A troubling trend
The most disheartening aspect of Bill Cosby planning a series of town hall meetings on how to avoid sexual assault accusations is that people will show up.
Cosby’s representatives announced the tour after a sexual assault case against the entertainer was declared a mistrial. At the meetings Cosby, who more than 50 women have accused of assault, will advise people, especially “young athletes” and “married men,” on how to avoid these charges.
As Jodi Omear, a spokesperson for U.S. anti-sexual violence organization RAINN, said in the New York Times, “It would be more useful if Mr. Cosby would spend time talking with people about how not to commit sexual assault in the first place.”
And yet a seminar that seemingly teaches people to toe a line they shouldn’t want to go near is neither new nor surprising.
The Internet is rife with seminars and resources meant to undermine respect for women’s autonomy and safety, whether through blatantly promoting sexual assaults or encouraging more subtle transgressions. But what’s even more troubling is the numbers they attract. Take two recent cases in Canada. Last week, the Star reported on two Toronto pickup artists who were secretly filming women for video tutorials on seduction. In at least one case, women were filmed in various states of undress without their consent. But because their faces had been obscured, police said the men couldn’t be prosecuted.
The previous week, a Calgary man was arrested on accounts of voyeurism and child pornography, accused of uploading photos and videos of women to the Twitter account “Canada Creep.” The account was active for a year and only veered into potentially illegal territory when it started posting up-skirt shots.
Both cases are examples of a perceived entitlement to women’s bodies. Legal or not, the photographing of a woman where the intent is to objectify and sexualize her for an unknown audience is a profoundly disrespectful and dehumanizing act.
Despite this, both endeavours had thousands of followers — the YouTube channel had 77,000, the Twitter account 17,000. That’s cause for real concern. Yet the solutions are far from obvious. One of the best methods to combating sexual assault, as the Canadian Women’s Foundation points out, is teaching consent, a measure provinces have adopted in their school curriculums, and one that’s needed, given a 2015 study by the organization that found although 96 per cent of Canadians believe all sexual activities should be consensual, only one in three understands what it means.
But fighting the kind of deep-rooted entitlement that creates the conditions for sexual assault needs to go far beyond the classroom. Everyone in society needs to speak out against not only the perpetrators of these acts, but the people who show up, whether to a town hall or a Twitter feed, to support them.
The Internet is rife with seminars and resources meant to undermine respect for women’s autonomy and safety