Ugh, that was sucktastic. I'm sorry you had to endure it, but I guess I'm not (retrospectively) surprised. Fortunately, nobody was actually harmed, though y'all had to endure plenty of annoyances and a significant amount of fear.

Though it does seem that some of the trouble you had was outright illegal and grounds for police action, and you might have been able to use that. (If I understand correctly, grabbing someone without their permission is assault in Massachusetts law.) Unfortunately, it seems as if these jerks had a reasonably good understanding of what they could be run in for and mostly avoided it.

That being said, you seem to have been in a position where you got to experience some of the worst of the male population of the area. Not surprisingly, the were not well-intentioned and they attempted to satisfy two strong male drives that they probably had precious little other opportunity for: dominance and lust. You frame it well into the political issues that any mass behavior is, but don't assume that they were being obnoxious in service to some political agenda, they were just trying to get a little of what they wanted.

I suppose if you were in a richer town, it might be willing to allocate police effort to drive these people away, lock them up, or perhaps stand guard.