As a woman who graduated high school in the past five years, the Pembroke scandal is no shock | Ruby Stewart

The shock only comes if the boys at your school are not doing something gross at best or disturbing at worst, writes Ruby Stewart.

Kissing a whale, sloppy seconds and crazy girlfriends. Just a few of the phrases paraded by Pembroke College student footballers on a misogynistic and racist internal fine system that has come to light.

It’s all very shocking, isn’t it? Mali has blamed Andrew Tate, the misogynistic influencer, currently facing human trafficking and rape charges in Romania. Social media has been made the bad guy. Experts are quick to share the term toxic masculinity.

But is it anything new?

As a 2020 high school graduate, yep one of the first generations to go through school with a mobile phone and plugged into social media since being a tween, it’s hardly anything new to me.

If you had not been asked for nudes or sent an unsolicited dick pic, you were an outlier. If a boy had not made a joke about your appearance or personality, you were lucky. And if the boys were caught using vile language in the classroom in front of teachers, well, that was just another day at school.

Misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate.

A friend of mine went to another school with a group of boys who acted like kings and regularly spoke down to their female peers and dropped racist or homophobic slurs under the guise of a joke.

They made memes of female students in unflattering lights, and circulated them in their online group chats.

If girls were upset with this, they tried not to show it as they feared further targeting and being labelled a “snowflake”. Sometimes fitting in was more important than standing up for yourself.

Controversial influence Andrew Tate brought in for questioning by the Romanian police over human trafficking and rape charges. Picture: Daniel Mihailescu/AFP

There was one boy in particular who female students had made countless complaints about. Among the girls, it was known that this person was one to be wary of. In response, the school decided he would be the perfect candidate to give a speech on White Ribbon Day as if to teach him a lesson.

As he gave a speech about the importance of ending violence against women, female students watched the source of their complaints be made into the poster boy for respecting women.

My friend remembers the palpable feeling of discomfort as the girls realised that he was being put back on his pedestal by the teachers they had trusted to help them.

And while the latest scandal comes straight out of a $31,000-a-year private school, one which is creating the future’s most powerful of our state, it really doesn’t matter what school you go to.

Private, public, metropolitan or regional, the shock only comes if the boys at your school are not doing something that is deemed slightly gross at best or disturbing at worst.

This keeps happening. And each time us girls receive an apology – but the individuals behind it get a slap on wrist. And then we wonder why it keeps happening, over and over?

While the Pembroke College incident has been brought to light through people speaking up, I shudder at the thought of how often similar situations are being swept under the rug behind closed doors.

Pembroke School. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

While male students’ actions can be dismissed by cries of “boys will be boys” and “they’re only kids”, I think it is important to acknowledge that what occurred at Pembroke College was an attack on women orchestrated by boys who will be men in only a few short years.

I am not saying they are lost causes or that there is time for them to learn from their mistakes but the truth of the matter is that it will not be long before these “kids” are adults. What excuse will you make when they pull these kinds of antics at their football club after graduation?

As a girl you are always told that boys mature at a slower rate to you as if this is some kind of hint that you should cut them some slack when they slip up. I would argue that the actions of Pembroke School students were far away from the behaviour of “kids”.

Kids don’t know, or should not know, what “sloppy seconds” are, they wouldn’t know what it means to “kiss a whale”. When you boil it down to the language, it is all very grown up.

Social media definitely plays a part, I mean it would have been harder to send a nude in the mail, but women much older than me who attended school pre-Instagram era, will remember the messed up things boys at their school did. What they once may have been told was “teasing”, were actually microaggressions against women.

The main difference is that now when boys are racist or misogynistic, it can live on social media forever and have a much wider influence at a rapid rate.

Nevertheless, you can blame it on the wider society, as Pembroke School principal, Mark Staker did, or fragile masculinity or whatever excuse you want to come up with next, nothing changes.

Every girl still has a story about a guy that made her feel completely awful.