Now that my son is seven, our weekend mornings have gelled into a proper routine. He wakes up at some ungodly hour—earlier, by the way, than he gets up on weekdays—and plays for a while in his room. When he’s tired of that, he’ll grab a couple of granola bars from the kitchen and then […] More »

For Erica Shiner, 2015 marked the year she first launched herself into the world of feminist activism. That May, she started a petition to stop American rapper Action Bronson from performing at Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square for annual music festival North by Northeast, saying his lyrics “[glorify] gang-raping and murdering women.” After gaining more than 40,000 […] More »

I take improv on Wednesday nights in a basement dance studio with floors so sensitive we’re not allowed to wear outdoor shoes on them. The ratio of men to women in the class is about five to one, which is pretty normal. It’s my turn to play. On stage my scene partner stations himself at […] More »

F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminsim By Lauren McKeon Goose Lane Editions, $22.95 In her first book, F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, Lauren McKeon, an award-winning writer, former This Magazine editor, and contributing editor at Toronto Life, investigates why contemporary feminism is deeply fragmented, and argues that we cannot continue to ignore […] More »

After my Vancouver book launch in October 2013, I headed right for the snack table. My travel schedule had brought me from Winnipeg to Vancouver early that morning: I had slept on a friend’s floor in Winnipeg and arrived before sunrise in Vancouver. By the end of my talk, the sun was back down and […] More »

The day before the 2017 March for Life, anti-abortion activists took over the hulking Renaissance Washington, D.C. Downtown Hotel. After lunch, I joined about fifty activists, lawyers, law students, and others for the adjacent Law of Life Summit, designed to advance the anti-abortion movement through putting forward more antiabortion legislation, attacking Planned Parenthood as a […] More »

On a Thursday evening in May, about a dozen women gather around a large wooden table at L’Euguélionne, Canada’s only feminist bookstore. The Montreal shop is filled with chatter as the crew, participants in a zine-making workshop, sift through piles of paper. Since it opened in December 2016, L’Euguélionne has become a hub, hosting public events like […] More »

Tamsyn Riddle was excited to start her university courses in 2015. At the University of Toronto, where she majors in diaspora and transnational studies and minors in equity studies and political science, her academic successes would be appreciated in a way that they weren’t at her Peterborough high school. Plus, she could be a part […] More »

One morning, in early September 2011, I sat at my work computer and watched my hands hover over the keyboard, shaking. I had just flown back to Montreal from Morocco, a trip I’d done many times since I immigrated to Canada six years ago; I was used to flying across time zones. But these hands […] More »

The “Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses” exhibit at Seattle’s EMP Museum should have been heaven. For a fan of Nirvana, Mudhoney, and a bunch of other bands from the Pacific Northwest like me, a room filled with rare artifacts, such as the sweater Kurt Cobain wore for the MTV Unplugged appearance or the drum […] More »

Virgin Envy: The Cultural (In)significance of the Hymen Edited by Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos, and Adriana Spahr University of Regina Press, $27.95 Losing your V-card, popping your cherry, your first time: losing one’s virginity is a sacred rite of passage in many cultures—but the contributors of Virgin Envy aren’t buying into the archaic and stereotypical […] More »