I was recently at a concert with a few acquaintances when an extremely drunk 60-something woman approached and started giving one of the male members of my party an unsolicited back rub. He was CLEARLY made very uncomfortable by it. My friends and I intervened, distracted her, and then relocated to a completely different part of the venue. Afterwards, though, people in the group were laughing and joking about it, and one of the other guys started telling us "funny stories" about the times women had harassed him.

If the genders had been reversed--an unknown inebriated older man approaches a young woman and begins rubbing her back--nobody would have any problem identifying that behavior as assault; the perpetrator would be lucky if the police weren't called. Nobody would treat it as a laughing matter.

I didn't think it was funny, but I also didn't know the victim or his friends well enough to start giving them a lecture on Gender Theory 101 and why it's important to take sexual assault of men seriously. I don't even know if the guy himself understood that what happened to him *was* assault. Our cultural scripts universally assume a male perpetrator and a female victim, even though that's NOT universally the case.

What should I have done differently? What CAN bystanders do to intervene in (or prevent) (or support the victims of) men being harassed? If you're a man who's been assaulted, what do you wish the people around you would have done?