Why is #BoisLockerRoom a shock or a surprise? Haven’t we indulged boys to be boys?

Schoolboys from respectable, “good” families were never above comparing girls’ body parts to those of animals in painful, graphic detail, with added descriptions of what they would like to do to them. I know because I too was a victim.

Fast forward 10 years and nothing has changed. When a friend sent me screenshots of the ‘Bois Locker Room’ chat group on Instagram, I didn’t feel anything. Not anger. Not disgust. Not sorrow. Not even annoyance.

I read one of the screenshots but refused to read any more. I had neither the desire nor the strength to read the violent comments that these hormone-crazed teenage boys had made on morphed pornographic images of unsuspecting minor girls.

I did feel a sense of fear for the brave, young women who exposed this nasty group and its inner workings. I also felt pity for the girls whose photos had been used in such a manner without their knowledge and consent. I shuddered to imagine their mental agony, the distress of their families, and the hate mail flooding their inboxes across platforms.

But reactions are unlikely to be different. “Boys will be boys,” “this is just locker room banter,” “if she smiles at you, she’s into you,” “if she wears short clothes, she’s a slut,” “if she’s a slut, she’s a whore,” and “if she’s a whore, she’s fair game.”

The moment a woman becomes fair game, it is open season on her. From rape jokes to rape threats, from lewd messages to body shaming, nothing is spared in the humiliation of a woman. In some cases, it becomes too much for even the strongest person to handle and suicide seems like an easier option.

But here we are, still gasping over the horrible things teenage boys want to do to their peers and classmates, girls they call friends in public, girls they share seats with in the classroom.

Another disturbing fact of this sordid affair is the social and economic class privilege that usually shields the sexual depravity of the rich kids. While all women are told to be wary of strangers in the bushes, including blue collar workers like plumbers, electricians, drivers and watchmen, few of us are warned adequately about the suave boys from powerful business families.

Society has taught us that criminality is the sin of the poor, while in reality, the rich have been allowed to get away with it—until they commit the stupidity of documenting it on an uber cool social media platform like Instagram or Snapchat.

What, if anything, will change? Sure, this group has been shut down… but I know for a fact that several other groups of the same name, with the same boys (under new fake accounts) have mushroomed.

This generation of boys and men, with its infinite access to information, is well aware of the buzz words of Feminism. They all know what is rape culture, they all know what it means to “call out” inappropriate behaviour, and they all know how to retweet a sensitive opinion given by an influencer.

But they don’t have the moral capital needed to confront their own hypocrisy. Millions of boys continue to enjoy the protection of their carefully chosen words while they watch this drama unfold.

However, it is perhaps unfair to place the blame squarely on these boys. What have we, as siblings, parents, and a society done? Our movies glorify the abuse of women and call it love. From Badlapur to Kabir Singh, from Ranjhana to Arjun Reddy, it has been normalised even for the so-called hero to violate and assault his partner. If this is what we call a hero, then what do we call the average Joe?

Our educational institutions have cemented and codified sexism in arbitrary, suffocating rules. I remember the time when girls in my sister’s high school were shamed in the morning assembly for wearing skirts with “unacceptably short” hemlines. To add to their humiliation, the headmistress ripped open their hemlines in front of all the 2,000 odd students watching—to increase the length of the skirts to a respectable level… and to send out the message that women’s hemlines were directly proportional to the amount of respect they deserved.

My fingers tremble as I write this, but these young girls were also underage, no older than 16, much like the young girls whose photos were leaked and morphed on the now infamous bois locker room on Sunday.

Such abuse and sexualisation of girls did not begin with these boys. It started with our elders and our educationists, our “strict” grand aunts, and our ‘fauxgressive’ (faux progressive) filmmakers with a penchant for sexist (read lazy) writing.

What can possibly clean this cesspool of pain and horror? What needs changing is how we raise children right from infancy.

Child is father of the man, wrote Wordsworth. But the son must not become the father this time.