A few weeks ago, British comedian Sam Pepper pulled a "prank" where he went around grabbing women's butts and then laughing and pretending it wasn't him.
But one stupid, stupid man's prank is the rest of the world's sexual harassment. Thankfully after Pepper uploaded the video he was taken to task, the video was taken down, he was banned from VidCon and his partner network, Collective Digital Studio, dropped him. What was funny to Pepper was the last disgusting straw for much of the YouTube community who has witnessed Pepper publicly lasso women and kiss them without consent. Many, mostly female (where the feminist bros at?!) YouTubers announced that sexual harassment is a real thing, a major problem within the online community and definitely not a joke.
The most confusing thing is that Pepper's video was no prank. He sexually harasses women on the street, an everyday occurrence for many of us.
Pepper has since tried to claim this piece was part of a "larger education project" to try to teach people about the larger problems of sexual harassment. He even created a follow-up video in which a female comedian goes around grabbing unsuspecting men's butts. Let's move beyond the fact that two wrongs don't make a funny, and say that in no one's world does violating anyone, man or woman, somehow educate about sexual harassment. That would be like giving Ebola to a bunch of people to teach them about its dangers. It's absurd.
But to me, what was even more striking about the dual videos were the reactions from men versus women. The butt-grabbed men looked the female butt-pincher right in the eye and said with determination: "Don't do that! That's not cool!" and walked away. Meanwhile, the butt-grabbed women had a very different response. First they looked around, trying to figure out who touched them. Women are so used to being inappropriately touched that they don't necessarily know where the touch is coming from-even though Pepper was standing right next to them. While some of the women said, "No, that not OK," many still uncomfortably engaged with Pepper and eventually consented when he reached around for an "amends hug." I felt their palpable discomfort because I've been there.
There's an impulse after someone has violated your space to attempt to make it OK lest it become something more dangerous and hideous. Women learn to minimize, to play along with the joke, so it doesn't escalate. We give up some body autonomy so that we don't have to give up all of it. Women are so used to getting touched and pretending it's OK that I think many of us don't even know where to draw our lines anymore.
I wish this would stop. I wish I could go back to a few years ago and furiously yell at the young dude on a bike who grabbed my butt one morning while I was on a run. I wish I hadn't laughed as he rode away because I was so horrified and uncomfortable and at a total loss of what to do. I wish that incident hadn't kept me from running in the morning for six straight months.
But mostly I wish things would change, because they need to. I hope that thanks to Sam Pepper's stupidity and blatant misogyny, we can start talking about why it is never OK to pinch a stranger's butt, grab her boobs or caress anything. And if a person does violate this boundary, there must be very real consequences.
Niki Fritz is a RedEye special contributor.
