In defense of the shit lad

I left St Andrews last year. (I’m a medic so only did three years). However, in many ways I still feel like a member of the 2013 graduating class. I feel, as Ben Chaplin in The Thin Red Line, that “I belong to you. If I go first, I’ll wait for you there, on the other side of the dark waters”.

This is just a preambling vindication for my posting one last missive to The Stand. I want to talk about Uni Lads.

A recent article in Vice magazine put it best. Uni Lads are “the bastard sons of 90s lad culture, raised with the conflicting mantras of “chug, chug, chug” and “education, education, education”.

We all know the scene. Midnight, Friday, on the main street of any University town in the UK and the clubs and bars resound with the catcalls and guffaws of a generation of Uni Lads out on the town. Beer flows down like water and chunder spews forth a mighty stream. Banter abounds, girls are sleazed upon and throughout the roaring drunken night the great chant rings out: “Lads! Lads! Lads!”

‘Lad culture’ has become a ubiquitous feature of British Universities and youth culture more generally. The archetype of the ‘Uni lad‘: the middle-class, Hollister-clad, rugby-playing, lager- swilling, Zoo-reading, Fifa-thumbing, Banter-loving young man can be seen swaggering the campuses of higher learning institutions across the country. The Lad mentality and lifestyle is, to my mind, not entirely without merit. Much of the camaraderie, one-upmanship and communal rough-and-tumble which are such important characteristics of any ‘Top Lad‘ are really not so far removed from Nietzsche’s “manly virtues”. Indeed, are not the values of strength, mutual respect and togetherness among the most crucial components of any functioning society?

However, there is also a great deal of vice littered among the virtues. From ‘fat girl rodeo‘ and ‘slut shaming‘ to the obscenities meted out to two female speakers at the Glasgow Union debating competition earlier this year it is clear that the Lad mentality contains a strong element of virulent misogyny and intolerance.

Such an attitude has a tendency to promote a herd-mentality and a world-view constructed in terms of “us versus them”. To me the greatest travesty of Lad culture is that I fear many of its adherents run the risk of living out their days as (to bastardise Bertrand Russell) merely the garrison of a beleaguered Wolf-pack: knowing only that a dark world surrounds them and that ultimately their unexamined life of “wenches” and lager must soon wither to it’s sclerotic end. In such a life the only peace can be the satiety of the happy pig. On this reading the Lad subculture can be seen to be as bland as it is boorish; as ignorant as it is intolerant; as dull as it is drunken. Lads, where is the attraction here?

This argument, though richly coloured by issues of gender and group psychology, rests most pertinently in my mind upon the purpose of Universities in individual development. I believe that University should be about making friends, making bad decisions, and having a lot of fun. But I also believe it is the greatest opportunity we may ever have to learn how to think for ourselves- to develop a critical conscience and an independence of thought and action which, with some degree of good fortune, will lead as many of us as possible towards a free and fulfilling life. It therefore seems to me a great shame that so many young men in our generation appear to squander that opportunity in order to fit in with their “Wolf-pack”.

In closing, I believe that the lad-culture which permeates our current zeitgeist is by no means an exclusively malignant thing but that it’s misogynistic and homophobic overtones and the manner in which it promotes herd-mentalities and hostility towards alternative thought and lifestyle renders it an ultimately undesirable way to conduct your one life. I will conclude my pontifications with the maxim of Scroobius Pip: “thou shalt think for yourselves”. Do this, and maybe you too will discover the perks of being a “Shit Lad”.

Headline image: Vice Magazine