Don’t Be That Guy: Sage Advice From A Urinal in Canada

TRIGGER WARNING: This post includes rape statistics and photos of potential sexual assault situations.

Our society creates images of typical rapists as sociopathic gang members or mentally unstable predators lurking in urban back alleys by night. Images in the media rarely acknowledge our friends, boyfriends, friends of friends, or acquaintances as potential rapists, even though seventy-five per cent of rapes are committed by someone already known to the victim. We hardly ever jump to the conclusion that a rapist could just be “that guy” pouring himself another drink at a party.

That guy. He probably would mean well, but society has conditioned him to think that buying a cute girl a drink, or maybe a few, somehow automatically entitles him to sex. Perhaps he even thinks that an already drunk girl is asking for it by default, regardless of any problematic (arguably prostitution-like) if-he-gives-her-alcohol-she-must-give-him-sex social norm.

He ignores that she is too drunk to give consent. He ignores the fact that sex without consent is, in fact, rape. SAVE (Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton) recently launched a print, transportation, and washroom advertising campaign with the tagline, “Don’t Be That Guy.” Targeted at men between the ages of 18 and 24, one of the posters features a girl drunkenly passed out on a couch with the words, “Just because she isn’t saying no doesn’t mean she is saying yes.” Another version shows a guy helping an obviously drunk girl home with the caption, “Just because you helped her home doesn’t mean you can help yourself.” Some more blatant posters are even strategically placed in men’s washrooms around Edmonton’s bar district reading, “Just because she’s drunk doesn’t mean she wants to f***.”

These particular posters are only slated to run through the end of January, but the campaign has a five-year plan where it plans to release a variety of different advertisements around Edmonton.The campaign itself is a collaboration of SAVE, a local organization that provides educational materials and resources for survivors, and the Edmonton Police Service. It was created in response to frightening statistics from a recent study of 18 – 25 year old men in the United Kingdom –48% of whom did not consider sex rape if the woman did not know what was going on, 46% who did not consider it rape if she changed her mind during the act, and 25% who did not consider it rape if she said no from the start, and local statistics that showed that 50% of sexual assault incidents reported in Edmonton during 2009 involved alcohol.

The statistics don’t end here. According to a 2001 survey, 21% of the students at the University of Albert reported having experienced at least one unwanted sexual encounter in their lifetime. Someone is raped every two minutes in the United States. Approximately 73% of rape victims know their assailants, yet despite all of this, only 6% of rapists will ever spend a day in jail. Perhaps most shocking of all is that these numbers come from reported rapes –it is estimated that 60% of all rapes go unreported.

“Don’t Be That Guy” is revolutionary where most past rape awareness campaigns have failed: it places the blame on the perpetrator, not the victim. Historically, rape awareness campaigns focus on warning women not to walk home alone late at night, or to carry pepper spray on her keychain. They tend to justify actual rapes with lengthy explanations about a woman walking alone in a bad part of town or letting a drug be slipped into her drink while she wasn’t looking.

According to these campaigns, rape is an inevitable byproduct of our cruel world that can only be partially fought through self-defense classes and avoiding a laundry list of potential rape scenarios. In other words, if a woman actually gets raped she somehow failed this system.

Instead of telling women how to cope with the cruel world that they live in, and blaming them if they fail, “Don’t Be That Guy” actually attempts to change this cruel world. It reframes rape as both a women’s and a men’s issue, possibly saving just as many men from committing a crime they will later regret as it saves women from being victims. It explicitly relays the message that rape does not happen because a woman was dressed a certain way or was behaving a certain way, but because a man took advantage of her. Implicitly, it lets women know that rape is never their fault.

One could probably find ways to criticize the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign posters. Perhaps the negative tone of the slogans could make men feel unnecessarily criticized, thus causing more feelings of indignation and denial than actual prevention. Perhaps some could find the campaign inappropriately blunt and catchy for such a somber subject. Then again, is it necessary to be grave and sophisticated when an ad is targeting college-aged men while they are barhopping? If 25% of men really think that it is not actually rape if a woman says no from the start, isn’t the least we can do to blatantly let them know otherwise from the urinal stall?

Anna Lekas Miller has lived between Paris, New York City, and California over the past year, but remains an advocate of global justice, revolution, and really cool socks across borders.

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