We’ve talked a lot about what’s going wrong so far with the G20 and G8 meetings taking place in Ontario this year. And lord knows there are plenty of problems: aside from the lack of discussion surrounding women’s health we’re now chopping down trees in an urban jungle and searching around for supposedly stolen police […] More »
Today we’ve got a new entry in the Verbatim series, the transcripts we provide of our Listen to This podcast. (Just a reminder that you can catch new, original interviews every other Monday—you can subscribe with any podcast listening program by grabbing the podcast rss feed, or easily subscribing through iTunes.) In this interview, Nick […] More »
Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced on January 26 that he was going to use Canada’s Group of Eight presidency to push for an annual G8 summit agenda focused on women’s and children’s health. Former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis said it best when he called the announcement an act of “chutzpah.” […] More »
In this episode of Listen to This, associate editor Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviews Carleton University professor Barbara Freeman about her research into the Abortion Caravan Campaign of 1970, one of the most important pro-choice movements in Canadian history. The campaign was literally a caravan that travelled from Vancouver to Ottawa in the spring of 1970, culminating in […] More »
We must protect women from religious coercion… Banning burkas has long been a popular idea among immigration hardliners on the European right, who claim that the head-to-toe woman’s garment is a matter of national security. Canadians may scoff at such paranoia, but the idea is gaining some momentum here, and the push is coming from […] More »
In all the hoopla following the New Orleans Saints’ momentous victory over the Indianapolis Colts in last week’s Super Bowl, an important piece of the biggest day in North American sports seemed to disappear all-too-quickly from the collective consciousness. With the pervasive and nauseating hyperbole around the significance of the Saints’ win in Hurricane Katrina’s […] More »
In today’s edition of Listen to This, I interviewed Alisa Palmer, who directed the production of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s landmark play Cloud 9, currently on stage at the Panasonic Theatre in Toronto. Cloud 9 is a hilarious satire on colonial-era notions about sex and gender, and how those ideas have crumbled over the years. […] More »
One of the perks of attempting to forge a career from your home office as a writer is the amount of time you’re able to just sit back and read. I’ve convinced myself that this is “research”, but lately I’ve been reading almost everything, including, I’ll admit, trash. Which is how I came to crack […] More »
Canada has a problem: since the early 1980s, over 500 Aboriginal women have been either murdered or reported as missing. It’s a shocking figure that’s motivated a pair of self-identified “survivors of the sex industry” to form the Coalition Against Violence Everywhere, an organization dedicated to stopping the violence by challenging the common narrative that […] More »
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 […] More »
A new generation of feminists are reclaiming porn, both as consumers and producers. A (very) intimate journey 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 […] More »