Sex is everywhere—selling everything from cars and clothes, to ideals and activism. But it’s all mixed messages, and the conversations between the sex we’re sold and our own sexualities are hard to hear.
ConsentFest wants to turn up the volume, using feminist rock star Jaclyn Friedman. Her lecture at Dalhousie tonight launches the event.
Friedman’s Yes Means Yes (edited with Jessica Valenti) has made her into something of a feminist heroine. The book was one of Publishers Weekly’s Top 100 Books of 2009 and was named #11 on Ms. Magazine’s Top 100 Feminist Nonfiction of All Time list. She’s been published in outlets including The Washington Post, Jezebel, The Nation, Bitch, The Huffington Post, The American Prospect, AlterNet, Feministing.com, and CNN.
The free festival, presented by Avalon Sexual Assault Centre, Dalhousie Women’s Centre, St. Mary’s Women’s Centre and Venus Envy, is a week-long look at sexuality and consent that aims to show how adding voices changes both the language used and the conversation as whole.
But the festival would never have been born if SlutWalk hadn’t wandered into “corset-and-fishnets craziness,” says Shannon Hardy.
“I was disappointed in how I saw (the SlutWalk movement) evolve,” says Hardy, Education and Workshop Co-ordinator at Venus Envy, and founder of Halifax’s ConsentFest.
Originating in Saskatoon, ConsentFest was first organized in conjunction with the city’s SlutWalk as an educational component to the protest that challenged the blaming culture in discussions of sexual violence. Hardy got the rights to hold ConsentFest here.
“(SlutWalk) started as a really cool movement where women were showing up in all kinds of dress. People in burqas and parkas really showing that dress has little to do with whether you’re assaulted or not,” she recalls, “The message got lost the bigger it got.”
SlutWalks weren’t good at including men, either.
“If you don’t have men in the conversation then nothing is going to change – they make up the other half of our world,” she says. Hardy hopes ConsentFest sparks new dialogue.
“Consent isn’t something that’s often taught or talked about. How can women be the only ones discussing consent?
Festival organizers are excited to have Friedman on hand to contribute to the conversation.
“She’s not speaking in jargon that’s only exclusive to feminists or even to people with university degrees," says Ellen Taylor, the Dal Women’s Centre’s campaign co-ordinator. "She really talks at a personal level with people and I like that about her. I feel like she reaches young women as a result.”
“The number one thing I’ve heard is I wish I had this (book) when I was younger, I wish I had it sooner. And that makes me sad, but it also really makes me happy that it’s having such an impact,” says Friedman. “It’s been really, really gratifying to see it received in the way I had really hoped it would be.”
Friedman believes it’s important that young women are exposed to the message in her book, a message echoed in the content of the festival.
“The real potential in making sure that young women get access to it is that they would be able to avoid a lot of the things we’ve had to struggle through,” she says, “that they would be better equipped to deal with the things they’re about to have to struggle with.”
She also appreciates the way the festival looks forward while paying respect to the past.
“I’m super excited about ConsentFest. I just love the idea of a whole week of activities—not just at a university—a whole community can participate in this conversation, it’s so exciting,” says Friedman, “Obviously it’s the same week as December 6th [the anniversary of the 1989 slaying of 14 women at École Polytechnique in Montreal] and all the remembrance activities, but I love how in the middle of the grief and anger of those activities we can also talk about what we want to move toward as well as what we’re against.”
For Friedman, that future is one where women are the focus of their own lives.
“I want a future where women and girls get to be the subject of their own sexuality, not the object of somebody else’s. That we are the main characters in our own play, not props in somebody else’s—which is how women’s sexuality is treated now,” she says. “Whatever the outside attitudes about sexuality it’s always about somebody’s agenda for us, and I want a world where we can have our own.”
