It’s a weird sickness about Australian bloke culture that no crime is so grievous as that of ‘dogging the boys’.
Share a sex tape of a woman without her consent, a crime under NSW law punishable by a maximum of three years behind bars and an $11,000 fine? No worries. Publicly call out the behaviour as abhorrent? Death threats.
Earlier today, we reported on a viral Facebook post from Newcastle bloke Hayden Brien, which highlighted an extremely gross video posted to the bloke’s Facebook page The Virtual Pub that invited the group’s some 14,500 members to laugh at the woman’s weight. Evidently, it was posted without her consent.
After Brien reported the video to Facebook and was informed that it didn’t “go against any of our specific community standards”, he shared a censored screenshot of the original post to his own Facebook in the hopes of affecting change.
He’s now receiving death threats.
“One bloke said, ‘I hope you get hit by a car’,” he told PEDESTRIAN.TV. “I haven’t read half of them. Some guy who must be a [Newcastle] local said he’s coming for me at my next gig [Brien is a DJ].
“So yeah, it’s been a little bit full on in some regards. I expected backlash from the boys in my town, but I didn’t really expect it to get this wide.”
He also expressed incredulity that members of the group – remember, the same group that delighted in the image based abuse of a woman – decried losing their “safe space”.
“Some of it’s been quite ironic that some of the dudes are now starting to worry about their own welfare, saying they don’t have a safe space, that women do this and women do that all that and the rest of it.”
“I felt sorry for him in some regards, because he says he’s trying to turn the group around, but at the same time I was receiving death threats from blokes.”
Since his post went viral, Brien says that several admins who approved the post and then commented on it have since been kicked out of the group. Also, so has he, but he kind of expected that.
“I don’t think it’s fair for me as the person who’s bringing all this to light to try and hide the truth from anybody,” he said. “This is what happened, it got put on Facebook, people need to be responsible for what they’ve done. I haven’t hacked anybody’s phone, I haven’t gone behind anybody’s back, I haven’t stolen anybody’s private information, this was quite easily accessible. Any man in the world could be added to that group.
“I come from a town where 14,500 people would be the town. If I walked around this town showing everybody naked pictures of somebody and getting everyone to make comments, it’d be a whole different story. But because it’s on the internet, people think ‘private group’ means ‘private group’. And yeah, they’ve found out the hard way there is something very wrong with what’s happened.”
Photo: Facebook, courtesy of Hayden Brien.
