As a 20 year old female, I've not been travelling independently for long. I've made two trips to Berlin, the first of which we were led around by our uni tutors, and, though left to our own devices at night, we followed the second-years around in the hopes that they were more knowledgeable than us as timid first-years. The second trip to Berlin was far more self-led, but we were also accompanied by my elder sister, who was living in Berlin for the summer and who, alongside her fiancé, pulled us out of more than one sticky situation (imagine two drunk teenagers staggering around Berlin at night trying to find their way back to the hostel, and you have a good image of what one of those situations was). I've made one to Prague, which was again directed by the university apart from when the sun went down, when we consulted our guidebooks and the internet in the hopes of reading about a decent bar that we - three girls who wanted to dance, one who didn't want a crazy club night, one gay man who wanted a 'big gay night out', and a couple of guys who were...

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a local hair salon getting my yearly haircut. Being an awkward, antisocial kind of person, when the choice between reading trashy women’s magazines or uncomfortably making small-talk with my stylist arose, I automatically went for the magazines. But while flipping through the glossy pages of Vogue, I spotted something that really perturbed me – and I’m not talking about the fact that Vogue, and most other fashion magazines like it, are actually just 200 pages of stapled-together advertisements pretending to be informative journals. I’m talking about the fact that fashion magazines, adverts, billboards, and editorials are all full of one repetitive image: the decimation of women’s bodies. Whether it is violence in general, rape-like situations, eerily decapitated body limbs, or, most prevalently, the portrayal of a woman as a corpse, fashion photography has become another medium that seeks to oppress women, through the idea that violence against women is more than acceptable; it is a fashion statement. This is not a new concept in the world of fashion. As early as the 1970′s, photographer Guy Bourdin was using the concept of dead women to sell shoes for Charles Jourdan. Photographs displaying...

Lad culture has been in the news a lot recently. Numerous accounts of public displays of sexism, misogyny, and examples of rape culture - attributed primarily to male university students and 'lads' - have been very publicly and outwardly criticised within the last couple of years. Just a few weeks ago, a Cambridge University drinking society was in the news, under investigation from police over a rape chant that the members were singing as they paraded around Oxford . Various onlookers described the men as being drunk and intimidating, and recounted that they were chanting words such as "rape", "she's too young", and "15 years". Meanwhile, the president of the Oxford Union, 21-year-old student Ben Sullivan, was in the news after being arrested on suspicion of both the rape and attempted rape of two undergraduates. After being reinstated just a week after his arrest, various keynote speakers due to talk to the Oxford Union pulled out in protest – all but A C Grayling, renowned philosopher and founder of the independent undergraduate institution New College of the Humanities, who defended the president, saying he was “ innocent until proven guilty ” – and an open letter calling for his...