to anyone ever.
What this spoof page quite obviously did was highlight just how awful the original efforts were, for they were offensive in an extremely blatant way that was most often totally devoid of humour.
What it also did was act as an exemplary beacon of self-policing. By embracing ‘York uni rate your shag’ and shunning the original we as students proved that we do not always need to be herded like sheep down safe, insipid alleyways by any higher power.
We managed similar when ‘Spotted’ was the Facebook craze of the day. It took a while, but we came out with something that was self-regulated and yet still fun. Something everyone could enjoy without the fear of being told they were dressed like a slag.
These two examples both made students proud to say they attend the University of York – there is arguably more to be proud of in this self-policing than there is in saying we are part of a Russell Group university or that we beat Lancaster at Roses again.
Other universities cannot say the same – I have not spoken to anyone from any other university who has seen their ‘Spotted’ and ‘Rate your shag’ pages combatted in anything like the same way. They continue in their base-level existence as York mocks them from its softly carpeted moral high ground.
And yet this university can also feel a lot like a school, with us the oversized children still bound by the mouth and suckling on the nipples of an overprotective students’ union.
Whether YUSU is forcing our heads down or we are gladly suckling at our own will is more difficult to say, but it is not something that we particularly need. When we’ve occasionally dragged ourselves away from the teat we’ve shown that we can look after ourselves pretty well as a group of young adults with no-one in particular to answer to. It’s not that a students’ union is redundant – far from it, and in general the work that YUSU do in the way of things like societies and welfare is vital to university life, it’s just that there needs to be less of a divide between us and them.
By its very essence a students’ union should be a part of the student body, but at York it doesn’t quite feel like that. YUSU tend to think of themselves as a group that is in control of students rather than thinking of themselves as students, and this is why at times people find themselves frustrated with them.
They hate the term themselves, but there is a reason why people who wind up in positions of power within the student body are labelled as student politicians. This is totally natural though, and is not a tag they should be ashamed of – by rights the sort of people who want these positions will also hold political interests, people who don’t wouldn’t run, and if they did would probably be awful at their jobs.
What it important is that they can separate themselves from that politician’s mindset – stop trying to think of what might be best for students and think as one instead.