Opinion: Teddy Hall’s Blurred Lines ban is pure laziness

Teddy Hall has this week joined umpteen SUs on the banned wagon with their decision to outlaw controversial hit “Blurred Lines” from playing during bops.

Many students are hailing the move as a step in the right direction yet to me this motion is nothing more than an empty gesture, a textbook case of SU slacktivism.

Scumbag Slacktivist?

You see, in practical terms, this motion won’t do anything to impede rape culture.

As the JCR President Margery Infield pointed out during the meeting, it’s a pointless move. Teddy Hall won’t be hosting another bop in college until the middle of Hilary – by which time Blurred Lines will presumably have been forgotten.

Student activism, it didn’t twerk for him!

Even if it weren’t so ill-timed and lazily conceived, the very idea that female students will be in any way safer after this seems monumentally narrow-minded.

In fact I’d argue that the whole trend of banning this song is a short-termist gimmick, a cry for attention which offers no practicable solution to the pertinent issue at hand – the Kony video of 2013, if you will.

It’s also rather suspicious that Chris Pike, the worthy JCR member who brought the motion forward, just happens to be running for OUSU elections this term.

An artist’s representation of possible future bans

What better way to get your name out there bring gender inequality to the fore than by taking a stance of fashionable outrage and resurrecting the yawnsome Blurred Lines saga? You’ll be next, Lil Wayne!

In a free, mature society, censorship should always be a last resort and not a kneejerk response to personal distaste.

This motion will achieve nothing apart from triggering an orgy of self-congratulation among the earnest folk at OUSU.

Oh yes – and it could just mean a few extra votes for Chris Pike, too.

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