Lists like this one had silently circulated among teen boys for generations, and it has happened in more recent years at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, too, the students said. But it was happening now, in the era of the #MeToo movement. Women had been standing up to harassment in workplaces and on college campuses and the high school girls, who had been witnessing this empowerment, decided they weren’t going to let the issue slide.
So they're claiming the mere existence of a hot-or-not list is harassment, and by throwing a fit about it, they will be "empowered."
They felt uncomfortable getting up to go to the bathroom, worried that the boys might be scanning them and “editing their decimal points,” said Lee Schwartz, one of the other senior girls on the list.
So being a normal male is "toxic."
Unsatisfied with the disciplinary action, Schmidt texted about 15 girls she knew, and told them to tell all of their friends to show up at the school’s main office the next day during lunch, “to tell them we feel unsafe in this environment and we are tired of this toxicity,” Schmidt wrote in her text.
About 40 senior girls showed up, packing into an assistant principal’s office as Schmidt read a statement she had written.
“We want to know what the school is doing to ensure our safety and security,” Schmidt said. “We should be able to learn in an environment without the constant presence of objectification and misogyny.”
In which we learn that an online list that apparently wasn't being talked about by its editors is "a constant presence," and misogynistic. Because having an opinion about how attractive a girl is must be misogynistic, apparently. Also, the list somehow threatens their safety. Although the school had, for some reason, punished a student for the harmless list, the young womyn decided they needed to keep kvetching, until they got more attention.
Sitting toward the center of the room during the meeting was the male student credited with creating the list, an 18-year-old senior in the IB program. After listening to all of the girls’ speeches, many of which were directed specifically to him, he stood up and spoke to the group, admitting to making the list and apologizing for the hurt it caused.
“It was quite intense, being so directly confronted in front of so many people for so long,” the student recalled in an interview with The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of the repercussions he could face.
And now they're having show trials, and the young man feels unsafe. How un-toxic.
