Sam Pepper And Everyone Like Him Can Get The Hell Off YouTube

22 September 2014 | 3:49 pm | Mitch Knox

The UK web personality and ex-Big Brother housemate is just the latest in a long line of narcissistic nobodies clogging up our culture

There is a reason that, as a rule, you don't see that many shows on TV about practical jokes any more.

This hasn't always been the case — there was a while where you couldn't flip a channel without running into Candid Camera or Prank Patrol or Balls Of Steel or Surprise Surprise or one of the other myriad hidden-camera prank shows that used to pollute the airwaves. But, recently, there have seemed to be fewer and fewer such programs on free-to-air TV, and the reasons are probably twofold — firstly, nobody really cares about them any more because pranks are generally irredeemably inane, and, secondly, that ties in directly to where they've largely ended up — on YouTube.

YouTube can unquestionably be a force for good, as we've learnt through multiple grass-roots social-media campaigns for armless, goatless Albanian orphans or whatever (I don't know; I definitely 'liked' one recently — what more do you want?), but it's unquestionably also an indefensible toilet of humanity, as we're reminded on an almost daily basis.

The most recent example of the way in which a YouTube pranker has confirmed themselves as little more than a giant drain on everyone's bandwidth has manifested in UK-based ex-Big Brother housemate and inexplicable YouTube star Sam Pepper — known for viral YouTube hits like InstaWhore and How To Pick Up Girls On Instagram —  and his latest upload, Fake Hand Ass Pinch Prank.

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I'm not going to give him the effortless traffic by linking to or embedding his stupid clip, but it's still around if you want to go and see why the internet has broadly turned on him quite literally overnight.

If you're really not that morbidly curious, here's the gist — Pepper walks around the street, wearing a hoodie, right sleeve tucked into front-right pocket and filled with a fake arm, so his actual right arm is free to move around under his hoodie. He then pretends to give directions to/ask directions from passing women and, when their heads are turned, grabs their butt with his obscured arm/hand and then acts confused when they look again to see what the hell just grabbed them.

Fine. You get a screenshot. BUT THAT'S IT.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand why this is problematic. Firstly, it's just another example of an asshole with a camera thinking that simply because a platform such as YouTube exists that they have a free pass to call themselves a filmmaker and create terrible content to beg viewers for money to sustain their shitty existence as would-be entertainers.

But secondly, and way more importantly, it's a very public perpetuation of rape culture in its most damaging, surreptitious form: an implicit statement that other people — not just men, but other people in general — have a right to go around invading other people's personal space, touching them without their consent, and essentially sexually harassing them in the name of "light entertainment". 

Of course, Pepper's defenders are as vocal as they are dense, coming out of the woodwork with amazingly poorly thought-out deflections, some of which I'd like to briefly address once and for all, because they're arguments made every single time this kind of thing happens.

"fucking feminists, if it was girl touching a guys dick, guys wouldn't start shitting their pants over it"

Well, YouTube commenter MillionsofDollars300 — you won't find women pulling this shit against men all that often, if at all, because women are not raised to believe that even their own bodies are theirs, much less that they can exercise control over anyone else's. In contrast, men are brought up with the insane belief that we have a life-given right to put our mitts on anything that even remotely pleases us, which is why we seem to so broadly struggle with the idea that someone else mightn't appreciate it.

Additionally, this ties into another whole world of damaging logic that says that men inherently enjoy being groped without consent, which is just one big clusterfuck of issues involving patriarchy and perceptions of masculinity and sexuality that really need to be done away with. Just because MillionsofDollars300 would be totally happy for random people to come up to him on the street and start clawing at his junk, that doesn't mean the rest of us would be.

Thirdly, this demonstrates an absurdly broad misunderstanding of the concept of feminism, but if you're on MoD300's side, you've stopped reading already. Pity.

"this really isn't a big deal hahaha it's funny cmon guys"

Unsurprisingly, this comment generally comes from people without fully formed adult brains, but plenty of folks old enough to damage their already compromised cranial capacity through the legal purchase of alcohol seem to engage with it too.

Let me just make this clear: the very first person that Pepper pranks says repeatedly, "I don't like that". Yes, she's sort of smiling, but she's also clearly bewildered and a little shocked by the whole thing. In fact, every woman he pranks, on some level, makes it pretty clear through body language that they're not impressed with what's just gone down.

Here is the thing about jokes — they aren't funny just because the teller says so. You need an audience that agree. And when your audience overwhelmingly agree that you've missed the mark, it's probably not them who are forming the wrong opinion about the gag. 

Yes, jokes are subjective, but some things are objectively not funny. Although the women in the video (in theory) would have given post-prank consent for their likeness to be used in the video, that's not the same as asking permission for a grope in the first place. So yes, it's a big deal, because, again, it reinforces the notion that consent is optional in any regard when it comes to other people's bodies.

"What if this happened to men? would the reaction be the same?"

~or~

"What if this was swapped around with a girl pinching guys arses. Everyone would think it was cute & hilarious."

Every. Fucking. Time. No, the reaction would not be the same, because men, as a rule (and not to contradict what I was saying before about everyone being susceptible to sexual assault), have not been systematically oppressed/objectified by women, are not as likely to die at the hands of a woman, and are not as likely to face extreme, ongoing violence from a woman, as a woman is from/by a man. That's just statistics.

In fact, if you're a white guy, then you need to come to terms with this simple fact right the fuck now: We don't get any concessions. We don't. I'm not saying that as an "oh, how unfair that we don't get concessions" thing — I mean "we don't deserve any concessions". We have, since colonial times, inflicted our will upon anyone different to us — different-coloured skin, different sex organs, different beliefs, different desires, what have you — and uniformly treated anyone who doesn't instantly adhere to the "What White Guys Like" style book as though they're lesser people, or strange and not to be trusted, or generally like lunatics who shouldn't be listened to. The reaction when the shoe is on the other foot is almost never the same, and nor should it be (generally).

"It wasn't that bad, most of the girls were good sports about it."

As opposed to what, exactly? As has been said over and over, men are, on average, the most dangerous things on the planet that women can deal with. And we're volatile, unpredictable arseholes. We're a group of people who think catcalling is complimentary, and then get explicitly angry and defensive — and sometimes even fatally violent — if we're told it's unappreciated.

So yeah, these women might look like good sports, but women — in my experience — also tend to possess a defence mechanism in place for dealing with unwelcome gropes or advances on the street or at the club, and part of that probably involves gently trying to let the offender down without giving them reason to arc up further and get serious about it and have it, you know, end badly for the woman.

Now, it is incredibly fucked up that women feel they have to do that (or walk down the street with keys in their fist, or know six different emergency numbers just because) — and I certainly don't want to add to the chorus of people who claim that the way to solve these issues is to continue telling women what they shouldn't do, or what they should be careful doing, or finding yet another way for them to modify their behaviour so they don't "invite" these sorts of actions "because that's just society these days", when really we should be teaching straight men not to develop a sense of entitlement over women's bodies to begin with — but that's certainly the most plausible reason these women appear so calm about it: not because they are actually fine with having their butts grabbed by a stranger, but because they fear the alternative of letting that stranger know that they're not fine with it. 

Doesn't seem like so much harmless fun now, does it?

Final Note: If you have read this article in its entirety and you want to come at me with any variation of the words "but not all men...", you can get out now. No, maybe not all men are like Sam Pepper, but it is on every single one of us to make sure the harm is as minimised as possible for everyone else. Enough excuses. Let's stamp this shit out.