"I'll do it," he told me. "But only if you get your tits out."

By NATALIA HAWK

I am well aware that nothing good happens after 2am. This is why I am not generally a stay-out-past-2am kind of person. But I was on holiday in New Zealand last week, and it was my friend’s birthday, and I’d had two Redbulls, and so we decided to go to a nightclub. At 2:30am.

I’ve been to this nightclub a bunch of times. It’s old faithful – your typically sticky-floored, strobe-lighted place that has little to no redeeming features but is a great place to go if you’d like to dance along to the Top 40.

I was with six friends – one was a girl, five were boys. We stood on the right hand side of the dance floor, right in front of the DJ booth. There were about six other people on the dance floor, so it was nowhere near crowded. My friends and I stood in a vague circle and started doing the kind of dance you do when it’s 2am and you’re on the borderline of drunk/sober, tired/not tired, bored/entertained.

At one point, I escaped the circle and wandered up to the DJ booth to request both a song and a shout-out for my friend’s birthday. I stood directly in front of the lone DJ, waiting patiently until he decided to look up from his turntables and acknowledge my presence.

I waited. And waited. And waited. And started to feel pretty stupid after it became evident he was ignoring me just for the sake of ignoring me. But finally – after half a song had gone by – he looked up from his turntables with a lazy flutter of his eyelashes.

“What’s up, babe?” he asked.

I laughed it off. I thought he was joking. But he really wasn’t. He refused to play his song until I got my tits out for him. Which he made quite clear, yelling “GET YOUR F***ING TITS OUT” over the music every couple of minutes, pointing to my girlfriend and I.

At one point, I turned around and put my hands up, looking at him with my best “WTF” kind of facial expression.

He stopped the music. He looked at me. He said something into the microphone.

“I’m gonna f**k you,” is what he said.

I ignored him and stayed away from the DJ booth, until my girlfriend dragged me back up there to demand that he play the song we’d requested. Once again, he ignored us for awhile. And then he stopped the music, pointed to us and yelled into his microphone: “These two beautiful ladies are going to f**k me and GET THEIR F***ING TITS OUT!”

We left after that.

But here’s the thing that really surprised me about everything that happened with the Queenstown DJ.

I didn’t really react to the DJ becoming the misogynistic arsehole to beat all misogynistic arseholes. Neither did my girlfriend.

You know who did get angry? The five male friends that accompanied the two of us to the club. They got so riled up by the DJ’s comments that they grabbed our arms and told us to get the hell out of there.

The guys were the ones who told us to go up to the bouncers outside and complain about the DJ (they were scared they’d get bashed if they said anything).

The guys were the ones who were even more outraged when the bouncers laughed at us and mocked us, saying “misogyny! That’s a big word!”

The guys were the ones who bitched about the behaviour of both the DJ and the bouncers, all the way home.

The guys were the ones who wrote angry emails to the club as soon as they got home.

The guys were the ones who ranted to all the other guys about it the next day (I was travelling with 11 of these incredible gentlemen).

The guys were the ones who asked me why I didn’t bother reacting to the DJ at any point.

And honestly? I was so damn tired of sexism that I couldn’t be bothered responding anymore. This kind of stuff happens ALL THE TIME – not only to me but to every woman out there. None of us can walk into a crowded location anymore without being groped by at least one person. About a month ago, my friend even got licked. LICKED. Because apparently ogling is no longer enough – bodily fluids have to be involved too.

I find that a lot of women tend to pick their battles when it comes to sexism. Getting outraged at every sexist comment that comes our way can be difficult – purely because there are so many of them. We can’t possibly change all the sexist douchebags out there that don’t know how to speak to women – so we might ark up at a few that really push a particular button, and let the rest go.

Solely in Queenstown – a town overrun by boys on boys’ trips – I’d already been smacked on the arse while walking down the street. I’d been called “Boobs” by a bartender repeatedly, even though I told him my name several times. At one point, someone even said to me: “With the way you carry on sometimes, I’m surprised you haven’t been raped yet.”

At the time, I was talking to three men at a bar. Just talking. But hey – apparently that kind of behaviour deserves a bit of rape now.

A few weeks ago, the Victorian Police Chief Commissioner, Ken Lay, wrote an article in the Herald Sun that issued men with a challenge.

“I want you to help make indecency against women deeply shameful. I want you to understand that this is not solely a feminist issue,” he wrote. “It’s a social issue, a moral issue and a men’s issue.”

Because Ken Lay is sick of everything that’s happening to slowly destroy our societal standards towards women. He’s sick of the casual groping. He’s sick of the disrespectful behaviour. He’s sick of everything that leads towards violence against women. He’s sick of the bashing, the raping. He’s probably even sick of the stupidly not-funny women/kitchen/sandwich jokes rattled out by every other Gen Y male on the Internet.

I read Ken’s article when it first appeared. I loved it. But I also found myself thinking that it was a bit of a lost cause. Because – as a female, that speaks to a lot of females – I’ve seen more and more denigrating behaviour towards women in the public eye, and barely any males standing up and saying, “you know what? That’s not okay.”

So thank goodness that those five boys stepped in when they did. Thank goodness that they got outraged when I no longer had the energy to.

I was losing faith in men quickly, until the wee hours of last Friday morning, in a nightclub in New Zealand.

Maybe some good things DO happen post-2am after all.

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