Monday 13th July 2026
Blog Page 1231

How fashion fell for feminism

Lottie Jackson
-
0
How fashion fell for feminism

I f life really does imitate art, revolution is in the air. The rumblings of Luella Bartley and Katie Hillier’s final A/W15 collection for Marc by Marc Jacobs sparked an uprising within the industry when they recruited a small battalion of leather-clad defiance, topped with Che Guevara-esque berets. As models marched, monochromatic emblems of SUFFRAGETTE and SOLIDARITY were wielded to the lyrics of Public Enemy’s notorious track ‘Fight the Power’. In a parade of William Morris print, primary shades and tartan textiles, their feminist manifesto was evoked through shouts of “Gotta give us what we need. Our freedom of speech is freedom or death. We got to fight the powers that be”. Such words came as Suffragette, the much anticipated film starring Carey Mulligan and the inimitable Meryl Streep, was set to open the annual London Film Festival on October 7th.

“We were thinking about positive protest,” professed Hillier in reference to this collection of Jacobs’ now discontinued diffusion label. “William Morris, suffragettes, socialism. We were trying to keep the youth interested in doing good things, keep alive the idea that you can change the world.” All lovely, however as fashion is increasingly becoming a platform for exercising political dissent, critics of the industry have alerted us towards the inevitable dangers of commodifying feminism, and associating sociopolitical movements with a commercial industry predicated on seasonality and trends. In mass-producing scarves and dresses emblazoned with iconic feminist motifs, doesn’t this place the fight for female equality hand in hand with capitalist motives? In trivialising such vocabulary and marketing it as a brand don’t we risk delaying further progressive landmarks?

These are questions that Karl Lagerfeld knows only too well, after Chanel’s creative director was recently plagued by criticisms towards his own brand of so-called faux feminism. Last season’s catwalk show saw the Parisian Grand Palais transformed into a French boulevard complete with weathered stone buildings, wrought iron balconies and ornate window carvings; this was then framed as a picket line for his troop of 70s styled silhouettes to chant (“Women’s rights are more than alright”), flaunt placards (“Ladies First”), and brandish tote clutches declaring “feministe mais feminine”. When compounded by the beats of Chaka Khan’s ‘I’m Every Woman’, such sentiments were deemed about as fake and inauthentic as the Belasco-esque precision of his show’s elaborate backdrop. In typical Lagerfeld style, he has hit back at his outraged opponents through asserting, “I like the idea of feminism being something light-hearted… My mother was very much a feminist and I thought it was something right for the moment.”

 Feminist communities have despaired over this very notion of feminism being presented as a mood, a transient fad and as “something right for the moment”. In an article for the Independent, journalist Mark Izatt condemned the charade, but also reminded us that “fashion really does have the power to make such changes: Coco Chanel herself emancipated women from the restrictive corsetry and heavy ornamentation of previous centuries, giving them freedom to move and work.”

Can history repeat itself? I believe so, if we look at designers such as Vivienne Westwood whose recent London Fashion Week show epitomised the industry’s potential for activism. Her S/S16 Red Label collection appropriately entitled ‘Mirror The World’ manifested a distinct air of Corbynism as she echoed the present political climate through her signs declaring “Austerity is a Crime”, “Politicians are Criminals” and “Climate Revolution”. It seems socks with sandals are not the only trend the new Labour leader has brought to next season’s collections. It was just several weeks ago that Westwood, accompanied by her ‘fash mob’, rode an armoured vehicle up to Number 10 in protest of David Cameron’s fracking policy. It is this genuine consciousness of the ethical, social and political environment today through which we can truly foster sartorialism as a force for good. As Emmeline Pankhurst famously declared, “It is the only way”

The Media And Self-Worth

Emmanuelle Soffe
-
0

The media has a knack for telling us what our bodies are supposed to look like. Films, television, music videos, magazines, posters and advertisements as we walk down the street; all of them have been, since the very beginning of our lives, subconsciously shaming us into thinking we are supposed to act and look a certain way. A Western teenage boy may take a second glance at a tiny-waisted, large-breasted girl walking past him because that has always been what social media and television has enforced as the ‘most’ attractive. But how does he know that this is his genuine preference, and just how far has he been moulded by what our society has embedded into his way of viewing the world? Of course, we all have personal tastes and each one of us individually views the world in a slightly different light; some things appear beautiful to some, yet distasteful to others as a consequence or a reflection, some may argue, of what we have experienced consciously and subconsciously throughout our lives. There is no right and wrong when it comes to physical beauty, we are who we are; and yet as simple as this sounds, society continuously tries to direct the way in which we should be feeling about others and about ourselves.

Weight bias, also known as ‘fat-shaming’, is an ever-present example which has been discussed heavily across various spectrums, but particularly in relation to beauty and the world of fashion. Yet at the opposite end of the line and disturbingly taken a lot less seriously, is ‘skinny-shaming’. Those deemed as too slim often struggle, and feel repressed in their facility to communicate what may feel like body degradation, not simply because it is considered a rather light-hearted criticism but that ‘skinny’ people can afford to have their bodies condemned whereas those who are overweight cannot. The emotional effect of this derogatory attitude is just as repulsive and damaging as ‘fat-shaming’. It is long overdue for today’s society, and all those who have allowed certain social hegemonies to taint their perceptions, to realise that nobody should ever be told that they need to change the way that they look.

This applies to any body type, not just those who are underweight or those who are overweight. You don’t have to be under a size eight to look good, but neither should you have to have curves to look sexy. The fact remains that we are all beautiful. The world of the media doesn’t want us to accept who we are and feel satisfied with the way that we look. This is because, despite the skin-deep messages of pleasure, enjoyment, carelessness that the media gives us on the surface; a contented, self-assured nation of people is not in their money-making interests.

A lot of what we see and watch on a daily basis, feeds on and gleefully nourishes our insecurities. The hardest part, perhaps, is being able to recognise its control over the way in which we view people around us, and being able to dismissively hurdle over it. We do not need such negativity in a world thriving with so many uniquely attractive people.

The Devil’s in the Details

Olivia Sung
-
0
The Devil’s in the Details

My Catholicism, which is inherited as opposed to practised, generally speaking, is having a bit of a flare-up. I just completed my third Daredevil marathon and still haven’t yet managed to quell the feeling that something ineffable is happening, even though I can now pretty much recite most of the crucial bits of dialogue. The notion that this TV series is actually a message from some divine alterity keeps clinging to the recesses of my mind. Or maybe that should be my soul. I’m not sure what the God of TV — or, let’s be accurate, of Netflix — is trying to tell me: but at the moment I’ve narrowed it down to the profound (that the devil might very well be a Janus-faced creature, on the one hand unquestionably and horrifically evil, and on the other just a misunderstood Miltonian archangel railing at the oppressive tyranny of his deistic overlord) and to the less profound (that the contours of Charlie Cox’s torso are really quite incredible, given that he claims he never had a gym subscription until a month before filming). Either way, I’m routing out my old rosary beads.

Joking and mild blasphemy aside, Daredevil is a very pleasant surprise as television shows go. These days, we’re inundated with the newsflash that television sets standards against which cinema can only hope to compete, in terms of originality of narrative and sophistication of production. And still, in spite of all this — and call me old-fangled if you must — I’m often reluctant to salivate over a TV series just for being what it is. The format of a television season is an enabler, not an achievement. There are plenty of television series I absolutely adore (Peaky Blinders, Penny Dreadful, Boardwalk Empire), but just because they are quality, slickly-produced television doesn’t mean they satiate a desire for the powers of the big screen.

Daredevil does. Kind of. It has a handle on the cinematic and it deploys the cinematic with incredible, confident sublimity, which is actually very hard to sustain over a thirteen hour narrative. Obviously it might make sense to note its two advantages borrowed from the movies straight off — that it’s a comic book adaptation, and that the particular universe it extends from is none other than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which right now is very busy giving us such small and inconsequential, pared-back indie affairs as Avengers: Age of Ultron and Guardians of the Galaxy. Still, in the same way that James Gunn’s Guardians forfeited the right to borrow all the precedents set by Joss Whedon, Daredevil does very little dealing with its big screen cousins.

Instead, its influences are subtle but potent, and indebted to the legacy of American moviemaking writ large — the Nessun Dorma sequence in the final episode a tribute, in fact, to Francis Ford Coppola. It brings its own intertextual meta-theatrics together by staging a climatic component of the final episode in an abandoned theatre: a huge and gorgeous move of religiously-loaded pageantry, one you can only dislike if you dislike such pageantry in general (in which case, this is not the series for you anyway).

This is, when it comes down to it, one sprawling, epic crime thriller; kind of what you’d get if you put Coppola and Gene Hackman together and told them to come up with an “American Connection” movie circa 1980, updated with iPhones, ninjas, and the ethical conundrums of journalism in the digital blogosphere. Put that way, it sounds eccentrically camp and it might have been, were it not for the genuinely stunning efforts of the production team to knit together a highly complex web of entangled dilemmas: the nature of evil, the efficiency of the law, the ethics of vigilantism, the presence of God in situations of terror and, most importantly, who is the devil and why is he bad?

In other words, it is one of the most challengingly and refreshingly gothic pieces of filmed storytelling to grace either silver or small screen in years: something you may not expect to see from the company that otherwise brings the witticisms of Ant Man and Loki to our screens. Which compliments the Catholic preoccupation, naturally; and also says something about our wider understanding of the gothic’s place in mainstream film and television. Horror movies these days, especially in the vein of the Final Destination or Saw films, will interrogate plenty of questions abstracted from the genre that birthed them, but will tend to obscure their significance with a deluge of blood and gore. Even Penny Dreadful, which does eclipse Daredevil in gothic style — naturally, having borrowed most of its characters from the original late-Romantic and Victorian texts in that genre — does not necessarily eclipse it in gothic content. For everywhere in this series is the threat of the double: from Murdoch versus Fiske (played with inspired thuggish diffidence by Vincent D’Onofrio) to the city at night versus at day, the symbolism of the mirror image, which is potentially one of the most overdone and even cliched of narrative devices across all film and literature, gains in this series from how honest it is about itself.

With its deft handling of magnificent themes, in some ways, Daredevil is a lot like Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. Not just because it paints the seedy corruption of the urban landscape in striking chiaroscuro, or because it tackles how, systematically, a bureaucracy can become poisoned, but because it wrestles an icon through the wringer of human fallibility. Cox is, in some ways, more approachable than Christian Bale has ever been, which makes mush of even diehard Batman fangirls like me. He carries none of the alienating distance that Bale necessarily puts between his character and the audience, because Murdoch is an intelligent street kid, thankfully shy of a genius, with a degree in law that he’s earned from working hard without the most affluent of bank balances. His demons are, at their truest, also shadows of himself; but of all the superhero issues impressed on modern audiences, it is here they strike closest to home.

The actor otherwise most remembered for his turn as the romantic lead in Stardust, and as a suave Irishman with a professional trigger finger in Boardwalk Empire, is able to sink into Murdoch; and not like he’s working against the material he’s given to find an individualising trait to fuse him to the character, the way Bale does with his guttural voice and taciturn surliness. Charlie Cox dances around inside Matt Murdoch as if he were actually a nominally blind ninja with acute Catholic guilt and preternatural hearing abilities all along. But then, why not? There are enough pseudo-Shakespearian soliloquies in this series to push the point home: the gothic survives in even the most unlikely genres, because we’re all secretly Catholics here. Any one of us could be possessed — by God, by the devil — at any time.  

A View From the Cheap Seat

Mark Barclay
-
0
A View From the Cheap Seat

 

Mark Barclay (theatre critic, thesp savant, bastard extraordinaire) gives this week’s theatre productions 60 seconds to sell themselves. Will they be great or will they be utter shit?

Featured on this week’s show:

Ruffian on the Stair – BT 20th October – 24th October 7:30

https://www.facebook.com/events/1671102923104112/

Blow – BT 20th October – 24th October 9:30

https://www.facebook.com/events/1491935981102348/

Titus Andronicus – Corpus Christi Auditorium  27th October – 30th October 20:00

https://www.facebook.com/events/894334300657327/ 

Cherworld: Do Conservatives need conserving?

Luke Barratt
-
0
Cherworld: Do Conservatives need conserving?

       

 

Tutors and students to teach refugees through OXPAND

Marianna Spring
-
0
Tutors and students to teach refugees through OXPAND

Christ Church, St John’s and Merton have all offered or are planning to offer places to academics fleeing the crisis in Syria, with several other colleges including Hertford and Wadham, expected to follow suit.

Oxford University said in a statement, “The University has long been a member of the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA.) Working with the colleges who provide accommodation and invaluable financial support, we already offer the opportunity and facilities for academics to come and work in Oxford in cases where their academic freedom and safety are at serious risk in their home countries.

“Given the present crisis in Syria, the University and colleges are planning substantially to increase our involvement in this scheme in order to help academics especially from Syria and neighbouring countries. The University is in contact with Oxford City Council to see what help we might usefully provide to help refugees through volunteering or through the offer of specialist advice.”
Stephen Wordsworth, the Executive Director of CARA, told Cherwell, “Four Colleges are already hosting CARA Fellows, and discussions are now going on about broadening this, bringing in more Colleges. Cara’s Fellowship Programme supports academics, often in very immediate danger, helping them to escape to a safe place where they can continue their work.

“Our Fellows come from around 25 different countries. Syrians are, of course, in the headlines just now, and make up around two-thirds of all recent applicants for support. It is worth repeating that CARA Fellows are not ‘refugees’ and don’t want to be seen as such. They badly need to escape from very difficult situations, sometimes from very imminent physical danger, but they are looking to get away for a limited period, and then, one day, hope to return home, to help re-build.”

Wordsworth continued, “In terms of what we need at Oxford, we would ideally like to see Colleges and the University, between them, finding a way to take over the full costs. The total numbers are likely to be fairly limited – I can’t put an exact figure on it, but the standards at Oxford are, obviously, very high, and only a relatively small proportion overall of those we are helping will probably qualify.”

Merton College Warden, Sir Martin Taylor, commented, “The College has chosen to become involved in this primarily because we recognised that there was a need to which we wanted to respond. Oxford has in the recent past been a place to which academics seeking refuge have come; among them Sir George Radda, the eminent chemist, who came to Merton after leaving his native Hungary following the events of 1956.

“As with all academics who come to Merton, they bring their scholarship and their research talents; for us this is not simply an act of charity – they come and they contribute, and we see this very much as something from which we stand to gain.”

The Dean of Christ Church, the Very Revd Professor Martyn Percy, said his college has now already welcomed a Syrian professor of pharmaceutical chemistry. “We took a decision several months ago that we would try to offer hospitality to academics at risk in the Middle East,” he said. “[She] was in Aleppo working at the university when she was forced to leave because of the instability and violence there. We are very glad to be able to offer her hospitality and support here.”

This Sunday also marked the first meeting of a number of tutors and translators, the majority of whom are current Oxford University students, involved in a new initiative called OXPAND. With the aid of Skype, tutors are collaborating with students and translators in order to facilitate “the continued education of displaced young students awaiting refugee status”.
OXPAND’s aim, stated on its website, is to bring “talented and aspirational asylum seekers the academic resources they deserve whilst they are waiting for status or living in refugee camps.”

At Sunday’s meeting of tutors and translators, there was a wide range of students present, all hoping to give tutoring and translation services to refugees this term. Anna Simpson, founder of OXPAND, told Cherwell, “There are 24 refugees taking courses this term, [the] majority from Syria, but also Iraq, the Yemen, and Sudan.” OXPAND has already established a wider database of “over 150 volunteer tutors/student teachers,” meaning that each refugee should be allocated “a tutor and translator, or two tutors if no translator is required.” The courses, which are being overseen by a team of coordinators, began on Tuesday.

Organisers stressed to tutors and translators, however, that OXPAND is not only about academic fulfilment, but also about establishing friendship with refugees and creating hope. As Simpson went on to tell Cherwell, “As the refugees Skype with our volunteer tutors and translators, they gain not only one-to-one academic support, but inspiring new friendships. Having the chance to study any OXPAND course they like, for free, brings them a real sense of positivity for their future: which, given the current refugee crisis, is incredibly valuable.”

OXPAND began in the context of this summer’s on-going refugee crisis in Europe, during which a team of Oxford University students volunteered with OXAB (Oxford Aid to the Balkans), many working with refugees in Sofia, Bulgaria over the summer. Universities have been shut down across Syria because of the war, which Simpson says is “leaving aspirational and talented students little opportunity to fulfil their full potential.”

OXPAND is also working in collaboration with a wider campaign effort, which seeks to secure scholarships from the University of Oxford for refugees currently living within and outside of the UK. Thaís Roque, who works with the Oxford University Refugee Campaign, Citizens UK, and the International Students Network (UK), told Cherwell that a motion this week has been submitted to OUSU calling upon OUSU representatives to support the Oxford Refugee Campaign. The campaign seeks to pressurise the University to sign up to Article 26 – a project which “now works with 14 universities, [and which] establishes UK-based refugees the minimum of a full tuition fee bursary [and] if possible additional financial support to cover the cost of travel, books and equipment.”

Roque was confident about this goal, telling Cherwell, “I think there’s a good chance Oxford will sign up to Article 26 and I really think we have a good chance with the support of OUSU and students of the University.” While she admitted that “money isn’t going to be a problem, [but] bureaucracy might be,” Roque emphasized the possibility of a positive outcome citing the example of Jesus College, which “already has one scholarship for refugees…this kind of thing is possible.”

“It’s a long term process,” concluded Roque. “Everything at Oxford takes time, [but] Anna’s project [OXPAND] is already giving refugees interested in education hope for the future.”

A View from the cheap seats

Mark Barclay
-
0
A View from the cheap seats

These are notes we found in TSK, presumably written by an ambitious director.

“Hamlet without Hamlet 2 – Hmm. I want to do this, but, like, I think we can only do a sequel if Hamlet is resurrected, because if not there’s, like, only Fortinbras and Horatio (buddy comedy?). But then Hamlet would be third wheeling on them… but then it would be like ‘Hamlet without Hamlet, now with Hamlet’ and that sounds too much like a really confused deal at Tesco.

“An adaptation of a book, maybe something like War and Peace but, like, set in Oxford. Maybe Stuart Webber could play General Kutuzov and Zuleyka can play Napoleon? Or maybe we could make a new version of Fight Club, but like make it a bromance rom com, (brom-com?) with a nice happy ending to get it into the Playhouse. Maybe they could get married and so we end with Tyler kissing a mirror. That would actually really speak to our audience.

“We need something with a social conscience, something with a real edge of social realism. Like, a documentary play on the life of students at shit colleges, like, we could go to Cambridge or something and interview them on how they cope living in a faux- Oxford fantasy. Might be a bit too much of a shocker, even for your average BT audience. On the other hand, there are some truths we just need to be told.

“Oh of course, we need an immersive theatre piece too: these are so expensive but, like, we need to keep up with the trends so we have to do it on the cheap. We could let all theatrical hell break loose with that, if we wanted to. Maybe we could do it in a rehearsal room and have all the actors sitting around bored, allowing the audience to walk around and explore. The play would be all about us coming up with the play. It would be so meta that it would save us actually coming up with a play. Hmm.

“Fuck this postmodern malaise. How are we ever going to get original ideas?” 

Magic Flute 2.0

Henner Petin
-
0
Magic Flute 2.0

The interesting thing about staging any opera is that you can virtually indulge in no lenience in the timings and details of what happens on stage. The music will go on, ruthlessly taking everything with it – improvisation, cuts and spontaneity are all impossible. This become even more complicated if you are staging an opera that everyone knows, like The Magic Flute. Yet Barrie Kosky, in his very special, exciting and highly successful production, manages to break up this stiffness of the operatic format. His production was recently at the Edinburgh Festival, having been in Berlin, Zurich, Düsseldorf and is now also going to Los Angeles.

This tour de force pays tribute to the fact that with his production Kosky created a stunning piece of art in its own right. This is mainly owed to the all-round visual entertainment in which the audience is indulged for a full three hours. The stage is non-existent and instead the actors stand inside and in front of a huge wall onto which the scenery – if that is the right word – is projected. Cigarette smoke turns into hearts, birds fly around, cats climb on trees and the people are running across rooftops at night, all animated in beautiful detail. 

This idea isn’t entirely novel but what sets Kosky apart is that while other directors have dared to enrich opera with video , Kosky turns the opera into video. The completely vertical perspective on the events as well as the holistic visual integration of the singers into the animations around them can make us forget that we are sitting in an opera house rather than a cinema. 

“Bored shitless” is how Kosky described his own first experience of The Magic Flute as a child. So it seems no wonder that in his own production he set everything on one card: enticing and invigorating entertainment. Everyone appreciative of the greatness of Mozart’s music will struggle to settle the conflict between ears and eyes Kosky kindles in his production. This is all embedded within a powerful and fast-paced way of narrating the story, which is mainly due to radical cuts in the libretto: Kosky and his team show us that the extensive spoken dialogues in Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto can be reduced to a few lines projected on stage, stylistically mid-way between a comic book and a silent film. As if the audience could not survive without constant auditory and visual entertainment, piano music is layered under the short intervals of projected dialogue, where Mozart’s original score would have the music come to a halt.

Kosky takes a deliberate stand against the common trope of the characters’ path of self-chastising tests in their pursuit of greater happiness. Mozart might have meant this happiness to be the values of freemasonry. But despite the recurring projection of words such as ‘Wisdom’, ‘Truth’, and ‘Beauty’, this development arc is not what Kosky’s flute is fundamentally about. Rather it is about human indulgence in beauty, which the characters find in the love they procure. We, the audience, find this beauty in an opera experience that unites some of the most beautiful music ever written with the purest indulgence in a sea of exquisite details, heartwarming animations and highly romantic peaks. This might not be what the grey-besuited opera lover would love to see done to his all-time favourite; but it might just be what opera needs today – to be fun again! 

Michaelmas Highlights

Mark Barclay
-
0
Michaelmas Highlights

Having just moved into non-college owned accommodation, I suddenly realise a) how much I miss heating b) how bloody expensive heating is. In devising a solution I pretty much have daytime covered, what with libraries and the spiritual warmth of the Cherwell office. Nighttime is a problem, not least because even my love of heat won’t tempt me to the dubious warmth to be had at Park End.

As in all things in life, the answer is of course to be found at the theatre. But as with Park End, you don’t want to be kept warm in any old way, so it is always best to pick the best option. Here follows our take on the best plays to keep you warm and possibly even entertained this coming term.

In all sincerity, I hate musicals with what I am convinced will one day become a diagnosable condition. But this term’s upcoming production of Singing in the Rain is undeniably intriguing. Not so much the play, but the ambition of the technical spectacle promises to make this a landmark production for Oxford theatre. Although the singing won’t for me be much of a draw, the rain certainly will be. I hear rumours that the producers intend to actually pour water all over the stage. For sure, you can’t say you’re not getting your money’s worth.

In addition, some complex video work seems to be in store with OBA president Hendrik Ehlers in charge of directing the live and recorded video. Still, with such unbearable music and such a profusion of fluids being discharged, perhaps that Third Week you might go to Park End anyway.

Next we have String; a promising piece of new writing addressing communication in the modern era.They want to do this in an interestingly literal way, with a huge installation of winding string that (I presume) represents the entrapment of interconnecting relationships permitted by an online world. So edgy is this production that chatting to its graphic designer as I write this piece, I still don’t really know what it’s about. In any case, dix points for set design in the BT of all places. Coming in Fourth Week.

For me the most intriguing piece this term is an adaptation of The Master and Margarita — the famous Bulgakov novel about Satan visiting the Soviet Union. For those of you who have read the original you will know what an absolutely mad idea it is to try and adapt it. A murderous

talking cat and the eponymous devil from the Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy For…” are among the spectacles we should encounter at St John’s gardens in Sixth Week. Make sure you bring a coat.

The upshot is that after a Trinity full of safe crowd-pleasers, it seems some ballsier showings in Michaelmas will give me reason to escape the chill of my house 

Creaming Spires MT15 Week 2

Don Juanson
-
0
Creaming Spires MT15 Week 2

What is traversing Europe by train without a thorough smattering of sex? A gap yah summer of travelling is nothing if one is single. We all know the stereotype. Move a couple of bricks, gesture compassionately every now and again, and salvation winks in favour of your true penitent behaviour in far flung regions, rewarding you with a few choice delights.

Forget the professed visage of Dante’s penitent sinner, eyelids sewn to the ground. When we reduce a holiday bucket list, all we really want is a good, guilt-free fuck. Or any form of foreign stimulation really. And we don’t care who knows about it, or sees us gurning in ecstasy. In far-flung fields, there will always be an English man, cumming.

The only thing to top sex abroad? Having it in public for all to see. Or at least have the chance of being caught. The heat of the Italian sun beating down upon pale brows, reflecting upon the Adonian form of Italian stallions is enough to get anyone’s juices flowing. Attempting to amble around Venice in 36 degrees with your elderly grandma and extended family does not reduce any of these urges. The humidity may stifle the skin, but it only stimulates the crotch.

But how do you satisfy an itch in a country where one can’t order more than a glass of prosecco? I feel awkward gesturing for the bill with the ridiculous English hand gestures, let alone asking for uno handjob. But lo! My contract happens to include European roaming internet. Grindr Italiano is not an assault on the senses so much as its English counterpart. Yes, the cock pics flow as easily without so much as a ‘Ciao bello xox’. But these are like no men that any pale English boy has seen, all willing to satisfy my (wander)lust.

However, no matter how many Venetians offer a helping hand, I’m still stuck staying in a room with my cousin. We’re the same age and just as horny. And yet I somehow feel even he would feel uncomfortable “sharing”, as one potential suitor suggested. But even I have more class than that. I almost hooked up with a guy staying in our hotel, but the only exchange we had was a rally of awkward glances across the breakfast table, thinking how little we looked like our pictures. I leave Venice frustrated.

Getting on the train to move onto our next destination with a sigh of frustration, I resign myself to sexual failure. Flicking through the catalogue of men on my Grindr screen in first class, I’m tantalised but all I can do is reply that I’m leaving the city.

A faceless profile starts to message me. I’m about to hit the block button, but then a face pic follows which stops me. He’s an American student, and a hot one at that. I’m about to disappoint Casanova number nine when he questions whether I was the guy who got on the train back in Venice. Forgetting stranger danger and focussing on the bulge in my pants, I quickly reply. Turns out he’s in the same carriage as me and asks if I fancy meeting him in the bathroom. I look at my family around me and resolve to escape. Peeking my head through the bathroom door, I see my Romeo approach and quickly get on his knees and set quickly to work with his wooing (refusing to even kiss me). Realising my stop is approaching, I button up and flee.

“You were a long time in there? And why are you sweating?” my Mum awkwardly asks. “Oh, I’m just feeling a little bit too hot,” I reply with a smirk.

1...1,2301,2311,232...2,599Page 1,231 of 2,599

Support Student Journalism

Cherwell is Oxford’s oldest independent newspaper, established in 1920. We are entirely student-run. By supporting us, you will contribute to keeping our paper in print and online. Every donation makes a difference.

Donate

Explore

Follow us

More

Oxford Student Publications Limited © 2025 - All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy

Website by Jamie Ashley