The Canadian Press
SASKATOON–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 no longer will 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 yesterday.
“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 invitation-only 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 coincided 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,” Caval Olson-Lepage, president of the Business and Professional Women of Saskatoon, said yesterday.
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?” she 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,” she remarked.
“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.”
