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How This Man Stood Up for a Woman Being Harassed Will Give You Faith in Society
Having a person disrupt a movie-going experience is probably one of the most annoying things ever, especially when a ticket can set you back $20 these days. That’s why when one man started shouting at another man during a screening of Ghostbusters in Toronto, Canada, viewers were pretty annoyed.
But all was not what it seemed.
In a Facebook post that has since gone viral, moviegoer Momo Hatsa describes the scene in the theater when a man began telling another man to “move over.”
“He said it again and again and again, each time a bit louder and more aggressively. Everyone in the theater was getting agitated, with a few people asking him to keep quiet,” she wrote.
“After a few moments of silence, this man stood over whoever it was he was speaking to (another man in the row in front of him) and yelled at his fullest volume, ‘I SAID MOVE OVER!’ (sic),” she continued. At this point, she writes that a woman behind her, who had brought her young son to see the movie, had had enough, and yelled, “BE QUIET!”
It was then that the man revealed why he wouldn’t back down.
“I WILL NOT. HE IS HARASSING HER (sic),” he said, according to Hatsa’s post.
Everything changed after that.
“And it got very quiet. And the standing man waited until the man in the row in front of him got up and moved to another seat. And the standing man checked on the woman being harassed and finally sat down, this time behind her to make sure she wasn’t bothered again. And the mother sat down. And we all settled down. And we were all surprised that what we thought was hypermasculinity (sic) rearing its ugly head was actually feminism raising its voice,” she wrote.
According to APlus, the man who stood up for the woman is named Dale Wells.
He told APlus that he was watching the movie when he heard the other man “talking incoherently to the screen.” Wells told him to be quiet, but later on, he started talking to the woman two seats away from him.
“She tried to discourage him. Then he moved over and sat beside her. She was firm in asking him to move but he wouldn’t. After her second request, I added my voice,” Wells said.
He also notes that he felt it was his duty to speak up.
“There is a moment in the movie where they talk about ‘If you see something, say something.’ We’re watching this empowering movie and someone is being harassed,” he said.
He goes on to note that the audience didn’t like the method he used, but for him it was a “worthwhile tradeoff.”
“It didn’t seem like anyone else saw anything. I wasn’t on the aisle to go get security. In hindsight, I should have yelled for security but I was focused on protecting the woman,” he added.
And everyone was glad he did. Hatsa writes that almost everyone stayed after the movie in order to thank Wells.
“A young girl who couldn’t have been more than 16 ran over to him and said, ‘Thank you for being wonderful.’ And hugged him,” she writes.
It just goes to show you that sometimes things are not what they seem. If more people in the world were like Wells, perhaps the world would be a better place.
