Everyone on the planet has, at one stage or another, met someone completely lacking in tact, manners, brains, or all of the above. Chances are, you couldn’t help but think to yourself, “Honestly, how did you get this far as an adult? How have you not died from idiocy yet?”
22-year-old Aussie university student Eleanor Henry has recently had one of these moments, when she was added to a bizarre group chat on Facebook Messenger.
This group chat was made up of some of her male peers from Melbourne University, and she was horrified to find that the chat was exclusively to host objectifying, sexualising, and misogynistic comments. The entire chat, which she could read back through, was terrifyingly all about her.
The men used to group chat to converse privately about her, seemingly because one of the group was sexually interested in her.
The advice given to the man by his friends includes approaching her with the pickup line, “show me where you piss from”, and also includes suggestions of bringing her on their holiday to Thailand because the group“need a bike”.
One man also shares Eleanor‘s profile photo, stating underneath he’d “throw her on that bed”.
Eleanor couldn’t reply to the conversation (below screenshots show she was either deleted from, or left the group) and so instead, she posted them to Facebook. Her caption read:
“Let’s all wave hello to my fellow peers at Melbourne University. This is why I’ll die a feminist. It’s 2016.. Let’s get back to that conversation on equality.Oh and for those asking, they accidentally added me to their chat group without realizing [sic] I could read everything prior“
See the whole post here:
PEDESTRIAN.TV News Editor Chloe Sargeant spoke to Eleanor, who spoke about how the incident made her feel and what’s happened since:
“In honesty, to begin with I felt really, really ashamed and I didn’t want to do anything. I tell my sister everything and I called her, explaining the situation.Our parents, the all girls school I went to and our friendship circle have taught me to stand up for myself and ultimately fight for women’s rights. After speaking with sister (who essentially reminded me of all this) I decided to go ahead and post about it.I’ll report the men to university, so I don’t have to sit in a class with them.Two of the boys I knew (just from doing the group assignment) sent relatively sincere apologies, but by that point the issue wasn’t really about my feelings anymore.. It became more of a mission to spread awareness!
Whilst we talk about equality on a daily basis, it is clear it’s not permeating even our most educated demographic and I think that has to change.”
PREACH.
While it’s easy to write off actions like this as ‘boys will be boys’, we must remind ourselves that constantly excusing misogynist behaviour from anyone simply normalises it, and cultivates it to be a standard that is readily accepted.
Saying ‘oh they’re just being boys, real men don’t act like that’ is common, but reductive – these are ‘real men’ that exist and have families and relationships and walk amongst us everyday. Plenty of ‘real men’ *do* act like this and receive no consequences to their actions. Regularly.
This type of gross sexism affects women every single day, and has done for a long time. We’ve all gotta stand up, say ‘no more’, and call this crap out, just like Eleanor has bravely done. 
Source: Facebook.
Photo: Eleanor Henry / Facebook.
