touching != assault (protip: it's just touching; bashing their fist into your face, for example, would be assault by a more common sense person's definition; but touching is just touching, regardless of what some arbitrary legal verbage says somewhere; a document could say "a horse is a squid" but if that horse doesn't look or act anything at all like a squid then a reasonable person would say it's not a squid, it's a fucking horse)
The problem is that some folks (both male and female) don't always perceive things the same way. Indeed, when someone (anyone, whether male or female) is "in the mood" they often interpret events and other people much differently than if they aren't. Add alcohol, add social inexperience, and these differences can magnify or become more frequent.
Fair enough. It's battery. Still a crime in the US. (Also UK. Also probably many other places.)
You've used the word "sexual" here. Using your word we see that some law would have been broken if this happened in England and Wales.
You've tried to say say that a touch without permission is not assault. Protip: in England and Wales you don't need to make physical contact for it to be assault. But, if you do make physical contact, and the contact is sexual, and you don't have permission for that contact, and there's no reasonable expectation that you'd have permission, then it's sexual assault.
Citing laws is always a weak tactic when trying to make an argument about whether a certain thing is right or wrong. All laws are just arbitrary strings of words on paper. If you seriously want to go deep on the ethics or appropriateness of any human phenomenon you really really don't want to fallback to citing laws. Because for every good/smart/reasonable law you can cite, we can find a dozen others which any reasonable person would say are unethical, ludicrous, ignorant or anachronistic. A bit like all the high and mighty language espoused by the US founders about how all men are created equal, about truth, justice, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, etc. Unless you were a woman, black, a slave, or not a land-owner. Or lived in Hawaii. Or Mexico. Or the Phillipines. Or were a Native American. A laborer in a union. A homosexual, etc. So the real question, I hope, that we should always be focused on is, not whether something is "merely" legal or illegal -- per some arbitrary jurisdiction's legal framework, at some arbitrary moment in time -- but rather on whether a reasonable, educated, experienced, intelligent, wise adult human would think about it, today, at this moment, giving objective criteria and similar goals, and with all relevant details and particulars taken into account, etc. If I'm arguing with somebody on the Internet about whether a horse is actually and truly a sea squid or not, you can't argue against me by saying, "This legal document here in France clearly says that a horse is a squid!". Because if that horse does not look or act in my eyes anything like a squid, and vice versa, then I'm going to be standing on much stronger ground when I say, "A horse is a horse, not a squid. They are nothing like each other. One runs around on the ground, has four legs, eats grass, etc. The other has tentacles, is squishy, swims around under the sea, and likes Justin Bieber music." And my case is stronger. The "b-b-b-but it says in this book here that a horse is a squid!" carries little weight, or rather, it should carry little weight when we're trying to have a deeper discussion, a more objective discussion. Whether thing A is more like B, or more like C.
Related: anal sex is a crime in many jurisdictions. Having sex outside of marriage is a crime -- unless you're a man -- in some jurisdictions. If a 17 year old and a 21 year old both have sex together, mutually consensually there are, I'm sure, some legal jurisdictions that claim that the 17 year old cannot give consent and therefore it was non-consensual, and therefore it was a kind of rape, and therefore that 21 year old will now have very bad legal and physical things happen to him/her, including a felony record, prison time, community ostracization, etc. Isn't that paradoxical and a travesty? "A horse is a squid." Unless in actual reality, it is not. Reality > laws.
hitting on != harassment
touching != assault (protip: it's just touching; bashing their fist into your face, for example, would be assault by a more common sense person's definition; but touching is just touching, regardless of what some arbitrary legal verbage says somewhere; a document could say "a horse is a squid" but if that horse doesn't look or act anything at all like a squid then a reasonable person would say it's not a squid, it's a fucking horse)
The problem is that some folks (both male and female) don't always perceive things the same way. Indeed, when someone (anyone, whether male or female) is "in the mood" they often interpret events and other people much differently than if they aren't. Add alcohol, add social inexperience, and these differences can magnify or become more frequent.