Don’t think you can get off spot-free!
**Working in the library can be dull and monotonous. I often spend hours yearning for something to make me chuckle and boost my will to keep going. In that sense, the new Facebook page ‘Spotted: Warwick Uni Library’ aims to give us that necessary morale, but it does so at the cost of undermining one of the best things about the library: that it is a safe space to learn.**
Many of the posts on the page are harmless: the snoring man in the library toilets, the lazy students taking the lift to floor 2, and even the student who unwisely chose to chomp roast chicken crisps in the earshot of an angry essay-doer. However, it is the sexually charged statements that raise the question of what is or is not acceptable to post on the Internet. If you walked up to a girl ordering eggs at the library cafe and asked if she wanted them ‘boiled, scrambled or fertilised’, you might expect to be charged with sexual harassment, or at the very least shamed for being a creep.
Why, then, is it supposedly acceptable online? There is no accountability either, because the page posts anonymously – and so the creepy innuendos spurt across the page with no consideration for the consequences. Although you do not know the person who you are recklessly constructing puns about, they have the capacity to work out that they are the subject of the comment, which can make an individual feel extremely uncomfortable.
The justification of ‘if you don’t like it, don’t read it’ doesn’t apply here. Even if you never look at the page, its very existence makes you feel uncomfortable in and of itself, because there are people willing to make sex related puns about you for a cheap laugh.
Another defence might be that objectification is universal, and that girls are buying into these posts too. But this completely misses the point – not all are, and there may be some guys out there (see yours truly), who feel uncomfortable about the page’s existence.
But there is something more to be said here – the most harmful ‘uniladesque’ posts on the page are from guys about girls. The comparison to UniLad is valid here, because UniLad marketed itself as ‘for when you are bored in the library’. If you believe that UniLad contributes to the everyday rape culture in our society, you believe that Spotted must be better regulated.
Which brings us to its last justification. Free speech. Which is total and utter baloney. When I commented on the page, using my own free speech to explain the hidden consequences of these cheap laughs, I was blocked.
Above anything else, this proves that, until it regulates itself properly, Spotted is just another site where the ‘bantastic lads’ will have their way, and should be ‘unliked’ as fast as possible.
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