u/AyaShuffles

Today I witnessed a very awkward situation happening to another woman and I had no idea how to react. I was in a free live concert organized by our local municipality in the town square. The artist was a 25 year old girl who plays electronic music with her own vocals and I have been following for a while, so I was excited to see her play.

We showed up early with my husband and waited for the concert to start and it wasn't very crowded since it was just a small local concert. Just before the artist showed up I noticed two guys who were obviously very high hanging out in the front-middle of stage but thought nothing of it.

Unfortunately when the artist was playing they started acting gross. They were whistling at her, doing kissy faces at her, trying to talk to her from the stage and dancing/yelling even though her music wasn't the dancing/yelling type. After a while you could see the artist started looking uncomfortable but kept playing for the sake of the audience.

We were all just standing there hoping the guys would chill but they didn't. The concert was small so there was no security of any sort. I told one of the organizers that the artist looks uncomfortable and he told me that "they are aware of it" and that gave me false hope that maybe they will do something about it. But to no avail, this kept going on for almost an hour until the artist decided to finish the concert earlier than planned claiming a "technical issue".

I feel horrible about the situation and about my own inaction. I was very close to one of the guys and tried doing shush-ing faces and "keep it down" gestures and maybe they would stop for a few seconds and then resume. An organizer (the most visibly jacked one) talked to the main troublemaker when he took his shirt off but again nothing changed (he just put his shirt back on after a while).

I keep thinking that something like this wouldn't happen if the artist was male and that all of the audience and the organizers kinda just froze and let it happen. Is there anything any of us in the audience could have done better? A guy from the audience tried talking to them but he was kind of bullied and some other girls were shushing them too. When talking with my husband about it after he said that since they weren't violent and there was no police around there isn't anything we could do and it was better not to cause a scene during a live concert.

I don't think that makes sense because the worst thing already happened (concert finished early) and there were moment the dudes were messing with the railing in front of the stage which could have been an opportunity for the organizers to tell them off and convince them to move further away from the stage at least.

Thanks for reading my block of text, I am on the spectrum so I struggle with unfair situations like this but stuff like that happen often to us women and I would like to know if there is anything I can do to be the least bit helpful in a similar situation.