One thing about getting older is that it becomes easier to drown out unwanted noise. To trim the fat from your life. The slow buses, sweet drinks, pinchy shoes and, most importantly, the places and people that make you feel uncomfortable. As an adult, it's rare that I have to go to a Rappers and Slappers night. It's rare that I have to walk down Brighton's North Street in a vest at 2am and rarer still that I have to do it in the company of people carrying pint glasses of vomit, wearing wigs made of turf, singing the Moonpig jingle.

But I can remember the feeling well, and I can remember how, even though everything in me wanted to walk very fast through the crowd down to the quiet of the seafront, I would ride on this wave of beer and banter for another year, because this was what being a student was – this poke-in-the-ribs of a life, a long car ride between people who hate you. But then, in time, I found my people and escaped to the seafront, and discovered, under the banter, the beach. I fear, though, that in the years since I was a student, it's become harder to escape.

That laddy life is so suffocating, in fact, that the NUS was moved to investigate it, and in its recent report on "lad culture" there are stories that are as sinister as they are depressing. It's less the stories of overt harassment and abuse that are upsetting and that appear to be the overwhelming problem in universities, but more the fast undertow of disdain – of women, of difference, and of education itself. The stories, particularly, of female students being silenced in class, told to "calm down".

The NUS defines lad culture as a subset of student life that promotes one particular masculinity – one expressed through hard drinking and hard bantering; one that normalises sexual harassment; one that exaggerates this masculinity in the face of a threat to it. Even though those who participate are in a minority, because they run the night-times they're a minority that dominates student life. And it's a serious problem. When this overwhelms all other student cultures (and this is how "cultures" work: they overlap and change and influence each other – people dip in and out of them, but they alter situations, scent it, like Lynx sprayed in through the vents) it puts women in danger. It pushes them backwards.

Another NUS report found that one in seven students has been the victim of a serious assault, but only 10% told the police. This is a culture problem – an environment where rape is the punchline to a hundred shit jokes, where (as quoted in last month's report) boys making rape jokes on buses laugh: "Don't worry, ladies, none of us have been convicted yet!"

Though it's a social thing, a beery, leery night-time thing, lad culture feeds into the classrooms, where policy changes and the endorsement of individualism mean laddish masculinities have been bolstered – competition, for instance. Noisiness. I see why lad culture and its associated terms are hard to take seriously, because it's a gentle word whose meaning has mutated. In its lightness, though, it speaks of an attitude of intimidation and modern sexism.

The solution, then, isn't to target the boys behind sites like Unilad (who, after I wrote about them last year, fired over reams of emails calling me frigid and ugly. Hi guys!) or to enforce, as has been discussed, a "zero tolerance" policy on Pimps and Hoes nights and similar. It's to try to wobble the dominating culture by pointing out that it's one of many. That it is challengeable. Speak-up-against-able. So that students realise, when they feel themselves riding that banterous wave down North Street, that it's possible to swim against it, and if not, to roll off down a slipstream, down to the water where it's quiet.



Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk. Follow Eva on Twitter @EvaWiseman