It might be 2023, but misogyny continues to be alive and well. We’ve seen it in recruitment, with one TikToker finding she got more job interviews when submitting her resume with a male name. We’ve seen it in the service industry, with a hotel worker sharing how a guess harassed her after she rejected him, and now we’re apparently seeing it in the automotive industry, too, as one TikToker claims a Toyota salesman made sexist comments about her to colleagues while unaware she was still on the phone.
In the two-part TikTok, which have cumulatively amassed over 1.6 million views, Bianca Emma Figueroa (@esposatoxica) explained how the “misogynistic, belittling interaction” came about.
“So me and my husband drive by, and we see this beautiful white Toyota match exactly the car that we were looking for—for the fleet for the business that me, my sister, and my mom have,” she said. “We go in, but we see that someone’s about to take it on a test drive.” However, at that moment, an employee from the car dealership walks out, and tells Figueroa that if the person taking the car for a test drive doesn’t want it, she can purchase it, Figueroa says.
@esposatoxica Bryan Easler Toyota of Hendersonville, NC – you really outdid yourself today. 🤗 We have already contacted corporate.
♬ original sound – Bianca Emma Figueroa
After the test drive, with the car still being available, Figueroa says her sister called the employee to commence the paperwork. “Here’s where it gets interesting,” the TikToker says. “[The employee] forgets to hang up the phone after the conversation is over with my sister. And he slips his phone into his pocket. And me and my sister overhear all of the locker room conversation that [he] has with his buddies inside the office. [He] says the following: ‘Yeah, bro, like her family came to see the [car]. They liked it, whatever. And then this girl calls and she was like, ‘Hey, I’m Krystal. And I was like, thinking, ‘What are you ,a stripper? And then she said, she owns a cleaning business. Oh, yeah. What kind of cleaning business? You know what I mean?’”
At this point, Figueroa’s sister already had her on the line, and the TikToker says how, by coincidence, she was already walking into the car dealership with in-person paperwork for the sale, as the salesman is “waving away” at her.
“And I’m like, ‘Hi, I think you forgot to hang up the phone on my sister before you called her a stripper.’ He pulls his phone out of his pocket, realizes he still has not hung up, and hangs up the phone immediately to my face. And I said, ‘Is that the way you do business?’ And he said, ‘No, ma’am. No, ma’am.’ He’s over here, red, shaking in his boots. But by now, I didn’t care.” Then, the content creator says she “walked [her] happy a** down” to the employee’s manager to make a complaint.
Then, in the second TikTok, Figueroa shares how the complaint went down.
@esposatoxica I cannot believe that it is 2023 & US AS WOMEN are STILL having to deal with behavior like this.
♬ original sound – Bianca Emma Figueroa
“Right now, I’m in the [car dealership] manager’s office,” she says. “And I just told him everything [his employee] did, expecting a little shock from him. But this man, […] did not even flinch. He didn’t even look up from his computer to acknowledge what I just said. This was just a normal Friday for him. In that moment, I realized that I, as a person, and my business, was not going to be respected in this establishment.”
But when Figueroa got up to leave, she says the manager attempted to “tower over her” in an attempt to “intimidate” her before shouting. “He started yelling, ‘Well, what do you want me to do? You just came into my office with all these allegations. What do you want me to do?’” she recalls. According to Figueroa, the manager then said to her that there’s other people interested in the truck if she didn’t want it, before walking back and saying that he wanted to verify what she was saying with the car dealership employee.
“And I said, ‘That’s it. That’s if you would have just said that,’” she says. “‘When you were sitting there staring at your computer, not even acknowledging our conversation, we would have had a different interaction. It was about the principle.’”
She concludes by addressing the two men directly. “Let me return that shame that you wanted to give to us back to you. You did not shame us. On the contrary, what you did was disgusting and downright distasteful, my boy. And let me just say, it’s 2023. There is no reason that we should still be having this locker room talk that you so desperately wanted to have with your buddies.”
Figueroa and the Toyota East Coast Regional Office didn’t immediately respond to the Daily Dot’s press request via email.
