We spent decades teaching women to take a joke. Now we’re asking schools to teach boys why it wasn’t funny.
By Miss Conduct | The FAIL Files
There was a time when humiliating women was considered perfectly respectable entertainment.
Not respectable in the traditional sense, obviously. Respectable enough to put on television, broadcast on breakfast radio, print in magazines and sell advertising alongside.
A woman objecting to the joke was usually considered the problem. A man making it was a personality.
Some of those personalities became extremely wealthy.
On 5 November 2026, Russell Brand was convicted of rape and three counts of sexual assault. He was acquitted of two further rape charges and one charge of attempted indecent assault.
The convictions concern serious sexual crimes, not offensive jokes, and the distinction matters. But the verdict has prompted another uncomfortable look at the entertainment culture in which Brand became famous. The laddish comedy, the sexualised interviews, the casual humiliation of women and the extraordinary tolerance afforded to men who could persuade an audience that their behaviour was simply part of the act.
Fran, writing at Whinge Whinge Wine in Russell Brand and the generation of women who were told to take a joke, reflects on growing up in a culture where women were expected to laugh along. Lads’ magazines, celebrity interviews, the treatment of young female pop stars. A period when objecting to something degrading was often considered considerably more embarrassing than saying it in the first place.
Don’t be so sensitive. He’s only joking. Take it as a compliment.
Twenty years later, schools are delivering lessons explaining to boys why those attitudes are unacceptable, while encouraging girls to speak up when they experience them.
Which is progress, certainly. Although reversing several decades of cultural conditioning is proving rather more complicated than updating the PSHE scheme of work.
The curriculum will save us
England’s revised relationships, sex and health education guidance came into effect in September 2026. Schools are expected to teach pupils about consent, respectful relationships, sexual harassment, harmful stereotypes and the influence of online content.
Quite rightly. But there is something faintly ridiculous about the fact that explaining why women should be treated with basic dignity and respect requires a carefully sequenced curriculum, differentiated resources and an assessment opportunity.
At Fallowmere Academy for Inclusive Learning, respect features prominently in our curriculum, assemblies, behaviour policy and several laminated displays.
FALLOWMERE ACADEMY
Our commitment to respectful relationships is displayed prominently throughout the school.
Following recent incidents, staff have been reminded to reinforce these expectations consistently.
The displays remain in excellent condition.
Unfortunately, a laminated display has limited influence over a teenager who spent the previous evening watching an online personality explain that women are manipulative, men are oppressed and anyone suggesting otherwise has been brainwashed.
We can offer an alternative perspective. The algorithm can offer another forty-seven videos.
Misogyny didn’t begin with Andrew Tate. He found an audience for ideas that were already familiar. Before social media influencers started selling boys a particular version of masculinity, mainstream entertainment had spent years presenting women as conquests, obstacles and punchlines.
The technology has changed. The audience can now join in rather than simply watch. And boys who might once have repeated something overheard on television can now find entire communities ready to reinforce it.
Schools are expected to challenge those messages, which is absolutely as it should be. It’s just worth remembering that we aren’t the only people teaching children what is acceptable.
The remarkable versatility of banter
Anyone who has dealt with sexual harassment in a secondary school will recognise the conversation.
A boy makes an openly sexual comment about a girl. She objects, or another pupil reports it. The teacher challenges him.
It was banter.
Apparently, nobody understood the joke. Not the girl, who was its subject, or the teacher who heard it. The boy is adamant that he meant nothing by it, although he was quite happy for everyone to hear it until an adult became involved.
Sometimes he denies saying it altogether. Sometimes the girl has misunderstood. Sometimes the teacher is picking on him. Occasionally, several explanations are offered in the same conversation, despite being mutually incompatible.
At Fallowmere, some pupils demonstrate a remarkable understanding of precisely when the word banter might be useful.
There is a tendency to assume that this behaviour comes from boys who don’t understand social boundaries. Sometimes that is part of the picture. There are pupils who genuinely need additional teaching about relationships, communication and how their behaviour affects other people.
But there are also boys who understand perfectly well that what they’re saying is unacceptable. They just don’t think they should have to stop.
The same attitudes can extend to female staff. A woman challenging inappropriate language becomes unreasonable, oversensitive or accused of having something against boys. A straightforward instruction turns into an argument about why she is making such a fuss.
The teacher is expected to remain calm, professional and measured while being spoken to in a way that would cause considerable outrage if the roles were reversed.
And, of course, she mustn’t take it personally.
We’ve heard that one before.
Please report it. Again.
For years, girls were encouraged to ignore inappropriate behaviour.
Don’t give him the satisfaction. Just walk away. He’s only doing it because he likes you.
Thankfully, schools now deliver a very different message. Sexual harassment is unacceptable, pupils should feel safe and girls should report behaviour that makes them uncomfortable.
The difficulty comes when they do.
In one Year 10 group at Fallowmere, a handful of boys have developed a habit of making sexual comments about girls in their lessons. Staff are aware. Incidents have been challenged, sanctions issued and parents contacted.
A girl reports another comment. The school investigates, speaks to those involved and applies a consequence.
Then she goes back to the same lesson, with the same pupils, including the boy who knows she reported him.
Perhaps the comments stop for a few days. Perhaps one of his friends starts instead. Perhaps the next remark is carefully worded so that it can be explained away as something else entirely.
The girl reports again, and another incident is dealt with.
This isn’t because the school has ignored her. Quite the opposite. Staff have followed procedures, challenged the behaviour and spent considerable time trying to prevent it happening again.
But from her perspective, she’s done exactly what the adults asked and is still having to put up with it.
Worse, she may now be blamed by the boy and his friends for getting him into trouble.
What does that teach her about reporting?
We tell girls their voices matter. We explain that telling someone is the right thing to do. But if speaking up is followed by another week of unpleasantness, it’s hardly surprising that some eventually decide it isn’t worth it.
And that is an uncomfortable position for a school. We cannot promise pupils that reporting will instantly resolve a situation. We can promise to act, to protect them and to keep responding. But if the behaviour continues, the gap between what we’re promising and what they’re experiencing becomes increasingly difficult to explain.
We have changed what we tell girls to do. We haven’t always changed what happens to them when they do it.
Zero tolerance. Considerable paperwork.
At Fallowmere, we take a zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment.
This means incidents are investigated, recorded and addressed. Staff challenge inappropriate language, parents are contacted, sanctions are issued and serious incidents can result in suspension. Restorative work is undertaken where appropriate and safe.
None of which necessarily stops the next incident.
There is a peculiar frustration in dealing with a group of pupils who seem impervious to every reasonable response. You explain why something is unacceptable. You make the consequences clear. You contact home, arrange meetings, involve pastoral staff and deliver interventions.
You may even spend a considerable amount of time speaking to a parent who insists their son would never say such a thing, despite three members of staff having heard him say it.
Sometimes it works. A pupil reflects, begins to recognise the harm caused and changes his behaviour.
Sometimes he simply becomes more careful about who is listening.
One boy stops. Another starts. A sanction appears to have worked on Monday, only for something remarkably similar to happen in a different lesson on Thursday. The behaviour moves between pupils, classrooms, corridors and occasionally onto social media.
Whack-a-mole, except the moles have phones, an audience and a surprisingly extensive vocabulary for explaining why none of it is their fault.
Staff can spend hours managing the fallout from incidents that take seconds to occur. Statements are collected, parents contacted, safeguarding records updated, follow-up conversations arranged and support offered. Someone checks whether the girl is comfortable attending the next lesson. Someone else has to establish whether the boy can be trusted to leave her alone.
Meanwhile, there are another five periods in the day and a school full of children who also need attention.
The problem isn’t necessarily that schools don’t take misogyny seriously. Many take it extremely seriously, and invest considerable time and resources in challenging it.
It’s that dealing with individual incidents and changing the attitudes behind them are very different jobs.
And while we’re busy doing both, the girls are still having to live with it.
Understanding isn’t excusing
Inclusive schools have an additional responsibility to understand the needs of individual pupils, including those who find social communication, emotional regulation or relationships difficult.
Some young people need explicit teaching about boundaries and consent. Others benefit from clear, concrete explanations of why particular behaviour is inappropriate. We might need to approach conversations differently, adapt our language or provide support that helps a pupil understand the impact of their actions.
That’s good inclusive practice.
But neurodivergence doesn’t cause misogyny, and additional needs shouldn’t become a convenient explanation for behaviour that a pupil knows is wrong.
There is a difference between genuinely misunderstanding a social interaction and repeatedly making degrading comments, denying responsibility and continuing after being challenged. Nor should we assume that the two can always be neatly separated.
Understanding the reasons for behaviour matters because it helps us decide what support and intervention might actually work. It doesn’t remove the need for accountability.
And it certainly doesn’t mean that a girl should have to tolerate sexual harassment because the boy responsible has additional needs.
At Fallowmere, we pride ourselves on understanding the needs behind behaviour. We need to be just as interested in the needs of the person on the receiving end.
That includes neurodivergent girls, who may themselves need support to recognise, communicate or report what is happening to them.
Inclusion cannot mean that one pupil’s right to support quietly overrides another pupil’s right to feel safe.
The boys get the meetings. The girls get the consequences.
One of the more troubling aspects of managing persistent misogynistic behaviour is how much attention ends up being devoted to the boys responsible.
Their attitudes are explored, their influences discussed, their emotional needs considered and their behaviour analysed. Meetings are arranged, interventions planned and progress reviewed.
All necessary work, particularly when a pupil is showing an entrenched pattern of harmful behaviour.
But the girls can become rather peripheral to the whole process.
Their experiences are recorded as incidents. Their accounts are used as evidence. They’re offered support and encouraged to keep reporting.
Then they’re expected to get on with school.
They still have lessons to attend, examinations to prepare for and friendships to navigate. Some become skilled at avoiding particular pupils, recognising when an interaction is about to become unpleasant or finding ways to remove themselves before something happens.
We shouldn’t be pleased that girls have learned to manage these situations so effectively. They shouldn’t need to.
And yet it’s easy for a school’s attention to be drawn towards the child generating the incidents. Understandably so: that’s where the immediate work is, and where staff hope they can prevent the next one.
But I wonder how often we stop and consider just how much energy the girls are using to manage behaviour they didn’t cause.
A boy who is repeatedly sanctioned may have a difficult few weeks at school.
The girl being targeted may find that an entire year of her education is shaped by trying to avoid him.
Those experiences aren’t equivalent, and we shouldn’t pretend they are.
There is also a question about the point at which we stop expecting further conversations to make the difference. Restorative approaches can be valuable, but they rely on a genuine willingness to take responsibility. They cannot simply become another opportunity for a boy to deny what happened while the girl is expected to participate constructively.
Sometimes the most inclusive, restorative thing a school can do is ensure that the person experiencing harm doesn’t have to keep experiencing it.
FALLOWMERE ACADEMY
The pastoral team has reviewed the reporting procedure, the behaviour policy and the RSHE curriculum. All remain fit for purpose. The girls have asked whether someone could review what happens after they report.
Who taught the adults?
The discussion about the manosphere often gives the impression that misogyny arrived unexpectedly through a teenager’s smartphone, as though everything was fine until someone discovered a podcast.
But many of the adults now trying to teach children about respectful relationships grew up watching women being publicly humiliated for entertainment.
The jokes weren’t always subtle, and neither was the message. Men could behave outrageously and be celebrated for it. Women who objected were accused of being uptight, humourless or attention-seeking.
That wasn’t everyone’s experience, and plenty of people challenged those attitudes at the time. But it was sufficiently mainstream that whole industries made money from it.
It’s worth remembering this when we express surprise at boys repeating similar ideas today.
Not because watching a particular television programme inevitably produces a misogynist, or because the internet is simply an extension of lads’ magazines. The influences are more complicated than that.
But attitudes don’t develop in a vacuum.
Children are watching how adults speak about women, how public figures behave, what gets laughed at and what gets excused. They’re watching how people respond when someone challenges unacceptable behaviour.
They’re also watching what happens to the person who complains.
Schools can teach consent and respectful relationships. We can challenge stereotypes and sanction harassment. We can provide opportunities for boys to question the ideas they’re encountering online, and for girls to recognise that they don’t have to accept those behaviours.
What we cannot do is control every message children receive outside school.
And we cannot reasonably expect fifty minutes of PSHE to undo attitudes being reinforced elsewhere throughout the week.
That doesn’t excuse schools from their responsibilities. It means the rest of society has some too.
The girls are still waiting
None of this means that every boy is a problem or that boys are incapable of changing. Many reject misogynistic attitudes, challenge their friends and are themselves uncomfortable with the pressure to behave in particular ways.
And some of the boys who behave badly do change. Consistent expectations, appropriate consequences and adults who refuse to give up on them can make a real difference.
That work matters.
But so does recognising when it isn’t working.
There comes a point when another restorative conversation isn’t enough. When a girl has reported repeatedly, when sanctions have been applied and when the behaviour keeps resurfacing, the question cannot remain solely about what more we can do to help the boy understand.
We also have to ask what we are going to do to make sure the girl can attend school without being harassed.
That may require changes to supervision, grouping, timetables or the way persistent patterns of behaviour are managed. It certainly requires us to look beyond whether each individual incident has been dealt with correctly.
Schools should continue teaching respectful relationships, challenging misogyny and holding pupils accountable. But parents, broadcasters, online platforms and the wider culture need to recognise their part in this too.
We cannot keep rewarding contempt for women in one part of society and expecting schools to eliminate it in another.
At Fallowmere, the next lesson on healthy relationships is scheduled for Tuesday. The resources are ready, the learning objectives are clear and the safeguarding procedures have been reviewed.
The girls have been reminded that they should always report inappropriate behaviour.
They know. They’ve been reporting it for months.
We have stopped telling girls to take a joke.
We haven’t yet made it safe for them to refuse to laugh.
Further reading
Russell Brand and the generation of women who were told to take a joke — Whinge Whinge Wine
Crown Prosecution Service: Russell Brand verdict, 5 November 2026
Department for Education: Relationships, sex and health education guidance
Leave a Reply