As of Sept. 11, Toronto police decided an online poster’s request that feminists be shot at the nearest UofT women’s studies classroom wasn’t a credible threat. Still, campus security was increased and the police investigation is ongoing. For those who aren’t familiar with the story: A user going by “Kill Feminists” posted this threat, and others, in BlogTO comment sections. CUPE 3902 with University of Toronto Education Workers called the threats beyond abhorrent, “As many of you will know from the Provost’s earlier message, public threats have been received at the University of Toronto. We can add the detail that these were gendered threats made specifically toward women and feminists.”

In further response, CUPE 3902 Women’s Caucus also held a demonstration against gendered violence—and in support of feminism. The event gathered over a thousand supporters on Facebook, and the physical turnout was impressive. After the demonstration the women’s caucus posted to the event page, Some of our favourite moments came from seeing folks who were nervous to come to the rally really get into chanting, dancing and shutting down the roads.” To the organizers, it was a chance to expand the conversation about gendered violence on campus, yet others have criticized the action, saying the threats was blown out of proportion.

Marcus Gee wrote an article for The Globe and Mail, published last Wednesday, headlined “Why U of T’s reaction to online threats was excessive—and unavoidable.” “It is sad to see a proud public institution devoted to the pursuit of reason let itself get so rattled by such a puny thing as an online posting, however vile,” Gee wrote, referencing  the increase in security, the demonstration held on September 14th, and the cancellation of some gender studies classes.

But is it really absurd that people were scared? That women and girls reported feeling unsafe? As Gee himself pointed out, this threat reminded people of the 1989  Montreal Massacre, in which Marc Lépine walked into a classroom at L’École Polytechnique and separated students into two groups: men and women. He declared his hated of women and began shooting the women. He then shot and stabbed women before shooting himself. A note he left behind listed the names of prominent Canadian feminists he intended to kill.

There is still the lingering idea in our society that online comments and discussion are entirely divorced from “real life.” Now that everyone and their grandmother is online in some way, online socializing is indeed real life. Maybe this specific poster did not mean to shoot anyone, but with the wide audience reached through the internet, it’s entirely plausible such comments could be the encouragement and validation for another Marc Lépine. The “big deal” made by police and campus security can send the message that women and girls are, in fact, people whose lives are worth something.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Tamara Dawit. Photo by Nabil Shash.

Tamara Dawit co-founded the 411 Initiative for Change, a non-profit public education program, to tackle the problem of community disengagement among young Canadians. Through 411 she produces and tours 90-minute school assemblies on social issues such as human rights, HIV/AIDS, and girls’ empowerment to encourage students to learn about and get active in their communities.

Unlike some adults who bemoan the apathy of “kids these days” and put the blame on trash TV, rap music, and social media, Dawit embraces pop culture as the spoonful of sugar to make her educational message go down. Her assemblies are a mash-up of TV talk show, newsy video clips, and musical performances featuring an impressive roster of artists and personalities (past tours have included the likes of K’naan, Eternia, Anita Majumdar, and Masia One). But Dawit’s successful formula is no fluke, but a method she says she learned “through trial and error.”

As one of only four black students at her Ottawa-area high school, Dawit, now 30, found herself bullied because of her Ethiopian heritage. “I just felt that people were really ignorant about me—who I was and where I was from,” she explains. She decided to put together a Black History Month assembly to set the record straight. That first year featured a local academic and an African drummer. The show bombed—so she went back to the drawing board.

The following year, she packaged her message in contemporary music and dance, and brought in younger speakers. Fourteen years and 400,000 students later, it’s still the basic model she says works best to create an engaging, safe space for students to learn some tough messages. In fact, Dawit was reminded of how powerful the experience remains for audiences just last month during the girls’ rights tour, when a young woman stood up and confessed to the group that she was thinking of killing herself because she could no longer deal with bullying from her classmates.

Admissions like this girl’s might not be the norm, but they’re far from rare and, most importantly, they spark dialogue and promote understanding between youth. In the end, Dawit says, “those are the things that lead to change.”

The Shameless editorial collective. Photo by Robin Hart Hiltz.

Flip through the pages of Shameless, a feminist magazine for teen girls, and you’ll find a debate about the value of corporate social responsibility titled “When Oppressive Corporations Do Progressive Things” alongside a first-person call for self-acceptance, “Shame, Beauty and Women of Colour.”

It’s not exactly Seventeen, and that’s the whole point — or at least it was. “When we started, we defined ourselves as what we aren’t,” explains Sheila Sampath, the magazine’s editorial director. “Now, we no longer have to do that. It’s more about what we are.”

Shameless was born out of a Ryerson University classroom seven years ago, founded by students Nicole Cohen and Melinda Mattos to redress the deficiencies in mainstream teen magazines. Sampath, who joined the team as art director early on, is now running the show — and providing day-to-day continuity within the all-volunteer team. The magazine’s 10 or so editors are joined by outreach volunteers, including those who run the Wire, a journalism training program for high-school girls.

“I wish I’d had Shameless when I was a teen,” says Sampath, pointing out that, refreshingly, it doesn’t assume its audience to be straight, white, and middle class.

Shameless is overtly activist, with a mission statement that reads, in part, “We understand that many of the obstacles faced by young women lie at the intersection of different forms of oppression, based on race, class, ability, immigration status, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

Its target demographic — vocal in its appreciation — usually finds the mag in school libraries, but Shameless is also available on newsstands and finds many fans in older age groups, too.

The indie title aims to provide a sense of community for those who are “different”—in viewpoint or ethnicity. “It really is validating to see yourself reflected in print,” Sampath says. “We’re trying to redefine what’s normal.”

G8 Leaders meet in L'Aquila, Italy, July 8, 2009.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced on January 26 that he was going to use Canada’s Group of Eight presidency to push for an annual G8 summit agenda focused on women’s and children’s health. Former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis said it best when he called the announcement an act of “chutzpah.”

First of all, Canada lacks credibility on this issue internationally, having consistently failed to meet our own humanitarian aid targets for decades. Secondly, and even more galling, we lack credibility in our own backyard. Consider that aboriginal infant mortality is markedly higher than the general population—Inuit infants are three times less likely to make it to their first birthdays. Among 17 peer countries, one study found, Canada is tied for second-last place when it comes to infant mortality (only the U.S. level is higher). Consider this is the same government that cut funding to the Court Challenges Program, the legal fund that since 1978 had supported legal challenges by minorities, including women. And the same government that heavily cut funding to Status of Women Canada, closing many of its offices across the country. The same government whose pay-equity legislation disappointingly maintains the status quo by encouraging public employers to consider “market demand” when determining wages (the same demand that caused the inequity in the first place). And this is the government that replaced a popular national childcare program with clumsy $100-per-month cash payments to parents. The resulting system isn’t just functionally inept, it’s ideologically offensive: it needlessly tops up budgets for families who can already afford quality childcare, and squeezes the ones who can’t. Since $100 won’t realistically cover the actual cost of quality childcare, the options become choosing not to work—the Ozzie-and-Harriet fantasy that social conservatives prefer, which is only available, of course, to two-parent families with one earning a sufficient living—or covering the difference between the government’s payment and the actual cost.

In other words, the prime minister’s call for the G8 to boost human rights and development for women and children around the world fits both dictionary definitions of chutzpah: unbelievable impertinence and worthy audacity. No one doubts that urgent action is needed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths among women and children worldwide, and if the G8 and G20 listen to the PM when they meet in Muskoka and Toronto in June—and more importantly, take real action that will save real lives— then it will be a great accomplishment, domestic criticisms aside.

But given the G8’s stunningly poor record on exactly these issues, there’s no reason to expect that’s how it will go. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development recently announced that the collective aid pledges the G8 nations made at their 2005 Gleneagles summit remain unmet five years later—by the outrageous margin of more than $20 billion. If the prime minister really wants to make a splash at this year’s summit, he should leave his platitudinous speech at home and show up with a signed cheque instead.

Erika Lust on the set of "Barcelona Sex Project," her "erotic experimental film" that exemplifies the style of the new crop of feminist-identified pornographers. Photo courtesy Lust Films.

The first time I remember thinking critically about pornography, I was 15. It was the early 1990s, and my friend and I were going through a stack of discarded magazines, undertaking the well-loved teenage art of collage. Between the Cosmos and National Geographics was this out-of-place porno, just stuck in there. We made awkward jokes while flipping through it, and found a fake advertisement for “Gash Jeans,” which depicted a naked woman bent over with her pants around her ankles. We added it to our collage, and next to it scrawled our own teenage thoughts about porn and sexism.

I’d seen porn before, having snooped through friends’ parents’ stashes or the collections kept by families I babysat for. But this was the first porn I remember laying eyes on after learning about feminism. Inspired by the punk-feminist Riot Grrrl movement of the early ’90s, I took books out of the library by feminist thinkers such as Andrea Dworkin, Catherine McKinnon and Robin Morgan, whose statement that “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,” summed up the attitude of many feminists of the previous generation.

By the time I found feminism, and started organizing rock shows featuring female artists and making zines, the anti-porn stance had fallen out of fashion in academic circles. But my local public library wasn’t exactly on the cutting edge of feminist theory — the information I had access to uniformly condemned pornography as an industry that fed male depravity and encouraged violence against women. Growing up on the bridge between second- and third-wave feminism was a puzzling thing. I revered the anti-porn feminists who gave me my early education in women’s studies — they knew, like I did, that women were being systematically harmed, and that it had to be stopped. At 15, I thought that watching porn made you hate women.

By 16, I wasn’t so sure. Younger feminists were taking a broader view of sex and sexuality, including a more open attitude toward porn. Third-wave feminists were more concerned with fighting for sex workers’ rights than condemning pornography as a whole. While these schools of feminism weren’t mutually exclusive, I had a hard time holding them both in my head without it raising significant questions. Was I supposed to support the hard-working woman in front of the camera, or feel repulsed and sorry for her as an exploited sex object? Since that collage-making session, I’ve looked at a lot of pornography in a lot of different contexts. I now see porn as a positive extension of human sexual expression, but I still have a lot of questions about big-picture issues around pornography and society.

I’ve searched for answers in a lot of ways: as an undergrad studying sex and gender; as a sex store manager trying (unsuccessfully) to get porn in stock because my female customers demand it; and as a staff reviewer for a website that informed readers about where to get the best quality blowjob videos online. I’ve looked critically at sex, society and porn for years now, and I still maintain that sex is an amazingly telling lens through which to view the world.

This continues today, with my work as manager of Good for Her, a Toronto-based feminist sex store, where I also organize the Feminist Porn Awards, which honour the hard-working feminists who are revolutionizing the porn industry. If the very idea of someone who cut her teeth on anti-porn theory now handing out butt-plug shaped trophies to pornographers doesn’t make Andrea Dworkin spin in her grave, I don’t know what would.

Today, one only has to turn on the TV, walk down the street or type “free porn” into their web browser to see how unsuccessful the anti-porn movement was. Where anti-porn feminists of the past condemned the entire industry — often with valid reasons — their dogmatic view failed to take into account that sexual imagery can be positive, and that porn is sometimes created by people acting of their free will, who feel good about what they do and who hold pleasure in high esteem.

Now there is porn for everyone. Literally. There are websites that have audio recordings describing pornographic websites for blind people (pornfortheblind.org [obviously, all these sites are likely to be Not Safe For Work—depending on your workplace]), porn full of saucy deaf people getting it on and using sign language to express their desires (deafbunny.com) and sites that cater to everything from our fear and fascination with Middle Eastern and Muslim women (arabstreethookers.com) to snot fetishes (seriously: see snotgirls.com if you dare). There is now porn about pretty much anything that a person could ever think of in a sexy way — and plenty that most of us would never find erotic, either. And, of course, there is pornography made specifically for women, who, according to a recent survey by Internet Filter Review, visit adult websites at a rate of one for every two men. Looking back to the time when feminists viewed pornography as an instruction manual for the degradation of women, the biggest irony may be that sexually empowered feminist women have gone from being critics of pornography to being major consumers of it. Pornography, like sex itself, is fraught with complexity and contradiction, but the failure of anti-porn feminism was ultimately positive. Out of its ashes came a new culture of porn that is serious and steadfast in its dedication to pleasure and politics.

The mainstreaming of porn, which, as an industry, rakes in billions and billions of dollars a year, is still primarily a male-driven phenomenon. This doesn’t mean it’s a boys-only club though — sites that cater specifically to women like hotmoviesforher.com and sssh.com (a reported 70 percent of women keep their use of internet porn a secret) are doing swift business. The very emergence of a category of “porn for women” or “feminist porn” as a respected and understood niche within the mainstream industry means that somebody is paying attention to the demands of women as consumers of porn. As if more proof were needed of pornography’s widespread acceptance, supermodel Tyra Banks recently devoted an episode of her daytime television talk show to the subject of women who watch porn, and the merits of mainstream porn versus porn made by, and for, women.

While pornography’s normalization is relatively new, anti-porn crusaders have been around for as long as humans have been casting their sexual dreams and desires into images and print. Rightwing and religious groups have been long-standing enemies of pornography and obscenity, their concerns based on morality and fear that porn would cause the downfall of Western civilization by pandering to base desires — which are supposed to be ignored, of course.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, many feminists began to pay attention to pornography with a different focus. They believed that the growth of porn, popularized in film and magazine form, indicated society’s growing tolerance for violating women and reducing them to objects. If we are to pick a year when pornography began its rise, 1953 is a solid one. That’s when Hugh Hefner founded Playboy, which featured risqué pin-up images — that actually look pretty quaint by today’s standards. The industry didn’t take off in earnest, however, until the early ’70s and the advent of feature-length porn films. (Until that time, stag reels — short films usually free of much story or context — were kept out of sight in adult theatres or passed from hand to hand by enterprising men.)

Films such as Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, both from 1972, sent audiences flocking to theatres. And these crowds were comprised of couples and other curious customers, not just stereotypical raincoat-wearing perverts. The sexual revolution, which espoused free love, the Pill and an increasingly open view of sex and sexuality — from swingers’ parties to gay liberation — all set the scene for porn entering the mainstream. The truly explosive growth spurt happened in the ’80s with the advent of the VCR: home video technology made porn private and easily accessible. Feminists revolted. Influenced by growing feminist academic study of rape, battering and trafficking in women, community groups sprang up across North America to protest the proliferation of porn and its perceived effects. In 1979, Women Against Pornography (WAP, one of many groups with such acronyms — there was also Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media, and Women Against Violence Against Women), famously began one of the most visible means of anti-porn protest and education at the time. WAP led tours of the traditionally male domains of the sex underground for women, to give them the opportunity to have a first-hand look at sleazy “adult novelty” shops, dirty bookstores and porn theatres.

Anti-porn activists also circulated petitions, ran slideshows of pornography in consciousness-raising sessions and actively attempted to shut down theatres and video stores. Their success was often limited, but according to one activist credited only as “R,” there was “one video store owner who gave us his 52 tapes, and refused to sell porn.” Other successes could be measured by “the number of people who turned out in support, by the number of men we stopped from going into the shops, by the amount of media attention we got for our analysis on pornography, by the number of small groups that formed to organize against pornography in their area as a result of contact with us.”

The movement was heated and heartfelt. Some anti-porn activists looked to the principles of direct action and engaged in more overt protest. In 1982, a group calling itself the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade attempted to simultaneously bomb three Red Hot Video outlets in the Lower Mainland and Victoria, B.C. Ann Hansen, a member of the Brigade (who was also a member of the “Squamish Five” — famous for bombing a Toronto factory that was manufacturing cruise-missile components), claimed the group targeted Red Hot Video because it was selling “very violent pornography.” She said the chain’s rapid expansion into suburban neighbourhoods was normalizing porn in areas that previously had little access to sexually explicit material.

While not every feminist with concerns about pornography pursued radical direct action, the bombing captured the sentiment of many women at the time. The British Columbia Federation of Women issued a statement the day after the bombings that stated, “Although we did not participate in the fire bombing of Nov.22, 1982 … we are in sympathy with the anger and frustration of the women who did.” The views were not uniform, but in broader society, feminism had become synonymous with anti-porn attitudes and activism.

That year marked a turning point for the anti-porn movement. In 1982, Barnard College in New York held an academic conference on the subject of “pleasure and danger.” The purpose of the conference was to investigate how to expand the boundaries of women’s sexual freedom and desire, while preserving the feminist project of eliminating sexism and violence.

Topics for discussion at the conference included “correct/incorrect sexualities,” teen sex, abortion, disability and race, and some anti-porn feminists attempted to shut it down, believing the presenters to be perverts and sex deviants. One of the organizers of the conference noted that Women Against Pornography were particularly outspoken in their protest of the event, and greeted the more than 800 attendees with leaflets proclaiming the content of the conference as “anti-feminist.”

The event marked a pivotal point in the war against pornography, as anti-porn feminists moved their battle from culture to the courts. The terrain shifted from pro- and anti-pornography to pro- and anti-censorship. And it was an enterprising man from Winnipeg who inadvertently set the stage for the battles to come.

In 1987, Donald Butler was arrested on 173 counts of obscenity, just days after opening an adult video and novelty shop. Butler’s entrepreneurial zeal (he re-opened the store and then faced further charges of obscenity), convictions and journey to the Supreme Court of Canada led to Canada’s current obscenity laws, which are based on the Butler decision.

That decision was the culmination of years of anti-porn activism and state intervention. The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund played a significant role, and intervened in the Supreme Court hearings to show the harm that came to women from the production of pornography. LEAF’s pro-censorship argument was based on the idea that sexually explicit materials were a form of hate speech against women. The group’s intentions may have been good, but the law backfired: the first obscenity case following Butler resulted in the banning of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitudes because of a story depicting a sexual encounter that started off as non-consensual. The magazine was confiscated from Glad Day bookstore in Toronto in the spring of 1992 and ignited similar problems with other gay and lesbian establishments, most famously with the bookstore Little Sister’s in Vancouver, whose war against Canada Customs, and its restrictive policies on importing gay and lesbian material, raged on for more than 20 years.

The unintended effect of Butler turned out to be a disproportionate number of charges against queer artists and representations of queer sex, including bondage and sadomasochism. LEAF may have been attempting to limit exploitative and abusive practices, but that wasn’t how the law came to be used in practice. Instead, cops, customs agents and judges found many aspects of gay and lesbian sexuality to be inherently demeaning and used the law to harass sexual minorities. For example, anal penetration was initially one of the criteria that could have materials banned. Ironically, it was backlash against these kinds of decisions that put feminists on the other side of the censorship debate. In opposition to this increasing reliance on state censorship that many anti-porn feminists were employing, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force formed in 1984. This group, and other feminists, were increasingly concerned that their anti-porn colleagues were acting out of simple prudery and that they were seeing nothing but violence in all depictions of sex, regardless of context. That, in fact, their views had morphed from being anti-porn to anti-sex.

While anti-porn attitudes dominated the late 1970s and early ’80s, with little attention paid to expressions and depictions of women’s sexuality from a feminist point of view, the rest of the ’80s and early ’90s became a hotbed of discussion and theory around getting it on. Self-identified feminists were strutting their stuff and actively showing the many different ways that positive, empowered sex could be showcased.

But that’s not to say that all porn magically became so enlightened.

After moving to Toronto in 2005 I’d been out of work for almost five months when I found an intriguing help-wanted ad on Craigslist. The company was looking for writers to review adult websites. With a deep breath and undying love of ridiculous situations, I sent my resumé. The company owner explained the site’s concept to me a few days later. My job was to give positive reviews of websites to direct online traffic to such enticing sites as “Black Dicks, White Chicks” and “Big Tits, Round Asses.”

As someone who strongly identified as a feminist, I knew taking this job did not reflect my politics. I still felt the sharp division between “good” porn and “bad” porn, and this was definitely bad porn. I had no idea what to expect. The offices were nice, and the project was backed by a semi-retired millionaire who fed his love of toned Latino men by starting several small-time softcore gay websites. I expected that the job would be strange, and an experience unlike anything I’d ever done before, and it was. But I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming boredom that awaited me.

A year and a half into the gig, I was closing in on my 1000th review; it was becoming difficult to differentiate between websites. The names were nearly indistinguishable, the performers generally looked the same, and the content was often not just similar, but exactly the same, just sold under a different title in order to grab customers with an appetite for whatever niche the sites were selling. The work at this point was automatic. I could do it in my sleep: count the videos and photo sets, document the frequency of updates, and offer some kind of snappy line that made yet another mundane site sound sexily appealing.

Generally I didn’t feel sorry for the women in these pictures, but to tell the truth I didn’t really think of them all that much — the naked bodies blurred together. But then I came across photos of a woman I knew. Her face and naked body brought me back to reality: We’d had drinks together, talked feminist politics. I was shocked by the reminder that these were all real people with jobs that put them in the strangely public/private realm of porn. Viewing this content day in and day out, my desire to learn about porn as a cultural force and to think about it critically had been overrun by my blasé attitude. There was a difference between what I was viewing and the kind of porn that could be empowering and celebrated, and the difference was suddenly glaring.

My time writing about porn sites often left me feeling conflicted — how feminist was it really to be making money off of the labour of (mostly) women? Could I still call myself a feminist if I was looking at naked ladies all day and not using my position to criticize the glaring sexism and racism that I was constantly viewing? I couldn’t help but be disturbed by the sheer number of “reality” porn websites that had premises based on the idea of “tricking” unassuming women (who were obviously actresses following a script) into performing sex acts with promises of money or fame or sometimes just rides to their jobs, and then quickly yanking away these opportunities at the end of the scene. At the end of the day, I knew that what I was looking at was fantasy — a world built up of erotic shortcuts created to arouse (mostly) men. I took this job not so that I could call out the fucked-up parts of the industry, but so that I could pay my bills, and gain more knowledge about the wide world of porn.

What struck me most often when looking at these websites was how frequently I was left feeling sad that this was all that men were being offered. In my time working in sex stores, my own personal goal was to crack open the infinite world of sexuality for people, and especially for women, who are the primary clientele of the shops I’ve worked in.

Seeing the world of Big Porn showed me that not only are women left out, but men are presented with an incredibly bland palate to work from and to mold their own sexuality. I left my porn review gig believing that the world of porn shouldn’t be eradicated, but that it should instead live up to the boundless possibilities of the erotic, and that it should, and could, be able to reflect the diverse bodies, desires and dreams that make up human sexuality.

I’m fortunate enough to be working in a place now where I can more easily reconcile the split between porn and feminism. At Good For Her, a staunchly feminist sex store, I’m partly responsible for stocking our shelves with independent porn (with occasional big studio features) that live up to the promise of erotic materials that address women as viewers.

This spring I organized the third annual Feminist Porn Awards, held in Toronto to recognize filmmakers who are doing it right, showing sex as positive and healthy, with categories such as Fiercest Female Orgasm, Deliciously Diverse Cast, and Most Tantalizing Trans Film. The films all depict consent and active desire, with women as agents of their libidos, rather than being shown as racialized or inferior objects. Leading up to the awards, which attracted an audience of upwards of 450 women (and even a few men), the bulk of my work hours were spent on trying to get the word out — I conducted many interviews with journalists who were confused by the very idea of feminists honouring porn flicks. A healthy part of my day became the Google search, looking for mentions in the media and on blogs. Most of the coverage I found was positive, and the negatives were hard to separate from online trolls looking to bait anyone with a different opinion. But the criticisms that I read most often, primarily on feminist blogs, focused on the impossibility of there ever being any such thing as feminist porn. The belief seems to be that recording a woman in a sex act was inherently degrading; the thought that any woman could choose to star in, or write and direct her own porn is unfathomable to these critics. For all the problems that mainstream porn presents, I knew that women can — and do — choose to be involved in the industry, either within big productions or in their own indie affairs. I knew this because I’d been talking to many of these women for weeks, and asking them to be a part of these awards. I was talking directly with the vanguard of the new porn revolution.

One such woman is Erika Lust, a 31-year-old mother of an incredibly cute toddler, and a pornographer. When Lust started making films, she wanted to provide something she couldn’t find anywhere else — porn targeted at straight women. “I want to make movies for straight girls because we are a big group of people and we are supposed to go with the mainstream heterosexual porn, made by men for men,” she says. “Lesbians, gays, trans — every group lately has their own porn, and I felt that nobody was thinking about the needs and desires of heterosexual women. We are supposed to be happy and satisfied with Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives or Playgirl movies, but we need more than that!”

Her debut film, Five Hot Stories for Her, has won multiple awards (including a Feminist Porn Award for Movie of the Year in 2008). Her latest project is premised on the idea that female audiences want to get to know the subjects they are watching more intimately than standard porn allows for. Barcelona Sex Project shows three men and three women being interviewed and talking about their sexual tastes and fantasies before they engage in some sultry solo sex.

While there is a history of women writing stories and taking pictures and even making movies that have been intended or used to fuel erotic fantasies, it’s only been recently that these have been marketed as porn for women. (Exceptions include Candida Royalle, who started in 1984, and is especially well known in the world of porn for women; her softer-focus flicks show female characters that have an equal stake in their sexual encounters.) Women have claimed a stake in the means of production in what has traditionally been a male-dominated industry, and they are finding success both in and outside the larger industry. Tristan Taormino, an acclaimed sex-columnist turned director, makes educational titles, such as Tristan Taormino’s Expert Guide to Anal Sex, as well as racier projects. Her just-released Chemistry Volume 4: The Orgy Edition takes six porn stars and puts them up in a house for 36 hours, Big Brother-style, giving them the power to script their own scenes, and take part in the filming as well. The performers get a lot of say in how they want to be represented and exactly what kind of sex they want to engage in.

This is not to say that everything is always perfect in feminist porn land — as has always been the case with feminism, there is never one solid vision of what “feminist” is, and what calling yourself a feminist pornographer really means. And there are disputes. Lust and another female director, Petra Joy from the U.K., were involved in a minor skirmish in the feminist porn blogosphere when Joy disputed the application of the feminist label for certain sex acts caught on film: “If you want to show come on a woman’s face that’s fine, but don’t call it feminist,” she wrote on her website. Lust took offense to this and shot back a passionate response in her blog, saying she was sad that “certain women devote their time and energy to pulling down the work of other women, instead of focusing on empowering our different approaches and points of view.”

While Joy made sure to say she believed that any feminist could show whatever she liked in her films, the sentiment remained that there were, or should be, rules in place. Is showing semen on a woman’s body inherently demeaning? If a performer is choosing to engage in these acts, and states either that it doesn’t bother her or more, that she relishes it, can we condemn the result?

When I was a teenager making my first dives into feminism, I couldn’t always wrap my head around the divides within pornography and notions of sex-positive expression in general. Even now, the call to support sex workers is too often predicated on getting them out of sex work, even if that is where they want to be. The idea that feminism was going to “save” women, either from performing in porn or from experiencing the presumed violent effects of porn still smacks too much of paternalistic control. Women need to be supported in their decisions and choices around sex and sexuality, and that includes appearing on websites some find gross, or checking out porn on cable channels and finding new ideas and acts that turn them on — even if it’s porn free of politics.

Anti-porn feminists had (and do have) their hearts in the right place. The problem remains that sex and porn are not inherently bad; it’s exploitation, unsafe working conditions, coercion, and advocating violence that are never okay. Feminist porn producers already depict women as active participants in their own sexual fantasy. The project going forward will be to continue to ensure safe, appropriate working conditions for those who appear in and produce porn, while continuing to work on traditional feminist goals, including eradicating the exploitation of women. Erika Lust’s film company, for instance, donates five percent of its revenue to Equality Now and Womankind Worldwide, non-governmental organizations combating sexual exploitation.

On the production side, more women are taking the reigns with distribution, ensuring that they remain in control of how and where their work is displayed. With the success of porn on the web, performers running their own sites are increasingly able to reap a larger percentage of the profits and maintain creative control in ways that wouldn’t be possible in the mainstream.

Feminist porn may not be the answer to all of the critiques of pornography as a genre and an industry, but it is a start that looks to the infinite possibilities the future holds for porn. Access to porn is expanding every day: Canadians will soon have a cable channel with 50 percent Canadian programming — mandated by the CRTC.

Film festivals are popping up from New York to Berlin to showcase erotic work in legitimate venues, and the Feminist Porn Awards are marching into their fourth year. Adult trade magazines are paying increased attention to independent porn marketed towards women, and the mostly-untapped female audience is being specifically wooed more and more.

Consumers have the opportunity to demand better porn, and we are doing just that on a larger scale than ever seen before. The new face of porn has an opportunity to disrupt stereotypes and address new viewers, all while creating a feminist view of sexuality. As Erika Lust says, “porn and feminism must be allies: they have to fight together against the conservative notion of considering [sex as something] that has to be only related with reproduction, and labeling [sexually] active women as whores. Both feminism and porn can help liberate women from what society expects from us: to be good, quiet nice girls, not complaining, not arguing, not fighting, not enjoying sex, not being powerful and provocative.” Women can watch and make porn as a powerful statement against the status quo, one dirty DVD at a time.

As a blissfully married and, I like to think, reasonably well-adjusted man, I must own up to a certain obliviousness to the so-called struggles of my gender. I appreciate that there are men who feel aggrieved. I sympathize, but I can’t relate.

In fact, the only thing more astonishing than the notion of disgruntled masculinity is any discussion of gender at all. Maybe I’m living in a post-feminist utopia, but I don’t know many people who identify themselves by their sex (except when looking for a public washroom).

Which is why it’s so startling to open a book like What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine the Future, a just-published collection of essays edited by American author and social activist Rebecca Walker. In it, she and other scribes explore the enormous and, in some cases, untenable expectations placed on modern men. In the leadoff piece, Walker recounts the day her 11-year-old son came home from school convinced that “girls will like me if I play sports.” What I see as an innocent remark, Walker views with utter gravitas—momentous enough to inspire a book. She sees her son’s realization as symptomatic of society’s disposition. Men must repress their gentler impulses in order to take up arms against each other in an unrelenting fight for dominance, a cut-throat competition that begins with school athletics and begets the narcissistic quest for the best cheekbones, the best job and the most money, and reaches its apex on the geopolitical scale with the most fearsome military. “This war against what is considered feminine that is wounding our sons and brothers, fathers and uncles, is familiar to women,” Walker writes, “but now we see that it is killing the other half of the planet, too. But instead of dying of heartache and botched abortions and breast cancer and sexual trauma and low self-esteem, this half is dying of radiation from modern weaponry, suicidal depression, and a soul-killing obsession with the material.”

Walker is not alone in her anxiety. Her book is merely the latest chapter in a growing literature beset by the waning status of men. Author Susan Faludi may have galvanized the issue in 2000 with her fulsome bestseller Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. She attributed the decline of men’s self-worth to the shrinking military of the postwar era and the rampant downsizing in corporate America, as well as the rise of feminism. The fact that men feel diminished has led to proportionately higher secondary school dropout rates and lower university enrollment rates compared with women. These are relatively new developments, but San Diego-based author Warren Farrell believes the devaluation of men is more entrenched. He likes to remind readers that in the military, a man is more likely to die in war than his female counterpart, and that prostate cancer, one of the worst killers of men, gets much less funding than breast cancer, a predominantly female affliction.

Farrell is widely thought to have fathered the men’s movement; his 1974 book The Liberated Man is the masculine corollary to The Feminine Mystique. A feminist during the rights movement of the 1960s, Farrell changed his ideological orientation in the ’70s to examine the unspoken plight of men. In his 1993 book The Myth of Male Power, Farrell outlined the 25 worst professions based on a combination of salary, stress, work environment, outlook, security and physical demands. He called the results—which included cross-country truck driver, sheet-metal worker and construction worker—the “death professions.” He found that of these 25 jobs, 24 of them were 95 to 100 percent male. Where feminists speak of a glass ceiling, Farrell talks of a glass cellar. “In the industrialized world, there has never been a time when men have been so unappreciated,” says Farrell. “For about 30 years, it hasn’t really been a battle of the sexes, but a war in which only one side has shown up. And women have been shooting the bullets and men have been putting their heads in the sand hoping the bullets will miss.”

Farrell has an affinity for pat analogies, and not everyone buys his reasoning. “Men have and still hold the power—political, economic, cultural—in every way. They own the property, they control the businesses,” says Kay Armatage, an associate professor of women’s studies at the University of Toronto. “So the notion of discrimination against men is ridiculous, as far as I’m concerned. However, you can argue that they pay a certain price for their power, for their ownership, for their domination.” Sending young males to war isn’t discriminatory, Armatage contends; combat is an activity men have always initiated and engaged in.

Whatever the reasons, there is evidence of a deep dissatisfaction among men. It’s generally accepted, for example, that men commit 80 percent of the suicides in Canada. The standard explanation is that men don’t like to talk about their feelings; if pushed to the emotional brink, they would sooner die by their own hand than reach out for someone else’s. (That said, a 1999 research study by Health Canada noted that “while men commit suicide more frequently, women attempt suicide more often but are more likely to fail in their attempts.”) The notion of men and their inscrutable emotions is a favourite subject of female advice columnists, but as the stats demonstrate, the cliché holds more than a whisper of truth.

Alan Mirabelli, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, feels that more and more men are opting to talk it out. “[They have] realized that to bottle it up and carry the stress leads to a direct line to Prozac or the psychiatrist’s couch. And that’s not the way they want to live their lives. They want to find a way to enjoy life, and if that means being vulnerable to some extent but not carrying that stress, so be it.” It’s not a perspective all men share. The model is still the strong dominant male. Although there are more “sensitive males,” their liberalism is continually challenged by our culture—most often by advertisers, who ridicule men for weakness or indecision.

“Men get a conflicting message,” Mirabelli says. “On the one hand, women want them to be gentle, but at the same time, they want them to be strong. Which is it? Or is there room for both?”

The reality is that both sexes grapple with conflicting cues. “Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘Women are not born, they’re made,’” Armatage submits. “In exactly the same way, men aren’t born, they’re made. Obviously, those gender constructions for men and women are equally forceful, although in different directions.” One thing both sides agree on is that as a society, we default to outmoded stereotypes, that women are gentle and nurturing but also self-doubting and needy, and men are strong and protective but prone to infidelity and violence.

If you want to experience the frontier of male disaffection, spend a Tuesday evening with the FACT group. The advocacy organization Fathers Are Capable, Too agitates for equal shared parenting time, and each week it convenes a support group in the basement of All Saints’ Kingsway Anglican Church in Toronto’s west end. The room is garlanded with bunny paintings and alphabet charts; a Little Tikes climbing apparatus sits at the front of the room. During the day, it’s a childcare facility; Tuesday nights, it becomes a soapbox for collective rancour toward the family courts.

The dozen or so men—and one woman—assembled on this night sit facing David Osterman and Gene Colosimo, the FACT directors who typically lead the meetings. The faces are long and worn with misery; these are people whose existence is no longer defined by their career accomplishments or even their families. The measure of these men is how long they’ve been in court. One man, Terry Lear, has spent 17 years in litigation—so far.

The meeting begins when a newbie floats a candid question. “I need an honest opinion on what chance I’ve got if I go to court,” says the tall, gangly fellow, who looks to be in his late 20s. Embittered chuckles ensue. The man is separated from his wife, with whom he has an eight-month-old son. FACT’s position on the justice system is firm: judges inexorably grant custody to women, and lawyers exist merely to draw out the proceedings and pocket the exorbitant fees. The organization lobbies various levels of government to rectify this perceived injustice but, for the most part, all FACT members can do is console one another. FACT’s message can be distilled in two words: make do. Osterman encourages him to attempt a reconciliation with his wife rather than proceed to litigation.

The young guy is skeptical. Right now, he gets to see his son for only two hours a week, in his wife’s apartment, under her supervision. “You will get as much access as she allows you,” quips Colosimo, who has no patience for platitudes. “You’re the hostage, she has a gun, and you’re trying to work out a deal.” Over the course of the evening, Colosimo will dispense a litany of caustic refrains, many of which are imbued with a subtle misogyny. “Love is grand, but divorce is 100 grand,” he says, simpering. You can tell he’s used that one before; it elicits knowing laughter. His repertoire also includes “She got the goldmine, he got the shaft” and “It’s cheaper to keep her.”

An outsider might find Colosimo insufferably mordant, but his cynicism is earned. He separated from his wife in 1991, and the custody battle over their daughter cost him $80,000; his wife spent as much as $160,000. He kept up the child-support payments for a while, but his ex-spouse wouldn’t allow him access to their daughter. After two years, Colosimo stopped paying. In doing so, he became a deadbeat dad, but he felt he couldn’t sustain the arrangement. He hasn’t seen his daughter in 10 years, which is about as long as he’s been out of work. The lawyer’s fees and support payments had reduced him to penury, and the mental strain had driven him to severe depression. Three therapists told him he was unfit to work; he quit his job in appliance repair in 1993.

Colosimo puts on a doughty bravado in the meetings, but his wounded humanity comes out in the poems he has written about his estrangement from his daughter, who is now in her teens. “Divorce was quite a revelation/ Not just a split but devastation,” he declaims in the church parking lot after the meeting. “They took my child, my joy, my soul/ And left my life a gaping hole.” As he recites these lines, his gaze is almost pleading. Of all the issues plaguing the male sex, the perceived discrimination in child-custody battles remains the most damaging. In 1988, mothers won sole custody of their children in 75 percent of divorce proceedings; this past May, the federal Department of Justice reported that, for the first time, less than 50 percent of custody cases went directly to women. Most judgments opted for joint custody. This would appear to be an improvement, but FACT director Brian Jenkins says it’s misleading. The concept of joint custody is actually broken down into separate categories: “joint physical custody” and “joint custody with primary residency.” The former is a total sharing of responsibility, the latter means that although the parents make major decisions together, the child spends most of his or her time living with one parent. According to Jenkins, the parent who provides primary residency tends to hold sway; in most cases, it’s still the woman.

“Men who lose their connection to children lose their connection to society,” Osterman notes. As Colosimo likes to remind FACT members, eight men commit suicide in Canada every day. The likelihood of suicide rises considerably among divorced men. According to 1995 Statistics Canada figures, the national suicide rate among divorced men was 42.5 per 100,000, four times the overall men’s rate. The ideology of family courts can be debated endlessly, but the fact remains that a distressing number of men find divorce so financially and emotionally taxing that they consider death their only recourse.

The blinkered stereotypes that complicate child-custody battles are also perpetuated in mass culture. Look no further than Homer Simpson. Crude, insensitive, moronic and quite possibly the worst father in television history, he’s the icon of male inadequacy.

Two Canadian researchers, Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young, found enough instances of misandry—a more refined word for male-bashing—in television, film, comic strips and books to write a fairly thick tome. Published in 2001, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture delineates stereotyping throughout the 1990s. Nathanson and Young take aim at movies like Sleeping With the Enemy, The Color Purple and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle for portraying men as either violent reprobates, hopeless patsies or women in a male guise.

“The people who make these movies aren’t necessarily trying to make that point, and the people who consume these products aren’t necessarily conscious of it,” says Nathanson. “You come out of a movie and you either like or you don’t like it. But very few people think, ‘Well, what does that say about me?’ That takes a level of conscious reflection that a lot of people don’t have. Some women have it, because they’ve been trained for 30 years to look for misogynistic elements. But for men, at least in the 1990s, it was a little harder to do that.”

One of their targets is the forgettable sitcom Home Improvement. In it, actor Tim Allen played Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor, a sheepish joe who wielded tools at work and simply acted like one at home. Alternately macho and dim-witted, Tim continually shot off his mouth, only to be summarily scolded by his wife, Jill (played by Patricia Richardson). The spate of daytime talk shows also reinforced our worst fears about men. Whether it was Oprah, Geraldo, Sally Jesse Raphael or Montel, topics like domestic violence and male perfidy were recurring themes.

According to Nathanson and Young, misandry was first promoted in political and academic circles to redress a history of female oppression. Eventually it radiated out into the wider culture. Nathanson says the cumulative effect of these stereotypes is that they warp men’s sense of who they are. “If you don’t provide boys with a positive identity, then they’re going to embrace the negative one,” he says.

Ironically, amid the flurry of unwitting male stereotypes, our culture began to reclaim many of them. If some men were feeling ill at ease about their collective image, the Maxim-ization of pop culture did them no favours. Thanks to the outbreak of lad mags, increasingly loutish pop stars (Oasis, Kid Rock, countless rappers), crass television series like Beavis and Butt-head, guy-oriented talk-radio stations (Toronto’s MOJO) and even whole television networks dedicated to men’s programming (Spike TV), it’s become all right—downright amusing, in fact—to be boorish, hedonistic and blatantly sexist, all those qualities glibly associated with the male id.

David Shackleton produces a lad mag, of sorts—he’s the editor and publisher of Everyman, a quarterly journal devoted to men’s issues. What you won’t find in its pages, however, are airbrushed pictures of bosomy supermodels, tips on building adamantine abs or how to uncouple a bra with one hand. With its low-budget paper stock, black-and-white appearance and humourless, didactic tone, Everyman is not for every man. It’s a zine for disillusioned males, dealing with topics like divorce and family law. The periodical has a circulation of 500 copies, which Shackleton prints in his Ottawa home.

He became involved in the magazine in 1994—eventually taking it over from co-founder Andrew McDonald—after a shocking personal revelation. In 1987, Shackleton’s first wife left him. He concedes that the split was upsetting but inevitable. It was her methodology, however, that truly rankled him. Instead of laying out the reasons in person, she left the house with their dog—under the pretence of seeing the veterinarian—and then called to tell him she wanted a divorce. When he asked her why she had chosen to break up in such an impersonal manner, she said she feared he might get violent.

Having never exhibited an aggressive tendency, Shackleton was stunned that his wife of seven years had so profoundly misunderstood him. The more disturbing inference, however, was that all men have a propensity for brutality.

“Up until then, I’d been kind of living out the cultural script of, you know, career success, et cetera. I started to look around at the stereotype that men are violent. And what I saw was that the whole gender story that was in play in society was the story of female victimhood, and it didn’t ring true to me,” he says. “I felt that there was a whole piece missing.” Shackleton believed that any discussion of how men were feeling was viewed as either anti-feminist or simply petty. “I got a sense why we were so caught up in women’s experience about gender and why we’re silent and unresponsive to men’s stories. I found myself steering my life more and more into that work.”

In 1993, Shackleton quit a well-paying engineering job at Nortel Networks to devote himself to the male cause. “I decided the world didn’t need more technical products,” he says. “What we needed was some more social insight.” Shackleton, who has remarried twice, divides his time between publishing Everyman, hosting gender workshops and doing speaking engagements. (Male advocacy is not a lucrative field, so Shackleton supplements his income with desktop publishing and technical consulting of the sort he did at Nortel.) One of his recent speeches was at Stories of Healing, a two-day conference this past June organized by the Men’s Network and Kitchener-Waterloo Counselling Services. Held in the auditorium of a Waterloo, Ontario, community centre, the annual assembly is a forum for abused and otherwise beleaguered males, as well as counsellors, to share tales of personal renewal.

On the morning of the second day, Shackleton stood before a still-somnolent crowd and narrated his story. A tall fellow with a close-cropped white beard, Shackleton has a muted intonation; although he’s thoughtful and articulate, his voice will occasionally become tremulous. Outlining his points on an overhead projector, Shackleton explained that his investigation of gender roles has led him to one overriding theory. He doesn’t deny that historically, women have been victims of male tyranny, but he says that men and women actually have a mutually oppressive relationship. Men subjugate women with physical, economic and political power; women, on the other hand, subjugate men with sexual, emotional and moral power. Shackleton’s belief: for all of men’s overbearing qualities, women have the power to shame. You could sense a collective tension in the room. People stiffened in their plastic chairs. Shackleton is quite used to offending people, and he took the acute silence in stride. Even so, when it came time for questions, he gazed around the room with nervous anticipation. One man stood up to the microphone and extolled Shackleton’s wisdom and courage. The majority of participants, however, took issue with his essential point. Another male counsellor approached the microphone and said, “Among my friends in their 20s, 30s and 40s, I don’t know anyone who thinks that way.” Shackleton smiled uneasily and mumbled something about welcoming differing opinions. Event organizer Randy Scott ended the discussion on a cheerfully contrite note, thanking Shackleton for his time but offering nothing in the way of an endorsement.

I could appreciate the heartbreak that inspired Shackleton’s rhetoric, but his conclusions seemed misguided. I found it difficult to liken shaming to physical abuse in terms of severity. Perhaps the most awkward thing about Shackleton’s speech was that it dispensed fault at an event honouring personal triumph. “I was really hoping we’d moved past that sort of thinking,” muttered one participant when I asked her about the presentation. “We don’t need any more assigning of blame.” I have to concur. If men are feeling plagued by negative stereotypes, reacting with equally hoary female stereotypes seems, at the very least, counterproductive.

If you ask Warren Farrell, a battle-hardened women’s and men’s libber, he’ll tell you the way forward is to take a more mature approach. “We’ve had a women’s movement blaming men, when what we should have had is neither a women’s movement blaming men nor a men’s movement blaming women. We should have been having a gender transition movement moving from the old, rigid roles that were survival-based to new, more flexible roles.” That ultimately means unlearning the gender myths, particularly the fiction that men can’t articulate their feelings. For too long, they’ve been told, and dumbly accepted, that they’re incapable of doing so. For men and women, the key to transcending this ridiculous drama is to play against type.