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If the recent cultural climate has proven anything, it’s that it is #TimesUp when it comes to men objectifying and creeping on women — and one Australian student has really taken this lesson to heart.
Eleanor Henry, a 22-year-old law student at Melbourne University, was recently mortified after her peers accidentally added her to an outrageous group chat in which they sexualized and objectified her. The men apparently added Eleanor to their message thread by mistake and quickly removed her, but didn’t realize that she could still access everything they had said up to that point.
What Eleanor saw was more than enough to make her shudder in horror and take to Facebook to make herself heard.
Photo Credit: Facebook
Her Facebook post reads:
“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 I could read everything prior.”
Henry told the Daily Mail Australia that she wouldn’t “publicly name and shame the men” — and her restraint is even more impressive considering what they wrote:
Photo Credit: Facebook
All that and they also said, “Bring her to Thailand. We need a bike.”
“Aside from this contact, I have never really engaged with them on a social level,” Eleanor told the Daily Mail. In fact, several of the people in the chat were guys she had never even met before. Reading the messages made Eleanor feel physically ill, and her sister suggested that she expose this particular “kind of rape culture” by posting the messages to Facebook. (With all the profile pics and names blurred out, of course.)
Apparently, after Henry posted the messages, one of the guys involved begged her to take them down:
Photo Credit: Facebook
Too bad his case wasn’t terribly convincing. The guy was far more concerned about being caught than he was about the ethical implications involved in joking about gang-banging a female friend.
Luckily for him, he and his friends will remain anonymous.
On her decision not to name the boys involved, Eleanor explained “it’s not particularly relevant in achieving the outcome I wish to pursue on a larger scale, which ultimately is to bring awareness about the issue and have people understand that it should not be merely written off as ‘boys being boys.’”
Just more proof that “locker room talk” often has nothing to do with the locker room.
