At least, that was the message that emerged from December’s “pension summit” in Whitehorse, where finance ministers and senior government officials from across Canada met to formulate a response to the failure of Canada’s baby boomers to adequately prepare for their own retirement. A turbulent decade in the equity markets, a marked decline in the number of private-sector pension plans, and an unwillingness or inability on boomers’ part to save enough means many members of Canada’s biggest generation face retirement years that may not exactly be golden. But while there are ideological and political differences of opinion on how this apparent crisis ought to be addressed, one thing was clear: the en masse retirement of the boomers presents a huge challenge that is still going untended.

Right now, Canada has one of the more generous government benefit plans in the world, with the combined income from the Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security, and the Guaranteed Income Supplement totalling as much as $36,000 per couple, or $19,000 per person as of 2009. Improving the lot of Canada’s retirees is a worthy goal, and the question of retirement income deserves closer study given the virtual disappearance of defined benefit pension plans in the private sector and the sorry fact that bankrupt companies’ pension recipients are among the last to be paid when creditors come to collect—as ex-employees of Nortel recently learned.

But there is something wrong if improving today’s pensions means saddling tomorrow’s workers with the bill—a very real possibility when it comes to pension reform. One of the most popular solutions floated in Whitehorse was a significant increase in contributions to the Canada Pension Plan in order to pay for the imminent bulge of retirees. One scenario would see employee contributions rise from 4.95 percent to eight percent, a 60 percent increase (and a 300 percent increase from the rates the boomers themselves paid for much of their working lives).

Harry Satanove, an actuary and pension advisor, worries that placing the burden of pension reform on young Canadians, many of whom are saddled with monstrous levels of student debt and all of whom suffer disproportionately from the consequences of a stiffening job market, is unfair. “We shouldn’t be relying on our kids and grandkids to pay for our pensions,” he said in a December 11, 2009, article on pension reform published in the Tyee. “There’s not enough of them to support all of us.” Unfortunately, that appears to be precisely the plan, and not just when it comes to pension reform, either. The federal and provincial governments failed to anticipate the crunch, and the shortfall will have to be covered by the next generation of taxpayers. Thanks to a declining birth rate, the number of elderly Canadians has been on the rise for some time and that figure will peak in the next 30 years as the “dependency ratio”—the number of workers for every non-working adult—falls from five-to-one today to twoto-one by 2040. One study from early 2009 estimated that pension, health care, and other senior-related programs will cost $1.5 trillion over the next 50 years. Rising costs and falling revenues—partly owing to new debt from 2009’s stimulus spending—are a toxic combination. Yet there has been no national conversation of any significance, no meeting of provincial and federal ministers, and no sense of urgency about how Canada will fund this massive liability.

In view of these facts, the recent panic over the state of Canada’s retirement infrastructure establishes a worrying precedent. Those speaking on behalf of Canada’s baby boomers prefer to frame the retirement issue as an effort to improve the post-work prospects for all future generations, but the timing of its arrival on the national stage betrays that elegant smokescreen: It is no coincidence that retirement-related issues suddenly became a pressing national concern as the first baby boomers began to collect retirement benefits—just as it won’t be when health care, assisted suicide, and other senior-related issues become pressing concerns in their own time.

That’s not to attribute malicious motives to the boomers, but instead to acknowledge their demographic dominance simply overwhelms the agendas of other constituencies. Federal and provincial politicians have reacted to the concerns of Canada’s largest generation with a degree of responsiveness unheard of on files like student debt or the environment. And it isn’t surprising that the boomers have the ear of policy-makers, given both their numbers and their relative enthusiasm for voting. But privileging the interests of one demographic over those of another is a recipe for conflict. Younger Canadians can only hope that the politics of the next 40 years isn’t defined by it.

Erika Lust on the set of "Barcelona Sex Project," her "erotic experimental film" that exemplifies the style of the new crop of feminist-identified pornographers. Photo courtesy Lust Films.

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 the Cosmos and National Geographics was this out-of-place porno, just stuck in there. We made awkward jokes while flipping through it, and found a fake advertisement for “Gash Jeans,” which depicted a naked woman bent over with her pants around her ankles. We added it to our collage, and next to it scrawled our own teenage thoughts about porn and sexism.

I’d seen porn before, having snooped through friends’ parents’ stashes or the collections kept by families I babysat for. But this was the first porn I remember laying eyes on after learning about feminism. Inspired by the punk-feminist Riot Grrrl movement of the early ’90s, I took books out of the library by feminist thinkers such as Andrea Dworkin, Catherine McKinnon and Robin Morgan, whose statement that “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,” summed up the attitude of many feminists of the previous generation.

By the time I found feminism, and started organizing rock shows featuring female artists and making zines, the anti-porn stance had fallen out of fashion in academic circles. But my local public library wasn’t exactly on the cutting edge of feminist theory — the information I had access to uniformly condemned pornography as an industry that fed male depravity and encouraged violence against women. Growing up on the bridge between second- and third-wave feminism was a puzzling thing. I revered the anti-porn feminists who gave me my early education in women’s studies — they knew, like I did, that women were being systematically harmed, and that it had to be stopped. At 15, I thought that watching porn made you hate women.

By 16, I wasn’t so sure. Younger feminists were taking a broader view of sex and sexuality, including a more open attitude toward porn. Third-wave feminists were more concerned with fighting for sex workers’ rights than condemning pornography as a whole. While these schools of feminism weren’t mutually exclusive, I had a hard time holding them both in my head without it raising significant questions. Was I supposed to support the hard-working woman in front of the camera, or feel repulsed and sorry for her as an exploited sex object? Since that collage-making session, I’ve looked at a lot of pornography in a lot of different contexts. I now see porn as a positive extension of human sexual expression, but I still have a lot of questions about big-picture issues around pornography and society.

I’ve searched for answers in a lot of ways: as an undergrad studying sex and gender; as a sex store manager trying (unsuccessfully) to get porn in stock because my female customers demand it; and as a staff reviewer for a website that informed readers about where to get the best quality blowjob videos online. I’ve looked critically at sex, society and porn for years now, and I still maintain that sex is an amazingly telling lens through which to view the world.

This continues today, with my work as manager of Good for Her, a Toronto-based feminist sex store, where I also organize the Feminist Porn Awards, which honour the hard-working feminists who are revolutionizing the porn industry. If the very idea of someone who cut her teeth on anti-porn theory now handing out butt-plug shaped trophies to pornographers doesn’t make Andrea Dworkin spin in her grave, I don’t know what would.

Today, one only has to turn on the TV, walk down the street or type “free porn” into their web browser to see how unsuccessful the anti-porn movement was. Where anti-porn feminists of the past condemned the entire industry — often with valid reasons — their dogmatic view failed to take into account that sexual imagery can be positive, and that porn is sometimes created by people acting of their free will, who feel good about what they do and who hold pleasure in high esteem.

Now there is porn for everyone. Literally. There are websites that have audio recordings describing pornographic websites for blind people (pornfortheblind.org [obviously, all these sites are likely to be Not Safe For Work—depending on your workplace]), porn full of saucy deaf people getting it on and using sign language to express their desires (deafbunny.com) and sites that cater to everything from our fear and fascination with Middle Eastern and Muslim women (arabstreethookers.com) to snot fetishes (seriously: see snotgirls.com if you dare). There is now porn about pretty much anything that a person could ever think of in a sexy way — and plenty that most of us would never find erotic, either. And, of course, there is pornography made specifically for women, who, according to a recent survey by Internet Filter Review, visit adult websites at a rate of one for every two men. Looking back to the time when feminists viewed pornography as an instruction manual for the degradation of women, the biggest irony may be that sexually empowered feminist women have gone from being critics of pornography to being major consumers of it. Pornography, like sex itself, is fraught with complexity and contradiction, but the failure of anti-porn feminism was ultimately positive. Out of its ashes came a new culture of porn that is serious and steadfast in its dedication to pleasure and politics.

The mainstreaming of porn, which, as an industry, rakes in billions and billions of dollars a year, is still primarily a male-driven phenomenon. This doesn’t mean it’s a boys-only club though — sites that cater specifically to women like hotmoviesforher.com and sssh.com (a reported 70 percent of women keep their use of internet porn a secret) are doing swift business. The very emergence of a category of “porn for women” or “feminist porn” as a respected and understood niche within the mainstream industry means that somebody is paying attention to the demands of women as consumers of porn. As if more proof were needed of pornography’s widespread acceptance, supermodel Tyra Banks recently devoted an episode of her daytime television talk show to the subject of women who watch porn, and the merits of mainstream porn versus porn made by, and for, women.

While pornography’s normalization is relatively new, anti-porn crusaders have been around for as long as humans have been casting their sexual dreams and desires into images and print. Rightwing and religious groups have been long-standing enemies of pornography and obscenity, their concerns based on morality and fear that porn would cause the downfall of Western civilization by pandering to base desires — which are supposed to be ignored, of course.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, many feminists began to pay attention to pornography with a different focus. They believed that the growth of porn, popularized in film and magazine form, indicated society’s growing tolerance for violating women and reducing them to objects. If we are to pick a year when pornography began its rise, 1953 is a solid one. That’s when Hugh Hefner founded Playboy, which featured risqué pin-up images — that actually look pretty quaint by today’s standards. The industry didn’t take off in earnest, however, until the early ’70s and the advent of feature-length porn films. (Until that time, stag reels — short films usually free of much story or context — were kept out of sight in adult theatres or passed from hand to hand by enterprising men.)

Films such as Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, both from 1972, sent audiences flocking to theatres. And these crowds were comprised of couples and other curious customers, not just stereotypical raincoat-wearing perverts. The sexual revolution, which espoused free love, the Pill and an increasingly open view of sex and sexuality — from swingers’ parties to gay liberation — all set the scene for porn entering the mainstream. The truly explosive growth spurt happened in the ’80s with the advent of the VCR: home video technology made porn private and easily accessible. Feminists revolted. Influenced by growing feminist academic study of rape, battering and trafficking in women, community groups sprang up across North America to protest the proliferation of porn and its perceived effects. In 1979, Women Against Pornography (WAP, one of many groups with such acronyms — there was also Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media, and Women Against Violence Against Women), famously began one of the most visible means of anti-porn protest and education at the time. WAP led tours of the traditionally male domains of the sex underground for women, to give them the opportunity to have a first-hand look at sleazy “adult novelty” shops, dirty bookstores and porn theatres.

Anti-porn activists also circulated petitions, ran slideshows of pornography in consciousness-raising sessions and actively attempted to shut down theatres and video stores. Their success was often limited, but according to one activist credited only as “R,” there was “one video store owner who gave us his 52 tapes, and refused to sell porn.” Other successes could be measured by “the number of people who turned out in support, by the number of men we stopped from going into the shops, by the amount of media attention we got for our analysis on pornography, by the number of small groups that formed to organize against pornography in their area as a result of contact with us.”

The movement was heated and heartfelt. Some anti-porn activists looked to the principles of direct action and engaged in more overt protest. In 1982, a group calling itself the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade attempted to simultaneously bomb three Red Hot Video outlets in the Lower Mainland and Victoria, B.C. Ann Hansen, a member of the Brigade (who was also a member of the “Squamish Five” — famous for bombing a Toronto factory that was manufacturing cruise-missile components), claimed the group targeted Red Hot Video because it was selling “very violent pornography.” She said the chain’s rapid expansion into suburban neighbourhoods was normalizing porn in areas that previously had little access to sexually explicit material.

While not every feminist with concerns about pornography pursued radical direct action, the bombing captured the sentiment of many women at the time. The British Columbia Federation of Women issued a statement the day after the bombings that stated, “Although we did not participate in the fire bombing of Nov.22, 1982 … we are in sympathy with the anger and frustration of the women who did.” The views were not uniform, but in broader society, feminism had become synonymous with anti-porn attitudes and activism.

That year marked a turning point for the anti-porn movement. In 1982, Barnard College in New York held an academic conference on the subject of “pleasure and danger.” The purpose of the conference was to investigate how to expand the boundaries of women’s sexual freedom and desire, while preserving the feminist project of eliminating sexism and violence.

Topics for discussion at the conference included “correct/incorrect sexualities,” teen sex, abortion, disability and race, and some anti-porn feminists attempted to shut it down, believing the presenters to be perverts and sex deviants. One of the organizers of the conference noted that Women Against Pornography were particularly outspoken in their protest of the event, and greeted the more than 800 attendees with leaflets proclaiming the content of the conference as “anti-feminist.”

The event marked a pivotal point in the war against pornography, as anti-porn feminists moved their battle from culture to the courts. The terrain shifted from pro- and anti-pornography to pro- and anti-censorship. And it was an enterprising man from Winnipeg who inadvertently set the stage for the battles to come.

In 1987, Donald Butler was arrested on 173 counts of obscenity, just days after opening an adult video and novelty shop. Butler’s entrepreneurial zeal (he re-opened the store and then faced further charges of obscenity), convictions and journey to the Supreme Court of Canada led to Canada’s current obscenity laws, which are based on the Butler decision.

That decision was the culmination of years of anti-porn activism and state intervention. The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund played a significant role, and intervened in the Supreme Court hearings to show the harm that came to women from the production of pornography. LEAF’s pro-censorship argument was based on the idea that sexually explicit materials were a form of hate speech against women. The group’s intentions may have been good, but the law backfired: the first obscenity case following Butler resulted in the banning of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitudes because of a story depicting a sexual encounter that started off as non-consensual. The magazine was confiscated from Glad Day bookstore in Toronto in the spring of 1992 and ignited similar problems with other gay and lesbian establishments, most famously with the bookstore Little Sister’s in Vancouver, whose war against Canada Customs, and its restrictive policies on importing gay and lesbian material, raged on for more than 20 years.

The unintended effect of Butler turned out to be a disproportionate number of charges against queer artists and representations of queer sex, including bondage and sadomasochism. LEAF may have been attempting to limit exploitative and abusive practices, but that wasn’t how the law came to be used in practice. Instead, cops, customs agents and judges found many aspects of gay and lesbian sexuality to be inherently demeaning and used the law to harass sexual minorities. For example, anal penetration was initially one of the criteria that could have materials banned. Ironically, it was backlash against these kinds of decisions that put feminists on the other side of the censorship debate. In opposition to this increasing reliance on state censorship that many anti-porn feminists were employing, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force formed in 1984. This group, and other feminists, were increasingly concerned that their anti-porn colleagues were acting out of simple prudery and that they were seeing nothing but violence in all depictions of sex, regardless of context. That, in fact, their views had morphed from being anti-porn to anti-sex.

While anti-porn attitudes dominated the late 1970s and early ’80s, with little attention paid to expressions and depictions of women’s sexuality from a feminist point of view, the rest of the ’80s and early ’90s became a hotbed of discussion and theory around getting it on. Self-identified feminists were strutting their stuff and actively showing the many different ways that positive, empowered sex could be showcased.

But that’s not to say that all porn magically became so enlightened.

After moving to Toronto in 2005 I’d been out of work for almost five months when I found an intriguing help-wanted ad on Craigslist. The company was looking for writers to review adult websites. With a deep breath and undying love of ridiculous situations, I sent my resumé. The company owner explained the site’s concept to me a few days later. My job was to give positive reviews of websites to direct online traffic to such enticing sites as “Black Dicks, White Chicks” and “Big Tits, Round Asses.”

As someone who strongly identified as a feminist, I knew taking this job did not reflect my politics. I still felt the sharp division between “good” porn and “bad” porn, and this was definitely bad porn. I had no idea what to expect. The offices were nice, and the project was backed by a semi-retired millionaire who fed his love of toned Latino men by starting several small-time softcore gay websites. I expected that the job would be strange, and an experience unlike anything I’d ever done before, and it was. But I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming boredom that awaited me.

A year and a half into the gig, I was closing in on my 1000th review; it was becoming difficult to differentiate between websites. The names were nearly indistinguishable, the performers generally looked the same, and the content was often not just similar, but exactly the same, just sold under a different title in order to grab customers with an appetite for whatever niche the sites were selling. The work at this point was automatic. I could do it in my sleep: count the videos and photo sets, document the frequency of updates, and offer some kind of snappy line that made yet another mundane site sound sexily appealing.

Generally I didn’t feel sorry for the women in these pictures, but to tell the truth I didn’t really think of them all that much — the naked bodies blurred together. But then I came across photos of a woman I knew. Her face and naked body brought me back to reality: We’d had drinks together, talked feminist politics. I was shocked by the reminder that these were all real people with jobs that put them in the strangely public/private realm of porn. Viewing this content day in and day out, my desire to learn about porn as a cultural force and to think about it critically had been overrun by my blasé attitude. There was a difference between what I was viewing and the kind of porn that could be empowering and celebrated, and the difference was suddenly glaring.

My time writing about porn sites often left me feeling conflicted — how feminist was it really to be making money off of the labour of (mostly) women? Could I still call myself a feminist if I was looking at naked ladies all day and not using my position to criticize the glaring sexism and racism that I was constantly viewing? I couldn’t help but be disturbed by the sheer number of “reality” porn websites that had premises based on the idea of “tricking” unassuming women (who were obviously actresses following a script) into performing sex acts with promises of money or fame or sometimes just rides to their jobs, and then quickly yanking away these opportunities at the end of the scene. At the end of the day, I knew that what I was looking at was fantasy — a world built up of erotic shortcuts created to arouse (mostly) men. I took this job not so that I could call out the fucked-up parts of the industry, but so that I could pay my bills, and gain more knowledge about the wide world of porn.

What struck me most often when looking at these websites was how frequently I was left feeling sad that this was all that men were being offered. In my time working in sex stores, my own personal goal was to crack open the infinite world of sexuality for people, and especially for women, who are the primary clientele of the shops I’ve worked in.

Seeing the world of Big Porn showed me that not only are women left out, but men are presented with an incredibly bland palate to work from and to mold their own sexuality. I left my porn review gig believing that the world of porn shouldn’t be eradicated, but that it should instead live up to the boundless possibilities of the erotic, and that it should, and could, be able to reflect the diverse bodies, desires and dreams that make up human sexuality.

I’m fortunate enough to be working in a place now where I can more easily reconcile the split between porn and feminism. At Good For Her, a staunchly feminist sex store, I’m partly responsible for stocking our shelves with independent porn (with occasional big studio features) that live up to the promise of erotic materials that address women as viewers.

This spring I organized the third annual Feminist Porn Awards, held in Toronto to recognize filmmakers who are doing it right, showing sex as positive and healthy, with categories such as Fiercest Female Orgasm, Deliciously Diverse Cast, and Most Tantalizing Trans Film. The films all depict consent and active desire, with women as agents of their libidos, rather than being shown as racialized or inferior objects. Leading up to the awards, which attracted an audience of upwards of 450 women (and even a few men), the bulk of my work hours were spent on trying to get the word out — I conducted many interviews with journalists who were confused by the very idea of feminists honouring porn flicks. A healthy part of my day became the Google search, looking for mentions in the media and on blogs. Most of the coverage I found was positive, and the negatives were hard to separate from online trolls looking to bait anyone with a different opinion. But the criticisms that I read most often, primarily on feminist blogs, focused on the impossibility of there ever being any such thing as feminist porn. The belief seems to be that recording a woman in a sex act was inherently degrading; the thought that any woman could choose to star in, or write and direct her own porn is unfathomable to these critics. For all the problems that mainstream porn presents, I knew that women can — and do — choose to be involved in the industry, either within big productions or in their own indie affairs. I knew this because I’d been talking to many of these women for weeks, and asking them to be a part of these awards. I was talking directly with the vanguard of the new porn revolution.

One such woman is Erika Lust, a 31-year-old mother of an incredibly cute toddler, and a pornographer. When Lust started making films, she wanted to provide something she couldn’t find anywhere else — porn targeted at straight women. “I want to make movies for straight girls because we are a big group of people and we are supposed to go with the mainstream heterosexual porn, made by men for men,” she says. “Lesbians, gays, trans — every group lately has their own porn, and I felt that nobody was thinking about the needs and desires of heterosexual women. We are supposed to be happy and satisfied with Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives or Playgirl movies, but we need more than that!”

Her debut film, Five Hot Stories for Her, has won multiple awards (including a Feminist Porn Award for Movie of the Year in 2008). Her latest project is premised on the idea that female audiences want to get to know the subjects they are watching more intimately than standard porn allows for. Barcelona Sex Project shows three men and three women being interviewed and talking about their sexual tastes and fantasies before they engage in some sultry solo sex.

While there is a history of women writing stories and taking pictures and even making movies that have been intended or used to fuel erotic fantasies, it’s only been recently that these have been marketed as porn for women. (Exceptions include Candida Royalle, who started in 1984, and is especially well known in the world of porn for women; her softer-focus flicks show female characters that have an equal stake in their sexual encounters.) Women have claimed a stake in the means of production in what has traditionally been a male-dominated industry, and they are finding success both in and outside the larger industry. Tristan Taormino, an acclaimed sex-columnist turned director, makes educational titles, such as Tristan Taormino’s Expert Guide to Anal Sex, as well as racier projects. Her just-released Chemistry Volume 4: The Orgy Edition takes six porn stars and puts them up in a house for 36 hours, Big Brother-style, giving them the power to script their own scenes, and take part in the filming as well. The performers get a lot of say in how they want to be represented and exactly what kind of sex they want to engage in.

This is not to say that everything is always perfect in feminist porn land — as has always been the case with feminism, there is never one solid vision of what “feminist” is, and what calling yourself a feminist pornographer really means. And there are disputes. Lust and another female director, Petra Joy from the U.K., were involved in a minor skirmish in the feminist porn blogosphere when Joy disputed the application of the feminist label for certain sex acts caught on film: “If you want to show come on a woman’s face that’s fine, but don’t call it feminist,” she wrote on her website. Lust took offense to this and shot back a passionate response in her blog, saying she was sad that “certain women devote their time and energy to pulling down the work of other women, instead of focusing on empowering our different approaches and points of view.”

While Joy made sure to say she believed that any feminist could show whatever she liked in her films, the sentiment remained that there were, or should be, rules in place. Is showing semen on a woman’s body inherently demeaning? If a performer is choosing to engage in these acts, and states either that it doesn’t bother her or more, that she relishes it, can we condemn the result?

When I was a teenager making my first dives into feminism, I couldn’t always wrap my head around the divides within pornography and notions of sex-positive expression in general. Even now, the call to support sex workers is too often predicated on getting them out of sex work, even if that is where they want to be. The idea that feminism was going to “save” women, either from performing in porn or from experiencing the presumed violent effects of porn still smacks too much of paternalistic control. Women need to be supported in their decisions and choices around sex and sexuality, and that includes appearing on websites some find gross, or checking out porn on cable channels and finding new ideas and acts that turn them on — even if it’s porn free of politics.

Anti-porn feminists had (and do have) their hearts in the right place. The problem remains that sex and porn are not inherently bad; it’s exploitation, unsafe working conditions, coercion, and advocating violence that are never okay. Feminist porn producers already depict women as active participants in their own sexual fantasy. The project going forward will be to continue to ensure safe, appropriate working conditions for those who appear in and produce porn, while continuing to work on traditional feminist goals, including eradicating the exploitation of women. Erika Lust’s film company, for instance, donates five percent of its revenue to Equality Now and Womankind Worldwide, non-governmental organizations combating sexual exploitation.

On the production side, more women are taking the reigns with distribution, ensuring that they remain in control of how and where their work is displayed. With the success of porn on the web, performers running their own sites are increasingly able to reap a larger percentage of the profits and maintain creative control in ways that wouldn’t be possible in the mainstream.

Feminist porn may not be the answer to all of the critiques of pornography as a genre and an industry, but it is a start that looks to the infinite possibilities the future holds for porn. Access to porn is expanding every day: Canadians will soon have a cable channel with 50 percent Canadian programming — mandated by the CRTC.

Film festivals are popping up from New York to Berlin to showcase erotic work in legitimate venues, and the Feminist Porn Awards are marching into their fourth year. Adult trade magazines are paying increased attention to independent porn marketed towards women, and the mostly-untapped female audience is being specifically wooed more and more.

Consumers have the opportunity to demand better porn, and we are doing just that on a larger scale than ever seen before. The new face of porn has an opportunity to disrupt stereotypes and address new viewers, all while creating a feminist view of sexuality. As Erika Lust says, “porn and feminism must be allies: they have to fight together against the conservative notion of considering [sex as something] that has to be only related with reproduction, and labeling [sexually] active women as whores. Both feminism and porn can help liberate women from what society expects from us: to be good, quiet nice girls, not complaining, not arguing, not fighting, not enjoying sex, not being powerful and provocative.” Women can watch and make porn as a powerful statement against the status quo, one dirty DVD at a time.

Before my son Louis could walk, he could surf. He took to the internet like an aquatic creature, swimming easily and confidently. It was cute to see him perched at the computer, his big baby head topped off by a pair of giant headphones. But his avidity made me uneasy, a disquiet that lingers still, when I hover over his shoulder trying to see what he’s watching, making, understanding.

Generations see screens differently. Illustration by Dave Donald

I come from a generation of watchers — of movies, of TV — but Lou belongs to a generation of makers. Even though he’s only seven years old, already he’s leaving me behind, moving from consumer to creator, making and posting videos of his Lego men, swimming in a vast sea of video clips, remixes, parodies. To him, culture isn’t a static thing to be passively imbibed, but something to act upon; not an inviolate product, but simply material. As much as I admire the next generation’s digital fluidity, I miss the bigger picture — something that isn’t cut up, sliced into bits and pieces. More importantly, I worry that Lou will miss it also.

The break between the emerging culture of the empowered creator and the old-fashioned passive consumer is the subject of Brett Gaylor’s award-winning documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto. RiP picked up the 2008 Dioraphte Audience Award at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam and is being released this spring online and in theatres. The subject of the film is how current intellectual property laws affect the culture being made by a new generation. The copyright debate is something of a Wild West show at the moment, and no one embodies that spirit more fully than a musician named Gregg Gillis, who records and releases under the name Girl Talk. Gillis combines hundreds of samples from other artists’ songs into mashups, and in so doing, risks lawsuits, prison time, and massive fines. The film uses Girl Talk as a test case for current copyright laws, but also poses fundamental questions about how new forms of culture always need to build, borrow, or outright steal from the past.

In one of the film’s more thought-provoking segments, Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and founder of Creative Commons, argues that overreaching copyright laws have strangled creativity and eaten away at the public domain in the name of money and control. Despite lawsuits and penalties, people continue to rip, remix, and sample with gusto. After all, Lessig argues, the desire to play along is a natural form of creativity. And to punish or outlaw such a manifestation is tantamount to creating a generation with no respect for the law. (Lessig’s talk, included in the film, is available online at ted.com.)

I think Lessig is right about the importance of sharing ideas, but my misgivings linger — not just about how material is used, but how it’s perceived. It’s not because I’m afraid Louis will get sued one day. It’s because when films are simply something to be cut up, reworked, made into goofy commentary, and viewed ironically, I think something is lost. The ability to follow a sustained narrative has been fundamental to human nature, but it’s been so fractured, so chopped into small pieces, that it sometimes seems in danger of disappearing.

Louis informed me the other day that YouTube was better than TV and movies because you could watch whatever you wanted, and no one made you watch something (like ads) that you didn’t want to see. Here I am in danger of dating myself terribly, but this makes me think about how the medium carries the meaning. I am reminded of what it once was to listen to records. The A- and B-sides, the sequential tracks, formed a journey — and to interrupt this process was to miss the larger impact. You were meant to move in a linear fashion, from beginning to end.

That straight-line mentality has been disrupted, and not simply because there is often no top or bottom, no beginning or end, on the internet. When the larger arc is missing, the fundamental nature of story can change, becoming smaller and less affecting.

But the loss of the experience of sitting quietly in a darkened theatre to watch a movie — something I still love, but can’t truly share with my son — makes me sad. My experience has been shared by countless parents, who watch their children launch into some new world we can only fleetingly grasp. All we can do is wave goodbye from the shore, as they swim away.

Illustration by Alexei Vella

Baby boomers: drop the watercolours, back away slowly

In last spring’s flimsy caper comedy Mad Money, an uneasy truth lingered beneath the slapstick thievery and rolling-in-greenbacks hijinks: the fabled baby boomers, now hitting their early 60s, have no idea how to deal with the diminishing returns of their impending senior citizenship. Pardon me if I gloat.

The film opens with Diane Keaton and Ted Danson, a greying upper-class couple with grown children, flitting around their vast, over-decorated home like panicked pelicans, wattles and all. Ted’s character has lost his job, and Diane’s has never worked. They contemplate getting jobs for which they are overqualified (or simply too self-important) to perform, but are so horrified by this prospect that when Diane finally does get a crappy job, her desperation and complete disbelief in her change of fortune leads her to go on a gluttonous crime spree.

Watching Mad Money, it occurred to me that, as a post-boomer, generation X-er, echo baby — choose your own term — I have performed many jobs “beneath” my education or class standing. And so has everybody I know.

In fact, I can’t think of one person from my generation who has not spent at least half of his or her adult life gainfully underemployed — typically by boomers with a third, or less, of our education and credentials. For clarification, I am, according to most demographic standards, a near-boomer. I prefer the term “post-boomer,” thank you, if the B-word must be used.

I was born in 1965, the year traditionally cited as the end of the post-WWII baby boom. But I have always considered this calendar system woefully imprecise. Boomers are a cultural phenomenon — as they like to tell us every single day — and not a demographic one.

A boomer is someone whose first “English Invasion” pop music crush was the Beatles. Mine was the Sex Pistols (and that’s one hell of a telling gulf). A boomer fondly remembers his or her first colour television. A post-boomer remembers the day the cable was hooked up. Boomers were taken to Expo ’67 to get their first taste of culture on a grand scale. Post-boomers were taken to … well, nothing.

One of the first bitter lessons we postboomers learned about the adult world is that once a boomer has all the cake he or she wants (practically free university tuition, full universal health care, bountiful entry-level jobs with minimal qualifications, CUSO), they don’t put the rest of the cake in the freezer for a future sweet tooth — they take a hammer to it and shove the mush down the garberator.

But now boomers are edging toward their golden years and you can see the fear steaming out of day spas and rumbling across golf courses like a charged purple haze.

Naturally, they’ve turned a timeless reality into a fresh business opportunity. Bookstores are packed with how-to-age books for boomers. The ever-resourceful Moses Znaimer has dubbed his own pre-walker days his “zoomer” years and created a magazine to sell the brand. Radio stations are converting to Age of Aquarius nap-time programming, and televisions are flooded with gardening and travel shows.

Sherry Cooper’s bestselling The New Retirement: How It Will Change Our Future (the hubris of the boomers demands that everything they do be declared “new” — what next, The New Death?) attempts to counter boomer mortality anxiety with recipes for “wellness” management and, most important, investment profit maximization (one suspects the two goals are mutually inclusive).

According to sherrycooper.com, “boomers will redefine retirement with great energy and creativity, working well beyond age 65 and mostly by choice…healthy goal-driven boomers will seek purposeful leisure…” Am I the only person who finds that paragraph terrifying?

Working “well beyond age 65”? Swell. That’s great news for the economy, transnational trade, all levels of government, the civil service, the CBC, academia, the arts (I could go on here, but it’s too depressing). Seasons 30 to 40 of The Vinyl Café ought to be a riot.

And what exactly is this futuristic-sounding “purposeful leisure”? I read that quote to a fellow post-boomer artist, and he stopped cold, gulped, and said, “Oh God, now they’re all going to be artists … watercolours are back.”

While I don’t condone violence, I can condone a reasonable, humane culling of the aging herd. They don’t have to actually die, just virtually pass away. And here’s how: if you are a boomer, stop. Just stop. Stop working, stop acquiring, stop micro-managing your (and my) universe, stop sucking the life out of popular culture, stop going outdoors in those ghastly Crocs and Tilley Endurable hats, and, please, stop talking about how you’re eventually going to stop and, instead, stop. Now.

You’ve had a good run, flower children, longer than anybody else’s, but the bloom’s off, it’s last call at Alice’s Café, time to relocate. I hear P.E.I. is nice, and it has a convenient bridge. The kind that locks at night.

Joey is a punk. His hair is bleached white blonde and styled to spiky points. He wears a black leather jacket and ripped jeans; his wrists are ringed with leather cuffs, one studded, one bearing a silver skull. He goes to protests and is known to spout revolutionary slogans. Joey is not unlike hundreds of thousands of kids who listen to punk and wear its signature look. Except this Joey is 47 years old.

Joe Keithley is the singer for D.O.A., the British Columbia band that has defined the sound and style of Canadian punk rock for 25 years. In the pages of music history, D.O.A. is right beside the Ramones and Dead Kennedys, bands that created the soundtrack to a new North American subculture seeking loud, hard, fast music that reflected their outsider social status and anti-establishment views.

Keithley (who also goes by the stage name Joey Shithead) is hardcore. His commitment to a punk lifestyle hasn’t waned with age. Even though he’s married with three children, Keithley is much the same as in 1978, when he formed D.O.A. and released the independent single “Disco Sucks.” He still dresses the part, still tours with the band, still puts out his own records (the latest is War and Peace, a greatest hits compilation), still participates in political causes, and still promotes the D.O.A. mantra “Talk – Action = 0.” He’s been called the godfather of punk, but his longevity makes Keithley a poster boy for all grown-ups who identify themselves with adolescent-oriented subcultures, who refuses to abandon the ideals—and hairstyles—of their youth. “I believe in what I do,” explains Keithley, on a visit to Toronto for Canadian Music Week. “This is how I make a living and support my family, which is the number one thing in my life. But music is just a part of it. When I started out, I wanted to change the world. I still do. That’s why I haven’t stopped.”

Ancestry, race, nationality, and (often) religion are thrust upon us at birth, but we can choose our cultural identities, our tribes. For most, this occurs in high school. While some teens dabble in different peer groups the way they flirt with drugs or bisexuality, others are drawn to specific subcultures—because they reflect their true natures. For some, being punk or goth is not just style as revolt. The way they dress and decorate their rooms is the visual embodiment of their psyches. Much to their parents’ dismay and society’s derision, these young people don’t grow out of the phase, they grow into it.

There’s an old joke that non-conformists all dress exactly alike, and it’s easy to pick on people who look funny (see celebrity worst dressed lists). But to dismiss those engaging in these lifestyles well into middle-age as vain or quixotic is to ignore the fact that consistent commitment to ideals is a much praised quality in other parts of society, and that these subcultures have more in common with other forms of devotion than many would like to admit.

Joe Keithley wasn’t able to follow punk rock as a teen: it hadn’t been invented yet. But his recent autobiography, I, Shithead: A Life in Punk (Arsenal Pulp Press), reveals his rebellious tendencies formed early in life. The first time his picture appeared in the paper, it was on the cover of the Vancouver Sun. He was demonstrating with Greenpeace against nuclear testing off Alaska in the early seventies.

“I got politicized early by anti-Vietnam war protests,” he remembers. “I liked rebellion. My favourite songwriter is Bob Dylan. I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer, but I left SFU [Simon Fraser University] after four months to play guitar. Then I wanted to be hippie but that scene was dead. All those people were co-opted and had given up. My gang had heard about punk rock and thought it was just the strangest bloody thing. Then we went to see the Ramones. “I was reborn when we saw this punk band. It was really ugly, snarling and unpleasant. It totally turned us on. I kind of learned to become a punk. But because so much of it is political, the grounding was there in high school.” In I, Shithead, Keithley outlines the early D.O.A. ethos: “Think for yourself. Don’t back down. Change your world. Be free.”

This is the kind of movement Thomas Frank referred to as “revolution through lifestyle rather than politics,” in his 1997 book The Conquest of Cool. The idea is that you can make a difference every moment of every day, not just by protesting the status quo, but by actually creating an alternative universe and living in it. Punk’s confrontational music and dress forces others—the suits—to think about why they are not. Also, a green mohawk looks really cool.

But a quarter century later, punk music and fashions are hardly as subversive. While bands such as D.O.A. have remained committed to Do It Yourself ethics, the accoutrements of punk culture are now 100% mainstream. The fundamental elements of its style—Doc Martens boots, unnaturally coloured hair, bricollage clothing, the ironic appropriation of political symbols—have been used to make “street” haute couture and market corporate products. The biggest punk group of the past decade is Blink-182, an apolitical MTV-sanctioned pop-punk trio best known for its dumb pranks. Suburban mall chains like America’s Hot Topic sell mass-produced, pre-fab fashions racked by “scene.”

Keithley knows all about this new generation of punks: he lives with one. “My daughter is the biggest Blink-182 fan,” he says. “Talk about prefab, she wanted a sweatshirt that said ‘Anarchy’ on it for Christmas. I bought it for her. I don’t care. Kids go through these things.”

One of the reasons subcultural fashion is so easily co-opted by mall culture is that it is possible to buy things that signify punkdom, gothdom or raverdom. But while dressing up announces membership in the distinct group, it cannot automatically admit you into it. Call it T-shirt – Action = 0. For every person sporting an anarchy symbol without understanding it there’s an older punk who thinks they’re a poseur. In I, Shithead, Keithley calls them “pukes”—audience members who dress as punks but pick fights or push others around. “It’s way more punk rock to come to a D.O.A. show in a business suit than a mohawk,” he says.

While he too copped some misguided fashions in his youth (he laughs about the home-made razor blade sunglasses he could barely see through), Keithley is best known for wearing working-class flannel shirts, which became regulation punk, and eventually grunge, wear because punks like Keithley wore them.

This is how punks (and goths, and ravers, and mods) end up dressed alike; they almost all start out mimicking the style of their favourite band. Then, as the group’s followers grow in number, the original devotees abandon it, the same way an underground band that scores a top 10 hit becomes uncool, not because the music has changed, but because it is now attracting too many poseurs—people the core group does not want to be associated with. In subcultures, it’s only somewhat important to look like other members of the tribe, people you admire. It’s more important to be different from people you don’t respect. A real member is defined even more by what they hate than what they love: Joey Keithley’s first original song was not called “Punk rocks!” but “Disco Sucks!”

While copying older punks is a rite of passage for the young rebels, 50-year-old punks adopting new teen looks seems, well, slightly sad. And now that the first generation of punks is about to hit retirement age, you just know it’s going to happen. Keithley says he won’t be one of those guys, but just because he’s giving up the look doesn’t mean he plans to give up the lifestyle.

“People who are middle-aged like I am should not go around pretending they are teenagers,” he says. “Lots of my friends are caught in a time warp of punk rock. But blind faith in anything, that’s crazy. I’m way too old for that. To get along in this life you have to adapt. That’s the prime reason humankind is at the top of the food chain. Still, I believe in my art, in music. When I get up there and play, I still get a similar charge I got when I was a teenager. I still want to drive the audience nuts and make them think. I may not always be in a punk band or dress like this, but I will always be an activist.”

I can totally relate to Joe Keithley. For more than half my life now, I’ve been pursuing a lifestyle that should have been a passing adolescent fad. I admit I never gave it much thought until other people started asking about it, but I’m proud to acknowledge I’m of the black cloak-pasty face-poetry reading persuasion. When I started they called us death rockers; these days we’re simply goth.

Like punk, goth is generally the domain of the teenager. It’s a lot easier to pine for immortality, spend three hours on one’s hair and hang out in graveyards when death is a distant concept and you’ve got no job. And yet, some of us continue to dress up like the walking dead long after it shocks our friends and families, although it does tend to shock strangers on the street. Growing up in a small town, it wasn’t so much a subculture as a lifestyle, because there was no group. Just me, trying to emulate the bands I saw on TV. It all started with The Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary.” I had tried to be a punk, but was pretty much a poseur. I related to the attitude, but not the aesthetic. But The Cult’s Ian Astbury was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. His song’s chorus “and the world drags me down,” spoke more to me than “Anarchy In The U.K.”

At the time, I had no idea there was a goth subculture, a gloomy-post punk musical movement that would soon be associated with wannabe vampires, suicidal tendencies and bad poetry. I just liked the music, dark and heavy with sexual longing and despair. Then I discovered the divine decadence of candlelight, velvet and late nights indulging in grand artistic ideals. In my personal elysium, I practised ritual dressing, draping myself in black clothing, painting a dramatic face of alabaster powder and dark shadows atop mine own then covering it in impractically long blue-black bangs. The look—which I didn’t exactly master at first—was a great conversation starter. Those who weren’t scared to come ask me what I was all about earned my respect, and an earful about the beauty of decay, the blight of “normal” society and why we should all abandon the capitalist system so we’d have more time for reading Shakespeare and listening to Skinny Puppy.

Paul Samuels had a similar revelation. The 34-year-old co-owner of The Savage Garden, Toronto’s oldest goth nightclub, grew up in England, where the scene began. He too heard the music and was drawn to it like sailor to siren.

“Me and my friends were sitting around the stereo at school and ‘She Sells Sanctuary’ came on,” he recalls. “We didn’t know anything about goth subculture, but we fell in love with that song. I always liked punk sounds and horror movies. I identified a bit with New Romantic, the make-up wearing rogues. Then The Sisters of Mercy hooked me in 1984. I couldn’t get enough. Soon we were wearing [pointy] boots, black jeans and tour t-shirts; after that it was the frilly shirts with long sleeves. Then I mashed in make-up and black, backcombed hair with lots of hairspray. We became the freaks of the town.”

At Savage Garden, Samuels is known as DJ Pale. He still wears black exclusively but his hair is light brown and rests in a short ponytail rather than straight in the air. He doesn’t have to maintain an extreme look. With his entire life intertwined in the goth scene, his membership in the tribe is well established. He’s what’s known as an ElderGoth.

“If you don’t dress the same or listen to the same music anymore, it’s because there is more to it than the stereotype you follow as a teenager,” he says. “When you’re young, all you want to do is conform with other non-conformists, buy the latest album you’re supposed to. As you get older, you realize it’s more than just dressing up and partying. You realize you’ve got some weird kink in the back of your head. For me, my experience has only expanded. The only difference is a greater perspective. Everything I believe in hasn’t changed. It never will.”

Sociologist Linda Andes, in her essay “Growing Up Punk: Meaning and Commitment Careers in a Contemporary Youth Subculture” calls this “transcendence,” the stage in which members cease to concern themselves primarily with their clothes or communities. I call it “nothing to prove.” She also points out that adult punks who do continue to express themselves through image and association are generally connected to the scene on an organization level, as musicians, promoters or writers, for example. Certainly this is true of goths as well. Apart from the CorpGoths—who trade tips on dressing cool for regular jobs—most grown-up goths who aren’t in artistic careers must choose between look and livelihood.

But then there’s the weekend. Clubs like Savage Garden attract plenty of older denizens who suit themselves up in their off-hours only. Since they have no goth identity during the day, they really make up for it at night. For that, they go to Toronto’s one-stop goth shop, Siren, which outfits goths of all ages from head to pointy toe.

Groovella Blak, proprietor of Siren, is a sort of fairy gothmother. Although she won’t reveal her birth date, she was already considered an ElderGoth when the store opened in 1988. “It’s interesting. I get mother and daughter pairs coming in,” she says. “I don’t know if the parent was doing it first and the son or daughter caught on or the other way around but I have a few of those customers. The mother isn’t going to clubs anymore, she just likes the look and the way it feels. If that’s what they want to do, who are we to question? If you can still look good at 60 or 70, that’s great.”

Groovella admits she was a “late bloomer,” a private-school kid who discovered goth in London when she was already in her twenties. Soon she became Toronto’s best-known goth girl. She claims she’s not “hardcore goth” anymore, but to anyone else’s eyes, she’s still a dark princess, petite, pale, poised. Her smile betrays her devotion.

At the height of vampire mania in the mid-nineties, Groovella had her canine teeth filed into fangs. She doesn’t like to make a big deal out of it, but it definitely secures her a spot in the goth-for-life camp, which if you subscribe to one of goth’s most treasured myths, could be a very, very long time.

“Vampires are immortal, so it doesn’t matter how old you are,” she says. “Goth is the one culture you can age gracefully in. You can slip through the cracks of time.”

When I was 16, I thought the most beautiful girls on earth were goth. I still do, which is why I continue to dress like one myself. Over the years, I’ve been asked what it all means, something I’m not equipped to answer. I do know that it is more
than a fashion statement. It’s about allegiance to ideals, and the rituals—hair crimping, pit moshing, whatever—simply intensify the devotion. You become what you believe.

Like religions, subcultures have their own ideals, ethical codes, rituals and aesthetics. And as in religions, members express their devotion to their group and their faith through modes of dress. But like devout members of religious groups, goths, punks, mods and ravers will tell you that it’s not really about the outfits. It’s about what they stand for.

I’m reminded of this while interviewing Joe Keithley. Into the coffee shop where we are talking steps a sister in full habit. An actual Blue Nun. I think we’re not so different, the three of us in our regalia, at odds with the rest of the world. I wonder how often anyone asks her when she’s going to grow out of it.

Liisa Ladouceur is a music and pop culture writer for eye Weekly, CBC Radio’s Definitely Not the Opera, Rue Morgue magazine and others. She is a member of the Royal Sarcophagus Society, a shadowy collective of artists and rogues in love with lofty Pre-Raphaelite ideals.