I'm a first-year (female) in university, and our residence just threw its first house party of the year. It was awesome, and there was a pretty packed/intense dance floor, which I'll get back to in a moment. Now, it's worth noting that our house has a guy on third floor who is known as a bit of a "creep" - he'll come up to girls and put his arm around them or stroke their arms, invade their personal space, etc. Last year, he apparently caused a girl to move out because he was harassing her. I don't know if he does this on purpose, of if he's just socially unaware, but everyone always says to keep an eye on him.

So at the party, he's dancing along, coming up too close to girls. He led one to the washroom and then stayed with her, in her personal space, and everyone was like "oh, watch out for him, make sure he doesn't do anything."

Now, everyone was worried about this. Everyone knows it's wrong, right? Yay, seems like a win. Society in general hates creeps. Woo.

Except...

On the dance floor, I see a buddy of mine, a big football player, grinding with this drunk girl. I give him a friendly shoulder punch on my way out, laugh about it to my boyfriend, and then we move on.

So later, we're standing around, and my buddy starts talking about how he didn't want to grind with that girl, how she just came up and started dancing on him, and he was really uncomfortable with it - but he was too polite to say no.

How is that okay? When a guy touches a girl and invades her personal space, without her permission, it's harassment (rightly so), but when a girl does it to a guy, it's fine? There was such a HUGE uproar awhile ago when someone posted "girls, if a guy comes up and starts grinding with you, it took him a lot of courage, so humour him and dance for a bit", with people saying you should NEVER have to make yourself uncomfortable at at anyone's expense. Yet if my friend had tried to push that girl away, he would have seemed like a jerk.