'Paul Mescal overreacted to woman 'groping' his bum…

'Paul Mescal overreacted to woman 'groping' his bum while posing for selfie - here's why'

Paul Mescal complaining about a hand on his a** gives me a bit of a pain in my own.

He’s 27, an Oscar nominee, and already one of the most famous actors ever to come out of Ireland.

Every young woman in the world fancied him in hit show Normal People and he’s lauded at home and abroad for his talent and good looks.

But despite all this good fortune in his career to be grateful for, he focused on an isolated, low-level, #MeToo type incident in an interview last week.

Mescal was so outraged at a fan touching his behind while posing for a selfie that he spoke publicly of his “fury” over it.

“As we posed for it, she put her hand on my a**,” he said. “I thought it was an accident so I moved away. But the hand followed.

“I remember tensing up and feeling fury. I turned to her and said: ‘What’re you doing? Take your hand off.’

“It was the last thing I wanted to do. It’s uncomfortable for everyone involved. But it was really not OK. It was so gross, creepy.”

The Kildare star described fame as 97% really nice, but said the other 3% was “somebody grabbing my ass”. By all accounts it was an upsetting incident for him personally and he asserted himself, which is the main thing.

But it struck me as something of an over-reaction.

And I wonder if we lose our proportion, will it end up diluting the gravity of sex crime in the public perception? To be very clear – it’s not a good idea to grab someone’s bum without their consent, and classifies as groping.

But on the spectrum of sexual crimes, dropping the paw in such a manner is at the very lowest level. This incident, as told, should not be conflated with serious sexual assault.

I found it a despairing sign of how his generation have been encouraged to view every interaction as a potential sexual assault.

In Ireland, the Department of Justice ran a €1million ad campaign telling us that everything, from the woman in work resting a hand on your shoulder to a fella trying to chat you up at a bar, was sexual harassment.

Some might reckon that’s a good thing – that these days we’re a more enlightened species, more aware of violations and quicker to “call them out” in public.

But such thinking is also ultimately freedom-limiting and too often veers into the uptight.

At the risk of sounding 900 years old, in my day if something like that happened, you’d just step away. You might – God forbid! – even laugh it off. Physically removing yourself from the situation was the most effective solution. So that’s what you did.

You took on board that humans occasionally did stupid, annoying, sleazy or weird things and – unless it got more serious – you didn’t make a massive deal of it.

This went on until 2014 when sociologists say we moved into a different cultural era – the era of victimhood.

It’s where the status of victim provides protection and gives reward.

But if we are to see ourselves as victims all the time, how is that good for us as people? Is that good for our progress?

Stoicism is the old philosophy of being able to cope with chaos.

It may have gone out of fashion recently but such thinking is known to make people happier and more resilient.