The sexual harassment of a man on stage is not only okay, it’s cause for celebration.
I want to talk about Zac Efron. That’s not a sentence I ever thought I would type. You see, Zac Efron won Best Shirtless Performance for a scene in That Awkward Moment. Earlier, Efron had tweeted that if he won, he would accept the award shirtless.
Well, he won. For whatever reason, he walked on stage to present his award while wearing a shirt. The crowd chanted “Take it off! Take it off!” When he didn’t take his shirt off, the actress presenting the award ripped his shirt open. Efron went along with it and seemed to be perfectly fine with it. You can see a re-cap here.
There’s a good chance that Zac Efron didn’t care. There’s also a decent chance that the whole thing is staged. I don’t know. That’s the thing; we don’t know. What we do know is that a group of people shouted for someone to lose his clothes and when he didn’t, someone else ripped his shirt open.
I’ve seen some reactions to this, and they’ve all been positive. They’ve all be along the lines of “cheers to that woman” or “thank god for that woman”. Here is an excerpt from VH1’s website:
And because presenter Rita Ora is a human being with curiosity and a pulse, she couldn’t resist trying to get a look at what Zac is working with in between chants of “take it off!” THANK YOU, RITA! The Movie Awards audience, the Internet and the world at large truly appreciate all of your hard work.
How is this something I have to say? Tearing someone else’s clothes off is not okay.
Maybe it was planned beforehand; I don’t know. I just know what it looked like. It looked like someone forcing someone else to disrobe in front of a crowd because that crowd demanded it. Then, it looked like a large part of the internet celebrating that forced disrobing. To me, that just sounds like sexual harassment.
Photo/ Flickr— Ivo Duran
