For day two of what we’ve dubbed “Legalization Week” here, Jordan Heath Rawlings writes about a plan from the Songwriters Association of Canada that would throw open the file-sharing doors to every Canadian and find new ways to help musicians make a living from their creativity. It’s just one of many proposals that have been made over the years — including the ones in today’s survey at right — to solve the problem of helping artists make a living in a time when digital music is easy to duplicate at virtually no cost. Cast your vote and let us know what you think!

Jordan writes in today’s piece:

Legalizing file sharing is the musical equivalent of legalizing prostitution: it’s already happening, crackdowns don’t stop it, and there are existing commercial frameworks that would improve working conditions and curtail exploitation.

The only things standing in the way—in both cases—are the taboo (it’s still illegal, after all) and the middlemen, those who stand to lose millions of dollars if the workers are allowed to own the means of production.

Piracy is happening all the time, so the question is how to transform people’s natural behaviour — wanting free stuff — into a plan that builds, instead of erodes, artists’ careers.

The opening spread from our special "Legalize Everything" issue. Click to enlarge.

The November-December issue of This is showing up in subscribers’ mailboxes and on better newsstands coast to coast this week, and today we’re kicking off “Legalization Week” to showcase the five stories and writers who contributed to this special issue.

Today it’s Tim Falconer’s call to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Canada:

Given that the boomers, a generation accustomed to getting their own way, who are watching their parents die—and not liking what they see—are starting to face up to their own mortality, we should be enjoying some momentum on this issue. We aren’t. But the Bloc Québécois’s Francine Lalonde did introduce a private member’s bill to give Canadians the right to assisted suicide. This is not the first such bill she’s sponsored and she did it knowing she has cancer. While that may mean her fellow parliamentarians have some sympathy for her personally, it won’t change the fact that private members’ bills rarely become law—and it’s not going to help her cause that the media has pretty much ignored the issue.

Well, we aren’t ignoring the issue. All this week we’ll also be posting polls like this one at the right, asking your opinion on these legalization ideas. Please do leave your comments here on the website or email your thoughts to editor at this magazine dot ca. This is all leading up to the “Legalize Everything!” party we’re throwing in Toronto on November 19. If you’re in the area, please come and meet the magazine’s staff and volunteers and bicker about these controversial notions in person.

Tomorrow: Jordan Heath Rawlings on legalizing music piracy…

The almost-bare shelves of Toronto's Pages Bookstore in its final days. Daniel Tencer writes about the plight of independent booksellers in the November-December issue of This Magazine.

The November-December 2009 issue of This Magazine is now snaking its way through the postal system, and subscribers should find it in their mailboxes any day now. We expect it to be available on newsstands next week, probably. (Remember, subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too.) We’ll start posting articles from the issue online next week. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other sweet, sweet This action.

This issue is our annual mega-hyper-awesome edition (64 pages instead of 48!), as we bring you a special supplement with the winners of the 2009 Great Canadian Literary Hunt.The winners this year were:

On the cover this month is a special package of articles we call Legalize Everything! — five writers tackle five things that should be legalized, and the activists who are fighting to make that a reality. Katie Addleman witnesses the madness of the drug trade, and the misbegotten “war on drugs” that criminalizes the mentally ill, funnels billions of black-market dollars into the pockets of narcoterrorists, and never actually reduces drug use. Tim Falconer asks our politicians to legalize physician-assisted suicide and allow Canadians to die on their own terms. Jordan Heath Rawlings meets the artists who believe that online music sharing may actually be the future of their industry, not its end. Laura Kusisto says criminalizing hate speech erodes Canadian democracy and offers no meaningful protection for minorities. And Rosemary Counter hunts down the outlaw milk farmer who wants all Canadians to have the right to enjoy unpasteurized milk, even if he has to go all the way to the supreme court to do it.

Elsewhere in the magazine, Meena Nallainathan surveys the state of Canada’s Tamil community following the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam last spring, and meets four Tamil activists who may hold some answers for rebuilding a Sri Lankan nation tormented by decades of civil war.

All that, plus James Loney on the Canadian government’s attitudes towards its citizens trapped abroad; Bruce M. Hicks on what Canada’s new Mexican and Czech visa restrictions are really about; Paul McLaughlin interviews B.C.’s Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, on the eve of his American incarceration; Dorothy Woodend on a new crop of documentaries that dissect the workings of our capitalist world; Darryl Whetter gives his picks for the must-reads of the first decade of the 21st century; Navneet Alang warns that when it comes to online charity, sometimes clicking isn’t enough; Lisa Charleyboy profiles Nadya Kwandibens and her photographic exploration of the urban Aboriginal experience, “Concrete Indians”; Aaron Cain sends a postcard from San Salvador, after a chilling meeting with some right-wing politicians on the verge of a losing election; and Jen Gerson ranks Canada’s political leaders on their Facebook and Twitter savvy.

PLUS: Daniel Tencer on the plight of independent bookstores; Sukaina Hirji on Vancouver’s Insite safe injection clinic; Lindsay Kneteman on Alberta’s Democratic Renewal Project; Melissa Wilson on getting the flu shot; Graham F. Scott on Canada’s losing war in Afghanistan; Jorge Antonio Vallejos on a remembrance campaign for Canada’s missing Aboriginal women; Jennifer Moore on an Ecuadorian village that’s suing the Toronto Stock Exchange; Cameron Tulk on Night, a new play about Canada’s far north; Andrea Grassi reviews Dr. Bonnie Henry’s Soap and Water & Common Sense; and Ellen Russell on Canadian workers’ shrinking wages.

Here’s Anthony talking with the American investigative radio magazine Flashpoints on KPFA 94.1 FM, broadcasting out of Berkeley, California. (Drag the slider to about the one-third mark to skip straight to the interview.)

A few days before that, Anthony was on the Jeff Farias Show, a progressive podcast from the U.S. (the show is one and a half hours, and he is the last half hour. You can listen to the broadcast through Jeff’s website.

Finally, later in September Anthony was heard on Gorilla Radio, the Victoria, B.C. social justice radio show, heard every Monday at 5 PM PST on CFUV, 101.9. His interview is the first part of the program.

Nova Scotia NDP Premier Darrell Dexter has a lot of reading to do, including This Magazine. Illustration by David Anderson.

The September-October 2009  issue of This Magazine should now be in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on your local newsstand coast-to-coast this week. All the articles in the issue will be made available online in the weeks ahead, though, so keep checking back for more. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other tasty links.

On the cover of the September-October issue is Anthony Fenton‘s special investigation into the world of Canadian private security firms, armoured-car manufacturers and oil companies that are profiting from the chaos in Iraq. While Canadians are justly proud of the fact that we declined to join the misbegotten “coalition of the willing” that occupied Iraq in 2003, Fenton finds that in many ways — politically, economically, militarily — Canada’s involvement in Iraq today is deeper than ever. Three years after the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada, Paul Gallant surveys the terrain of LGBT activism and finds it increasingly deserted. Marriage certificates in hand, middle-class gays and lesbians have drifted away from the movement, he finds, while the underfunded and burnt-out activists left behind say there’s still plenty of work to do. And reporting from Israel, Grant Shilling meets the beach bums, peace activists, and former soldiers who believe that the region’s world-class surfing could be one way to bring Israelis and Palestinians together—if only he can deliver a load of wetsuits to Gaza.

There’s plenty more, including Paul McLaughlin‘s interview with new Nova Scotia NDP premier Darrell Dexter; Sienna Anstis profiles the remarkable long-distance relationship between the University of Manitoba’s microbiology lab and a sex-worker clinic in Nairobi, Kenya; Andrew Webster meets the  independent videogame designers who make Canada an increasingly important player in an emerging art form; Hicham Safieddine says that during the election uproar over the summer, Western mainstream media got it wrong about Iran—again; Soraya Roberts finds that, in choosing Veronica over Betty, freckle-faced comic-book icon Archie Andrews has subverted seven decades of cultural expectations; RM Vaughan tests the limits of his solidarity during Toronto’s great municipal strike of summer 2009 as the litterbox threatens his sanity; Laura Kusisto digs into the real numbers behind Saskatchewan’s plan to pay $20,000 to recent graduates who choose to settle there; Souvankham Thammavongsa sends a postcard about the strange nighttime happenings in Marfa, Texas; and Darryl Whetter asks why, when 80 percent of Canadians live in cities, so much of our fiction takes place down on the farm.

PLUS: Chris Jai Centeno on University of Toronto budget cuts; Emily Hunter on overfishing and the seafood industry; Jenn Hardy on the DivaCup; Milton Kiang on better ways to recycle e-waste; Navneet Alang on microblogging service Tumblr; Jason Anderson on the Toronto International Film Festival; Sarah Colgrove on Len Dobbin, the Montreal jazz scene’s most important audience member; Kelli Korducki reviews Who’s Your Daddy?: And other writings on queer parenting; and Graham F. Scott on net neutrality and the CRTC.

With new poetry by Sandra Ridley and Lillian Nećakov, and a new short story by Kathy Friedman.

The arguments of liberals against suppressing pornography, however, are very often seductive and in some cases even thoughtful. We are familiar now with the attempts of some — as at the Edmonton Public Library and its show of paintings of female nudes — to equate the depiction of the nude body per se with grossness and vulgarity. In this equation no distinction is made between eroticism and pornography, between celebration and degradation, between naturalism and the grotesque. Indeed the assumption is made — and this is as old as the Judaeo-Christian culture — that the nude female body is the same thing as prurience and corruption. Obviously this equation must be protested.
This too should be considered: that the stripping way to sexual taboos is a moment in the liberation from the sexual, emotional, and social control of the male-centred family, the male-controlled marketplace and the male-dominated state. In the taboos around female virginity and chastity, in the double standard of monogamy for women and promiscuity for men, in the systematic devaluation of women’s work based on fallacious arguments about our ‘biology,’ and in the publicization of female masochism in commercial imagery, lies hte patriarchal prohibition against women determining the nature and practice of their own sexuality.
Finally, one must be very cautious about asking the state to move against the production and distribution of pornographic and violent materials. Do we really trust the authorities in our society to confine themselves to censorship of pornography, to not expand that mandate to include censorship of anti-establishment points of view? If we ask for the suppression of Hustler, do we find ourselves deprived again of D.H. Lawrence, of Germaine Greer, Angela Davis and Lina Wertmuller?
But other arguments raised by civil libertarians and free-thinkers are more problematic. The claim, for instance, that repressive morality is ‘responsible fort’ child abuse, domestic violence, and sexual hang-ups is too simplistic by half. It says nothing about the relationship between repressive morality and the constrains of law, custom, practice and habit, nor about repressive social structures (such as marriage and its feudal economic relations which underlie women’s dependency) nor about the intertwining of one’s class with one’s sexuality. By the same token, the claim that “sexual repressiveness has produced a gun culture of the most alarming proportions in all human history” (this was written in 1971, in the United States) is a rather glib assertion of causality; besides, seven years later, we now have a gun culture and pornography.
The hope that pornography, as ‘harmless fantasy,’ is a way for the sexually-aroused and frustrated to blow off steam, as it were, the hope that it might embody the individual’s right to explore fully his/her sexuality, and the principle that impediments to self-expression muyst be rejected are only superficially libertarian. They are meant to be meaningful to us all but are mostly meaningful to men. What is ‘harmless fantasy’ to men is very often a humiliation to women as we see over and over again images that mock and injure our femaleness. The male in process of embodying his sexuality, in the full flight of self-expression (or so he thinks), is very often a rapist, a sadis, a person violent in language and arrogant in imagination. At what point, one might ask, do his rights become in fact women’s diminution?
A European film-maker says, “we should be able to open up and show all kinds of things because it means you can trust in people to react soundly.” That would be very nice. But people do not react irrespective of their cultural baggage. While watching a pornographic film, say, they have with them the consciousness shaped by their sexual socialization, by their values and of feelings about family life and work life and by the lessons imbibed at school, in church, in the media. As long as that cultural baggage is characterized by the myths of male superiority, as long as the social situation of a film is the generalized coercion of women in our society, then pornography can only be a sexist event.
The same thing can be said of many works of art, soo. Traditionally, it has been argued that art is exempt from all considerations of ‘permissiveness and ‘censorship’ because we all believe that ‘good’ art — the kind that galleries and wealthy people collect — cannot possibly be bad for anyone. After all, aesthetic values are universally veneficient, are they not? Do they not refer only to art itself — no messing about, here, in social and political values? Do we not assume that wokrs of art are or should be part of everyone’s cultural experience because they make up a common heritage for us all, irrespective of our maleness or femaleness, our economic privileges or lack of them, our residency int he metropolis or in the hiterlands? In other words, it is usually considered bad form to enquire of an art object just what value system it buttresses, what set of power relationslies behind its execution and presentation, or waht particular group finds its interest reflected in its images.
I am looking at a book, The Nude in Canadian Painting. The text at one point reads: “the figure in Dennis Burton’s arresting Niagara Honeymoon #1 The Bedroom is a packaged nude, and a reminder that Pop Art was very much involved with containers…. James Spencer’s Margaret, althought superficially similar to the Burton, is in fact quite different…. Spencer uses ready-made subject-matter to raise questions about the relationship between the fundamental nature of the subject…and the object. The ambiguity is deepened by the over-life-size scale” etc….. I look at the pictures. I do not so much see playful commentaries on “packages” and “containers” and thought-provoking “ambiguities” as this: women in panties (black lace!) and garters, naked breasts and flesh, thick, heavy and pendulous with their uselessness, scrunched-up faces as though hurting, the whole arrangement pivotted towards the viewer, presumably male, as though it were an offering, long since deprived of any animation. This is art. It’s supposed to be good for me.
I do not mean to sound like a luddite, calling on feminists to trash cinemas and art galleries. I mean to enlarge the discussion around pornography beyond the usual categories of ‘civil rights’ and ‘aesthetics’. i mean to argue that these categories are not the universal perspectives we have accepted them as but are particular. Particular in the sense thtey reflect the way a certain group of people (usually men and formerly aristocratic but now middle-class and of liberal proclivities) see culture and social relations, and not the way others might. Their perspectives are in fact a justification for their privileges as men — for ‘pornography is a legitimate human expression’ read ‘pornography legitimizes my dominance” — and so they are unable to discern in pornography the ideology of male supremacy. It is people outside this dominant group, notably feminists, who discern that.
When, to our Judaeo-Christian inheritance that woman is venal and the gate of perdition, you add the medieval romance that sexuality is separate from spiritual love and the Victorian notion that ‘good’ women experience sex as a violation, then you arrive at the conclusion that women who assert their sexual needs for their own sake are perverse and deserving of discipline. Their victimization is justified. (And that of unassertive women too. If women are ‘naturally submissive and masochistic, then ‘naturally’ they will enjoy being brutalized. A justification for every occasion).
I don’t think it any coincidence that the explosion in imagery of violence against women accompanies the contemporary struggle for women’s liberation. It is a means of dealing with ‘uppity’ women: bind and flog us on record album covers as we march through the streets demanding wages for housework.
Paint us vapid and defenceless as we organize our collective strength in unions, cooperatives and committees.
Snuff us out in films as we get the measure of our female pride and beauty and rage.
Look around. As women press our demands for a fair share of wealth and power, even as we imagine a tough, sweet new order of ‘bread and roses,’ the defence of male authority becomes ever more bizarre and desperate, as it depicts women in increasingly grotesque ways, usually sexual, as though to reduce us to our despised sexual function again is to blow us away in the wind.
Or, as one man put it, “men need pornography because they are incapable of relating to liberated women.”
And women need it like we need a hole in the head.
It teaches us in its pervasiveness, even as we turn away from it, to see ourselves through the dominant male ‘I’ of our culture. “Men act, women appear,” writes the English art critic John Berger. “Women watch themselves being looked at. Thus the woman turns herself into an object” when she views herself in pornographic imagery. Our nudity, our flesh, our posture, are not there as an expression of our own feelings about ourselves but are rather a sign that we have submitted to the wishes of the painter, the photographer, the collector, the audience as to how we shall be displayed. The ways in which we are posed and the expressions given our face are signals not of our own appetites but are rather the means by which is fed the appetite of another. So when we celebrate the humanist vision and the lively individualism of the artist, we should remember that these evolve in contradiction to the sexist reification of the woman-object. And when we celebrate the sexual revolution and its proliferation of sexual images, we should remember: ‘The sexual revolution was so much late Sixties bullshit. It was about male liberation, women being shared property instead of private property. and we know which kind of property gets better treatment.’
There is an education of men as well through pornography. It teaches them that their honest, hmane wish to have their sexuality legitimzed, to have it shorn of its ashamed and guilt-ridden associations, will be met by images of themselves as fuck artists ‘liberated’ from their feelings and their responsibility to another person. In pornography, a person is no more complex than his or her orgasm, and sexual behaviour no more engaging of the person than a job at an assembly-line. Pornography takes the need-to-be-with-another and distorts it into sexual self-service. “it destroys our connectedness,” says an American feminist film-maker, “and educates us to be alone.”
***
I am at a photography show in Toronto. There are three walls of nudes, women in various postures in a room — the central prop is a dishevelled bed — and all of them are headless. The connecting image from one photograph to another is a ray of light, now thin and bright, now diffuse and shadowy, playing across the women’s limbs, their breasts, at their feet, across their buttocks. I come to the last picture. It is of the photographer himself, shot upwards from the level of his feet so that his thighs and chest rear up like the Colossus of Rhodes. He is nude. Except that where his genitals should be is a great glowing ball of light.
Women in rooms, lying on beds or strung languorosly across chairs. No purposeful activity here, no action outside, there, in the world of relationships and projects, just this enclosed intimacy between subject-camera and object-woman. Whatever her reason for being here, it is not her own. Perhaps she doesn’t have her own, for women are not in the world, they are in their bodies, in teh inaction of the flesh. Male nudes are rarely depicted, says Jerrold Morris, a Canadian art critic, because “the sexual attributes of the male nude add little t its heroic, formal characteristics.” Men, unlike women, are understood to have other things to do than project their sexuality. Men transcend their corporeality; women are their bodies. Women are shown headless, so irrelevant to their being are thgeir consciousness and intelligence. With every succeeding image of their nudity, we come to know the minutiae of their bodies, the pores and hairs and clefts, just so, and privacy and autonomy are banished. Women are not allowed to withhold themselves. Neither may they generate their own activity. There is, remember, that ray of light, the cord that leads back from the female body to the phallus, that instrument of energy, so mysterious and charged with meaning it does not even materialize but radiates in an aura of blinding light, homo triumphans.
The content of eroticism is the power men have over women. The power to enfeeble, enslave, terrorize and, ultimately, to kill: women under pursuit and attack, women in chains and ropes, women abducted and betrayed. Once we have been defined as unconscious and indolent, anything is possible: Hustler magazine makes jokes about Betty Ford’s mastectomy; a record album, showing the bikinied crotchof a woman, is called ‘Jump On It’; and in Denmark a study of the effects of freely-available pornography shows that all sex crimes (exhibitionism, voyeurism, indecency) have decreased in frequency, except rape.
Sexual violence against women is not about sex, it is about power and control. Our culture’s equation of sexuality with dominance-submission obscures this. Obscures the political content of male hostility towards women. Says Susan Brownmiller, feminist author of a book about rape, “if illustrations show the lynching of blacks or the gassing of Jews, then people would understand it as a political issue, but tie a woman up and that’s sexy.”
In images of erotic arousal, men and women learn well who is allowed to do what to whom. But hte location of that lesson in the irreducibles of ‘biology’ rather than in the mutations of politics, demobilizes us, even as our rage rises like blood in our throats.
What is to be done?
In the short term, feminists and their supporters should demand that materials depicting the bondage, mutiliation or murder of women for no other purpose than sexual arousal be banned, whether the image is in a porno film or on a billboard.
We should be organized to put forth our political point of view, to offer a counter-education to the existing ideology that will teach the public to discern in pornography its violently anti-woman content and reject it, the same way the public rejects gratuitou s images of the torture of animals, the brutalization of children, and the humiliation of minority groups.
We should offer a definition of pornography that releases the discussion from the liberal trap of ‘different strokes for different folks,’ that clearly makes the distinction between the erotic connection of equally willing, self-determining partners and the obscene connection of the sexual fascist and his victim.
We need to be clear that the resistance to pornography is not the same as the desire to legislate sexuality but is the need to delegitimize images of male supremacy over women. “What we need now,” says the psychologist Bruno Bettleheim, “is a new sexual morality freeing sex from the old anxieties, the old nhibitions, and from the social and sexual superiority of the male.” That is, the “anxieties” and “inhibitions” associated with the sexual experience are the inevitable concomitants of the intimidation of women and the split in men of their tender feelings from their desire.
We must begin to situate sexuality in our social relations to see that our sexual unhappiness is related not just to the anxieties of the sex act but also to the deadening relations of the family place the workplace and the marketplace. The content of pornography confirms, not contradicts, those deadening effects for it ‘celebrates’ the atomization and irresponsibility of hte person in the pretence that what one does as a sexual being has nothing to do with anything else, neither with the sexual partner nor with the society at large. Eroticism, on the other hand, that gentle, laughing, administering embrace of sensual camaraderie is the exact opposite of, is the alternative to, the social tyrannies of passivity and mechanization. Such sexuality has everything to do with the way we see ourselves politically, in the polis, as co-citizens of the aggrieved against those forces that would circumscribe and attenuate our compassion and vigor.
In the future, the couple will be “multifariously depicted,” says Vilgot Sjoman, Swedish director of I Am Curious (Yellow), “socially rooted, psychologically distinct, politically distinct. Prurient interest thereupon slinks around the corner — it cannot manage to embrace the total human being.” Will be so? Perhaps. Could be so? Definitely. Men and women as equable collaborators in sex as in work and creative effort. But only if we start from where we are, at the pornographic image, say, at the woman black and blue and roped, the man her disciplinarian, this our, men’s and women’s only marriage, the only coition permitted us, and say we would have it otherwise.

On a Saturday night, in a supermarket in Montreal, Natalie Reis picks up an 89-cent can of peas and carrots. She pulls one of her original drawings–a grey-and-red sketch of birds in flight–out of her purse and wraps it around the can. She secures the drawing with a single piece of transparent tape, places the can back on the shelf, steps back, snaps a photo with her digital camera and walks away.

Reis is part of a growing network of artists using stores as impromptu venues for their work. Shopdropping, shoplifting’s iconoclastic cousin, can be as overtly political as placing T-shirts of Karl Marx in a Wal-Mart or as self-serving as slipping your band’s CD into the rack at Starbucks. For Reis, it’s about creating a visual surprise in an otherwise familiar commercial space. “In the supermarket we are often on cruise control,” she says. “I want to disrupt the routine, give people an image that isn’t selling anything–a mental break from the brands and the advertising.”

Reis doesn’t mind if shoppers want to take her art home with them. “But I don’t want them to try to buy it,” she says. “I hope they steal it off the shelves.”

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