#EndViolenceAgainstWomen
This week’s blog prompt is not relevant to the Simpsons 😔. I decided to write about a situation that happened early on this week at a Toronto bar close to my place, one that I used to go to last semester. The bar is called Locals Only and is located on King Street West.
This week a fellow classmate of mine went to visit the bar and was interrupted by a strange sign that they had posted on their wall. The sign read: “No means yes, and yes means a**.” When she asked the bartender what the “A**” stood for he hesitated and then said “anal.” She was clearly disappointed by her interaction at Locals Only because when she went home the next day, she decided to do something about it. She posted the nasty picture of the sign on an online platform on Facebook called Bunz Helping Zone where she immediately received a response from the community.
Now, this is where the story taps into our class course material and this week’s blog prompt. Planned content can create tremendous change and respectfully, bring a community that believes in the same issues together. Katii’s post has caused quite the commotion (and I’m happy it has). We’ve discussed how content shared online can influence positive actions to be taken across the internet. In this case, multiple other platforms heard Katii’s Kri.
Rape jokes are not okay.
Suddenly, news reporters were on her case, taking the post head on and discussing how it’s derogatory statement is never okay!
This type of publicity is an incredible aspect to influencing movements. For one, it reaches a vast range of the population. This means that the story (stressing the importance that these types of displays of public performance are incredibly WRONG) was able to travel to different cities even.
Why is free publicity good?
For one, it allows your organization, business, cause, story, etc., to stand out in a crowd, to build new relationships with prospective clients, to connect within your community, to leverage the credibility of your messages, and plenty more.
(i MEAN EVEN THE hAMILTON sPECTATOR COVERED THE STORY…)
For Katii, the message is simple. She’s merely trying to spread the importance of the awareness of this derogatory behavior. In fact, she’s obtained so much publicity that organizations are eager to team up with her to help educate other bars on the importance of creating a safe environment that doesn’t promote messages about rape culture.
Moving on, Locals Only had no choice but to apologize for the incident and to terminate the employee who created the diabolical sign. This was a necessary action that they had to take to save their bar’s reputation. Locals is even taking the initiative to pair up with the Sexual Assault Action Coalition on passing a bill that will increase sexual assault training in local bars.
In my opinion, I think this is a necessary approach in the industry. Having dealt with sexual harassment on multiple occasions I can’t begin to stress how happy I am that people are taking this seriously.
Conclusively, Locals Only I hope you guys are on-board with this and actually dedicated to this project because it needs all of the support that it can get. I’m only skeptical because this isn’t the first time we’ve run into the sexual assault issue. I mean, take the College Bar incident that occurred just last year (and, the many more that have not been reported or haven’t been mentioned in this post).
But hey, at least the people are still passionate about this. What’s the next step? Can we all just get on board to educate employees on Sexual Assault Training?
