Matilda

A sadly-obsessed Harry Potter fan since the age of six, I had high expectations for Muggle Quidditch and nursed a hope that it would be everything I had ever dreamed. A small part of me fantasized that I’d be nimbly sailing through the skies like Oliver Wood on a Nimbus 2000. I had heard rumours that the sport had, inevitably, been adopted by Oxford and was fascinated to see what it would actually entail. How could a game that relied so heavily on the possibility that children as young as 11 could fly around on pieces of wood in the air pelting each other with dangerous bludgers work in the real world?

Arriving at University Parks to the fourth meeting of the Oxford Quidditch society and excited to be the Angelina Johnson of Oxford, I could see that it wasn’t exactly as I’d pictured it. To replicate the Quidditch experience on land, players must run around a small pitch with a ‘broomstick’ (usually a mop) wedged between their legs at all times, an entirely redundant practice that seems to just get in the way of any smooth athletic manoeuvrings. I was put into Ravenclaw team and assigned the role of the keeper, and Will a Hufflepuff chaser. I was feeling confident: Hufflepuff are traditionally known more for being “really nice” than their mean Quidditch prowess. I had a chance of victory and finally making my name in the Quidditch world.
The rules were thus: the ‘quaffle’ and two ‘bludgers’ are placed in the middle of the field. The chasers try to score by throwing the quaffle into one of three goal hoops. Each goal is worth 10 points. Beaters try to ‘peg’ players with their bludger. If a player is ‘pegged’, they have to stop what they’re doing and pay a penalty: run back to the goal post or sit down. Keepers guard the goal posts at each end and attempt to block chasers’ attempts at scoring. Seekers try to tackle the snitch (a player dressed in yellow running around the pitch) by grabbing a sock attached to their trackies. When the snitch is ‘caught’, the game ends.

I quickly came to realize that being a Quidditch ‘keeper’ wasn’t exactly my calling. I let in about three goals in the first twenty minutes and there was a bitter consensus among my teammates that I wasn’t taking Muggle Quidditch seriously enough. Soon the score was heavily in Hufflepuff’s favour: 80 points to our pitiful 30. Eventually, the “Snitch” was released into the game. The boy dressed in yellow ran valiantly and was, eventually, caught by the Hufflepuff seeker. The game was over. The score? 180 to 30. My Quidditch career, it seemed, was over, and wouldn’t even qualify for a sentence on my future Wikipedia page.

I was wrong not to take the sport seriously though. Quidditch is a growing phenomenon. The first intercollegiate Quidditch World Cup was held in 2007 at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2011, the Quidditch World Cup was held in New York City. Described by Fox News as like ‘a cross between the Superbowl and a Medieval Festival’, TIME Magazine put it best in their coverage of the 2010 World Cup: ‘Quidditch is a sport striving for legitimacy. It has a rule book, a governing body (the International Quidditch Association, a nonprofit) and its own live streaming webcasts. Its players move with the grace and ferocity of top athletes; the best of them look like lacrosse players and hit like linebackers. All told, 46 teams from the U.S. and Canada vie for the Cup, and hundreds more franchises are just getting started. For a five-year-old sport, it’s a remarkable ascension.’

‘Leave the book at home, this sport is real,’ confidently proclaims the website. Yet, as a sport in its own right, I’m not so sure. Without knowledge of Harry Potter and the ingenious world JK Rowling created, I’m not certain the game would exist successfully. But as a way to escape our early adulthood and Oxford life, Muggle Quidditch is wizard. I’d recommend it to anyone as the perfect way to meet like-minded people, indulge nostalgia, and grow up on your own terms.

Will

Quidditch is the newest sport on the block, and I fancied my chances at it. I knew that Matilda just did not have what it took for our game of Muggle Quidditch. My eye for the snitch, my instinctive rapport with the broom, my canny awareness when it came to knowing the position of the beaters would edge it over her self-imposed decision to be a keeper (a somewhat cowardly position of course). I was Hufflepuff (surely the sporty house) and felt reassured as we screamed the name into the air before both teams charged at each other.

Quidditch is serious; it’s violent. As you run down the pitch  broomed men are chasing after you, hunting you eagerly with their quaffles. A quaffle to the head is not unusual and a fall off the broomstick brutal (if only for the chaser’s bruised dignity). The chasers are as vigorous in their tackling as the finest rugby blue; they have eyes only for the quaffle and want it there and then. A lean, mean Quidditch veteran explains it to me: ‘People think Quidditch is geeky. But they change their minds when they see it is fucking violent’. I worry about what I have got myself in for, while resenting Matilda keenly for the cop-out of keeper status.

Quidditch has already had as many controversies as some of the longest established sports in the University. The Harry Potter Society had tried to rein in and control Quidditch Society, their younger offshoot. They thought control should rest with the Harry Potterites, and that the Quiddites were too liberal in their understanding of the rules. The idea of a quarter blue being awarded in the first Varsity match this coming year is sure to upset some people. It seems any sport, no matter how magical, is always dragged into scandal.

On the Quidditch pitch I take a while to get to grips with the game. The beaters seem to be very content to mutually bludgeon themselves to destruction, while the chasers continue with the game. This functions like a game of rugby but without the brutality (despite what I had been warned). Boys and girls play together in a harmonious game of running to each end of the pitch. Serious competition is absent and there is the chance of playing sport together in a quaint and amusing way. There is also a lot of laughter and the ever-present Harry Potter jokes (if only we had our wands, I need a firewhiskey, S.O.S. Mudbloodism).

Yet my competitive side had come out in full. Matilda had been a confused keeper; she conceded easy goals and seemed ill at ease on the broom. My own team keeper loudly heckled her: ‘What is that keep DOING?’ she bellowed. But my own play had been ineffectual. I had been bludgeoned and had a pass intercepted. I needed to step up my game.

Flying to the side of the pitch I screamed for the quaffle. I caught it one handed keeping my broom snugly in place and then sprinted up the side of the pitch. I dodged and darted niftily between attempts from enemy beaters and the crowd and team roared me on. As I approached the goal it was just me against the keeper and the three hoops attached to the tree. I sidestepped the keeper, I was one on one, but at the very last moment my throw faltered and the ball missed the hoop. There was a collective groan from all of Hufflepuff, I was belatedly bludgeoned, and I trod back to my side in shame and disgrace. I had failed myself, I had been worse than Matilda, and even worse than all that, I had let Hufflepuff down. If it had not been for the snitch being caught, Hufflepuff might not have won so resoundingly.

Despite my poor performance, Quidditch perfectly fills the niche of enjoyable and amusing sport that is not (too) serious. I laughed more than is perhaps healthy for such high octane sport. It is a shoo-in (broom joke). Quidditch happens every Saturday in the University Parks at 12. Brooms are provided and a good time is guaranteed.

­Do we still need a feminist movement? Haven’t women come a long way, and wouldn’t it be dangerous or somehow unnatural to go any further? Kat Banyard, founder of activist movement UK Feminista, has been labelled the UK’s most influential young feminist, and her acclaimed book The Equality Illusion, which challenges head on the idea that British society is now gender equal, makes worrying, yet totally inspiring reading.

There’s been a lot of media coverage recently of the sort of issues that feminists like Banyard make their business. Few will have missed the UniLad scandal, where the shutting down of the website, if only temporarily, caused controversy and gave an important indication of an answer to the question of whether there is any place at all in our society for casual, jokey sexism. The Leveson Inquiry heard from feminist campaigners about the damage done by women’s objectification in the media. Debate goes on about the lack of women in parliaments worldwide, yet it’s people like Banyard who are providing the impetus for actual change, and pressing others to believe it can and should be made.

But aren’t we doing pretty well, considering? Banyard disagrees. ‘If you actually start to pick away the surface of what we see as normal, you see that there are vast inequalities still coursing through the veins of society. They manifest themselves in every aspect of our lives, in the home, in the workplace: fundamentals such as being able to take part in public life on an equal footing are still very distant dreams.’ Victories of the past, Banyard argues passionately, are still being translated into reality: ‘We’re still paid significantly less, we’re still outnumbered 4:1 in Parliament, there are still horrendous rates of violence against women, 100,000 women are raped every year just in the UK. So clearly we’ve got an awfully long way to go, but also we must remain vigilant to new threats, new forms of sexism.’

Banyard’s prime example of a rising obstacle to gender equality is the multibillion dollar global sex industry. ‘This is a very modern industry, whereby pornography and prostitution are taking place on a scale unprecedented in human history. For the first time a generation of young boys are basically being brought up on hard-core porn.’ But hasn’t prostitution always been around? ‘It’s very convenient to dismiss it as the world’s oldest profession, but exploitation is unfortunately a very old aspect of society, and that doesn’t make it inevitable or right. Also, commercial sexual exploitation is taking place on a mass industrial scale, and that is new.’
She cites developments in communication technology which make it easier to access and disseminate pornography as reasons for this. ‘Pornography actually holds up a mirror to something quite dark going on in our society, because the pornographic world is horrendously misogynistic and violent and brutal. And pornography is now a major form of misogynistic propaganda, because it tells lies about women to a lot of young boys who are forming their ideas about sex and girls. Not only are vast numbers of vulnerable women being funnelled through this industry, but the pornographers are also trying to steal and co-opt men’s sexuality for their own profit.’ Banyard describes pornography and prostitution vehemently as ‘the ultimate coming together of patriarchy and capitalism’.

In response to the suggestion that watching pornography can be liberating for women expressing their sexuality too, Banyard is hard-lined. ‘What we’ve got to be clear about is that the vast majority of pornography is filmed prostitution. What we know about the very fundamental concept of prostitution is that it is inherently dangerous for the women who are taking part in it. 68% of women in prostitution have post traumatic stress disorder as a result of having repeated, unwanted sex. In order to endure this women are having to find strategies to separate mind from body, and you see women on a mass scale self-medicating to get through it.’ Banyard is at pains to stress that she is not prudish or anti-sex, as feminists are accused so often of being: ‘What the industry has been very adept at doing is co-opting the language of sexual liberation and making consumers think they’re really socking it to the anti-sex conservatives. On the contrary.’

So is there anything we can do about it? I ask what she thinks of the Nordic model, which makes it illegal to pay for sex acts but decriminalises the act of selling sex. For Banyard this is ‘an amazing example of feminist lawmaking. Prostitution is seen as inevitable, but feminists in Sweden and various other countries have shown that the sex industry is not infallible. It makes you recognise it for what it is: violence against women, and they’ve seen significant drops in demand for prostitution and reduction in trafficking. It’s exactly what we should be doing here.’
We turn to the hot topic of media portrayals of women, and Banyard is firm that ‘the sex industry has played an absolutely paramount role in media sexism generally. As it ballooned in the 1990s and 2000s, it completely shifted the mainstream and the porn aesthetic suddenly started to appear on billboards, in magazines, in people’s beauty regimes. Now the objectification of women is utterly rampant as a visual backdrop to everyday life, and we know from extensive evidence that this has real, harmful effects. It makes girls see themselves as objects, which leads to lessening self esteem, body image issues and other problems, and it encourages boys and men to see women as sexual objects and treat them that way.’

She describes UniLad as ‘an example of casual sexism that’s still flourishing. These massive rates of rape and violence against women don’t come from nowhere. It doesn’t stem from individual pathologies alone or a random crazed faceless man jumping out from bushes. Something is creating a conducive context for this violence. Rapists are made not born, and it’s exactly this sort of rape tolerant attitude that helps create this environment.’
I ask about the Sun’s recent anti-rape campaign, which has attracted a feminist backlash by being focused on the paper’s ‘women’s pages’, alongside make-up tips and celebrity gossip. ‘We need to face up to the reality of what’s going on here.  Victim blaming is endemic and it’s got to stop. It’s not women who need to change their behaviour. In order to stop rape we need to fundamentally change what it is to be a man in this society, and we can’t do that by putting an ad on women’s pages.’ The need to admit the reality of violence against women is a powerful mantra running throughout Banyard’s discussion, and it certainly makes for uncomfortable hearing in a world in which casual sexism is indeed rife.

During our discussion of rape I wonder if Banyard is beginning to fall into the trap of man-bashing, but she assures me this is a feminist stereotype to be avoided at all costs. ‘Feminism helps men, it sees the best in men. The real misandrists are the biological determinists who say that aggression and violence are natural in men. They’re not. And for me it’s crucial for progress that men get actively engaged in feminism. We’re talking about reshaping what it means to be a man and that can’t be done if men aren’t part of the conversation. More men than ever are signing up to the ethical imperative, saying equality is right and fair, but they don’t think it’s got much to do with them. We need to do away with the bystander problem among men.’

We turn to the problem of why, if women aren’t inherently inferior to men, are they still so underrepresented in public life? ‘It’s the nature of how Parliament is organised. The Houses of Parliament is a workplace, and yet women still do the bulk of caring in the UK, and that’s very difficult to combine with a life in Parliament because of the extremely long working hours and various demands. But the practicalities of that can be changed.

‘Women shouldn’t have to choose between a career and having children. At the moment they’re paying a significant penalty for being the ones who do the bulk of the caring and for having children – 30,000 women are sacked each year for being pregnant. Now this is a choice we have to make as a society: do we want to create a workplace that enables people to combine those caring roles, where we value women’s unpaid caring role and the role of bringing up the next generation of citizens, or not?

‘In countries that have raised paternity leave or shared parental leave, you do see dads playing a much greater role in the upbringing of children. We need much greater workplace flexibility. Many businesses do offer flexible working but it’s seen as the mummy track, what you do if you’re a woman and not really serious. It’s still the stigmatised option, which is why you don’t see many men taking it or asking for it on any significant scale. And the culture and expectation perpetuated by firms that if you do take flexible working hours you’re not as committed to your job needs to change.’

It’s a seemingly bleak picture. But Banyard remains optimistic and her final message is inspiring. ‘We are the lucky benefactors of the struggles of feminists throughout the centuries. But the job isn’t finished yet and it’s up to us to take action. Change doesn’t happen by itself. It requires people to stand up and be counted, and it’s now our opportunity to do that.’

Visit www.ukfeminista.org.uk to find out more.