Lovely person and brilliant educator

Comments

7 responses to “Lovely person and brilliant educator”

1. 

   Artymorty

   Apr 29, 2026 6:04 PM

   He didn’t buy those giant fake tits at the gender expression store. He bought them at the sex shop, where sex toys are sold. It’s a sex accessory. Boo hoo, he’s “just trying to live his life” — like he’d fucking die if he didn’t wear his hardcore kinky sex gear to work. Fuck all the way off, Joe Turner.
2. 

   Ophelia Benson

   Apr 29, 2026 7:12 PM

   Oh but how can that be, when he’s a lovely person and a brilliant educator???
3. 

   Your Name’s not Bruce?

   Apr 29, 2026 9:26 PM

   …you’ve written an impressively long tweet likening a sustained career of sexual harassment to someone having the nerve to look a bit unusual while, as far as you know, not harassing anyone at all.

   Yes, but I would say his simple presence in the classroom, with that “look”, is harassment, and highly sexualized harassment at that. He doesn’t have to say anything or do anything else. It’s no different than blackface, or no different than if he wore a t-shirt with a racist or sexist slogan. The fake tits are enough. They’re an affront, a provocation, and a calculated insult, one that clearly excites and arouses him. Does the university really want that behaviour in the classroom? In a historic women’s college? That’s part of the thrill for him. He gets to parade around like this in front of women* who are forced to be there to get the course credit. This is not something he “needs” to do, this is something they’re letting him get away with. He’s prioritizing – sorry – “centering” his own personal needs and desires at the expense of his teaching duties, and the needs of his students, including their safety and well-being. This man is a danger to women. Nobody needs to see his “whole self.” They just need him to teach biochemistry. He’s forcing his female students to participate as an audience for the acting out of his sexual fantasies. Was that noted in the course syllabus? Was there a trigger warning for misogyny and fetishism? Does this help the learning environment? Tell me again just who is it that’s being “mean-spirited” in all of this?

   I don’t think that’s just random. I think it’s a strong clue that a hell of a lot of men just do not care about visible contempt for women.

   Note that the scenario of a woman tutor/lecturer wearing a huge prosthetic penis would not be the “reverse” of this situation, because the potential threat to students is much greater from a male exhibiting this kind of public, sexualized behaviour. There is a fundamental asymmetry that leaves any kind of “turnabout” or “reversal” thought experiment fall short in regards to safeguarding concerns, as it does with TiMs and TiFs accessing the spaces of the sex they are not. The threat from men is always greater; the threat to women is always greater. Add on the teacher/student power imbalance to this male female one, and you’ve got a fine recipe for coercion and exploitation. And he is coercing and exploiting them, without saying a word, without laying a finger on them. He has dehumanized his students by turning them into sexualized props in his fantasy world, and he’s getting paid by the university to do it.

   (I wonder if Rattley’s rat’s nest beard is meant to help hide the edge of his fake tits appliance?)

   *I wonder if he wears this fetish gear 24/7, or if he saves it for performances before his captive, female audience? That would be interesting to know, and speak to his supposed “need.”
4. 

   Bjarte Foshaug

   Apr 29, 2026 11:34 PM

   I’m not going to say that these people are actively working to assist the far Right by going out of their way to confirm every accusation against “progressive” types.

   I will say that if that were the agenda, they couldn’t be making a better job.
5. 

   iknklast

   Apr 30, 2026 5:27 AM

   Bjarte, I was thinking if I were a Republican running for something, all I would need to do is put up a picture of that guy and say something like “this is what Democrats think is a woman”, or “this is how Democrats want the teachers in your kids’ schools to look” (though I might move around a few apostrophes to make sure they understood I was one of them).
6. 

   Your Name’s not Bruce?

   Apr 30, 2026 7:27 AM

   The only hoops Rattley’s students should be jumping through are academic ones. By forcing them to contend with his pronouns and his appearance, he’s placing additional obstacles for them to negotiate on top of the required class work. They are also required to accommodate his personal beliefs. It’s like biochemistry class suddenly having a layer of Catholicism or Shia Islam slathered on top. It’s not a matter of “respect,” for his “identity,” he’s forcing them to submit to his fetish, and accept it as part of the classroom environment, and by thus accepting, to take part in it.
7. 

   Athel Cornish-Bowden

   May 1, 2026 7:59 AM

   I’ve been trying, with singular lack of success, to find out what contributions to chemistry Matt Rattley has made. He was second in a list of seven authors in 2012 of a reasonably well cited paper about cinchona alkaloids. That’s about it. Maybe there are other important papers that I’m missing, but that doesn’t seem enough for a permanent position at Oxford, so I’m wondering whether in fact he has a permanent position. In my day St Hilda’s was a women’s college, and the chemistry tutor was a woman, as you’d expect: Muriel Tomlinson, who had done significant work of steroids. Very old-fashioned ideas about organic chemistry, but that described most of the older lecturers at that time.