When a wedgie isn't just a wedgie

I grew up roughhousing with boys. My male cousins still get a kick out of the fact that now that they have outgrown me, they can throw me over their shoulders and spin me until I get dizzy or blindside me with a tackle. I squeal and laugh and throw weak punches and have a good time. In friendly relationships with men, there's roughhousing (notably the one time that a good friend of mine and I got kicked out of a bar for fake-fighting--I swear, it was fake). In romantic relationships, tickling, wrestling, goosing, you name it. I preface the post with all of this to remind everyone that the distinction between fun and harassment is not being blurred by feminists but by victimizers who are looking for a cover for their behavior.

Ross Lincoln sent me this story about a boy giving a girl a wedgie.

A 16-year-old Muskego student accused of giving a "wedgie" to his former girlfriend at school is facing juvenile charges of fourth-degree sexual assault.

Gosh, that doesn't sound so bad. I've gotten wedgies, you've gotten wedgies. Granted, they used to date but still. Could there be more to this story?

The girl, 15, told authorities that the boy pushed her up against a locker, put his hand down the back of her pants and pulled her thong up above the waistline of her pants, the police report released Wednesday says. The boy also touched the girl's buttocks, the report says.
She told him to stop at least three times and said that the incident was both painful and embarrassing, the report says.

I dealt with some ugly harassment when I was in high school, having my body grabbed and getting called names but I can safely say that no one actually had the nerve to put his hands inside my clothes.

But the boy had his reasons!

After the assault, according to the report, the boy said, "Now I got some action."

The boy told police that since he had dated the girl in the past, he thought it was OK to do what he did.

Ah, I see. He had a good reason to believe that she owed him the chance to humiliate her in public because she had dated him for a bit. I don't imagine this young man would have agreed to the contention that she had a right to strip him naked and make fun of his penis in public due to a prior relationship, however.

The comments at Fark are just the sort of thing that made me not want to read Fark, which is to say that very few people saw that there was really a problem with the boy's belief that taking a girl on a date gives you the right to mock her in public and molest her at will for as long as you wish. But first, a word from the reason they still have statuatory rape laws:

PS: 16 year olds in thongs. stampa stampa.

And this from a commenter who figures that knowing a girl gives a guy a right to manhandle her:

Doesn't say grabbed - it says touched. It's his former girlfriend, he obviously knows her fairly well...have you never joked around with a female friend?

I'm sure next time he sees his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend with his hands down her pants, he'll understand it's just joking around with a female friend.

my question is wtf's a 15 yr old doing wearing a thong ?!

God knows that guys never harassed girls before the invention of thong underwear. Had I known that was the problem, I too would have refrained from wearing thong underwear in high school....oh wait, I didn't wear thong underwear in high school. Hmmm....it must be girls in pants! That's the ticket!

biatch is my term for a girl that whined and cried about it instead of kicking his ass like he deserved. This country's full of whiny asses that want to run and cry to people and expect them to "take care of it" instead of handing thier own problems. It's called personal responsibility, check into it.

Once again, we peer into the wingnut mind and find that the term "personal responsibility" is only applicable to victims and never to victimizers. Now that a young man has to take responsibility for something he chose to do, the squealing and complaining begins.

He learned it from Clinton who always got excited at the sight of a thong. in fact that's about the time our moral decay became okay for anyone doing sex acts.

There was no sexual assault ever before Clinton had consensual sex. That would probably come as a surprise to your local police department.

I saw a girl give another girl a wedgie in gym class. The one girl bent right over to tie her shoes, and the other girl ran by and gave those panties the hardest yank she could manage. I think every guy in the class went home and beat it that day

No, actually only you, weirdo. No one else thought the dogs humping was all that sexy, either.

parents that will buy 12-15 year old girls thongs are asking for trouble. Right or wrong, that thong says "easy." You can say whatever you want to flame me, but I got to my nephew's 9th grade football games and I see 12 and 13 and 14 year old girls with thongs sticking out of their skin tight shorts that say "sexpot" on the back and their skintight tops that their bras are busting out of all over. They are constantly pulling the shorts out of their collective ass cracks all night long.

Because you are stare at the asses of underage girls is not the fault of their parents.

You might not realize what is socially acceptable in today's age. Look at all the little fake, baby gangsters that are complete scumbags getting today's teenage women. Half the time, an incident like this would lead to the woman giving the guy oral love in the bathroom (it is an exaggeration, but the point is many young women actually enjoy this type of behavior).

How much you wanna bet this is one of those guys who whines that he can't get laid because he's a "nice guy" and girls only like assholes?

To all of you who are over reacting. This has only happened once. To a girl he use to date, by no means should he be charged with a crime and sent to juvie.

Didn't you know the rules? You get one freebie assault after breaking up with a girl, for god's sake!

And so on and so forth. The sad thing was that a number of people were still hyper-focused on the underwear this girl was wearing and what that might have to do with her assault. The article shouldn't have mentioned it--what does it matter? It's just more evidence that not only do we not give women in general basic privacy rights, but that we think that teenage girls especially don't have any right to privacy. What kind of underwear a girl has under her clothes is not open to public debate, period. I don't see anyone screaming and crying about boys wearing boxier briefs instead of the less sexy tighty-whiteys.

As for sexual harassment in the schools, it's about time someone did something about it. When I was in high school, it was a constant problem and the teachers never said anything, ever. Granted, it never got so bad, but that's only because we were lucky. At my cousin's high school, a girl in this situation was not so lucky as her ex-boyfriend decided to lock her in the stairwell between classes and invite a couple of his friends to rape her. The school took the doors off the stairwell, but the young woman was harassed so much that they had to transfer her to a different school. A firmer policy against sexual harassment might not have prevented that assault, but it's a step in the right direction towards teaching boys that they do not have the right to just do what they want to girls, even if they used to date them.