Women’s advocates appalled over Boys Lunch Out; event to be discontinued

A fundraiser with scantily clad women that has been held annually for 35 years is being discontinued at a time of heightened awareness around gender-based violence and sexual harassment.

The Saskatoon chapter of the service organization Canadian Progress Club says on its website it will no longer hold its Boys Lunch Out event.

“The Progress Club Saskatoon Downtown recognizes the Boys Lunch Out has raised a mixed reaction in the community, with many people strongly against it,” the website said Thursday.

“This recent attention has served to highlight that some events no longer have a place in today’s society.”

A CBC reporter shot a short video last Friday at the invitationonly event that showed women in G-strings gyrating on raised walkways.

The Progress Club said earlier this week that the event had been “grossly misrepresented,” but added it would review all future fundraisers.

The controversy comes as sexual assault and harassment allegations against some of the most powerful men in Hollywood, politics and the media have flooded online social networks. Many have spoken out using the hashtag #metoo.

It also coincides with the United Nations 16 Days of Activism Against Gender- Based Violence and Wednesday’s 28th anniversary of a gunman killing 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.

“The fact that this event was even timed in conjunction of all of that was just unreal to us,” said Caval Olson-lepage, president of the Business and Professional Women of Saskatoon, said Thursday.

Olson-lepage said she doesn’t know what the experience was like for the women who took part in Boys Lunch Out.

“Did they feel like they could say no if something uncomfortable happened to them?” OlsonLepage asked.

The Progress Club did not respond to interview requests.

Olson-lepage said she doubts Boys Lunch Out would have caught national attention had it taken place before sexual assault accusations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein came to light this fall.

“Definitely that has had an impact. People are really looking at this more closely than just brushing it off as they would have in the past.”

Marie Lovrod, program chair for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, said the event was out of step with the times.

“I was certainly taken aback,” she said. “It’s ironic in the extreme.”