Editor, Daily Nexus,

In response to “If I Don’t Mind When Someone Grabs My Ass, Why Should You?” (Daily Nexus, Nov. 18, 2002), harassment is harassment, harassment leads to assault, assault leads to rape. Who is more likely to be raped – a woman or a man? Granted there are men who are raped, and in no way am I undermining those instances, but the reality is that women being grabbed, abused, assaulted or raped is not an instance, it’s an epidemic. I acknowledge the voice of the man who wrote the piece regarding men’s asses being grabbed and I have heard others with a shared sentiment. However, the difference in your ass being grabbed and a woman having her ass grabbed is striking and spans a larger picture of respect and personal space.

Your statement that men don’t care to make a big deal out of it does not give you or anyone the right to assume that it is permissible for anyone to give or accept such treatment. You specifically talk about an isolated incident of harassment yet not one woman has or will ever experience an isolated incident of assault. You walk down a crowded street and have your ass grabbed once. Women walk down the street and have their ass grabbed once by one guy, once by his friend, once by the friend’s brother and then all over again five minutes later half a block down the road.

You state that there is no difference between a guy harassing a girl and a girl harassing a guy and I would argue that there is a huge difference. Nine times out of 10 a man is grabbing a woman’s ass to prove he can, that he has a somewhat inalienable right to her body and to prove his masculinity and socially deemed hypersexuality. I would also argue that while that woman may like your sexual advances, the majority do not. A problem that pertains to both men and women is personal space and the problematic question of if your body is not your own, then where pray tell do any of us have our own space? What I always say is, do unto others as they would have done unto them. Respect it!