My book tour took me across Canada and despite being between 22 and 29 weeks pregnant with twins, it was nearly the same as travelling when I wasn’t pregnant. The only differences: I was deadly tired, I had to check my luggage because I couldn’t lug it around with me, and I had to anticipate well-meaning friends offering me terrible advice.

The advice ranged from you simply cannot travel, you will miscarry, to warnings that my travel days would soon be over. The night of the Vancouver launch, I poured myself a third of a tiny glass of wine. I was getting to the end and I was ready to have wine again. A male friend watched in terror, horrified that I might be doing something reckless.

The perception other people had of my abilities or capacities to operate while carrying twins was what I remember most from my professional life in 2013. People couldn’t believe that I wrote a book with so-called Baby Brain, or that I was capable of a book tour.

That’s why for the past few months I closely watched the NDP leadership race and how Niki Ashton was perceived, celebrated and, often, ignored. 

Each of the male candidates crafted a persona that balanced mainstream electability with edgy social democracy: Angus is a punk rocker who has got your back. Caron is an economist who seemingly ran to be the NDP’s first finance minister. Singh’s landslide victory was, at least in part, thanks to the image he crafted of a stylish, hip fighter who can go toe-to-toe with Trudeau—whether in the House of Commons or in a boxing ring.

But Ashton stood apart from the group—both thanks to her politics and, more insidiously, the limits of her gender and pregnancy.

Ashton’s pregnancy barely entered into the discussion about her candidacy. None of the male candidates made an issue out of it. But they didn’t have to. Once the first wave of articles announcing her pregnancy passed (and then the second wave, as everything comes in twos with twins), silence about Ashton’s capacities emerged, leaving the chatter to percolate on social media alone. This allowed for stereotypes and anti-parent rhetoric to dominate the discussion.

Qualifying the impact that anti-pregnancy bias has is difficult, but the comments I’ve seen are illustrative: questioning the period of time that Ashton would take off, wondering how Ashton would lead the party while also “feeding on demand,” how she would manage work and home life. Those questions could be legitimate, but a debate, whether in the press or among the membership would have to happen. The lack of open debate or discussion about Ashton’s pregnancy is indicative that many NDP members feared that if she couldn’t hit the ground running on January 1 as the leader because she’s covered in baby goo, she is a less desirable candidate than one of the men running.

The reason why I know that these questions aren’t simply innocent is because I’m an expert in what people who do not have twins think about people who do have twins. I, like probably every single twin parent in Canada, have heard it all. Did they sleep together? (Kind of.) Did I breastfeed? (Kind of.) Did I breastfeed them at the same time? (God, no.) Are they identical? (No.) Is it the worst? (Yes.) Is it the easiest way to have kids? (So very no.) How did you ever find time to work? (It was easy: I needed the breaks.) And so on. Buried in every question is an assumption that I’d gleefully puncture.

The conceptions that people have about having twins are usually all wrong. Everything that characterizes a singleton pregnancy flies out the window when you’re blessed with an egg mutation that unbelievably places two humans inside of you. You have no time for reading or practicing parenting theories. The list of issues that characterize the early days with twins is long and rarely fit into what people think it must be like: isolation, boredom, mastitis, double liquefied poo explosions, injuries, hair pulling, quadruple illnesses, travel challenges, daily laundry.

And it’s within this that the stereotypes of the mother’s role are most evident. New mothers are barely allowed to be whole persons; mothers of twins simply cannot be whole persons. They must be laying on the living room floor meeting every single need of their new offspring.

I saw comments like these posed on Facebook in relation to Ashton’s ability to lead the NDP, and they need to be aired and discussed. When silence replaces conversations about post-natal life, stigma and stereotypes about motherhood will take root.

Will Ashton double feed? Will she be up at night when one cries? Can she perform in the House of Commons on two hours of sleep? Is her partner serious about being present for 24-hour care? Can a father ever really replace a mother in those precious early days?

Ugh.

Parenting twins is about survival. In the beginning, all my partner and I did was ensure that the kids were fed, clean enough, and sleeping.

But we also continued to work. We went back to work immediately while our kids were hospitalized (because there was literally nothing for us to do otherwise) and, despite taking some time off, we were travelling again in two months, working on the edges once they were both home. We had the support and help from our friends to make it work. I clocked the most amount of cross-Canada travel for work in my life the year my kids were born.

Pregnancy forces us to re-consider the structures and barriers in place that prohibit participation in politics. And, if we don’t talk about them, we further entrench sexist and ablest barriers. Images of breast-feeding parliamentarians aren’t feel-good examples of women’s liberation. They’re dynamic pictures of how to parent on the fly while maintaining your own career—and every story contains lessons about how to make politics better for new parents.

The silence about Ashton’s pregnancy only served one goal: to quietly convince the membership that a pregnant politician is a liability. As the candidate with the most audaciously left platform, writing her off her because of her pregnancy also meant not needing to seriously contend with any of her policies. Whether or not a majority of the membership supported her vision is one thing. Whether or not a majority of the membership were uncomfortable with her pregnancy is a wholly separate matter.

We have to talk about pregnancy in politics if we have any hope of making things better for politicians who want to bear children.

The latter woman, Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of New Wave Feminists (slogan: “Badass. Prolife. Feminists.”), was on stage. As part of a panel featuring “young leaders,” she sat with two other women. One was Alexandra Swoyer, another Ave Maria graduate and a Washington Times journalist who covered the presidential campaign for Breitbart. The other was Alison Howard, the director of alliance relations at Alliance Defending Freedom. Each had their cell phone out, fingers swiping and connecting. Moments earlier, by way of introduction, the moderator, Jill Stanek, the national campaign chair of the Susan B. Anthony List, crowed, “I have surmised that you all know that we won, right?” She went on to say that the anti-abortion movement must prepare for “the most evil tricks that we can’t even possibly imagine” and called feminists “perennial losers.” She cheered what she deemed feminism’s “generational in-fighting” and its “reluctance to pass the torch”—stoking the divisiveness within the movement. “My observation of the pro-life movement is exactly the opposite. We first demonstrate the love of our young people before they were even born,” she said, emphatically if not grammatically. She was so proud of the women on stage, she beamed. “These women are so precious.”

Herndon-De La Rosa had recently catapulted onto the national stage after New Wave Feminists applied to become a partner at the Women’s March on Washington and was, to her great initial surprise, accepted, and then, swiftly and much less to her surprise, rejected. The march pointed to its pro–abortion rights stance as the reason for its rescinded partnership, but Herndon-De La Rosa “invaded” the totally public march anyway (the audience applauded wildly at this, as if she’d infiltrated the Gestapo) and welcomed the publicity boost the controversy created. She went on to say there were no hard feelings and joked that she “needed to send them a fruit basket, because this is the best thing that’s ever happened.” I’m not sure what she said after that because the room erupted in laughter and clapping, drowning her out. A few minutes later, she won the room again when Stanek asked the panelists how they saw the movement’s future. “The future is pro-life female,” answered Herndon-De La Rosa, riffing off a popular feminist T-shirt with a similar slogan. She added that it was important for anti-abortion advocates to promote the pro-women narrative. “We’re not trying to control women or take over their bodies—that’s not it at all,” she told the crowd. “We believe that you should have control over your body from the moment it first exists.”

Yikes.

Moments later, after the panel ended, the audience voted to skip their washroom break—they were too engaged to stop. Hood, who emceed the conference, his face permanently pink with excitement, encouraged attendees to step out if they needed to, directing them to the men’s room. “There are restrooms,” he added, hesitating, before jovially breaking off to responding laughter and shouts of “good for you!” as he confessed, “I don’t know where the women’s room is.” A few minutes after that, the audience broke into another round of rowdy, gleeful laughter when John-Henry Weston, editor-in-chief of the website LifeSite: Life, Family & Culture News, jumped up on stage, holding his laptop, voice hiccupping in excitement as he interrupted Hood.

“Outside the conference room, teenage girls clumped together. The youth rally had ended at the same time. I was surprised to see how many of them carried signs that read ‘True feminists protect human life.'”

“Breaking news! President Trump just did it again,” he cried, emphasizing “again” with Shakespearian drama. “He once AGAIN called out the mainstream media for not coming to cover the March for Life.” Giddy noises rippled through the crowd. “He’s like our best advertisement tool right now.” Westen broke off into giggles that were answered with more laughter and riotous clapping. “President Trump is also confirming—officially, sort of—that Mike Pence is going to show up tomorrow.” At this, the audience lost composure, filling the room with shouts of “Wow!” He continued quoting Trump, and the audience continued mirroring his excitement, hollering victory.

What a fun crowd!

The blending of traditional conservatism and new feminism made for a strange but effective mix. In one breath, we got speakers who asserted things like “mom’s the real issue”—referring to the presumed superiority of the traditional family structure and the sanctity of motherhood—and, in the next, other speakers praised feminism and lamented what they saw as a you-can’t-sit-with-us mentality in the movement. Both, however, preached a brand of pro-women activism rooted in restriction, no matter how often it employed “dank memes,” risqué language, or Urban Outfitters–style (ahem, sorry, Pro-Life Outfitters) “All Lives Matter” shirts shilled on tattooed bodies. While it’s beyond my purview to define someone’s feminism for them, the more I became exposed to the Anti-Abortion Movement Dictionary’s meaning of feminism, the more I became convinced it wasn’t as advertised: a sort of modern feminism-for-everybody with a “pro-life” twist. Take one of New Wave Feminism’s memes, for example, a funky pink text on a black, distressed background: “We reject the failed feminism of victimhood and violence, for ourselves and for our unborn children.” In the corresponding Instagram caption, Herndon-De La Rosa added, “The fauxminists can have #victimhood if they want it. Real #feminism is beyond that.”

Well, now, doesn’t that sound familiar?

Outside the conference room, teenage girls clumped together. The youth rally had ended at the same time. I was surprised to see how many of them carried signs that read “True feminists protect human life.” (The signs were hot pink, of course, a shade so ubiquitous that day it might as well have been the event’s official color.) At the bottom of the sign, a pink banner highlighted the Guiding Star Project, accompanied by #NEWfeminism.

Curious about what, exactly, new feminism was, I hunted down the organization’s booth at the nearby trade show, where teenage girls carrying the signs were even more abundant. I scanned through a pamphlet at the booth, which was bordered by still more young girls, trying to master my poker face. “‘Old feminism,’” read the pamphlet, “is based on the idea that men and women are interchangeable and that women have been unfairly held back from achieving their potential in society because of their role as mothers in the home.” (Oh, geez.) “New Feminism,” the pamphlet explained, “views femininity through a lens of hope and joy. We honour the unique feminine genius—the way women think, perceive, and love as women—and celebrate that these strengths are compatible with the strengths of others. We know that true feminine success is measured by a woman’s love of others” [italics theirs]. Sure, fine, but I had just one question: by what bar is true masculine success measured? The pamphlet didn’t say, but I’d seen enough that day to guess.

I wandered through the trade show, checking out the other feminist-branded booths. For all their dismissal of “old” feminism, these groups tended to promote a feminism that was—well—musty, like first-wave, nearly-a century-gone, make-sure-you-have-mothballs-handy-because-it’s-so-old kind of old feminism. Non-profit Life Matters Journal, a publication of Rehumanize International, an organization that describes itself as “a non-partisan, non-sectarian/secular group dedicated to the cause of life,” displayed a giant mint-and-pink standing banner that asked, in lettering reminiscent of both tattoos and Pinterest, “Can you be Pro-Life and Feminist?” On it, they’d given Rosie the Riveter a makeover, rendering her face blank except for a piece of tape over her mouth that read “life,” a nod to the Silent Siege project, which calls its tactics a “divine strategy from the Lord”—a strange choice for a supposedly secular group. As the banner pointed out, early feminists, including Alice Paul, who spearheaded the battle for women’s right to vote in the U.S., and Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the U.S., largely protested abortion, at least in public. Still, as much as we owe a debt to these women, I’m not about to grab a petticoat and try to be them. I might picture myself standing on their shoulders, but it’s not in a straight and unwavering line. Rather, it’s an inverted pyramid that allows for pluralities and expansion, a rejection of this idea that it’s good to go backward.

Excerpted from F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism copyright © 2017 by Lauren McKeon. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions.

Kristen was in high school. Mackenzie was 23. Jess made a pros and cons list. Each woman had an abortion. Without Apology: Writings on Abortion in Canada centres around a woman’s right to choose. In this five-part series, women share their personal stories, alongside a detailed history of the criminalization of abortion in Canada. Editor Shannon Stettner powerfully tends to the intimate—and sometimes political—conversation first ignited in the 1960s when cis men wrongly dominated and interrupted the abortion debate. The collection is at times grim, harrowing and passionate, but it ultimately solidifies the notion that a woman’s body is solely hers—point, blank, period.

How did Femifesto and the idea for the Use the Right Words guide come about?

We’re a Toronto-based collective that was formed in order to work on shifting the culture to consent culture. So our first project was the Use the Right Words guide. It began because we were seeing more conversations about sexual assault in the media during a time of really high-profile cases. We were inspired by similar work in the U.S.—media guides that helped journalists report on issues like sexual violence or domestic violence against women in a way that’s supportive and that won’t be seen as blaming survivors of violence. We started the Use the Right Words project to create something that was applicable to the Canadian context.

Who worked on the guide and decided what to include?

We first started crowdsourcing feedback in 2013. We tried to get as many people involved as possible and were really surprised at the number of journalists who were willing to speak with us. The version that we have now is the finalized version. We wanted to make it as inclusive and all-encompassing as we could. It started out as being about language, but became a lot more comprehensive. It was the advisory committee that really informed this guide, particularly lawyers, journalists, journalism professors, students, abuse survivors, sexual violence advocates, and activists. They all had really diverse experiences and knowledge that helped in terms of figuring out what journalists are able to say, the culture of newsrooms, and what survivors would prefer.

What kind of response has the guide got from the public?

It’s been really positive. When we published the guide we also simultaneously launched the Use the Right Words campaign on social media. We encouraged people to share when they saw any type of news article that is using harmful language in terms of survivor shaming or survivor blaming and to fix the headline. If you take a look at the hashtag you’ll see lots of people calling out different instances of this—when using different language would be just as accurate, but much less harmful. It’s really amazing to see others really taking it on.

What is your long-term goal for the guide?

Our vision would be to have this guide in every single newsroom in Canada because it is such an important resource and one that is so informed by journalists. We have often been told that it’s not necessarily that journalists are trying to be harmful towards survivors or that they are inherently promoting rape culture; it’s that they don’t necessarily always have the tools. A lot of the language that media uses is ingrained into the traditions of journalism. That’s why it’s such an important goal of ours to have journalists, editors, and key players in media organizations engage in these conversations and talk about these stories.

Can you explain what the harm can be in using the victim narrative?

People have the right to define how they want to identify. So for some people the word victim will really resonate with them because they feel that they’ve been victimized. It’s often the first word that we use when we describe those who have experienced sexual violence. At the same time, many people feel that the word victim has negative connotations. It can denote a really tragic person who is defined by the violence that they’ve experienced. In reality, people who have had violence perpetrated against them are full people with complicated lives; the violence is just one thing that happened to them. This is why many prefer the word survivor. It acknowledges they survived a violent event, but it does not define who they are. It’s important to let each person decide for themselves.

The United Nations has declared this month Human Rights Month, with December 10 marking Human Rights Day. Consider it perfect timing: JayU’s fifth-annual human rights film festival kicks off tonight in Toronto, celebrating and visualizing human rights through 12 thought-provoking documentaries.

JayU founder and executive director Gilad Cohen says the program this year is especially holistic and representative of current issues getting coverage in the news, such as immigration, the refugee experience, homelessness, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights.

“We’re seeing a lot of talk lately about immigration and undocumented people, and we tend to think a lot of times this is affecting people in the U.S.,” Cohen says. “I’m excited for tonight to be able to turn that conversation into a local one and speak to someone who has been dealing with those challenges here at home.”

Specifically, the festival is premiering two films that deal with undocumented people and immigration: the Canadian premiere of Don’t Tell Anyone and the world premiere of Stateless, which focuses on a Canadian-born man who lost his citizenship after it was revoked by the government four years ago.

Cohen says attendees can look forward to films that talk about mental health in a more unconventional way. He recommends the film Prison Dogs, which tells the story of New York inmates that train puppies to become service dogs that are then handed over to war veterans suffering from PTSD.

In an effort to diffuse the heavy subject matter that comes with human rights issues and counter those feelings, each screening ends with a Q-and-A that Cohen says he hopes ensures people aren’t leaving the cinema depressed or overwhelmed in the safe space of the cinema, and that people can debrief together.

JayU has also partnered up with over 15 community organizations that will be present at the festival and have been chosen alongside films that deal with similar challenges, such as the AIDS Committee of York Region, Horizons for Youth, and Lifeline Syria.

“I hope that people walk away inspired,” Cohen says. “What we’re hoping is that people take what they feel after the film and take the time to speak to some of these community partners and find ways to contribute to some of the solutions that are already happening here in the city.”

If you go: The festival takes place this weekend, opening tonight at 6 p.m. Tickets are as low as $10 and all access passes are available for $30.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

Living as a fat person in this world is hard—really fucking hard. As a fat woman, I’m exposed to near-constant discussion about my body by those who have no right to discuss it. It’s a never-ending fight not to be undermined and viewed as physically, economically, or emotionally unnecessary.

Every person’s body journey is different. While finding your voice, you can encounter several different types of activism, different types of empowerment and draw inspiration from people both online and offline. And then there’s the unexpected stuff: hate from within the fat activism community, cliquey attitudes, and false empowerment deemed as activism.

Here is the thing: body politics are complicated and uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to be better and more inclusive—to ensure the dialogue we’re promoting isn’t as harmful as the feared body-shamers that many of us battle each and every single day.

When I co-founded the blog Fat Girl Food Squad, I created a platform to share thoughts and opinions in the body positivity community. The aim of our blog, which developed into a community space, was to “provide a safe, positive space for all bodies, while showcasing those who identify themselves as fat.” It is not okay to dismiss another fat person’s experiences just because they are “only” a size 16. It’s not empowering or uplifting to call out others in the fat community as “skinny-fats” and tell them their opinions don’t matter.

Privilege does exist, but at the end of the day, fat bodies still matter—all fat bodies. It’s incredibly frustrating that so-called “skinny-fats” are shamed and shunned from the straight-sized community and also deemed unworthy by the fat community. We’re allowed to feel complicated feels and we’re allowed to feel discomfort, but we need to ask ourselves: When do those feelings border on bullying? Where do we draw the line?

There is so much to unpack when we use the word fat. It’s a powerful word, one that we’re still fighting hard to reclaim and one that still makes many people uncomfortable. It’s a three letter word and yet it holds so much power. People are afraid of fatness, they are afraid of you owning your fatness, and they are afraid of your fat being a source of political energy. Let’s stop separating which fat bodies are right and which fat bodies are wrong. Fat holds so much energy over others. Rather than using that energy to tear down one another, we should use it to uplift, empower, and liberate other fat bodies.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

I am of the generation of women academics too young to remember the 1989 Montreal Massacre—the moment that promised to be our turning point, our watershed moment. I am, however, old enough to see how this was a failed promise: too many incidents of violence and harassment in academic spaces have made it hard for myself, my colleagues, my mentors, and my students to imagine how post-secondary institutions in Canada might, once and for all, put an end to the spectrum of aggressions and oppressions that push so many women— particularly queer women, trans women, and women of colour— out of the intellectual communities they rightfully deserve to participate in.

I cannot suggest another think-tank, another task force, or another deployment of brute intellectualism to address what fundamentally requires us to deal with how bodies move through academic spaces. How many of these reports are simply shelved and forgotten? Our bodies register the urgency of dealing with violence and harassment: our racing hearts, our clammy hands, our clenched teeth. And so, in a life of the mind, it is perhaps the body that contains the answers we so desperately crave.

To address violence and harassment in colleges and universities, we need to talk about the body. We need to acknowledge which bodies occupy positions of power and maintain the most visibility in academic communities. We need to discuss the embodied experiences that we bring into our work as faculty, staff, and students, and the many effects of bodily violence—fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, sexism— that we carry with us, whether we experience them in public, private, professional, or personal spaces.

I understand the resistance: after all, bodies are messy things. We would rather talk about the minutiae of policy development or engage in discussions of trauma that are often so abstract as to obscure the lived experience of violence; we would rather talk about the statistics of sexual violence and harassment on campus than to talk about churning stomachs or bruises or pain in the most intimate parts of our body.

This may be difficult. Awkward. Messy. But once violence is no longer easily translatable back into the bureaucratic language of press releases and policy documents, once sexual violence and harassment are truly understood as injuries to flesh and blood and spirit rather than to prized ideals of intellectual communities or to corporate values, then, perhaps, our watershed moments will finally arrive.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

Christine Lagarde’s quip during the 2008 global financial meltdown raised hackles and elicited laughter. “If only Lehman Brothers had had a few sisters,” the then-finance minister of France observed, “we might not be in this mess.” But her off-the-cuff critique of the testosterone-fuelled risk-taking of predominantly male investment bankers precipitating the financial collapse is bolstered by academic research. And it speaks to a greater truth: Ensuring that women’s voices are heard as often as men’s, and that their perspectives exert similar influence, is critical to our collective future—not just in pursuit of more stable economic markets.

It may seem that Canada has achieved necessary parity, given the ample evidence of how much more powerful women’s voices are today. In Justin Trudeau’s gender-balanced federal cabinet, strong, articulate female ministers manage justice, health, and the environment portfolios. Three of the country’s most populous provinces are led by women, and we’ve had a female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court since 2000.

And yet, in the grander scheme of things—including the realms of business, sports, and entertainment—women’s voices remain seriously under-represented. Even though women have made up more than 60 percent of university graduates for some years now, and contribute at senior levels in virtually every sector, elected officials across the country still average threequarters male. And independent Canadian research conducted in fall 2015 found that men’s perspectives continue to outnumber women’s by three or four to one in many of the nation’s most influential news media.

For the sake of all our futures, we need to change that. It’s now widely understood that in countries around the world where women’s voices count, everybody’s prospects are enhanced. A raft of respected research also makes clear that including the views of competent women leads to better business decisions and more rigorous science.

The truth is that many women’s day-to-day realities remain profoundly different from their male relatives and colleagues. Because they conceive, bear, and—for the most part—remain more responsible for raising children, women not only have different life experiences, but society also views and treats women differently. It’s not surprising that their perspectives and priorities reflect that.

It’s true that ceding the floor to women more often will shift the emphasis of our public discourse, and make us pay more attention to things currently not so prominent. But would less focus on hockey fights and more on health research be a bad thing? So-called “women’s issues” might get front-page treatment—even when the women aren’t wearing bikinis! And the downstream benefits include more family-friendly policies, stronger communities, and lower income inequality.

That said, our research finds that many female experts are less eager to be interviewed and pontificate than their male colleagues. Critics have argued women’s voices aren’t as prominent because most women aren’t arrogant enough to think they have all the answers. That, too, seems like a benefit; as any news producer or astute observer can tell you, microphone hogs don’t always deliver value-added commentary.

Informed Opinions, the non-profit project I lead, has worked with more than a thousand female experts across Canada in almost every field. These women have deep knowledge about important issues, and hundreds of them are now sharing their experience-informed analysis of current issues with the broader public. We all benefit as a result.

In an effort to assess what difference their amplified voices are making, we recently conducted an experiment, creating a word cloud out of 100 news commentaries penned by women and published in daily newspapers. When we compared the most prominent words in their analyses to those most prominent in commentaries written by men, we discovered that all sorts of topics get significantly less attention when women’s voices aren’t present. These include: access, assault, care, discrimination, equality, families, justice, policy, services, sexual support, treatment, and violence.

Canada’s self-definition is one that privileges equality of rights and opportunities, public health care, and social justice. Ensuring that women’s voices in all their diversity have as much influence as men’s is essential to not only building on that identity, but supporting our future success.

Illustration by Matthew Daley

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

I’ve witnessed it countless times: at my favourite bar on Friday nights, walking down the street, riding Toronto’s subway line. These are the places I most often see women shrinking—adjusting their bodies to make space for others. Access to public space is political. White, hetereosexual, cisgendered men are generally privileged enough to be able to take the bus or subway without daily harassment or intimidation. But our public transit systems are unsafe spaces for women, especially women of colour and those who identify as LGBTQ2S. I do it too: make myself smaller. I see a vast divide between my fellow feminists’ and my willingness to speak out and the way we contort our individual bodies to accommodate perfect strangers.

The average dude I see on my daily commute who takes up more than one seat—also known as “manspreading”—isn’t doing it consciously. He’s doing it because no one taught him not to; because he wasn’t raised to keep his knees together and his head bowed. Research suggests women take on a “Wonder Woman” stance (feet wide, hands on hips) during important business meetings because it’s a posture that evokes power and confidence—sadly, it’s one we don’t often use. That’s because our society has linked smallness with femininity. We’re constantly the target of weight loss campaigns and plastic surgery advertisements. Our Instagram feeds are inundated with celebrities hawking waist trainers and tea that promises a smaller belly. We’re even told to settle for smaller pay. Historically, the message has been to stay in our lane (that is to say, don’t you dare take up a single inch more space than you absolutely need to. Suck it in. Cross your legs. Fold your arms.)

After I first noticed my own self-shrinking tendencies, I began to obsess over the way women occupy space. Through listening to others’ success stories, I learned that the more we refuse to shrink, the more respect we command. When we resist the instinct to make ourselves smaller on public transit, we’re making a political statement: I will not apologize for existing. And as much as it empowers us to take up our space, it’s important for those of us with privilege to look out for those with less privilege when it comes to defending all our personal spaces— an act as simple as a friendly smile, a quick “are you OK?” or moving to casually stand between a person and a stranger who’s making them uncomfortable can let folks know you’re watching out for them.

In her poem “Take Up Space,” British slam poet Vanessa Kasuule says, “Don’t shrink yourself into a sliver of self-loathing soap when you walk down the street. Don’t cower in anticipation of catcalls and stares. It is they who should shrivel and slouch in shame, not you. You go ahead and take up some more space.” The first time I made the decision to occupy my subway seat without squeezing my thighs together and squishing my arms against my torso, I felt surprisingly light. I wouldn’t let myself feel ashamed that my thigh spilled over onto the seat next to mine. Instead, I told myself: This is the body I am in and this is the space it occupies—and that’s not something I’m going to apologize for any longer. And in my vision for the future, neither will any other woman. Ever.