[LINK] "Jian Ghomeshi scandal becoming a tipping point for anger over mistreatment of women"

[rfmcdonald]

Sarah Boesveld's National Post article about the wider Canadian import of the Ghomeshi affair is worth reading.

The Jian Ghomeshi scandal is fast becoming what pundits call “a moment,” a classic tipping point for anger around the treatment of women that has been on a slow boil for the better part of a year and is now bubbling over.

Most recently, the subject was a video documenting 10 hours of a woman walking the streets of New York and being catcalled left and right — it shocked many men, who had no idea that still went on. There’s also GamerGate, a tense and still very live discussion about sexism in the video game industry. Earlier this year, there was widespread horror when footage surfaced of NFL player Ray Rice punching his girlfriend unconscious in an elevator, and he was merely suspended from the Baltimore Ravens.

And all this happened only a year after two high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio, were convicted of raping a drunken 16-year-old girl, and Nova Scotia teenager Rehtaeh Parsons died by suicide after an alleged sexual assault at a party, where she was drunk.

At the heart all this is a culture, sometimes called “rape culture,” in which these things happen even within view of bystanders — including major institutions like the CBC — and women themselves are often blamed for sexual assault. At the very least issues of consent and culpability are deeply confusing.

Amanda Dale, executive director of the Barbara Schlifer Commemorative Clinic for women who’ve experienced violence, calls the Ghomeshi case “an opening.”