Outrage over the suggestion – posted on a student website – that rape was acceptable as long as the "lad" involved said "surprise" closed the site last week. The "lad" phenomenon, which has pervaded university life for years, is newly inescapable on campuses everywhere thanks to such sites as Unilad.
Founded in 2010, Unilad claims to have more than 8,000 visits a day and more than 75,000 Facebook fans. Other sites, Truelad and Toplad, receive hundreds of "lad" stories each week from their users, such as "Saw a LAD on the train texting a girl on his phone – her contact name was "Met on Friday – big tits" titswithnonameLAD".
To be against the "lad" lifestyle is to be against humour, a good time and possibly even the entire student ethos itself. And the reason for this, the lad-catch-22? It's all one big joke. Not only in the sense that it shouldn't be taken seriously, but also because, for Durham lads anyway, the whole thing is swathed in so much irony that it's categorically impossible to make out if this "banter" is satirical or genuine. It's no coincidence that the extreme voice of lad found its home in the journalism of Unilad. Lad culture started in lads mags like Nuts (whose tag line is, suitably, "When You Really Need Something Funny").
At Durham we have our own Daily Mail-Nuts hybrid, Durham One, which is the only major rival to Durham's official student newspaper. Sexual politics features heavily, as does general "banter" such as comparing the Arab spring to a college bar crawl. The point of this journalism isn't to express any closely held beliefs about women or anything else – instead it's an exercise in courting controversy, being inventive with your taboos, and ultimately being able to call anyone who finds it offensive "stupid" for not appreciating the complex irony involved.
It's frustrating that "lad" culture has managed to make it difficult to condemn misogynist views, especially when it is laying claim to huge swathes of the university experience. It's both harmless and fatal, real and fictional, and that's why it's so difficult know whether to laugh or cry.
The writer is a student at Durham University.
