The World Is Listening

The strange, ominous and creepy case before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal is reverberating around the world. This is the case of the person, variously identified on the Internet as Jonathan or Jessica Yaniv, who has mounted a campaign to force unwilling cosmeticians to do a “Brazilian Wax” on their still very present testicles and penis. Yaniv has filed complaints against them all.

As I wrote last week, these are all women, some immigrants, and on the economic and cultural margins — 16 in total, according to most accounts. At least one, originally from Brazil, has had to close her small business. All have been under intense duress, and the vexatious complainant is notably hostile to immigrants (social media posts by Yaniv, then identifying as Jonathan, are remarkably insulting to newcomers to Canada). Some have paid Yaniv $2,500 dollars to lay off, while others equipped themselves with lawyers, at their own expense, had the complaints dropped.

It is a very disturbing case — and for more reasons than the harassment of these women. It raises questions not only about the human rights tribunal but about many of the main organs of Canadian journalism.

The latter first: The Times of London has a story on it, a popular Irish radio show talked to Yaniv (angry about the questions, Yaniv hung up, but only after telling the host she was capable of getting pregnant). A far continent away, The Australian gives a full account of the story. Hundreds of other serious and widely followed news sites and blogs in Canada, the U.S., and abroad have done the same.

This is not a local story. And when tweet-master Ricky Gervais fired off this projectile of compressed lucidity, the matter had the Twitter equivalent of an Apollo liftoff: “It is a woman’s right to say ‘I don’t wax testicles. On a man or a woman.’ End of discussion. No sexism. No homophobia. No transphobia.” The world is listening to this squalid tale.

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