Those of us who aren’t at Coachella have been cooing over Beyonce’s breathtaking performance, the supremely chic street style and Rihanna’s game-changing accessories.
But for the some of the women at the festival, things don’t seem to be as peachy.
Teen Vogue reporter Vera Papisova has published a piece documenting sexual harassment at the festival, and says she was groped 22 times while trying to get the story.
‘One guy followed me across the field to the Mojave stage, where I was meeting a friend to see FIDLAR,’ she recalls. ‘When my friend left to see another band, I stayed behind, and this guy came up behind me and whispered, “You’re a goddess” and then rubbed his hands on my hips and butt.’
And she wasn’t the only one being targeted, of the 54 women she spoke to for her piece, all of them said they had been sexually harassed at the event.
‘It never goes further than a touch on my butt or my back, but it’s not an OK place to be touched,’ said one interviewee. ‘Would you do that to a coworker? Or another guy? Then don’t do that to me. This is my third day, and it’s probably happened to me 40 times this weekend.’
Another festival goer told this story; ‘As I was walking, a guy grabbed my butt cheek," said Anna, 27. "This is the sort of environment where I think people assume it happens a lot, so you can get away with participating in it.’
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Some of the disappointing reactions to Papisova’s piece on Twitter show exactly why we need to be having more conversations around sexual assault.
‘Do u have any video or pictures of these incidents? Did u report it to anyone while u were there? Or did u just walk around and allow this to happen over and over. It’s fake news’ wrote one person.
‘What’d you expect when you dress like a whore and surround yourself with drugged-out millennials’ typed another, ‘If you walk around with nothing but glitter on your breasts you are kinda asking to for attention of the sexual kind. #JustSayin’ wrote a third.
Papisova has been dutifully retweeting and replying to these tweets, hopefully having this dialogue out in the open will go some way towards changing this toxic festival environment where some men take mere attendance as a sign of consent.
Follow Phoebe on Twitter @PhoebeParke
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.