In the festival’s aftermath, stories of sexual assault and harassment that took place at Woodstock ’99 abounded in the media. But many other women weren’t so fortunate. Stephanie Frizzel ultimately emerged from Woodstock ’99 relatively unscathed. ![]() I’m gonna stick with safety in numbers.’ And anything outside of that was definitely something I was trying to avoid at all costs.” “I would say I was definitely pretty street smart and my Spidey sense was tingling. “I definitely, being from Brooklyn, just in general, was not going anywhere near that kind of riffraff,” she says. “It totally set the tone at that point, where we were like, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to be quite as fun-loving as we anticipated.’”įor much of the weekend, Frizzel and her female friends didn’t dare venture outside of their tents. “We basically set up our tent and kind of assessed the area right away, just looking around to see who else was around to make sure we felt safe, from the entry, right from the very beginning,” she says. We were like, ‘Oh, this is not what we expected.’ It was definitely a frat type of vibe.” -Festivalgoer Stephanie Frizzel But no man can really know what it’s like to be a woman in this situation, in an environment where you know that anything can happen to you at any moment … and nobody is going to stop it.Īt Woodstock ’99, the sexually aggressive men immediately put Frizzel into a defensive posture. He taught her how to look out for herself. “We were like, ‘Oh, this is not what we expected.’ It was definitely a frat type of vibe.”įrizzel prided herself on having street smarts. “Before we even got to where we were going to be camping, there were other campsites set up with guys shouting like, you know, ‘Show us your tits,’ and all kinds-I mean, we immediately were on edge,” she says. But I also was really just kind of looking to have a good time.”īut when Frizzel and her friends arrived at Griffiss Air Force Base, they quickly discovered that Woodstock ’99 was anything but peace and love-especially for the women in their crew. “I obviously was hoping that the vibe was going to be peaceful and then possibly occasionally political. “I kind of had expectations that it would be a little bit like the original,” she says. The festival was a chance to finally have her own Woodstock experience. She had grown up listening to her parents’ Woodstock movie soundtrack and even watched the documentary. When the festival was announced, Frizzel thought it would be the ultimate party. “It just seemed like a huge stretch to the rest of us that anybody would be comfortable to do that. “We were all kind of like, ‘You’re crazy for going off on your own,’” she says. Frizzel and her female friends, however, weren’t so liberated. For them, the myth about gathering together with strangers and feeling a spirit of oneness was very much within reach. As the festival unfolded, the men in her group felt free to explore the grounds in search of an archetypal Woodstock experience. She camped that weekend with a group of friends that included men and women. I think he was just high.”įrizzel is a Brooklyn native who was 20 years old when she attended Woodstock ’99. “I’m not sure if it’s true, but he claimed he met Wavy Gravy. “I definitely remember one of my other friends, this regular white guy, went off on his own,” says attendee Stephanie Frizzel. However, there is one variable that had an outsized effect on whether you felt safe at the festival: gender. It’s impossible to account for all of the dozens of factors that can shape an individual’s experience at an event like this. We’ve outlined many of the festival’s problems.īut during my reporting, I also encountered people who had a great time at Woodstock ’99. When it comes to a mass event like Woodstock ’99, which was attended by around 200,000 people, you have to account for around 200,000 different points of view. Subscribe here and check back each Tuesday through August 27 for new episodes. In this episode, we look at the sexual assaults and violence against women that happened at the festival.īelow is an excerpt from the sixth episode of Break Stuff. We’ve explored who’s to blame (or not to blame ) for what happened, how the seeds were planted for chaos, and the myth of the original Woodstock in 1969. But Woodstock ’99 revealed some hard truths behind the myths of the 1960s and the danger that nostalgia can engender.īreak Stuff, an eight-part documentary podcast series available exclusively on Luminary, investigates what went wrong at Woodstock ’99 and the legacy of the event as host Steven Hyden interviews promoters, attendees, journalists, and musicians. Incredibly, this was the third iteration of Woodstock, a festival originally known for peace, love, and hippie idealism. ![]() There were riots, looting, and numerous assaults, all set to a soundtrack of the era’s most aggressive rock bands. In 1999, a music festival in upstate New York became a social experiment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |