Two events hosted on Jan. 29 commemorated the 10th consecutive year of Consent Tea, the Wellness Centre’s annual consent education program.
The grand finale to this year’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month, the program consisted of a sexual violence panel discussion and a keynote speech. Special guest Meghan Gardiner, a Vancouver-based actor, writer, and activist, headlined the event, sitting on the panel and giving a thirty-minute talk to the audience later that evening.
Consent Tea began as the brainchild of TRU Senior Wellness Coordinator Chelsea Corsi, as she observed and attempted to navigate the recurring issues of sexual health, violence and consent that come up on university campuses.
The concept arose from the viral Tea and Consent video, which used tea as an analogy for sex while discussing consent. “If you’re struggling with consent, just imagine instead of initiating sex you’re making them a cup of tea,” the clip goes. “If you can understand how completely ludicrous it is to force people to have tea when they don’t want tea, how hard is it to understand when it comes to sex?”
Corsi found this a compelling analogy and developed the Consent Tea Toolkit with former colleague Meaghan Hagerty. Since then, Consent Tea has grown into an annual event that promotes sexual health, educates on consent, and offers support and community to its attendees. In the decade since its inception, Consent Tea has garnered more than a thousand participants.
The first of two anniversary events, the Consent Tea Panel and Dialogue, was held from 11:45 a.m. to 1:20 p.m. at the British Columbia Centre (HOL 190).
The panellists present were Indigenous rights activist Viola Thomas, anti-violence advocate Alix Dolson, consent mentor Sabreet Ghumman, student and inclusive sexual health advocate Monty Armstrong and Gardiner herself. They addressed the audience with their experiences, opinions and advice around issues of sexual violence, consent, and both gendered and racialised oppression.
Gardiner’s personal experience with sexual violence has shaped both her art and activism. Her one-woman show, Dissolve, has been performed hundreds of times across the continent since 2003 and remains on tour to this day, though Gardiner herself retired from the play in 2016. She has received several accolades for her work as an artist and activist. She has pushed this activism even further over the years with more plays, appearances and talks across Canada.
At 7 p.m. in the Clock Tower’s Alumni Theatre, Gardiner drew a crowd of students, faculty, and community members to listen to her keynote speech, The Power of Sharing Your Story.
“In all iterations [of the word resistence], we resist in order to avoid or prevent long-term pain to ourselves and others,” Gardiner said. “But there’s short-term pain and huge risk in the process of doing so.”
Gardiner recalls her experience of assault and the struggle with turning it into a play that she then performed for thousands of people across the globe. “The other side of resistance is strength,” she said. “If there’s no force on the other side, there’s nothing to resist. So, resistance makes us stronger. Fighting for something makes us stronger.”
Though Gardiner had achieved notable success with the play, it took her two years to admit that the experiences in it were hers. This drew a new wave of interest in the play and her life, and opportunities abounded for her career, activism and personal healing journey.
She discussed the difficult expectations often levied on women who try to speak out about their experiences with sexual assault. “I think that women face this pressure [to be okay] constantly,” Gardiner said. “Expressing anger is not an emotion that is seen as powerful in women. So while I was publicly okay, I was privately angry.”
“An act of resistance feels strong,” she continued. “It feels angry. And I love that.”
Gardiner fears that people—particularly survivors—may feel pressured to hide or minimize their feelings to project strength. “There’s a huge desire to be a part of the resistance, but there is a huge resistance to feeling something,” she said. “To going deep, to getting uncomfortable. I firmly believe I am okay today because I excavated. It became part of my resistance training regime. I stopped resisting my feelings and I started resisting the system that told me it was my fault.”
To close off her speech, Gardiner performed the expanded version of the final monologue from Dissolve for the audience.
“The show has been running for 23 years and I’ve never uttered the final monologue until tonight,” she told the room. “I feel strong enough to do so because of all my resistance training.”
To learn more about the Wellness Centre and its resources, find them on their website.