With the exposure of a putrid, misogynistic, and predatory trend of messages trivialising and encouraging rape coming out at my University I have been forced to reassess my hopeful opinions about the world.
University has been one of the most fulfilling, enriching, and joyful experiences of my life and I have made unforgettable memories and met people whom I love dearly. However it has also been a constant process of disillusionment in my belief that the world is a good place. The acceleration from a sheltered school and home environment came as an unexpected shock to my emotional stability. Going to a grammar school meant I saw people leading mostly privileged lifestyles. Of course, I saw events of bullying and cruelty, as everyone will inevitably witness throughout their lives, but I was juvenilely preoccupied with pubescence and friends. Throughout my school career I saw friendship groups unanimously exile vulnerable friends, people condemn those who acted in a way that cried for help for their difficult childhood, and majorities turn on single individuals for eccentricities. Even in primary school I saw children refuse to sit next to a young boy whose parents didn’t allow him the basic right of hygiene. I defiantly sat next to him, sharing my food with him and talking with him despite judgemental and sneering glances from other kids. But these events were few and far between for the most part.
It was only with the propelling into a new world devoid of supervision, where children stumbled into adulthood, that I felt somewhat dismayed by the state of the human condition. The stories I told of the bullying I had witnessed at school were met with laughter at their mundanity and outshone by more shocking stories of boys physically molested for fun, of girls fed high-calorie food to prevent them losing the weight they wanted to.
Then the next wave of disappointment hit when a torrent of sexist comments entered my daily conversations. Lad culture was omnipresent, inescapable, ubiquitous. Nothing was off limits: abortion, pregnancy, voting, women’s appearances, sex; anything could be made a joke of. The rampant slut-shaming and the superficiality with which women’s worth was assessed made me question the way people talked about me when they went back to their friends. Why were my female friends judged outrageously differently for exhibiting the same behaviour as my male friends? Why was one tormented and the other lauded? Why was this suddenly my normality? I had to get used to it, and then had to get used to resenting the fact I was used to it.
But the impetus for my writing is an event so disturbing that it has become national news. 11 boys at my University were revealed to have created a group-chat named ‘fuck women, disrespect them all’, so outrageous in its sexism that it is hard to believe to be true. With messages like ‘sometimes it’s fun to go wild and rape 100 girls’, ‘I cannot wait to have surprise sex with some freshers’, ‘I need to be stacked so I can hold the freshers down’ and ‘rape the whole flat, teach them a lesson’, the articles on it are sickening to read. One boy insisted that a girl deserved to be ‘violently fingered’ by her father, proceeding to call her an ‘absolute cum bucket’. They joked about girls who have claimed to have been sexually assaulted, used the n-word, anti-Semitic slurs, and claimed that ‘racism is class’.
The only remedy for my horror at these messages, some of which were from people I have seen around my University, was that my peers expressed equal outrage. In fact, almost everyone was disgusted. And then this feeling of unanimousness dissipated. I heard passing jokes about this group-chat, I heard people say they had made similar comments or even that they found the messages humorous or inoffensive. My feelings of anger and profound sadness then became proliferated. How could my disgust not be shared? These comments were far more common than I would like to believe.
So whilst I remain relentlessly optimistic about life, I still find myself disappointed by moral depravity I find around me. I privately admit to myself that I am ashamed that people cannot be as good as I want them to be. I wondered if I was just too emotionally over-involved. But then I thought: it is not me who is at fault for being appalled by the intolerance that pervades our society, but the intolerance itself.
Why must I lower my expectations of humanity?
​Why can’t humanity just get better?