One weird thing about this tweet—which I've now seen a bunch of times in my timeline. The waitress called it a sexual assault. In the article.
That Ted Kennedy article, BTW, tells you a lot that's relevant right now about the culture of the eighties, and not just in what it describes but also in the way the article itself is written.
The article, published in 1990, is aggressively critical of Kennedy's sexual misconduct, but it makes no attempt to distinguish between consensual and nonconsensual acts. It's all just "boorishness."
All of which is to say that (1) casual sexual assault was much more cuturally accepted in the 1980s than it is today, and (2) women often described it as sexual assault even when male perpetrators and observers didn't.
