Monk presents ‘Filthy’ at Loveshack, and the world spins back on its axis.
For those not familiar with the concept, Monk’s most recent event encourages girls to wear as little as possible, “think…Victoria’s Secret Angels, Ann Summers and Playboy Bunnies”. The event encourages you to “prepare to bare” in order to win a prize for best dressed (or person most willing to trade common decency for nakedness). Girls and Boys will enter through different entrances and will remain segregated until an undisclosed time in which the two sexes are allowed to mingle – because that’s a great idea isn’t it? – Supplying scantily clad girls and guys with alcohol, depriving them from the opposite sex, and then unleashing these drunken students into a club where the key theme of the night is sex or, in Monk’s own terms, ‘Filthy girls’.
This event takes it inspiration from Exeter’s traditional Safe Sex Ball, a tradition which, may I just mention, has since been banned. The Safe Sex Ball is contradictory in its aims as it invites both male and female students to wear as little as possible (in freezing weather conditions) all in an effort to promote safe sex…a recipe for disaster as proved by CCTV footage of students having full-on sex at said event. Should we really be taking “inspiration” from a university which has become infamous in the headlines recently for incidents of slut-shaming, sexism and sexual harassment?
Durham college officials have even taken it upon themselves to discourage students from attending this event highlighting it as “an event causing concern”; whilst this may be the University being overly cautious, I think it is fair to say that this is an event causing concern and far from encouraging safe sex, like Exeter claimed to do, it possibly enables a situation in which non-consensual sex can quite easily occur and the objectification of women is condoned.
Hopefully any self-respecting male or female can see this event for what it really is: perverse, misogynistic and down-right archaic.