I recently took an interest in the K-pop idol group, April, and have been binge-watching their first reality TV show, called "Here Goes April".
On Episode 18 when the girls went to the beach, I noticed that their managers had no qualms making body contacts with the girls so much so that it seems to me that they are using fun as an excuse to inappropriately touched some of the girls.
As you can see from the screenshot, one of the managers grabbed one of the members from behind to such an extent that his crotch would have no doubt been in full contact with her buttocks.
Although the show was recorded several years ago, do you think that it is right for managers to behave that way?
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I watched the episode and my verdict is: no, nothing inappropriate happened. The managers were playfully teasing the girls. Whether that's mature behaviour is a whole other discussion, but what the managers did did not cross the line. That screen cap at the beginning of the article might look bad, but the reality is, if you grab a person from behind in order to lift them in the air, your crotch will be against their butt. Without any sexual intention, that is just what happens when you wrap your arms around someone. And most of the time the managers did not grab the girls by their waists but by their arms.
There's nothing wrong with friends playfully touching each other, and I assume that managers don't just have a professional relationship with the members but the relationship is quite friendly. And this is an important point to note; what the manager does in that picture would not be OK if he did it to a stranger on a subway, but the more people get to know each other, the more comfortable they get around each other and also more accepting of physical touch. We all know how friends can sit on a couch side by side, wrap their legs around each other, playfully tickle each other, hug each other without any discomfort, etc. When people get closer to each other, they have less of a problem with physical touch, something that would be deeply uncomfortable if a complete stranger did it. So what happened in the video falls into the category of playful teasing. It really did not look like the members felt like they were being sexually harassed. They looked more annoyed by their shoes getting wet.