Jason Wong is a student at LSE and also the perpetrator behind this advert, that would perhaps even feel out of place in an edition of Nuts magazine. Recently, he wrote an article in their student newspaper, arguing against gender neutral toilets. You can read it here.
He doesn’t seem an experienced writer though – for example, he says that the money spent on gender neutral toilets would be better spent on free printing for students. Does he not realise that the standard unit of measurement for wasted money is nurse’s salaries?
He sums up his message briefly in a series of tweets.
This is an incredibly sexist, and anti-progressive attitude.
The overwhelming majority of my gender are not sex offenders. Believe it or not, we are capable of sharing an environment, like we do in the majority of life, without sexually assaulting a woman.
There are of course a minority that do commit sexual assaults, but this is by no means confined to one gender perpetrating such crimes, and even if it was, that would not be any excuse to lambast 48% of the population.
I know it’s a cliche to compare such attitudes to racism, but I think this is a good example to compare. Statistically, a higher percentage of black people go to prison than white people (see this report). This is nothing to do with the colour of their skin, it’s to do with the social problems of black people tending to live in higher poverty areas, in which white people from the same area are just as likely to go to prison.
But, if you were to take Jason Wong’s argument to treat entire social groups without regard for individual equality, you could easily make an argument for having segregated toilets for white and black people. After all, why should a white person have to live in fear every time we uses a bathroom, because we’re openly inviting criminals in?
Of course, such an attitude would not only be ridiculous, but absolutely abhorrent. Yet such arguments along gender lines, vilifying men, are often openly accepted by society.
