A PSA for Ottawa Comiccon #OCC #consent

In the current conversation about consent and sexual harassment/assault, the subject of how people are dressed often comes up. Whether it's a police officer saying "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized" (the wotrds that launched Slutwalk) or questions about behaviour or reputation, victim-blaming contributes to a culture that enables rape.

At this weekend's Ottawa Comiccon, you can expect to see all kinds of attendees, men and women, getting their "cosplay" on as they dress up as their favourite comic book and sci-fi characters.

Via comicsthegathering.com

Unfortunately, some attendees see costumes as an excuse to harass and assault women at the Comicon. To address this issue, Hollaback! will be there, "to explore the issue of harassment in geek spaces and open up the floor to discussions on how we can make the community safer."

They are also participating in the "Cosplay =/= Consent" campaign by Geeks for CONsent, an organization started by Hollaback! Philly that encourages the organizers of comicons to adopt an anti-harassment policy and train their volunteers on how to appropriately deal with offences. They also encourage people share their stories of harassment, to hand out "Harasser Cards," learn how to be supportive bystanders, and to promote the Cosplay =/= Consent meme by posing with branded placards.

Have fun at the con, everyone. Just don't be a SuperAsshole.

Edgy restaurant branding, or terrible new euphemism for "vulva"?

Via skirtsteak.ca

The question is, of course, rhetorical. The web site's feature image shows a woman splayed over a butcher block, hanging an agonizingly vaginal steak by a meat hook. It's about the most awful advertising image I've seen in ages. (Apparently, it's also a billboard.)

The Ottawa Citizen reports that this upcoming suburban steakhouse is owned by the Rooney Group, who also own Tosh Steakhouse & Bar in Arnprior. The Rooney Group would not talk to reporters.

The work is featured in the portfolio of Ottawa's Light Switch Creative.

The restaurant's site is all about hiring right now. Here's how they describe themselves:

Skirt Steak is a steakhouse redefined. The sleek, contemporary atmosphere combined with unique menu selections and cuts of meat, leave guests with little to desire. [...] This sexy and edgy take on today’s steakhouse will keep you wanting more.

 Sexy, edgy... and almost literally dripping with misogyny.

Julie Lalonde, director of Hollaback! Ottawa, told the Citizen, “I rolled my eyes. How unoriginal, you’re using women as a metaphor for meat. If you can’t advertise your business without objectifying women then you don’t have a good business model. It turns people off and it’s offensive.”

Barry Nabatian, director of market research for Shore-Tanner & Associates, added that the location — close to the hockey mecca, strip malls and technology businesses of Kanata — may be right for this kind of approach, saying “a lot of the people are engineers who go out looking for those things.”

Doesn't really say much about the profession, does it?

The women as food cliché is already tiresome. This one is gruesome as well. The woman with the cleaver offers us her "skirt steak," freshly butchered. Are we supposed to want to eat it or...? I don't intend to find out.


Thanks to Paul for the tip.

On second thought, perhaps this "tap booty" ad conveys the wrong message...

Boston Magazine reports that the above ad, which appeared on Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority vehicles, has been voluntarily removed by the advertiser.

Hollaback! Boston, the local chapter of an international anti-street-harassement organization, had complained to MBTA about the ad's appropriateness, especially in public spaces where sexual assault and street harassment happen frequently.

“We get stories constantly about groping incidents on trains,” said Britni de la Cretaz, co-site director of HollaBack! Boston. “The cartoonist made it super sexualized, and the reason I felt that was inappropriate is because a lot of people riding the trains have their butts touched without consent all the time.”

Ironically, Ms. de la Cretaz points out, the "Tapbooty" ads were appearing at the same time as MBTA was running its own anti-harassment campaign:

“I know in general [the T tries] to be good about talking about harassment and how it is not OK," she added. "Maybe they just didn’t even realize that’s what [the advertisement] looked like.”

Interestingly, both Tapbooty and Hollaback are in the apps business — Tapbooty as a "social games for fun & rewards" one, and Hollaback! with a tool to report, analyze and protect oneself from street harassment incidents.

LEGO suffers another PR setback over street harassment sticker

Oh, LEGO... You used to be so cool. You sometimes still are. But too often now,  you're just so far behind the times it's sad.

This puffy sticker set was, according to AdFreak's David Gianatasio, released in 2010 by defunct licensee Creative Imagination. So they had a convenient player to throw under the bus.

But they still screwed it up. At first.

The whole PR nightmare began a little over a week ago when journalist and press freedom organizer Josh Stearns posted a photo of it on his Tumblr bog, Talking To Strangers:

I was stunned. Maybe it’s the fact that I just saw the team at Hollaback speak this month, or maybe it is that this is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, or maybe it is just that street harassment sucks. But chances are it was all three of these things that made me so mad to see a brand I love pushing this sort of thing. 

The Hollaback website notes that street harassment is the most prevalent form of sexual violence for both men and women in the United States. Internationally, they point out, “studies show that between 70-99% of women experience street harassment at some point during their lives.”

The issue was picked up by Slate and championed by the group Stop Street Harassment. That got LEGO's attention.

First, Charlotte Simonsen, Senior Director at LEGO’s corporate communications office, told Josh “To communicate the LEGO experience to children we typically use humor and we are sorry that you were unhappy with the way a minifigure was portrayed here.”

That's what we in the communication industry refer to as a "non-apology". So Josh wrote back and got the following reply from Andrea Ryder, the head of the LEGO Group’s Outbound Licensing Department, who said she was "truly sorry" that Josh "had a negative experience" with a LEGO product. She refered him to LEGO's brand values, including the line "Caring is about the desire to make a positive difference in the lives of children, for our partners, colleagues and the world we find ourselves in, and considering their perspective in everything we do." And she concluded, "we would not approve such a product again."

This is progress in brand responsibility, but it does not happen unless people are willing to speak up about the little things that reveal big problems in our society.


Laura Northrup from Consumerist wrote, "Street harassment isn’t the most pressing issue facing women today, but it can be a problem, and certainly isn’t appropriate for a children’s product."

I beg to differ on how serious this "one little picture" really is.

Just recently, I was having a conversation with someone from Hollaback about street harassment and rape culture. When you look at the big picture, the normalization of sexual harassment through bystander apathy is just one end of a continuum that ends with the dehumanization of women as targets of sexual violence.