Students call for gender equality by calling the NSS boycott a ‘personcott’
Can’t we escape the tyranny of the patriarchal ‘boy’cott?
Can’t we escape the tyranny of the patriarchal boycott?
The world is not overly nice to students. Sure, they generally originate from well-to-do families in leafy home-county neighbourhoods and have rosy prospects, but they also appear to be the butt of a long-running sardonic government joke; a joke that typically consists of raising fees, cutting support, and, through a battery-farm style system of university governance, driving their over-educated and underpaid educators to limits of human endurance.
Despite, or indeed because of, the laziness that underpins the student condition, resistance to the onerous and ugly system has adopted the form of a refusal to complete the National Student Survey — both because it is an organ of the ugly higher-education behemoth that tries to raise fees, and because filling it in it is a task that requires effort.
Amidst the dark and confusion of the NSS boycott, Warwick students have taken to Facebook (which is newspaper parlance for ‘going on Facebook’) to express their ‘disgust’ at the ‘revoltingly discriminatory’ nature of the word, boycott.
“I don’t know who invented the word,” said April Cott, student, “and I don’t know who they thought they were to say that only boys can personcott. In 2017, anyone can personcott anyone they like, and I’ve temporarily changed my profile picture to demonstrate that fact.
“Everyone who isn’t disgusting and revolting should use the correct modern words: ‘personcott’, ‘girlcott’, ‘boycott’ and ‘transcott’.” (The last of which, we should like to add, is not a Scottish rail operator.)
The term boycott is derived from the name of Captain Charles C Boycott, an Irish land agent who was personcotted in 1880.