Editor, the Gauntlet,
As someone over 50 years of age and not connected at all to the university, I don’t understand why everyone is – once again – shooting the messenger. In the original Calgary Herald story, University of Calgary’s Rebecca Sullivan, in the Faculty of Communication and Culture, was quoted as saying the Gauntlet had a responsibility to the community. “They [the Gauntlet] are refusing to take a responsible, mature position on these issues.”
“It is gratuitous, graphic and entirely unacceptable,” said Roman Cooney, Vice-President External Relations. “They have offended many people on campus.”
Wait a moment. Why the double standards? Why do they expect the Gauntlet writers to be more mature and responsible than anyone else in the case at hand? Wasn’t it the Students’ Union who felt it was responsible and mature to recruit exotic dancers to promote Sexual Awareness Week? Where is the public outcry about such a juvenile decision, spending SU fees and possibly taxpayer’s money on strippers? What are U of C administrators doing about that?
And the poor student/stripper, who feels so marginalized and humiliated, that she can’t even face campus anymore. Why did she not think about the consequences when she accepted to work in the nude on her own university’s campus? Can anyone after last year’s events on the “Red Mile” reasonably expect not to be photographed (after all, camera phones are everywhere). And now, after most of the Gauntlet’s 15,000 [sic] copies containing “the picture” had been stolen or censored thus not allowing her picture to be seen by too many people, she is posing freely for the Herald, thereby distributing her picture all over town. Now that smells fishy.