The famed annual music festival known as Coachella just finished weekend one of three this past Sunday. This year nearly 600,000 attendees, of mainly youth, came out to the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California to see their favorite artists. Normally, large music festivals are known by youth to be an welcoming environment with ‘good vibes’ where people don’t judge one another. However this year one young man took it too far with his shameless celebration of rape culture.
A man by the name of Jemayel Khawaja saw the shirt at the festival and immediately felt shocked and disgusted. Khawaja felt compelled to share what he saw thus he approached the young man and asked to take a picture. Rather than be embarrassed, the young man enthusiastically agreed and posed with a huge foolish grin and threw up the peace sign. Fortunately, the image that Khawaja shared on Twitter gained a lot of attention and people everywhere shared the same feelings of disgust and outrage.
The shirt was meant to be an obvious play on the well-known slogan “Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat” made popular by the 2013 Fatboy Slim and Riva Starr track. The slogan is very familiar in electronic dance music scene and it is not uncommon for people to make variations of it, however, this young mans ‘joke’ was simply taking it too far. In an attempt to come off as edgy or radical, his plan obviously backfired. But the fact that he felt comfortable enough to wear it out in public says something about rape culture and common, and almost accepted, occurrence of sexual harassment against women. Hopefully, in the near future this will not be so easily accepted, although the backlash online is a step in the right direction.
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