In a continuation of the rancid rape culture spewing from Australian university and high school campuses, a national grouping of young men identified with the Facebook page 鈥淵eah the Boys鈥, which boasts half a million likes, is spitting chunks onto social media.
The page is receiving attention now because members of the group scheduled a 鈥渕ale-only鈥 meet-up at Sydney's Coogee Beach. While the anonymous 鈥榊eah the Boys鈥 page admins sought to distance themselves from the event, within hours thousands of the page鈥檚 followers had jumped behind it.
The event quickly became a misogynistic cesspool of sexist threats and derision, with hundreds of comments condoning sexual assault, rape and violence against women, or 鈥渕eat tents鈥 and "two-holes" as they were referred to.
Men who attempted to intervene on the page were told they were 鈥渄ogging the boys鈥 and had homophobic abuse hurled at them, such as: 鈥淵ou need a left right goodnight for dogging the boys you gay cunt鈥.
These comments reveal the deepening of a sexist macho culture on social media that transcends harmless online banter and effects real girls and women.
91自拍论坛 Weekly explored this in the wake of the recent Brighton Grammar school 鈥測oung slut puspus鈥 scandal in which school boys who sexually objectified underage girls as young as 11 were defended by their parents and again in the horrific development of a national ring involving boys from more than 70 Australian schools ordering and trading child pornography.
The United Nations says Australia has one of the highest rates of reported sexual assault in the world. The Centres against Sexual Assault found that the greatest proportion of survivors of sexual violence was girls between the ages of 10 and 14, followed by young women between 15 and 24 years.
Jokes about sexual violence are not just cheeky online banter. For women and girls, these 鈥渏okes鈥 touch on very real, painful and familiar aspects of our day-to-day online and real life lives. These 鈥渏okes鈥 remind us that we do not live in a post-sexist society. They tell us that the reason women travel at night with thumping chests and keys shoved between their knuckles is an urgent, 21st century crisis.
Excuses must stop being made for violent men and the women鈥檚 movement needs to break out of its niche to stop sexual violence in its tracks.
And that is worth dogging the boys for.
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