The Genii Forum

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/1 ... ut-consent

Voronin's act is described by an audience member in a complaint about unwanted sexual advances / audience involvement:

"At one point during the show, the Maître d’ came up behind me and stuffed a handkerchief down the front of my dress, between my cleavage, with a fork. He then fed me some of my soup, picked the fork back up, ran the tined of the fork across the side of my breast, and then pulled the handkerchief out of my cleavage, revealing a bra attached to the handkerchief (I had not felt the need to wear a bra with the cocktail dress I had on). I love slight of hand magic, but this made me feel intensely uncomfortable. I have had my bra pulled off in many very non-consensual circumstances in my past ...

... Near the end of the show, he approached me again, and pressed his pelvis to my back, where he had a vibrator on under his pants. I actually said to him 'That is very disturbing', but he was already gone. Again, I was taken back to other memories of having men press their cocks to me in non-consensual ways, where I felt frozen by fear to do anything."

Has this sort of tripe ever been considered acceptable?

Right or wrongly it probably has, however there is no place for this type of behaviour at any time.

Perhaps this is the topic that should be exercising the minds of the Ennobling Magic experts.

Andrew

Michael Finney was the subject of some similar complaints a couple of years ago, but that tempest passed on without any long-term repercussions (as far as I know). If that same show and spectator happened in Dec 2017, I'm not sure it would have turned out the same way.

The Maître d’ was presented as a silent, creepy East German man. He took several women from the audience and danced uncomfortably with them, leaning far into them, pretending he was trying to get a kiss.

This reminds me of an open air performance seen in Palo Alto, CA about 15-20 years ago. City hired a "magician" and fire eater. The idiot got a little kid from the audience, said he was going to teach him to be a fire eater, and slowly lowered a burning torch towards the kids upturned face, as the kid literally bent over backward to get further away from it.

There is far too much of that kind of thing and there always has been. Magic often has a bad name and the ironic thing is that "magicians" are the ones who make it so.