Should nightlife be “safe”?
CBC has a piece here on making nightlife safer by having security enforce polite behaviour on dance floors in clubs.
Really? When you go out, you’re putting yourself out there. You’re taking chances. A dance club is not a daycare. This reminds me of the thing about Osheaga and the woman who blamed security because someone may have put something in her drink. How could security have watched over every detail of adult human behaviour, to the extent of intervening when someone left a drink untended?
If you go out and take chances to meet people in a sexually charged setting, you need to accept responsibility for yourself. You’re a grown-up now, you can’t expect the grown-ups to step in whenever anything upsetting happens. But some people do seem to think this is normal and desirable.
steph 14:08 on 2019-03-30 Permalink
Training security to recognize predatory behavior is a great initiative.
Blork 15:46 on 2019-03-30 Permalink
@steph, that is a great initiative, but it doesn’t mean you just hand over all responsibility for your safety to the security people when you go out.
The problem is (in my opinion) that so many young people were brought up in hyper-secure environments with helicopter parents hovering so closely for so long that the children never learned how to take responsibility for themselves, or even how to take risks. This sounds like the ranting of an old fart but it’s well documented.
qatzelok 17:53 on 2019-03-30 Permalink
I agree with you here, Kate. This is dumb.
Nightlife is supposed to be dionysian – dark and mysterious.
If you want safe and controlled, go dancing at 2 in the afternoon to a brightly-lit space with lots of security cameras.
Hamza 13:40 on 2019-03-31 Permalink
if you’re a normal , boundary-respecting person then this shouldn’t really affect you, and in fact, may come in handy one night. for a lot of other folks, it can make an otherwise uncomfortable or unsafe experience that much safer. on the other hand, for a nightclub owner, nobody wants to have their business get a reputation for being ‘that sketchy place where i got sexually assaulted.’
jeather 18:03 on 2019-03-31 Permalink
By “enforce polite behaviour” I think you mean “stop people from harassing and assaulting others”.
Meezly 12:16 on 2019-04-01 Permalink
Back in my day, young women used to frequent gay night clubs because the men there would leave anything female the f*ck alone. I wonder why that was such a popular thing to do….? It may come as a shocker, but sometimes girls just wanna go to a night club to enjoy themselves and not have some slimeball grind up against them. The liberty to dance in a nightclub with your friends unharassed can be a rare and wonderful thing for a young woman. Take back the dance floors, I say!
Bill Binns 13:38 on 2019-04-01 Permalink
I don’t know. I agree on the Osheaga case completely but I think clubs are different. I remember an Ex girlfriend explaining to me why she stopped going to clubs even though she loved dancing. She said you could have 300/500 people in a club and one or two assholes that didn’t understand the word “no” or took “no” as a highly offensive personal insult would ruin it for everyone.
Getting rid of these types of guys is just good business. Douchebags will cause the girls to leave and when the girls leave the guys will leave as well.