Vicky Mochama is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
In a recent Twitter post, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre was talking up his housing plan at some kind of rally. Housing is so unaffordable that young adults are still living in their parents’ homes. And this dynamic – of 35-year-olds renting their parents’ nanny suites – poses a horny problem.
He reports asking a different crowd in Vancouver, “What do you do if you’re 35, and you’re living in your mom’s basement? How do you even bring home a date?”
Mr. Poilievre recalls one response: “Very carefully.”
Finally, a politician was asking a good question: How is anyone supposed to get down, do the old spin-around-mess-around, Netflix and chill, get to third base, park their big Mack truck into a little garage these days? In this economy? In this political climate?
Sex hardly looms large in the Canadian consciousness. If anything, there’s a light discomfort with addressing the fact that people in Canada have sex. In 1973, writer and historian Pierre Berton was quoted as saying, “A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe,” which manages to both over and undersell Canadian sexual prowess. In 1967, discussing the Criminal Code omnibus bill, which, among other things, largely legalized homosexuality, then-justice minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau made famous the saying, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” Less often noted is the second part of the Trudeau quote: “What’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code.”
The Canadian consensus seems to be that the state will neither criminalize nor abolish consenting private sex between adults, nor will it involve itself in the nation’s private intimate affairs. And yet, governments the world over, including in Canada, are concerned with decreasing fertility rates and social isolation. From laws on abortion and homosexuality to the present-day moral panics over trans rights, societal discomfort and state involvement have long been our sexual partners.
Struck by how sex and sexuality have been legalized and regulated, I went to a strip club in downtown Toronto on Easter Monday. It was predictably sparse for a holiday, but according to the doorman, it was unusually quiet. This place used to be legendary, he told me.
Like many other nightlife businesses, strip clubs have been struggling since the pandemic shut their doors. And the strip club is one measure of whether we’re in a recession. The so-called “strip club index” relies on the lived experience of dancers: When tips and cash are in abundance, the economy is in a good position; when patrons start leaving fives instead of twenties, time to start clipping coupons. Bank of Canada economists may be better off unclasping garters to the tune of Pour It Up by Rihanna rather than studying lagging indicators if they really want to understand the economy.
The pandemic’s social and economic costs may have taken a toll on strip clubs, but prevailing winds were already battering the strip club ship. Due to a cultural shift to internet-based sexual activities and the obstacles imposed by provincial and municipal by-laws and legislation, strip clubs were already in a precarious state. Twenty-five years ago in 1998, there were 47 active strip club licences in Toronto. Today, there are just seven left standing.
Notably, in 2015, Saskatchewan legalized stripping in places that serve alcohol, then soon reinstated a partial ban so that stripping in those establishments was only allowed once a year – and for charity.
Provinces and municipalities have long had a hand in regulating sex and sexuality, often deciding against the interests of strip clubs and the like.
This stands in contrast to the liberalizing era of legal wins. Strip clubs have won successive cases, including establishing the legality of lap dances, while other court rulings have called into question the intrusive and expansive laws around prostitution. According to a 2018 House of Commons committee submission from four gay and lesbian historians, “The morality provisions in the Criminal Code were based on the 19th-century ideas about what was ‘indecent,’ ‘obscene,’ or ‘deviant.’ These continue to form the basis of many sections of the Code and must be repealed. In our view, only sexual practices that cause direct harm, as in assault, harassment and abuse, should be criminalized.” They pointed to obscenity laws, for example, which they said were unjustly used against LGBTQ people. Sex workers have long decried laws that criminalize purchasers and the advertising of sexual services. The long arm of the law continues to reach into the nation’s private parts.
Decades of legal wins and gains around sexuality have not (yet) untangled centuries of sexual shame and censure. (The boy band b4-4′s Get Down is our sexiest pop anthem, and that’s not saying much.) There remains a lingering tension between hard-fought sexual legal freedoms and a broader sex-negative culture. We are still guided by antiquated and repressive ideas of sex and sexuality.
Mr. Poilievre’s question belies something fundamental, though. There has always been a place for the state in the ostensible bedrooms of the nation, whether it’s in mom’s basement or otherwise. Let’s not pretend that they’re just sitting in the corner, watching.