Yes, because the lead singer of a rock band that has been touring for 20 years stopped the concert to call out… some guy gently placing his hand upon the buttocks of this young girl who “seemed to be enjoying herself” simply to support her weight?
:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
We’re straying too far from Bricker’s point here, which is why we treat groping a minor (without consent) differently from groping an adult. That is to say, if Aaron Lewis saw a bunch of assholes groping someone, it shouldn’t matter how old she is. Can we at least all agree that reaching up to grab a crowd-surfers breasts without her explicit consent is fucking disgusting, even if she “doesn’t complain about?” Because it’s fucking wrong.
Here is another rumination for ya. Take California, where the age of consent is 18. I grew up here. My cohorts started engaging in consensual sex, and bragging about it, when they were approximately 14. Knowing all the parties involved, and the bragging, even looking back on it, the only coercion was by mother nature. The suggestion that they were “statutorily raping” each other is a preposterous legal construction. They had as much right to rutting as wild raccoons as a matter of their biology. Not that it was sensible.
Laws that prevent sexually desirous young perverts from indulging themselves with other desirous young perverts seem to violate basic human rights, if not laws of biology.
Sure, someone volunteering for crowd surfing is accepting being touched by strangers to a greater extent that someone just standing in a crowd. That’s the not the same thing as volunteering to be groped though. Maybe that line can get slightly blurry, but there is a line, and my impression from this story is that some of the guys were pretty blatantly crossing it.
The age wasn’t always 18. It was raised, ostensibly to deter older men from impregnating teenage girls. It’s still 16 in much of the US. Not surprisingly, that’s the common age for Americans to become sexually active.
There is that, which is a point I don’t think I’ve heard made by many people. Why should the lead singer be the one to decide if its too much? Did they woman indicate that she was uncomfortable or upset that what started out as simply crowd surfing turned into a grope-fest? Or was she enjoying it? If the later, why should the singer be the one who decides how much is too much for her?
Are we seriously having this conversation? The correct amount of groping that’s allowed is none unless consent is given first. You can’t grope women and then if they don’t complain say, “I guess she was OK with it.” WTF?
I’ll bet every time you made to kiss someone you had them sign a form first, right?
because we can’t judge consent by a person’s behavior. knowing people are going to have their hands all over you is a foregone conclusion that informs the choice to crowd surf, and exactly what constitutes “groping” is rather subjective here. As some posters point out, we could be talking about people whose intent is merely to support the girl.
Part of the problem here is it’s the singer’s idea the girl was being groped, AFAWK, not the girl’s.
If the girl happens to like it, the singer is interfering with her rights to do as she will with her body, including making it available to strange men and women.
It’s weird how, for so many people, their first reaction to “I saw a woman being sexually assaulted,” is to start arguing how it probably wasn’t really a sexual assault in the first place. Nobody does this for other forms of assault. You never see someone say, “I just saw a guy get shot!” and have over half the responses be, “I’ll bet it was just a cap gun,” “Are you sure you weren’t on a movie set?” and “I’ll bet the bullet barely hit him, anyway.”
If I met a guy at your house and we started going at it in the living room, would you just figure that’s our choice and leave us be?
In the vanishingly unlikely event that this young woman engaged in the common and typically non-sexual act of crowd surfing as a pretext for luring strange men into engaging in sexual touching (which is something that doesn’t happen, but whatever), guess what?
A concert is STILL not the proper venue for that and I’m not surprised the singer put a stop to it. If girl wants to get her freak on in public, she needs to go to a sex club or fetish party or something. Even if it were all consensual and the young lady was having the time of her life, you still don’t get to decide to use a concert as your own personal gangbang venue.
People don’t routinely get shot for fun. People do routinely get groped (and do some groping of their own) for fun - usually in the context of a relationship of some sort, of course.
Note that if we change the example to, say, a physical altercation, there really are people who would question it - “They’re just horsing around.” “Boys will be boys.” “It was obviously mutual - they were both probably drunk and being stupid. Nothing serious.”
Nudity isn’t exactly allowed in public either, but a lot of women show their breasts at concerts. Can you make an argument for what we’re not even sure was a sexual assault without turning it into a gangbang?
Could part of the reason for the Romeo and Juliet exception be, beyond the whole idea of “people under a certain age just aren’t capable of meaningful consent”, that there’s another issue? Because, even among people who are of the age of consent, when there’s a power differential, we frown on the relationship. We have trouble with the idea of a boss having sex with an employee, or a teacher with a student, or a prison guard with a prisoner, etc, even when they’re all of the age of consent, because there’s a power differential there. Maybe part of the exception for “Romeo and Juliet” relationships is because there’s a power differential between a 30 year old and a 15 year old that’s not there between a 15 year old and a 16 year old.
Yes, that is how I’ve also seen it at times: it’s about “in a case of mere immature judgement on both sides, should one get stuck with a strict-liability charge for a Class 1B Felony and put in the predators’ registry with a marker for ‘offense against a minor’? if so, which one?”. We can understand that 15 year olds can (and often do) WANT to have sex, but at the same time we can say that past a certain age point the older party ought to know better and act responsibly.