Mary O'Hara asks if a comedian who groped a woman onstage was crossing the line. She discusses some of the online conversation that followed the event, and she seems to think that it's clear it's not. Which is good. I'm with her on that.
However. I find this interesting:
But like Knight, I wonder if members of the audience - or Stewart Lee, the comedian who hosted the event - should have intervened. The young woman had seemed to go on stage of her on volition, but had no reason to suspect she would be pinned to the floor and groped. I did shout "get him fucking off you", but obviously not loud enough. [my emphasis]
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What I think is interesting about that is that she shouted to the woman to tell her to stop Vegas from doing what he was doing.
Now, I don't think that O'Hara is deliberately employing victim-blaming here - in fact, it's pretty clear that she thinks Vegas was the one at fault. But in the moment, it was the woman she held as responsible for what was taking place. The woman who was described as "unnerved", "nervy", "passive", "rabbit in the headlights", nervous; as (at first) "giggling and clearly somewhat enjoying the attention, so it sort of just went ahead without so much as a yes or no from her."
I'm all for the idea of women's agency, but here's the thing. When you're 18 or 19, given the chance to get up on stage with someone famous (maybe someone you admire), you're going to be powerless compared to that person. O'Hara acknowledges that in her article. The woman was doing something to try to stop things from going too far (O'Hara describes her as pulling her skirt back down whenever she could), but clearly didn't feel she was in a position to do too much.
On the one hand, O'Hara's shout could be taken as supporting the woman in her attempts to stop the assault.
On the other hand, O'Hara - and, indeed, the entire audience, everyone back stage, and so on - should have been shouting at Vegas to "fucking get off her". They should have been storming the stage and pulling him off. They should have been helping the woman up and asking her if she was ok.
There is no doubt in my mind that what happened was sexual assault of a pretty nasty nature (that it was occurring in front of so many people has got to aggravate it).
I would love to see a prosecution take place here - I mean, one of the big problems with prosecuting sexual assault, usually, is the lack of witnesses, and how many more witnesses could you want? But somehow, I don't think a prosecution is going to take place.
And I bet the first thing anyone would say if the possibility of a prosecution was brought up would be: "but she consented to be up there, and she should have known what he was like".
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