Bill S-210 has an arresting title compared to the majority of those passing through the various levels of government in order to become law: “Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act.”

“The title of the legislation sends a fairly powerful message. There is absolutely no doubt about that,” said Kevin Lamoureux, parliamentary secretary to the leader of the government, in the House of Commons during a reading of the bill.

Bill S-210 is a federal, private member’s bill. As of June 2024, the bill has passed second reading and is in the report stage. It is meant to protect children and teenagers from exposure to age-inappropriate content. On paper, that seems like a good idea that most people would support. Protecting children is important, and much of the discussion during the House of Commons readings focused mainly on that—not the issues with privacy the bill poses. The details surrounding how age verification would work are nebulous, and the ones that are known raise privacy concerns.

During the readings, Liberal and NDP members of parliament mentioned some of those concerns alongside the ones about children. Conservative and Bloc Québécois representatives mainly focused on controlling who is able to watch pornography.

“Canadians want their children to be protected, but they are also wary about invasions of their privacy. Canadians have very little trust in the ability of the web giants to manage their information and private data,” said Anju Dhillon, a Liberal MP who represents Dorval-Lachine-LaSalle, in November 2023 when the bill was being discussed in its second reading, a rare stage to reach for a private member’s bill. People are also fearful, she said, of deliberate violations of privacy and data security breaches.

The Privacy & Access Council of Canada has pointed out that the sweeping provisions in the bill could endanger all Canadians’ privacy, not just underaged people. Currently, age verification could entail forcing people to upload pictures of their faces and government-issued IDs to watch porn online. Some of that data could be stored long term, creating easily found trails online. The bill does not set out clear terms to prevent this from happening.

Age verification technology has been criticized as immature and not adequately developed at a technological level. A recent report from France’s National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties found that six of the leading age verification solutions did not respect users’ rights.

This is a particular stress on members of the 2SLBGTQIA+ community, who could face exposure and/or blackmail for their browsing history. Not everyone in the community is out, and the ability for others to access intimate data puts already marginalized people at further risk. For 2SLBGTQIA+ Canadians who live in rural areas, this can be especially scary as the online world is sometimes their only way to connect with queer culture.

There is not a lot of data specific to the porn-viewing habits of Canadian youth, with researchers denoting a need for more studies. A 2023 report from Common Sense Media found that around 73 percent of U.S. teens aged 13-17 had watched porn online. The same study found differences in the porn consumption of 2SLBGTQIA+ youth compared to their hetero peers—the former group was more likely to seek out porn intentionally, in an effort to explore and affirm their sexuality. Yet this bill and its sweeping provisions seems based on the idea that all youth engage in the same habits online (watching violent pornography where a woman is subjugated by a man; the concern being its influence) when that is simply not accurate.

Another critique of the bill has been that a VPN, which many youth know how to use, could be a way to get around age verification. The bill is meant to protect those under 18. They are arguably also the most internet and tech-savvy generation to exist and the bill is being created by people who have not grown up online in the same way, and may not be able to anticipate how young people will subvert provisions.

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne is the chief architect and lead defender of the bill. A former Radio-Canada broadcaster who was appointed to the Senate in 2018, she was a guest on the “Law Bytes” podcast to debate it. In a January 2024 episode, she provided her rationale and defence against the criticism and concerns it has sparked. She explained to host Michael Geist that she has worked carefully on drafting the legislation and adding amendments for three years.

Miville-Dechêne responded to the issues Geist raised around privacy by saying that the bill had not specifically mandated exactly what age verification system would be used at this point, noting that technology evolves constantly. “No method is absolutely zero risk…we can erase the data. We can make sure that it is a mechanism that doesn’t go too far. But frankly, this is not in the bill. This is to be discussed afterwards. So how can you say the bill is dangerous?” Mivelle-Dechêne said.

“In some ways, it seems to me, that makes it even more dangerous,” Geist retorted.

A bill meant to protect vulnerable members of our society should not further marginalize others. If there are not sweeping reforms to this bill, particularly the technological aspects, it could easily become one of the biggest national threats to privacy in recent history.

What are torture films? The biggest examples are the Saw and Hostel franchises, and the ever-controversial Human Centipede 1 and 2. However, there are lots of torture films, even among B-grade horror films; it’s a big trend. Remakes of older horror classics seem to always end up nauseatingly gory, bordering on the torture genre. I’ve frequently had the problem of putting on what appears to be a classic slasher, stuck-in-a-house-with-a-serial-killer kind of film, and had it turn out to be a torture film. I immediately switch it off.

First off,  the genre shows a complete lack of creativity. Ghosts and ghouls, hellish dimensions , the iconic images of hockey masks or striped sweaters and fedoras, parasitic otherworldly life forms terrorizing researchers in the Antarctic—now that’s creative. Even the simple black and white silent film Nosferatu changed how we saw vampires forever. That is horror creativity at its finest. Performing surgeries on live people—that’s grotesque. If I wanted to see that, I’d go to one of those bizarre hospital auditorium thingies. If I wanted to see innocent people get brutalized, I can turn on the news. Viewing horror films does have a definite element of sadism, but torture films take that sadism to the extreme.

Torture films are scary, yes. But is being scary the only way we can make good horror? Is profiting on the viewing of extreme pain and suffering healthy for audiences? There’s a difference between paying for creepy thrills and mild psychological scares, and dishing out cash to watch ultra-realistic slicing and dicing of characters wailing in agony. Sure, it’s fictional, but the total desensitization to images of extreme violence is real.

It’s one thing when you’re joking around with your friends cheering for the slasher running ridiculously down the street with an axe and another when people are excitedly taking in graphic scenes of eyeballs being removed and limbs being cut off. Half the time, the freaky part isn’t watching the movie, but knowing that some people are actually truly enjoying this macabre show. I guess some directors figured that the invention of realistic fake blood and advanced special effects meant they could sacrifice good plots, creativity, and subtle, albeit creepy, scares for total violent mayhem.

And on top of that, torture films are notorious for the sexualization of women’s deaths, hence the idea of calling it torture porn. In fact, all horror films are notorious for this, but I see it more deeply in the torture genre, because the women are often tortured whilst naked. Guys die with all their clothes on, women get cut up with their breasts exposed. Guys die in a spree of violence, women are first groped and licked before their horrific demise. Even when explicit scenes of rape are not shown, they are alluded. It bothers me that somewhere, someone out there is getting a sickening adrenaline rush from watching a naked woman undergo brutality.

It doesn’t matter that it’s fictional; it does something to our society. It’s also a direct reflection. Women are brutalized in real life and the murder of women is so frequently accompanied by rape. Patriarchy has normalized this, and film is just as much as a part of that normalization as any other medium. When horror normalizes misogynistic imagery, we internalize it. And if you’re not convinced that we internalize it, then just look at some of the comments and tweets every time there is a news story about a woman getting beaten and raped—hundreds of “she deserved it” and insensitive “jokes.” So despite the fact that this violated and dehumanized character is fictional, I take it personally. As a woman, it feels real to me.

So, excuse me while I impatiently wait for this trend to end. I guess I’m just not into repetitive frames of senseless violence and if that makes me oversensitive, then I’ll gladly be oversensitive rather than utterly desensitized, or worse, salivating over scenes of tortured women. Monsters under the bed, Satan’s spawn, and high-tension slasher chase sequences are more my thing.

Next week I’ll be looking at mental illness in horror films regarding the ever-popular trope of the “psycho” killer and horror’s obsession with psychiatric hospitals.

Emma Woolley at Shameless has provided a comprehensive overview of why International Women’s Day still matters. The upshot is that while the last century has seen improvements for women—especially white, economically privileged, heterosexual, cisgendered ones—that oppression is still the norm around the world and around the corner.

Recently Wendy Glauser wrote on the This blog about the uses of “girl power” imagery in the marketing of Plan Canada’s “Because I Am A Girl” campaign. Keshet Bachan yesterday responded with an interesting post at GirlsReport, about the tensions and harmonies of radical and liberal feminisms. One of Canada’s most radical feminist actions was the 1970 Abortion Caravan, which travelled across the country demonstrating for reproductive justice and ended up shutting down parliament in a spectacular protest that played an important role in securing reproductive sovereignty for Canadian women. Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviewed Barbara Freeman last spring about the caravan and the agressive media strategy its activists used.

I’ll also direct your attention to Katie Addleman’s cover story from our July-August 2010 issue on why voting reform is a feminist issue. It’s worth remembering that Canada ranks shockingly poorly for women’s representation in elected office — below rich European countries like Norway and Sweden, but also below troubled, impoverished states like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Burundi.

Not all change comes at the ballot box, of course, through capital-P Politics. Arts and culture play a huge part in changing social mores. In November 2008 we published Alison Lee’s popular cover story on feminist pornography, and the ways in which women are reclaiming porn, both as consumers and producers (that essay appears in the 2009 edition of Best Canadian Essays, by the way). Last summer, Natalie Samson interviewed Canadian rapper Eternia about the gender dynamics of hip hop, a world in which macho swagger is the norm and female MCs struggle to break through with audiences. Finally, I’ll slip in a link to my own post about the crazy masculinity-panic that seems to periodically afflict the media, and serves to obscure hard truths about the actual gender dynamics of our society.

I highlight these examples of our reporting on issues of feminism and women’s rights because I think it’s important to say that while we’ll mark International Women’s Day, gender justice—for This as a media outlet and an organization—is not now, and will never be, a “special occasion,” relegated to one day of the year. The struggle for gender equality is one in which This has participated for 45 years, and we intend to continue—today, tomorrow, all year, every year.

Best Canadian Essays 2010

Katherine Ashenburg on cosmetic surgery, Ira Basen on citizen journalism, Will Braun on the tendency to customize Christ, Tyee Bridge on the power of fiction, Abou Farman on the Iranian Revolution, Paul Gallant on future of gay activism,Lisa Gregoire on life in Nunavut, Danielle Groen explores the brain when in love, Elizabeth Hay on the summer of her last poems, Jason McBride prepares for the end of the world, Carolyn Morris on people forced to live underground in Canada, Katharine Sandiford on the longest dogsled race in North America, Andrew Steinmetz on his family history and the Second World War, Timothy Taylor on a Spanish pilgrimage route, Chris Turner on the prodigal Alberta band, Nora Underwood on the future of farming and food.

Carolyn Morris’s excellent essay is reprinted from Toronto Life, but she also wrote about undocumented migrants needing health care in Canada in our March-April 2009 issue, if you’re looking for a bit of further reading. You also might be interested in reading Alison Lee’s “The New Face of Porn,” about feminism and pornography, from our November-December 2008 issue, which appeared in the 2009 Best Canadian Essays collection.

A Campa Vista home with a view to the ocean. Photo by Dawn Paley.

I’m sitting with the cab driver who has brought me to the end of a long gravel road, near the edge of Trujillo, a small town on the north coast of Honduras. He’s flipping through a newspaper, telling me in halting English that he’s saving up to buy an excavator. Anyone with an excavator has work, he says. I hear the sound of four-wheeled all-terrain-vehicles in the distance, humming as they near. In a cloud of dust, Cathy Bernier appears at the top of the hill, followed on another ATV by her two daughters. All of them are here for a vacation from a freezing Alberta December. Bernier, who works as a client-relations manager with the development, has agreed to take me on a tour of Campa Vista, a housing project for retired Canadians perched above the Caribbean Sea.

With a wave from a security guard tuning his radio in a tiny booth, we pass under the front gate, a cement arch built over a dusty gravel road. From the back of Bernier’s speeding ATV, her blonde hair blowing in my face, I can see that the route we’re on is cut through what was quite recently a thick jungle. Along one side, a high wall of earth shades the road, and on the other, a steep ditch drops away toward the ocean. Peeling around a corner, the road forks. We hang right, and Bernier slows to a stop in front of an imposing house with a pool set in the front patio. Within a few months, this house will be occupied by a 70-year-old rugby player from Edmonton—one of this gated village’s first residents. Below us, dense jungle sprawls down the mountain toward the water, interrupted only by the newly built roads, faint outlines of staked-out lots, and high power lines.

Once completed, as promised in the promotional materials, Campa Vista (“Country View” in English) will afford a sunny, secure perch for Canadian snowbirds. The development’s website boasts of a “Euro-Mediterranean-style private gated community, with each property possessing its own unique and outstanding view.”

North American baby boomers have proven to have a boundless appetite for vacation or retirement homes in sunny, cheap places that aren’t too wracked by crime or war. It’s been a global windfall for many other countries, and now the people who run Honduras want a cut. Canadian entrepreneur Randy Jorgensen, developer of the Campa Vista complex, is happy to oblige. Jorgensen sells this tropical dream over the internet and in hotel conference-room seminars held in grey-skied Canadian locales: Regina; Etobicoke, Ontario; Duncan, B.C. His basic pitch: Honduras is the latest, best bargain available to Canadians wanting to own their own piece of a developing country.

But—as you might have guessed—this sunny picture doesn’t tell the whole story. Just off the beach in Trujillo, six men sit around a peeling wooden picnic table. They’ve agreed to meet me here to discuss their concerns about the Canadians they say are squatting on their ancestral lands.

“Canadians have a strong sense of private property,” said Evaristo Perez Ambular, a native of Trujillo and member of Honduras’s major organization representing the Garífuna indigenous population. “We don’t have any access to that land anymore, including to some of our traditional pathways.”

Ambular speaks fluent Spanish, but switches back to the Garífuna language at times to discuss with the other men. The Garífuna language and its people are unique in a way that is recognized worldwide: the language, dance, and music of the Garífuna peoples were added to the United Nations’ list of rare cultural traditions in need of safeguarding.

Popular lore has it that Garífuna peoples descend from a slave ship that washed up on St. Vincent Island, whose passengers escaped slavery and instead intermarried with local indigenous people. The Garífuna were once called “Black Caribs” by the British, who forced them off St. Vincent and onto Roatán Island and the Central American mainland in 1797.

A fishing people, the Garífuna developed a rich collective lifestyle dependent on the ocean, the forests and the beaches. Expert seafarers, many Garífuna became deckhands for cargo ships travelling up and down the coast of Latin America. Today, there is a significant Garífuna diaspora in the United States.

The latest threat to Garífuna people, says Ambular, is the wave of Canadian settlers who are cutting them off from their land base.

In the first decade of the 20th century, the Garífuna who live in Trujillo were given collective titles for a fraction of their territories. But community members allege that in 2007 a former leader misrepresented himself as the owner of the land and wrongfully sold off parcels of real estate—land that eventually ended up in Randy Jorgensen’s hands.

“There are many Canadians in our communities on the coast, and we haven’t seen a positive presence from them,” says Ambular. “They use our bridges and our roads, and they don’t leave us a thing.”

Evaristo Perez Ambular (far right) together with members of the Garifuna community in Trujillo. Photo by Dawn Paley.

José Velasquez, the current president of the two Garífuna communities in Trujillo, hands me a photocopy titled “Pronunciamiento No. 3.” It outlines the Garífuna peoples’ desire to reclaim their ancestral territories, and demands that the Honduran government nullify all land sales to Jorgensen.

Randy Jorgensen has lived in Honduras for 20 years, on and off. It’s been a getaway of sorts from his bustling life in Canada, where he conceived and oversaw the creation of Adults Only Video, the country’s first national chain of pornography stores.

Originally a muffler salesman in small-town Saskatchewan, Jorgensen was nicknamed Canada’s “porn king” in a 1993 Maclean’s profile. His specialty, as the article put it, was to “bring dirty movies into the clean streets of middle-class Canada,” and by the early ’90s, Adults Only Video was bringing in $25 million a year. Faced with lawsuits and police raids because of the content of his videos, Jorgensen maintained that everything he did was within the boundaries of the law.

Later, when I called Jorgensen to get his response to the claims of the Garífuna on the land where he’s building Campa Vista, he laughed, chalking the claims up to a form of “extortion.”

“For Canadians, the easiest way to compare it is to compare it to our own native Indians in Canada,” he says. “Depending on what’s going on, they may or may not decide that they have a land claim going on.” He says all of the paperwork for the land that he’s purchased is legitimate, and there’s no conflict. “As soon as there is any development going on generally, the Garífuna start checking around and seeing if there isn’t some way that they can extort some funds or something out of whoever is doing that development,” said Jorgensen.

Today, Jorgensen lives full-time in his home near the Campa Vista development in Honduras. He runs AOV Online, the internet broadcasting version of what his porno chain once was. But his first career is downplayed in his most recent venture into real estate, where he instead positions himself as a lifestyle expert. However, it’s clear that he’s learned something from his years in the porn business: sex sells.

The marketing videos for a partner project sold in Costa Rica include close-ups of various young, attractive women in tight, white T-shirts. After I watched these videos with a crowd of prospective buyers, the first comment from a man sitting nearby was “I wonder if she’s single.” Should he choose to move down to Honduras, he wouldn’t be the first to discover that sex tourism abounds.

In the tropical coastal town of La Ceiba, a few hundred kilometres from Trujillo, I meet Rick Mowers. I find him, a retired Ontario Provincial Police officer from Hamilton, sitting at the computer beside the bar at Expatriates, a restaurant that he now co-owns.

“I just quit, moved here, went to instant retirement, did nothing for one year,” he says. The boredom eventually got to him, though. “It costs money to do nothing all day long. We find that too many of us drink too much alcohol or beer if you have nothing to do all day long.” Buying the restaurant has given the young-looking 53-year-old something to do with his time. He tells me he moved to Honduras with his wife, but they split after he had an affair. A warm breeze moved through the restaurant, stirring up the air under the high, thatched roof.

“It’s too cold, it’s too expensive, and I’m not going to live there for the free health care,” says Mowers of Canada. He rattles off how much cheaper things are in Honduras, from rent and food to crack cocaine and sex.

“Here sex is, in the whole country, sex is $10. So if you go downtown, and you stop and the girl gets in your car, it’s $10, 200 lempiras, for you to go have intercourse,” he says. Mowers didn’t mention the AIDS epidemic in the north-coast region, where over 60,000 people have HIV/AIDS, the highest infection rate in Central America.

Later, I Google Mowers. It turns out he was a bad cop. He had at least six disciplinary sanctions on his record when he left the Ontario Provincial Police, including neglect of duty when responding to a domestic violence complaint. On his partial police pension, he now lives like minor royalty in Honduras, a country where more than half the population lives below the official poverty line, and at least two million people live on less than $2 a day.

Sitting in the central park of San Pedro Sula one hot afternoon, I get a text message from a friend who says that the Honduras National Tourism Federation is having its annual meeting in the city tonight. After stopping at my hotel to change from shorts and a T-shirt into my most stiflingly hot, but fanciest, dress, I catch a cab over to the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The downstairs lobby, in from the heat, noise, and chaos of the outside, might as well be in Winnipeg, Los Angeles, or Shanghai. Air conditioning blasts the air, and well-dressed Hondurans sip fancy drinks and drag on cigarettes. San Pedro Sula has long been home to the country’s richest families, and today is the hub of Honduras’s sweatshop industry. I finagle my way into the upstairs ballroom and mingle with the upper crust of the tourism business in Honduras. They’re happy to talk about Canadian tourists. “Canadians are super-important to us,” says John Dupuis, the top representative for tourism in La Ceiba. In some hotels in the region, 70 to 80 percent of the guests are Canadian.

“Tourism from Canada, especially in winter, represents the largest source of income in the tourism sector in the Bay Islands and the north coast of the country,” said Piero Dibattista, who owns and manages several hotels in Roatán.

Canada has always been an excellent ally of the tourism industry, says Juan Antonio Bendeck, the chair of the Honduran Chamber of Tourism. Honduras’ tourism industry is small by comparison with its neighbours: the country welcomed 247,082 visitors in 2001, compared to nearby Costa Rica’s 823,575.

But following the June 2009 coup d’état in Honduras, the already struggling tourism sector took a substantial hit. “I’d like to tell everyone to come to Honduras and that it’s a tranquil place and everything is beautiful, but you think I’d be successful with that message?” asked deposed tourism minister Ricardo Martínez, after showing footage of riots and repression in Tegucigalpa during a presentation to the Central American Travel Market.

“Well, Central America is Central America,” says Jorgensen, when asked about the safety of travelling and living in Honduras. He says Trujillo is a small town, and the “really bad guys” tend to stay away from the area.

Jorgensen’s Campa Vista development in Trujillo is being marketed by Tropical Freedom Properties Ltd., who promise just that for only $85 per square foot. Tropical Freedom is a subsidiary of Fast Track to Cash Flow, a St. Albert, Alberta-based company. The local Better Business Bureau gives the company a D on a scale of A+ to F, expressing “concerns with the industry in which this business operates.”

On this sunny morning in June, I’m attending a meet-up hosted by Tropical Freedom Ltd. in the basement of a Travelodge hotel on the freeway beside the sleepy retirement town of Duncan, B.C. Cindy Storme, a petite blond woman in a gold-accented brown pantsuit, wowed the three dozen or so mostly retirement-age people attending the event with stories about waking up to the sound of howler monkeys, banana boating, barbecues, and life beside the water. As her audience chewed on white-bread sandwiches cut into little triangles, Storme talked about Costa Rica, a much more stable country, which she says is “exactly like the movie Avatar.” At the tail end of Storme’s talk, she spends about 10 minutes talking about Honduras, a country that she says “every Canadian” can afford to buy property in. Not only will investing in Honduras give Canadians a place to get away, says Storme, but there’s no credit check involved. Jorgensen is even offering a travel allowance for anyone to go visit the properties, and there are income-tax breaks to boot. At least a few people in the room signed up for a $500 gold membership with Tropical Freedom, which gives them the right to buy property with Jorgensen’s Honduran project. Jorgensen is making sales. But the global market in pleasant tropical experiences is a highly competitive business, and members of the North American middle class have certain expectations when they purchase their own little slice of a Third World paradise.

Québécois tourists in La Ceiba, with a Garifuna boy. Photo by Dawn Paley.

My mind went to a conversation I’d had with two tourists from Gatineau, Quebec on a beach near La Ceiba. They told me that they found their hotel boring. They were too scared to go into town. The two of them were the closest thing I can imagine to professional beach-goers: deeply tanned, lathered up in oil, laid out on folding lounge chairs with most of their middle-aged skin exposed to the scorching sun. For the money, they said, Cuba is a better deal.

Honduras isn’t for the faint of heart, or stomach, as anyone who strays from their supervised beach resort or walled-in retirement complex to a larger city will soon learn. There were 4,473 murders in Honduras in 2008, giving the country the chilling designation of having one of the highest murder rates per capita in the world.Canadians who ignore the country’s security situation do so at their peril.

But Canadians who choose to ignore the long-standing conflicts over rural land do so at the expense of all who have lived there before, and put themselves at risk as well. Consider the advice of the U.S. State Department: “U.S. citizens should exercise extreme caution before entering into any form of commitment to invest in real estate, particularly in coastal areas and the Bay Islands.” Instead of buying into a smooth sales pitch, Canadians would do well to ask themselves why they expect to land in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries, which is also one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and be treated like gods.

In some corners of the web, piracy is a form of curation. Illustration by Matt Daley.

In the summer of 1999, a terrifying rumour began circulating on the then-young internet, gluing millions to their screens: Napster, the illegal music service, was about to be shut down. It seemed like the party with an endless soundtrack was coming to an end.

The site, which famously provided access to millions of illicitly copied songs, introduced internet piracy to the masses. Once people had a taste for a web that was a unending cultural smorgasbord, there was no going back: piracy has now become as central to web culture as celebrity news and porn.

But though the greedy rush to download anything and everything remains, a new and surprisingly widespread breed of piracy has been quietly simmering in the corners of the internet. Rather than encouraging users to grab as much pop culture as they can, these sites are about quality, not quantity. Instead of an anarchic free-for-all, they’re more like a curated exchange amongst aficionados. By most definitions, it’s still stealing, but stealing with a “Robin Hood” twist: the ultimate goal is to spread good art and challenging ideas—for free. That may be controversial, but as principles go, it’s a pretty noble one.

Today, the most common way to download copyrighted material might be a site called The Pirate Bay. It’s just one of the sites that index content scattered across the internet rather than housing it, making them harder to shut down. Every day, millions of films, songs and books are downloaded; unsurprisingly, the most commercially successful entertainment is also the most pirated. A perhaps unintended consequence of the entertainment industry’s hype for the new and popular is that it also drives those who steal from it.

But another approach to piracy has been evolving, too. Rather than an all-you-can-eat buffet, these sites are more akin to an underground dinner club for foodies. Instead of an array of popular, everyday items, one is presented with the crème de la crème of culture, whether a pristine copy of a Fellini film or that Ella Fitzgerald recording few have ever heard.

It was perhaps a music community named OiNK.cd that was the most prominent of these more rigorous sites. This go-to place for quality tunes was shut down by a legal challenge in 2007, though the site’s owner was recently cleared of charges. Nonetheless, What.cd and Waffles.fm (which, for visitors to its homepage, pretends to be a site about recipes), quickly took the place of OiNK. cd. In function, these sites work much like The Pirate Bay. In philosophy, they differ significantly. Many users take time to find and upload obscure tracks of smart, Scandinavian electronica rather than something by Beyoncé. Discussion on the sites’ forums often reflects this commitment to hidden gems, and those who share obscure or difficult works often gain credibility. Instead of mirroring the behaviour of the populist industries they seek to undercut, the sites are unapologetically elitist.

But to characterize these sites as a paradise for thieves with highbrow tastes would be to miss part of the picture. The original material might have been pirated, but these sites make members share amongst themselves. Ratios of uploads to downloads are enforced. Download every available bit of Spanish jazz without sharing in kind and you will be ruthlessly and quickly ejected. What’s more, rather than the populist grab-whatyou-can ethos of The Pirate Bay, you have a community of invested, informed people to guide your wanderings, introducing you to the innovative and new as you return the favour with your own obscure treasures.

Nor is this phenomenon limited to movies and music. AAAARG.org, a site that stores hundreds of academic articles, has electrified cultural theory geeks by finally putting some of that anti-establishment Marxist thinking into practice. When an academic publisher recently requested an article be taken down, it was met with angry and erudite responses about “the exploitative forces of capital.” To the publisher, a copyrighted work was being distributed without compensation; to the sites’ users, ideas were being shared for the greater good.

From the start, we knew the web was going to change things. What we possibly didn’t realize was, unbeknownst to many, new modes of cultural exchange were being born that replaced blind consumption with careful curation, often by simply removing the costly barriers erected around “the good stuff.” As a result, those who adhere to the letter of the law, and the spirit of copyright and ownership that underpin it, believe these sites are simply dens of theft.

But such a view is short-sighted. What these services let us see is that when the exchange of ideas, rather than the exchange of dollars, is the controlling principle, communities will form around the best and most challenging of what culture has to offer. Call me a naive idealist, but I think that’s a good thing. And when history looks back on this moment, rather than maintain the status quo, I’d rather it be known I was in Robin Hood’s band of merry thieves.

W00t! This Magazine's November-December 2008 cover story, "The New Face of Porn" by Alison Lee, reprinted in Tightrope Books' "The Best Canadian Essays 2009".

Alison Lee’s November-December 2008 This Magazine cover story, “The New Face of Porn” was chosen as one of 14 pieces to be published in Tightrope Books’ The Best Canadian Essays 2009. There are some great pieces of writing in there, and we’re thrilled that an essay that started in the pages of This is getting some further, and richly deserved, exposure. I’ve reposted “The New Face of Porn” today at This.org so you can read it here, but of course buying the book gets you 13 more great reads, including essays by past contributors to This Nicholas Hune-Brown, Anita Lahey, and Chris Turner.

Here’s an excerpt of the cover story:

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.

Tightrope is throwing a party to launch the book tonight in Toronto, where Alison Lee will be reading from “The New Face of Porn,” and her employer, your friendly local feminist sex shop Good for Her, is providing door prizes. There will also be readings by Nathan Whitlock and Kamal Al-Solaylee. The party starts at 8 PM at Revival (783 College St. West).

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.

The preference among Canadian literary awards for historical fiction has created a national literature devoted to burlap sacking instead of life in the sack. The repeat shortlisting of historical fiction, in which a rural or foreign yesterday is somehow more important than today, contributes to our excessively chaste literature. England has just seen the release of In Bed With, an anthology of smut by respected female writers. Meanwhile, in their new book The Porning of America, literature professors Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott examine how the internet has made porn and sexuality mainstream (hello, YouPorn.com). Yet here in Canada we still have a fiction devoted to mill town sagas and multi-generational farm stories, few of them emboldened by sexuality.

Here in Canada we still have a fiction devoted to mill town sagas and multi-generational farm stories, few of them emboldened by sexuality. Illustration by Graham Roumieu

Mary Lawson’s 2003 Crow Lake manages to have a plot that turns on the consequences of sex, but prefers to devote its prose to marsh fauna and the joinery of farmhouses, not farmhands. Andrea MacPherson’s 2007 Beyond the Blue is literally set in a wartime burlap factory. In life, we flirt by email. In our literature, we go to barn raisings.

Several Canadian literary magazines have recently released so-called “sex issues.” Pick up these earnest journals and you’ll find plenty of writing devoted to pop culture and shades of afternoon light. Etymology will abound. But no one will actually have sex.

Counter to this trend of dour and sexless fiction is Russell Smith’s self-confessedly pornographic — and recently re-released — novel, Diana. Part dirty love letter, part cri de genitalia, and part satire, Diana has many layers. This urban coming-of-age story follows a twentysomething Toronto woman in and out of a few jobs and several more beds. The vicissitudes of the publishing industry meant the first edition had become hard to find, so when Biblioasis, a new Ontario press, began re-releasing important but out-ofprint Canadian books, Smith emerged from behind his female mask to re-release Diana with a frank new introduction. Smith rightly calls it “silly” that Canadians don’t write or read about sex, “that area of conflict and pleasure which is so central to our daily lives, our relationships, our self-confidence, our whole sense of self.”

Globe columnist and Governor General’s Award nominee Smith originally released the novel under the pseudonym “Diane Savage.” Although he now regrets having tried to pass off the first edition as the writing of a woman, that gender-bending was obviously more than just a desire to court the largely female market for erotic literature. Writing as a woman allowed Smith to investigate important issues of submission and dominance both freely and authoritatively. Diana is submissive in one relationship, then dominant in the next; this trajectory provides an honest and complex portrait of female sexuality.

More generally, however, our sexless national literature perpetuates North America’s gender double standard and is even more discouraging of lustful, pro-sex women. Popular fiction by Canadian women has recently forgotten about birth control, with Ami McKay’s The Birth House featuring a cover image of a woman who is headless, barefoot, and pregnant, and Leah McLaren’s The Continuity Girl, devoted to a “sperm bandit” in search of a big belly, not the big O. Not Diana. Not Smith. His sweaty chapters are a sexual decathlon, taking us through exhibitionism, BDSM, three-ways, phone sex, fetish-wear, and swinging.

Smith’s affectedly female voice is interesting and socially valuable, even if it isn’t always successful. He goes straight to the genitals on the first page, which is exactly counter to any advice I’ve ever received (couldn’t we start with the backs of the knees?). The original use of a pseudonym may also have made Smith too cautious. The penis is freely described with a varied schoolyard vocabulary, yet Diana‘s happy spot is often referred to as “her sex.”

The fact that sex is everywhere save our (subsidized) literature is more than simply misrepresentative. It’s also a lost opportunity to capitalize on one of fiction’s specialties — privacy. We often watch movies with someone else, whereas fiction is almost always read alone. Diana is actually quite funny, and humour is another thing often lost in our overly chaste literature. Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version was one of the last novels to win the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and it’s full of sex.

If realism, social relevance, intimacy, and humour aren’t reason enough to up the porn quotient in CanLit, look at your thermometer. This is Canada. Is there a better way to keep warm in the winter?

I spoke with Myrna in September to discuss how the original article came about, how her views have changed since then, and whether the term “feminist pornography” is a contradiction in terms. Myrna Kostash is an Edmonton-based writer, teacher, and translator, and the author of
Long Way From Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada and The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir.

Tomorrow we’ll be reproducing Myrna’s original essay here on the blog in its entirety, so check back then to read it.

This is the first in what we hope will become a semi-regular podcast on the website. As always, I’m happy to hear your feedback. Contact me at editor at thismagazine dot ca.

This podcast is published under a Creative Commons licence. The music you hear is also CC-licensed:

Intro: “Lemmings in Love” by Pornophonique
Outro: “Ender” by WhiteRoom