Recently, I came across a video on YouTube that disgusted me. Sam Pepper, a YouTuber, posted a video titled "Fake Hand Ass Pinch Prank," which showed him asking for directions with a fake hand in his pocket, and his real hand would reach around and pinch a girl's bottom. Prank? Am I supposed to find sexual harassment funny? I don't think it is.
Sexual harassment is bullying in its basic form. Bullying is never funny. Why, then, is degrading attention and harassment toward woman ever considered funny?
Sam Pepper put up a new (back-peddling) video talking about the "prank," which he says was a "social experiment" and the girls in the video apparently knew the concept of the video. Regardless of it being a "prank," or even scripted, it is the absolute wrong way to raise awareness of sexual harassment.
In other videos, he has done things such as "How to Make Out With Strangers," "How to Steal a Girlfriend" and "How to Pick Up Girls With a Lasso, they all show "unsuspecting" girls being harassed, belittled and ridiculed. People argue that the girls were comfortable with it, as they just nervously laugh it off. But some girls don't know how to respond to sexual harassment. Not all girls will outwardly say that they're uncomfortable, or tell the person to knock it off.
Even when told "I don't like that..." in the video, he still proceeded to laugh and touch the girl anyway. How is that acceptable? When we allow people to make jokes about it and not take NO to mean NO, we are sending a message that harassing women is OK -- that it is funny and acceptable. Apparently Sam thinks disrespecting women is humorous. But I'm not laughing. It's not funny. It's bullying.
Making harassment into a joke, making people think it's funny is all wrong. Sexual harassment is not funny and It never will be.