Art by Valerie Thai

Aaron Campbell was 37 when he walked away from his world. For 27 years he had been told that leaving would jeopardize the chance of eternal salvation for him, his wife, and their four children. Yet salvation was just what he needed, and immediately. “Ultimately, I said, ‘If I don’t [leave], my mental health is going to continue to suffer to a degree where I don’t know what I’ll do,’” he recalls. “That was very scary for me.”

Campbell grew up in 1980s Wainwright, Alberta, a farming town of about 5,000 southeast of Edmonton. Until age 10 his community consisted of his mother, his brother and sister, and a handful of neighbours. Then, his single mom’s search for social support and spiritual direction led her to the Mormon Church (officially called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 2018, after God urged a “correction” to the abbreviated LDS in a revelation received by church president Russell M. Nelson).

In many ways Campbell, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, was raised by the Wainwright branch of the LDS, amid tight community and tighter programming. Monday was Family Home Evening: a religious lesson and activity for family completion. A weekly schedule of age-specific meetups, seminary sessions, and miscellaneous social gatherings followed, culminating with a three-hour church service on the Sunday Sabbath.

The church provided friends and support, but prescriptions and proscriptions cast a shadow. “The messaging was subtle: that if you do these things it will enrich your family, it will bring you blessings,” says Campbell. “But the implication was: if you don’t do these things, bad stuff will happen to you.” Family reputation was paramount, and meant prioritizing the programme. “It required me to basically put my authentic self to the side,” Campbell recalls. “To be accepted into the community, in order to be accepted into my family, I felt I needed to perform and have a mask on.” There was, he says, “very consistent, daily reinforcement of: the person you are is not acceptable.”

Rural, pre-internet life meant that Campbell knew no different, and his mental health suffered. At 15 he was put on SSRIs, and enrolled in a national health system with scant appreciation for therapy or supplementary practices. Only after 20 years of futile treatment did he identify his relationship with the church, invisible in its ubiquity, as the root of his suffering. “When I left, it was like putting a tourniquet on a wound,” he says. “The wound had stopped bleeding, but I’ve still got a wound. Now I got to deal with this.”

Angry and confused, disillusionment with the medical system led him elsewhere in search of remedies. He went “all in” on exercise, cannabis, and keto dieting to little avail. Then, in 2017, he came across Johns Hopkins University research documenting the alleviating effect of psilocybin on end-of-life anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients—an early harbinger of the so-called psychedelic renaissance, which started to go mainstream with Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind. Inspired, Campbell contacted a fledgling psychedelic group in Calgary. Little did he know, he was initiating a journey into a community that would change, and possibly even save, his life.

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Mormonism was founded by Joseph Smith in New York State, amidst the fervent Protestant revivalism of the Second Great Awakening. On April 6, 1830, 11 days after the Book of Mormon was published, about 55 people gathered on Whitmer Farm near Fayette for the first Mormon congregation.

At first glance, tripping on psychedelics seems a sinful departure from Mormon tenets. The Word of Wisdom, a revelation Smith said he received from God in 1833, commands Mormons to refrain from alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee. Church prophets have since added substances that “impair judgement or are harmful or highly addictive.” But did the first prophet do as later prophets have preached? Convincing evidence suggests that psychedelics were in fact integral to Mormonism’s visionary beginnings.

In 1820 or 1821, a teenaged Smith experienced his First Vision after entering a grove of trees near Manchester, New York, seeking wisdom. “I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me,” he later reported. Heavenly “personages” then told him of the imminent Second Coming, and condemned all existing Christian churches for teaching incorrect doctrine. Smith experienced a string of such visions, from which several cardinal Mormon doctrines emerged.

A 2019 paper by Robert Beckstead, Bryce Blankenagel, Cody Noconi, and Michael Winkelman presents compelling evidence that these visions came from entheogens (chemical substances that produce altered states of consciousness when ingested). During his First Vision, Smith experienced mouth dryness, paranoia, and vivid hallucinations: symptoms consistent with entheogens—including two psychedelic mushrooms, psilocybe ovoideocystidiata and amanita muscaria—either scientifically documented to have grown in every area Smith lived, or almost certainly available through established trade networks.

It’s highly likely that Smith was familiar with these substances. His mentors, including his father, were enmeshed in folk magic, the occult, and esoteric Christian practices, some with entheogen links. His family possessed a panoply of magic-adjacent artifacts, from astrological charts to an alchemical amulet. His visions echoed those experienced by both of his parents and foreshadowed those of many early Mormon converts. Multiple eyewitness accounts describe the unusually intense visionary nature of early Mormon congregations, with symptoms seemingly manifesting on demand after drinking Smith’s wine sacrament. There was widespread suspicion that the wine was spiked.

Smith was shot dead by a mob in 1844 while awaiting trial in Carthage Jail, Illinois, after causing uproar by destroying a Mormon-critical press and, according to some reports, imposing martial law while mayor of the city of Nauvoo. Brigham Young became the new Mormon prophet. He shepherded the church to Utah and away from its probable, or at least possible, psychedelic genesis, which for nearly two centuries has been forgotten or denied.

But modern Mormons and ex-Mormons are returning to these visionary roots. The “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast is dedicated to “alternative methods for healing from trauma” and “exploring higher consciousness while healing from toxic religious shame.” Since launching in 2020 it has grown a monthly listenership of over 10,000. Divine Assembly, a Utah-based “magic mushroom church,” was founded in the same year by ex-Mormon and former Republican state Senator Steve Urquhart and his wife Sara. Though not all of its roughly 5,000 members are ex-Mormons, the church was founded in large part to help people leaving religious environments find healing through psychedelics. These congregations contain clues about the power of collective psychedelic practice to help people find new ways forward and process past pain.

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Campbell’s first psychedelic journey came courtesy of five grams of psilocybin mushrooms. Sitting in a circle of 15 fellow trippers and six sober space holders, he became the universe. He recalls creating stars and planets and music as scattered parts of himself. He felt giggly and joyous. “It was just a magical experience,” he says.

Campbell emerged from his trip feeling more connected to everything around him. He had felt a radically new sense of perception, free from hierarchy and suppression—a mode he still feels able to slip into to view situations differently, even though no experience since has recaptured that first sense of interconnection.

The decision to contact that Calgary psychedelic community started a chain of small events that, Campbell says, have “fundamentally changed the course of my life and, frankly, probably saved me from a trajectory that was going to end up in suicide.” Much of this stemmed from feeling like he was spending time with people who understood him, who saw him for who he was rather than how well he followed the rules. The Mormon church doesn’t exactly encourage experimentation and self-exploration.

On the “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast, two ex-Mormon friends, Mike and Doug, have languid conversations about psychedelics and related matters. It sounds like Seth Rogen and his best pals running a The Kardashians-style show. In a June, 2024 episode, they talk about basic milestones in their lives their religious loved ones may not necessarily condone, like the times when they each had their first drink.

Mike and his wife were travelling, and one day he just looked at her and asked if they should share a drink. “Then we were like, ‘fuck it! Let’s just each order one drink! Let’s order our own drink!’” Doug laughs uproariously. “What a decision-making process that was, though, right? Like so scary, so terrifying to wade into those waters, right.”

“Yeah…” and the conversation sobers.

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From 2001 to 2021, the number of people in Canada reporting no religious affiliation doubled. In the U.S., church membership dipped below 50 percent for the first time in 2020. Canadian census data contains 87,725 self-identifying Mormons in 2021, down from 105,365 in 2011. Even official LDS data, which includes inactive former members, shows Canadian membership growing slowly in absolute terms, but shrinking as a proportion of the population.

The ex-Mormon community, on the other hand, is growing—and connecting. The r/ExMormon subreddit, with 302,000 members, is the headline example, but Campbell says there are countless other ex-Mormon pockets of society. “There is something about the Mormon experience that teaches people to organize really well,” he says. The internet fundamentally changed things, and those who leave the church are now better able to connect again outside of it. Campbell says this means the church no longer controls their narrative.

Meanwhile, the psychedelic renaissance has bloomed. Psychedelic practice has a long history, from ayahuasca use across the Amazon Basin to iboga ceremonies among West African Bwiti communities and peyote usage among North American Indigenous peoples. But prohibition has reigned in the contemporary West, with promising medical research suppressed through the war on drugs. Until recently.

Research increasingly points to the potential of psychedelics in treating mental-health issues (despite serious methodological challenges, like ensuring double-blind trials with mind-altering substances and navigating the complex knot of possible mechanisms). Tectonic legal shifts are nudging countries, including Canada, toward clinical trials, medical use, and decriminalization debates. Stores selling psychedelics are semi-tolerated across Canada. Investment has boomed with the hype. And facilitated psychedelic experiences are accessible through an underground network of practitioners.

This renaissance holds growing appeal for religious communities, as evidenced by an emerging network of psychedelic chaplains integrating psychedelics into spiritual thought systems, as well as people processing the psychological challenges of leaving totalizing religions like Mormonism. Campbell is careful to stress that every experience of apostasy is unique, but there are patterns. Abandoning Mormonism generally means relinquishing a moral and spiritual worldview, which often creates a deep need for sensemaking. “You just need something to matter again,” an ex-Mormon Divine Assembly member and psychedelics user told Rolling Stone. Leaving can mean losing a tight-knit community of friends and family, plus the navigational framework of a familiar culture. This, in turn, can trigger the task of discovering your authentic self, which may contain characteristics long repressed through shame, like sexual desire or identity. For many, it can feel like being fully alive for the first time.

Powerful psychedelic experiences are inspiring some ex- Mormons to facilitate those experiences for others. Campbell now guides people through psychedelic journeys, from pre-trip preparation to in-trip support and post-trip integration. He isn’t formally trained or licensed, and doesn’t stick to a particular modality, but adapts his approach to individual clients. He works underground, mostly with ex-Mormons new to psychedelics and looking to make sense of life after leaving. They are typically middle-aged, well resourced, and curious.

Psychedelics are pattern disruptors, Campbell says. He believes the reason there’s so much research into how they can help people trying to break addictions is that they make people question their reasons for doing what they do. He helps people deconstruct these patterns as a precursor to long-term change. He typically works with somebody once, either recommending practical next steps or referring them to a medical professional with relevant expertise.

Campbell’s understanding of his work highlights what seems obvious, but is often effaced by psychedelic discourse focused on individual treatments and miracle trips: that our psychology is shaped by the systems we live within. “Any system that is well established basically tricks people into thinking that it’s not alive,” Campbell says. “It hides, and the more it can hide, the longer it will last.” This can lead ex-Mormons and others to mistake mental-health challenges for personal failings, or scapegoat leaders without recognizing how systems also enclose those scapegoats.

Community is a powerful vehicle for identifying and understanding systemic patterns. Psychedelics are often most effective as deconstructive tools when used with others who understand and can help process that deconstruction.

Later in the “Mormons on Mushrooms” podcast, Doug talks about a recent trip he took that felt different. He was contemplating what makes him feel fear and anxiety, and thinking about how, once the thing he thought was causing those feelings dissipates, something else comes and takes its spot. He and Mike agree that being afraid of death is the same as being afraid to live. They talk about overcoming shame in the way we can only do with someone who really gets us. Doug talks about this moment he always has when he’s high and feels super dirty, but says it’s the grounding part of the trip for him. It reminds him, “Ya popped up from the earth, big dog! And yer going back down.” Mike murmurs understanding.

Campbell experiences similar seamless conversations now, too. “I don’t have to explain the acronyms, I don’t have to explain the backstory of any of this stuff,” he says of his experiences in ex-Mormon psychedelic circles. “People are like, ‘Yep, I get it,’ right away. That feeling of being understood, being heard, being validated, is huge —huge.” Psychedelics alone didn’t save Campbell; psychedelics plus finding community did.

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This insistence on collective psychedelic practice resonates beyond the ex-Mormon community, and represents a broader call for a different psychedelic renaissance. Writing in Jacobin, Benjamin Fong identifies two possible renaissances. The “psychiatric paradigm” sees government institutions and psychedelic companies administering psychedelics in tightly regulated medical settings to alleviate specific mental-health symptoms. Critical psychedelics podcast “Psymposia” dubs this corporadelia: psychedelics as commercial service and psychological adaptation.

The collective paradigm envisions an alternative renaissance, rooted in a systemic understanding of psychedelic possibilities and what conditions our mental health. This paradigm proposes supplementing psychiatric services with decentralized, community-centred psychedelic practices, and connects individual healing with the need to acknowledge and even reimagine the social, economic, and political systems that shape mental health. Whereas the psychiatric paradigm reduces psychedelics to “just another little pill for skull-bound ailments,” in the words of Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis, co-founders of psychedelic-assisted therapy organization Cardea, the collective paradigm is more radical. “When used correctly, these substances are not quick-fix cures for illness but consciousness raisers,” they write. “And raised consciousnesses tend to find the public causes for personal pain.”

The collective paradigm heeds what we know about how psychedelics work. One of the few concrete research findings is that the context around a psychedelic experience— set and setting—affects its outcomes. The systems that shape us are the bedrock of that context. Proponents also cite the array of Indigenous psychedelic practices—encompassing religious, social, medicinal, creative, and warfaring rituals—as evidence of collective psychedelic possibility. Another touchstone is Mark Fisher’s “acid communism,” which holds that the psychedelia of postwar New Left counterculture helped people transgress boundaries, generate new artistic forms, and bolster new social relations capable of undermining “capitalist realism:” the seeming impossibility of imagining beyond capitalism.

What the collective paradigm should look like in practice is a complex, contested question. But experimental answers are sprouting in Canada and beyond, like mushrooms after rain. Motivated by the exclusion of racialized communities and issues from existing research, professor and clinical psychologist Monnica Williams is pioneering research exploring psychedelics as a tool for processing intergenerational racial trauma. “When people are traumatized, usually it’s of an interpersonal nature,” she recently told The Conversation Canada. “But also we find that people heal through connecting with other people.”

Williams has been involved in research documenting the impact of naturalistic (non-experimental) psychedelic use on racial-discrimination symptoms among Indigenous, Asian, and non-white people in North America. Her ketamine-assisted psychotherapy work has alleviated PTSD associated with racial trauma. Through both individual therapy and group sessions for specific communities, like Black women, she applies psychedelics to historic, cultural forces impacting mental health at systemic scales. Her work gestures toward the possibility of improving mental-health outcomes and raising consciousness around collective issues in therapeutic settings.

There is growing experimentation around collective psychedelic care. Daan Keiman is a psychedelic practitioner and Buddhist psychedelic chaplain. Formerly through The Synthesis Institute, and now through The Communitas Collective, he is at the forefront of work to develop holistic models of psychedelic care, including training for potential psychedelic practitioners, that integrate systemic, spiritual, somatic, and relational dimensions. Keiman sees systemic issues and collective experiences as integral to healthy, transformative psychedelic practices. “Psychedelics can offer us these experiences in which we feel part of something bigger again,” he says, because they help dissolve boundaries. “It becomes so incredibly important to make sure that the model of offering psychedelic care to someone can address both these experiences: of communitas, and underlying problems of alienation and belonging.” Research shows that systems shape mental-health outcomes like alienation and loneliness, he continues. Who and how we are changes with social setting, and a sense of belonging guards our mental health. Collective psychedelic practices can not only demonstrate these findings and cultivate empathy, but can also prove more accessible and cost-effective than individual services.

Another example of collective psychedelic activity is the patchwork of Canadian associations offering psychedelic advocacy, education, and experiences, from the Psychedelic Association of Canada down to local communities like Vancouver’s The Flying Sage. Empowered by creeping psychedelic permissibility, Michael Oliver started The Flying Sage after working for the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies Canada, which has been instrumental in enabling psychedelic medical research. While he recognizes the health benefits and trojan-horse strategic value of medical trials, Oliver imagines broader cultural possibilities. So The Flying Sage aims to destigmatize psychedelics by pairing them with activities like cold plunges, breath work, and dance.

“Psychedelics are really great at tapping into this collective unconscious,” Oliver says. “It’s a very powerful aspect of psychedelics which at the moment isn’t really being talked about at all in the mainstream narrative.” As a meeting space for underground and overground practitioners to connect, The Flying Sage is one example of how hidden collective-paradigm psychedelic communities are underpinning the ostensibly individualistic psychiatric paradigm.

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Campbell has learned that people are finding value not only in psychedelic trials or miraculous doses, but by combining psychedelic experiences and time spent with others. His ultimate goal is for psychedelic practice to be integrated into communities. The point isn’t that all communities must use psychedelics, but that normalizing safe, connected psychedelic experiences can help more people.

Campbell says he is struck by “just how not unique the work is that I do,” meaning it isn’t so different from the many forms of care that sustain healthy people and communities. He cites American spiritual leader Ram Dass’s culturally integrated conception of care, and his notion that “we’re all just walking each other home.” Thanks to finding both psychedelics and deep connections, Campbell has made it back to a home in which he knows himself better than ever before. He’s more present; a better parent. Regardless of faith, he hopes and thinks more people will soon be served by collective psychedelic guidance.

Whose past? My past, obviously: I was Bart Gerrard, one of my noms de plume—the name of a then-forgotten and probably now more-forgotten Canadian newspaper caricaturist of the turn of the century. That’s the turn of the century before the turn of the century we just had.

But also the past of Canada, or Kanada, as we sometimes, then, in the seventies, found it clever to say. (Why did we find it clever? I’ve forgotten.) Bart Gerrard drew Kanadian Kulchur Komics for a small populist leftish periodical that had originally been called This Magazine Is About Schools, but had then become more general in its interests, re-naming itself as This Magazine. (“I write for This Magazine.” “What magazine?” “This Magazine.” “What?” “Who’s on First?”) (It is now called simply This, so no longer gets involved in this kind of circular conversation about its name.) Bart started drawing for it through Rick Salutin, an old friend, who thought the sometimes portentous and pulpit-thumping tone of This Magazine could use a little lightening up. Anyway, I’d always drawn stupid comix in private, so was not averse to doing it in public. As you can tell from the drawing, the strip was often cranked out on the fly: I was living on a working farm at the time and running a huge vegetable garden, so KKKomix sometimes had to take second place to slug-destroying and hay-harvesting, not to mention the TV script writing and other forms of scribbling I was doing to make a living and support my poetry-writing and novel-creation.

The central joke of the Survivalwoman comics was this: in 1972 I’d published a book called Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, which had made waves of a sort, not all of them friendly. This book was an attempt to distinguish what people wrote in Canada from what they wrote in the United States and the United Kingdom, in riposte to what we were so often told: that there wasn’t any Canadian literature, or if there was, it was a pale echo of things written in large, cosmopolitan, important places. Survival against the odds—both natural and human—I took to be one of the leitmotifs of such Canadian writing as I could get my hands on then, in the dark ages before the Internet, print-on-demand, and Abe Books.

Pair that leitmotif with the fact that, in the world of comix, Canada did not have a superhero of its own—Nelvana of the Northern Lights and Johnny Canuck and their bros and sisses having vanished with the demise of the wartime “Canadian Whites” in approximately 1946. (King of the Royal Mounted did not count, being American. Anyway, King had no superhuman features, unlike the present-day Wolverine.)

So what more appropriate than Survivalwoman: a superheroine with no discernable powers, who had a cape but could not fly—hey, it was Kanada, always lesser—and came equipped with snowshoes? The visual design was based on me—curly hair, short—as was part of the personality—earnest and somewhat clueless. This figure later did some fundraising for This Magazine, as a set of greeting cards, in which Survivalwoman sits on the curb looking dejected, as was her wont.

As Hope Nicholson has told me that she only understood about half of the references in the strip, here are some interpretations for you. In the Origin Story, Holier Pierre is Pierre Trudeau. We culture types were mad at him because he paid scant heed to us and our efforts: in that dimly remembered era, support for culture came from, guess who, the Progressive Conservatives! The middle finger is the same one Pierre had given some journalists. The rose relic is of course his buttonhole rose. The innocent, pure-minded Canadian was a cliché, and also a joke: we ourselves knew that this was not our real nature or indeed our real history.

The “Amphibianwoman” sequence is about a very high-profile concern in the 1970s: the Quebec separatist movement, then at its height. Why “Amphibian?” After the disrespectful slang applied to French people at the time, which was “frogs.” (I myself do not see why this should be derogatory, as I am an amphibian-fancier and my company is named O.W. Toad. But that is another matter.) Amphibianwoman is portrayed as sexier and more sophisticated than the naïve and flat-chested “anglo” Survivalwoman because we “anglo” gals were often treated to comparisons of that kind. (Why can’t Toronto women dress as well as Montreal women, and so forth and so on.) “René” is of course René Levesque, then the leader of the separatist forces. And as usual, the anglos (squareheads or wooden throats, in Quebecois slang) were told they just didn’t understand. They often didn’t, so fair enough eh?

In the Love Life strip, Survivalwoman has encounters with both Pierre (again), who (again) isn’t forking out for Culture, and Superham from the U.S., interested—as so often—in Canada’s natural resources. The final “Exit, pursued by a bear” animal panel is a reference to Marian Engel’s novel Bear, featuring a love affair of sorts with a bear, which had just rollicked upon the scene.

There you have it, young people of today. Don’t judge me. You will anyway, but wait forty years and see if anyone understands your political cartoons! Plus ça change, eh? Adieu, and bonne chance!

Excerpted from The Secret Loves of Geek Girls: Redux, published by Bedside Press. The book is now available at hopenicholson.com or on Amazon.

According to its mandate, the Body Confidence Canada Awards (BCCA) “advocate for equitable and inclusive images, messages, practices and policies supporting body diversity.” It’s pretty hard to argue with that mandate, unless you’re a jerk. And if the past few weeks are any indication, there a lot of jerks out there. On October 27, BCCA issued a statement of concern in regards to the TTC and National Ballet of Canada’s joint campaign “We Move You.” The campaign is meant to highlight a partnership between Toronto’s transit infrastructure and cultural organization. Campaign videos and posters showing ballet dancers on the TTC are displayed in transit stations and vehicles.

Media outlets have since cherry picked which parts of the statement to share. So, let’s break it down.

“In regards to the TTC and National Ballet of Canada joint campaign we have concerns about the body size, shape, and weight diversity, or should we say lack thereof, that this campaign unknowingly communicates. The body type of most ballet dancers do not adequately represent those of most Canadians and dare we say most TTC users.”

The argument here is, “Well they are dancers and train all day.” This is true, and yes, dancers work hard at what they do and it requires discipline a lot of us don’t have. In cases like that of former National Ballet of Canada company dancer Kathleen Rea these bodies are also suffering from eating disorders. In a Huffington Post article titled “How My National Ballet Career Led to Bulimia,” Rea writes about her experiences: “My required performance weight was 105 pounds, and at 5’6″ that was bone thin. My ballet mistress told me that I needed to be thinner than the other girls because of my ‘larger’ breasts (my cup size was B!)” Rea starved herself, and then began purging; she even considered cutting the fat from her thigh with a knife. After finding an eating disorder therapist she told the company she was in recovery. They told her she was “far too fat to appear on stage” and that she had “embarrassed the nation of Canada on the international stage.”

“While we completely agree with the intent of message: one of acknowledging and celebrating Toronto arts and culture, we believe initiatives like these, executed in this manner, continue to perpetuate unrealistic and highly regimented bodies as some sort of an ideal of ‘beauty’ and ironically more specific to this ad they become signifiers of some sort of higher ‘art’ and ‘culture.’ It is also well documented that ballet as both an art form and as a sport is not inclusive to differently shaped or weighted bodies traditionally. While we know some alternative ballet exists that feature differently sized bodies for instance, it does not receive the prominent attention nor the distinct ranking that institutions such as National Ballet of Canada would enjoy.

Our critique is not a dislike of ballet. We want to make that crystal clear. We have attended ballets and quite enjoyed them—though we did leave lingering to see more progressive shifts in body diversity. Our critique is a challenge to you to reflect on what version of “enhanced beauty and movement” is being privileged in this ad for public consumption by the public TTC. And what about those who will never embody this mould? Are they equally moving, beautiful symbols of Toronto’s thriving cultural fabric?

Many TTC users in their daily movements who identify as fat, racialized, disabled, elderly, and pregnant have experienced varying forms of body-based discrimination, sexual harassment, fat and body-shaming, or simply rude treatment where they are not given seats even in designated priority areas based on their mobility needs.

We do not believe this campaign reflects how users of the TTC “move” regularly. We have had many pleasant experiences on the TTC and in our city travels but sadly the negative experiences can have lasting consequences. ”

If thin, white, Eurocentric bodies were not the only ones we already see plastered everywhere on the sides of buses, magazine covers, and billboards, this initiative wouldn’t need to be called out. BCCA isn’t saying the bodies in this campaign are wrong or do not deserve to exist, as implied in this Toronto Star article. Instead, they are suggesting it would be great to see other bodies represented as well.

Jill Andrew, BCCA Co-Founder is not making this stuff up for fun. Maybe she wants to change the culture where it is socially acceptable for someone to call her a “fucking fat black bitch.” A horrible thing to say, right? Not the norm, right? I would love to think that too, but these words are continuing to be thrown her way as a response to the articulate, hospitable released based in valid concerns, experiences, and research.

Additionally, BCCA is not simply ‘complaining’ without offering suggestions to accommodate everyone:

“An ad like this could have been made more inclusive with the addition of non-professional or professional children and adult dancers of differing sizes, shapes, ages and abilities dancing with the National Ballet dancers in the video. THEN we would be seeing MORE of Toronto’s superb beauty, art and culture in motion in collaboration with National Ballet’s principal dancers.

At the end of the day if you want us—TTC users—to be ‘moved’ by a campaign like this while we are ‘on the move’ we MUST SEE OURSELVES.”

The backlash Andrew and the BCCA organization has received is appalling. In response to the suggestion that other bodies should be represented as well as the thin Eurocentric ones has been met with fat shaming and hate; in other words, BCCA’s message has been met with the reason their fight is so important.

Here’s our special This Magazine “Gender Block” take on all that fun advice:

No Selfies
Girls take up way too much space with their selfies. After all, this is space that could be used for yet another hilarious drawing of a dick. A clear headshot is OK, but selfies show a lack of self-confidence, but also narcissism (oohhhkay). So, whatever you do, make sure to show your confidence by listening to what guys, like Joseph, have to say: “It’s especially annoying when it’s the first photo. You have one photo to get my attention, and you failed.” Don’t be the girl to fail Joseph. (Yes, Joseph is real.) (Sadly.)

Use your Profile to Tell a Story
Most guys find this part of a Tinder profile underutilized. Why are women so worried to write about themselves? All they have to do is make sure they come off entirely perfect for the Leslies of the world who remind us, “It’s like a resume.” Like a resume for the potential love of a guy who is kind enough to dissect every part of your being. Remember, absolutely do not use a Marilyn Monroe quote—that comes off too aggressive. If you do this you will be failing Vincent, 30, like you already did Joseph with that selfie you took. You know, the one when you were digging how you looked but somehow also showcasing your lack of self-esteem.

Send the First Message
Adam doesn’t want to think of something witty to say; it’s hard. So do it for him. And for the love of God, don’t lose Vincent’s momentum by not responding quickly enough. Nothing else is as important as scoring a date with Vincent.

But, also, remember, don’t get too excited about scoring a date with Vincent …

I mean, that’s desperate.

Don’t Plan an Elaborate First Date
Men don’t want to feel pressured. Pressure is on you, lady.

Take a Tinder Break if the Date Goes Well
While he is using Tinder after your date, he doesn’t want to see you doing the same—stay classy, ladies.

All of this sounds like so much fun! Let the love games begin! Where do we sign up?!

Growing up in a low-income household in a small Quebec town, Starchild Stela passed the time drawing. “It was one of the few things I felt I received validation for,” they say. As a teen they started to graffiti and moved to Montreal where they have been working since. Within the last five years the artist says they have become more dedicated to their art, a mix of soft and bright colours—with feminist messaging. The artist often refers to it as “radical cute culture” or “radical softness.” Feminist messaging is incorporated in their artwork with mottoes such as, “I believe you,” and “unapologetically feminist.”

The mix of art and feminism in their work is organic and can’t be disassociated, they say. “My work comes from my heart and guts,” they add. “I started to explore feminism and anti-oppression politics while I was processing traumatic gender experiences. It helped me understand trauma in a larger context.” As their understanding of feminism evolves, so does their work. Stela’s earlier work was a nod to how much they loved 1980s and ’90s manga as a teen. Now, they say their work—with its soft, luminous imagery—reflects their personality as an adult.

“I also want to dedicate myself a bit more to radical softness,” they say. “I would love to co-organize a radical softness art show, and maybe a pop-up gallery for a month.” They have a strong interest in community building and are excited to collaborate more with friends and other artists. Like with hosting art-making workshops as therapy for survivors of sexual violence: “I’m interested in focusing on my experiences with coping with trauma and art-making as survival.”

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.

UPDATE (SEPTEMBER 5, 2017): The subject of the story’s pronouns have been updated from the original point of publication.

Like many women, I connected with Gray over similar experiences of trauma. When the Silence is Violence Legal Defense Fund went online in December, I thought the timing worked perfectly for a January fundraiser.

Mohammad Ali performing at the Silence is Violence fundraiser. Photo by Leonardo Paradela IG: @spleo2

Dave’s… in Toronto was packed the Sunday night of the fundraiser. The bar’s management, all the entertainers, prize donors, photographers, and musicians replied quickly when I reached out and, without question, volunteered their time and energy to the cause. The Rough Go, Mohammad Ali, Wayne Kennedy, and Jen Unbe were the evening’s musical performances of the night and prize donors for the silent and live auctions included FloralManifesto, Dani Crosby, Sera Rootlet, Gnarly Art, Carlton Cinema, Jane Doe, and, of course, my Gender Block home, This Magazine.

Many involved with the event shared their own stories of sexual assault and/or rape and, naturally, their experiences with victim-blaming and thoughts on the rape culture that allows so many people to be hurt in these ways.

I connected with Gray over a series of well-timed coincidences this past fall. I snapped a picture of a Silence is Violence (SiV)  poster hung on a wall in the sociology department at York University in the fall as a reminder to add the group to the feminist resource directory I had recently launched, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange. When This Magazine started researching on campus activism for an upcoming alternative university guide, I thought of SiV: feminism is kind of a big deal to me and the poster was pink, so I was attracted to the prospect of learning more.

The morning following the fundraiser I joined Gray and 40 of her supporters in court for three days. Again, experiences were shared. In spite of our relentless rape culture and a society that ignores this culture’s existence and instead turns to victim-blaming, Silence is Violence has connected victims and survivors (we all identify differently and that is OK!) nationwide, on campuses, court rooms, and in a bar on a Sunday night.

Feature photo by Jordan Clarke

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.

Today, I still hear about how men prefer women with no makeup. As if I should care. When I do go without makeup I’m often asked if I’m sick. How am I supposed to reply to that? “Nope, just ugly, I guess?” Too often when mansplainers cheer the no makeup “look” who they’re really thinking of is the cool girl on TV whose makeup team made her “natural.” The whole issue of make-up for women is fraught with a sense of lose-lose.

Women are told they need to wear makeup in order to look presentable. Wearing makeup is an unspoken requirement for many working women. If we don’t wear it, we’re taught, then we must feel bad about ourselves. (Women feeling bad makes a lot of money.) When women do wear makeup, on their own terms, they’re also criticized by wider society. As with anything that’s deemed feminine, makeup is decidedly vain and frivolous. Makeup is both a possible a tool in liberating a woman’s creativity and a weapon used against us as a tool of oppression.

“Makeup as a concept does not oppress women,” says makeup artist Siera Taylor. “The basic idea of adorning one’s skin with colour for either practical, ritual or expressive reasons has existed for both females and males within almost every culture dating back as far as human history is recorded.” Makeup doesn’t have to be used to make everyone look the same: women can defy beauty standards by wearing makeup however they want, ignoring rules about colours, or what is considered too heavy or too light.

Taylor believes using makeup should be an act of joy, and if it isn’t, then it becomes a negative societal obligation—one women shouldn’t feel forced to meet. “This can be difficult to determine,” she says, “as we are conditioned from birth to believe we should all be striving to achieve a certain ideal beauty and the cosmetics industry profits off that belief.”

When it comes down to it, maybe it’s as simple as: We can wear as little or as much as we want. Our faces, our choices, our terms.

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.

I learned about Kats at the 2014 Beauty Confidence Canada Awards, where she had won an award but, due to health issues, could not attend the reception. I became interested in learning her story  and I soon found out she was a real life Archie character! I had to know more. Kats is a woman many of us can relate to in some way. She had been through a lot in her life, “People have found inspiration from my real life story,” she said in our 2014 interview. “I’ve personally triumphed over a childhood car accident, sexual abuse in my teens, anorexia, depression and divorce in my adult years. I’ve never let anything or anyone stop me. I refuse to give up.” This refusal to give up is what drove her.

English was her second language. Kats learned how to read by piecing stories together through illustrations in picture books. Seeing her as an adult—in her hot pink wheelchair and fancy headpieces—it wasn’t surprising to learn Dr. Seuss appealed to Kats. By the age of nine Kats was getting lost in books. It was on the way to a Scarborough bookstore that someone drove into her mother’s car. It was a bad accident. Kats was sent to SickKids Hospital, where she stayed for six weeks before being sent home in a body cast. She continued to be on and off bed rest for the rest of her life.

Rest may not be the appropriate word, though. Back to the Archie comic that first made me want to know more: As a kid, Kats liked to read Archie comics. Yet, while the stories were great, she had no character to truly relate to. As she got older, she developed a comic strip series called The DitzAbled Princess. This series brought her to the 2013 Toronto Fan Expo, where she met Dan Parent, her favourite writer and artist of the Archie series. Looking him in the eye, she asked how it was possible for Riverdale to have no characters with disabilities. And so came Harper Lodge, a columnist who uses the pen name Jewel. It seems only natural for such a vibrant woman, in spirit and style, to become a comic book character.

Kats continued to ensure characters with disabilities were represented in her own children’s books, like the popular Cinderella’s Magical Wheelchair and Hansel and Gretel: A Fairy Tale with a Down Syndrome Twist. In her book Reena’s Bollywood Dream, Kats writes about sexual abuse. Kats didn’t stop there. Just like she wanted a character to relate to in storybooks, she wanted a fashion-themed word search book to do for those days in bed. So, she went ahead and made one.

When Kats found out I was writing for Anokhi she told me how much she wanted to be involved with them. I sent her the editor’s way and immediately after she was at their 12^th Anniversary awards show, collecting another award—as Crusader of the Year for People with Disabilities—for her ever-growing collection. A week ago, on her site, Kats posted a picture of this past summer’s PanAm Games, where she carried the Pan American Sports Organization (PASO) flag during the opening ceremonies. She was very excited about that.

I’m heartbroken over the passing of Kats. After our initial interview we kept in touch and to hear encouraging words from someone so driven is invaluable. Judging by social media, many others feel the same way.

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.

Women are still forced to ask Daddy Patriarchy for permission when it comes to reproductive rights. Being denied access to a safe abortion because a doctor is Catholic, for example, seems absurd in 2016. Yet here we are. The bright side is progress is being made, at a snail’s pace perhaps, but made nonetheless. This year a new medical abortion option will become available to women: RU-486 (marketed in Canada as Mifegymiso).

Medical abortions provide more choices to women as well, putting more control in women’s hands, “As usual with medical decisions, there are a variety of factors at play,” writes Planned Parenthood Toronto in response to my questions, “including many personal ones, and the important thing is that there is a choice at all.”

Mifegymiso has been available for women in France for over two decades. In Canada it usually takes nine months for a drug to be approved. Mifegymiso was reviewed by Health Canada for two and-a-half years. It’s now hoped this option will become available in the spring. Mifegymiso is a combination of two drugs. The first drug will prevent the production of progesterone, which prepares the uterine lining for pregnancy. The second drug, misoprostol, will cause contractions, eventually leading to an abortion. The process is similar to a miscarriage, and can even be used to aid in such situations. Only doctors will be able to give women a prescription for Mifegymiso, at least to begin with.

The current medical option is similar, using a mixture of methotrexate and, again, misoprostol. Methotrexate blocks cell growth; in the case of abortions it prevents the placenta from growing. This same drug is used to treat cancer and arthritis, as well as ectopic pregnancies. Misoprostol is taken at home, 3 to 7 days after the methotrexate is injected. A woman may choose a time that best suits her needs within this time frame. Misoprostol comes in tablets to be inserted vaginally. Like with Mifegymiso, the methotrexate misoprostol combo creates an abortion similar to a miscarriage.

While a trained pharmacist can fill the prescription, they must deliver it directly to a physician, who will have to administer the medication. It is never in the hands of a patient. So, as a Toronto Star article points out, “But if you’re in a remote or rural community, you don’t have a family doctor or your primary care provider doesn’t want to prescribe an abortifacent pill, you could be in the same boat, access-wise, you are now.”

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.

The store has now moved to an all-ages format, eliminating the sexually explicit videos and magazines, says Taylor in an e-mail to This.

Venus Envy has locations in Ottawa and Halifax. The shops are trans-affirming. The stores also sell books and health products around safer sex, in addition to toys, and also offerworkshops on sex education. As its website says, “Anyone who’s turned off by traditional sex shops will find us a welcoming and informative place to get cool and sexy stuff.” On October 9 Venus Envy started a Pay it Forward Campaign, offering free binders and gaffs (similar to a jock strap) through their shops. This is possible through donations (which you can make here). “We’ve had a lot of interest in our new Pay It Forward campaign that was sparked by this whole kerfuffle,” says Taylor.

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.