The Shameless editorial collective. Photo by Robin Hart Hiltz.

Flip through the pages of Shameless, a feminist magazine for teen girls, and you’ll find a debate about the value of corporate social responsibility titled “When Oppressive Corporations Do Progressive Things” alongside a first-person call for self-acceptance, “Shame, Beauty and Women of Colour.”

It’s not exactly Seventeen, and that’s the whole point — or at least it was. “When we started, we defined ourselves as what we aren’t,” explains Sheila Sampath, the magazine’s editorial director. “Now, we no longer have to do that. It’s more about what we are.”

Shameless was born out of a Ryerson University classroom seven years ago, founded by students Nicole Cohen and Melinda Mattos to redress the deficiencies in mainstream teen magazines. Sampath, who joined the team as art director early on, is now running the show — and providing day-to-day continuity within the all-volunteer team. The magazine’s 10 or so editors are joined by outreach volunteers, including those who run the Wire, a journalism training program for high-school girls.

“I wish I’d had Shameless when I was a teen,” says Sampath, pointing out that, refreshingly, it doesn’t assume its audience to be straight, white, and middle class.

Shameless is overtly activist, with a mission statement that reads, in part, “We understand that many of the obstacles faced by young women lie at the intersection of different forms of oppression, based on race, class, ability, immigration status, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

Its target demographic — vocal in its appreciation — usually finds the mag in school libraries, but Shameless is also available on newsstands and finds many fans in older age groups, too.

The indie title aims to provide a sense of community for those who are “different”—in viewpoint or ethnicity. “It really is validating to see yourself reflected in print,” Sampath says. “We’re trying to redefine what’s normal.”

It’s easy to conclude from the video that, more accurately, It Mostly Seems To Get Better For White People Who Work In The Arts, and I’d hardly be the first to criticize the project for its blithe elision of wide swathes of the queer experience. The project has taken some flak—I would say deservedly—for being lily-white, for being classist, for being ableist,, for being just plain factually incorrect, or for being downright smug. But it’s Friday! Let’s look on the bright side. A bunch of Canadian celebrities are telling queer kids to hang in there, and that’s just swell.

But if you’re looking for videos and stories that better reflect the actual diversity of the population, I’d suggest taking a look at the We Got Your Back Project from the U.S., which explicitly aims to solicit and highlight It Gets Better stories from people of colour, people with disabilities, working-class people, and others who seemed underrepresented in the original version. There’s something sanctimonious about Rick Mercer or George Smitherman telling you how nifty their lives are now that they’re all grown up, financially secure, and working in positions of power: like, duh—of course it got better for them. Hooray.

Anyway, Canadian queer celebrities! Passive-Aggressive High Five!

Still from 'Continental, un film sans fusil' (2008) directed by Stéphane Lafleur.

The title of Quebec director Stéphane Lafleur’s Continental, un film sans fusil (Continental, A Film Without Guns) is not only a playful warning to viewers seeking the adrenaline hit of an American action movie. A classic on the Quebec line-dance circuit, The Continental Walk is an American dance tune written by Hank Ballard—the man behind The Twist and The Hoochie Coochie Coo (line dancing is very popular with Quebec singles’ clubs). Their backs rigid, dancers of the Continental glide across the floor in sync, moving backward, then forward and to the left and right, occasionally jumping up and clicking their heels together. Like the characters in Lafleur’s feature, the lone dancers cross paths without touching each other. Lafleur pointedly drew from American popular culture for the title of his film, which follows the lives of four quintessentially North American characters lost in the circumstance of their suburban lives.

Lafleur is one of a generation of thirtysomething Québécois filmmakers, coming to be referred to as the “Quebec New Wave,” who explore the disquiet and confusion of life on this continent. Although these young filmmakers justifiably reject being labelled as a collective, taken together, their work reflects a new sensibility in Quebec cinema. While the characters speak French, their experience as members of North America’s largest francophone minority barely registers. Their cultural reference points are universally North American, not specific to Quebec. Questions of language and nation are conspicuously absent.

Critically acclaimed at home and increasingly recognized on the international festival circuit, Quebec New Wave directors include Yves-Christian Fournier (Tout est parfait, Everything is Fine); Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault (A l’ouest de Pluton, West of Pluto); Maxime Giroux (Demain, Tomorrow); Rafaël Ouellet (Derrière moi, Behind Me); Denis Côté (Carcasses, Carcass), Simon Lavoie (Le déserteur, The Deserter); and Guy Édoin (Les Affluents, a trilogy of short films).

Still from 'A l'ouest de Pluton' (2008), directed by Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault.

New Wave films are minimalist, reflective, and marked by the austere influence of distinctive, deliberate filmmakers like Roy Andersson, Pedro Costa, Ulrich Seidl, Darren Aronofsky, Gus Van Sant, and Bruno Dumont. They focus on the seemingly mundane, morose aspects of daily life, often with painstaking slowness. The dialogue is sparse and the takes are long. The themes they explore are dark: social isolation, the breakdown of the family, teenage suicide, and prostitution. And while they draw heavily on the work of Northern and Eastern European auteur filmmakers for their harsh, in-your-face realism, the Quebec New Wave is firmly rooted in the landscape and culture of North America. Many of their characters seem trapped in uninspired suburbs where they are cut off from nature and other people—except for their dysfunctional families.

Most of these New Wave directors came of age in the politically uncertain period after the 1995 separatist referendum defeat, when the Quebec nationalist movement was deflated and rudderless. They later practised their art with the thriving Kino experimental short film movement.

Their films respond to the blistering speed of contemporary media and to the wave of crowd-pleasing, nostalgic Quebec films released to considerable commercial success in the past decade, such as La Grande Séduction, Les Boys 4, and C.R.A.Z.Y., which portray modern Quebec culture as homogenous, insular, and cheerfully Norman Rockwellian in its ability to resolve conflict. Three of the filmmakers—Fournier, Ouellet, and Giroux—spent the early part of their careers immersed in consumer culture making video clips and advertising. Côté was a well-known film critic notoriously contemptuous of mainstream box-office hits.

Still from 'Continental, un film sans fusil' (2008) directed by Stéphane Lafleur.

It’s as if these young filmmakers are collectively saying “let’s slow down a minute and really take a look at what’s going on in this culture.” In Continental, which was awarded the prize for best first feature at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007, lonely people try to connect, but can’t. Chantal, a single woman invited to a party on a blind date, is so ill-at-ease she drops a squirming baby to the floor with a thud. Is it a comment on Quebec’s declining birthrate that a woman in her early 30s panics when she touches a baby? In an equally uncomfortable moment, Louis, the travelling salesman, is invited by the couple next door to him at the hotel to watch them have sex. Lonely, he agrees. In what feels like an interminable shot he sits observing them, with a Styrofoam cup of wine in his hand, completely unaroused. Embarrassed, he abruptly leaves, mumbling his thanks.

Still from 'Tout est parfait' (2008), directed by Yves-Christian Fournier.

Yves-Christian Fournier’s Tout est parfait probes the taciturn world of five adolescents who feel so alienated they make a collective suicide pact (suicide is the number one cause of death among men aged 20 to 40 in Quebec). Written by Guillaume Vigneault—son of Quebec’s unofficial national poet Gilles Vigneault—and nominated for seven Genies, Tout est parfait screened at festivals in Seattle, Namur, and Belgium and was awarded the Claude Jutra Prize for best first feature from the Canadian Academy of Film and Television.

Using footage he shot in rural, urban, and suburban Quebec, Fournier created a generic North American post-industrial city. The five friends attend a massive high school and pass their time smoking dope and aimlessly driving around. Lower middle-class, they are bright but poorly educated. And while all five speak Québécois French, two of the boys are of ambiguous ethnicity: one appears to be Central American, another Scandinavian, though we never learn their origins.

Fournier and cinematographer Sara Mishara—an exceptionally talented artist who also shot Continental and Demain—jolt the audience with visuals juxtaposing both the possibility and despair of youth. In the slow-moving opening scene, a smooth-faced adolescent boy sits on a bus filled with sunlight and blue sky. Before he gets off at his stop, he hands his iPod to a radiant young woman who smiles at him. A few moments later, he shoots himself in a graveyard. In the following scenes, Josh, the central character, discovers one of his friends hanging from his bedroom ceiling in a sequence that is so tightly shot and harsh that it’s claustrophobic. Throughout the film, Fournier highlights the cultural and spiritual poverty of their domestic lives: the dark bungalow with neglected, greasy kitchen cupboards where one boy lives with an alcoholic father; or the sterile dining rooms where families sit around the dinner table staring at each other in silence.

“As human beings we are confused,” Fournier told me when I spoke to him last spring, shortly before the Jutra Awards. The 36-year-old director believes that the complexity of modern life, including technology overload, environmental problems, and lack of spiritual guidance, overwhelms young people. “Thinking about these issues we are faced with brought to my mind a character who is feeling empty, although he is full,” Fournier says, referring to the lead character, Josh. “I wanted to explore that emptiness.”

Still from 'Derriere moi' (2008), directed by Rafaël Ouellet.

Derrière moi, which opened TIFF’s 2008 Vanguard section last year and A l’ouest de Pluton, which won the Special Jury Prize in the Narrative Features category at the 12th Bermuda International Film Festival, also portray the vulnerability of North American adolescents with exceptional clarity. In A l’ouest de Pluton, directors Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault recruited a group of 14- and 15-year-olds, all non-actors, from a Quebec suburban high school and followed them for a 24-hour period. While the film is scripted, much of the dialogue was improvised. The shots are long and the camera hand-held. The film’s central drama is a house party where an unpopular girl invites a group of fellow students to celebrate her birthday. A group of them trash the house, stealing the family pictures off the wall and throwing them in a field. One boy is violently beaten. Another girl is seduced by a young boy then abandoned by him after they have sex. The teenagers are wild and uncontrolled—overconfident, hypersexual, ignorant, greedy. Yet they also seem utterly lost, navigating new experiences without wisdom or the guidance of adults.

Derrière moi is a slow-moving, cynical tale of Betty, a prostitute who travels to a small town and recruits lonely 17-year-old Lea into prostitution. The seduction of Lea by Betty is the centre of this psychological drama, although the film is nearly plotless until the final scenes.

Shot in dark indoor settings, the film’s shadowed, grainy texture is at times like a B-horror film: Betty is a vampire, preying on Lea’s sexual energy and youthful innocence. Ouellet wrote Derrière moi because he’s interested in how young North American women are drawn into the sex trade. “I worked at MusiquePlus for seven years,” explains Ouellet. “I was responsible for trying to sell adolescents a lifestyle based on consuming the latest iPod and being like everyone else. But young people have so much curiosity and naiveté and idealism. With my films I want to try to show them something else.” As in A l’ouest du Pluton, in Derrière moi it appears that no one is around to protect the young.

While their stories are at times opaque and frustratingly slow-moving, what is remarkable about these New Wave films is their careful attention to the detail of character. Unlike the films of celebrated Quebec filmmakers such as Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique, Maelström) and François Girard (The Red Violin), which feature exquisite images but often suffer from weak scripts, New Wave films are obsessively character-driven: the cameras meander through their stories, revealing nuanced emotions with facial expressions, body language and long, uncut sequences. And in contrast to the practised and frequently dogmatic cynicism of celebrated Québécois director Denis Arcand, the New Wave films compassionately (and often humorously) portray a society in the midst of a spiritual and social crisis.

The culture they evoke is an uneasy mixture of American excess and Nordic austerity. It seems utterly appropriate for this wintry nation that has somehow produced two of the splashiest, most commercial acts on the Las Vegas strip: Cirque du Soleil and Céline Dion. What’s not present in New Wave films is the warmth and easy-going chattiness—the so-called joie de vivre— that anglophone filmgoers often associate with Canada’s other solitude. And the backdrops of these stories aren’t the romantic historic neighborhoods tourists flock to see, but the dreary suburbs and small towns where most Quebecers—most North Americans—live.

Post-war Quebec was rigidly Catholic and conservative until well into the 1960s. Five decades ago, the large, rural Quebec family was promoted as the ideal. Along with the church, it was viewed as one of the central pillars of the nation. Today, Quebec has one of the lowest birth and marriage rates and one of the highest male suicide rates on the continent. Quebec has transformed from a highly religious culture, where community and church were central, to a highly urbanized, secular society with a deeply ingrained media culture in half a lifetime. It appears that this new generation of filmmakers are measuring the fallout of such rapid, irrevocable change. In the process, they have reached beyond the boundaries of their own culture to develop a cinematic language that is both universal and yet—if it’s not too loaded a term—distinct.

If Maclean’s was looking for someone to explain Canada’s teenage girls to their parents, Sax was a strange choice. He does have a PhD in psychology from 1980, but he primarily interprets and popularizes research rather than doing peer-reviewed work himself. Unfortunately, his interpretations are pretty controversial.

A blog called Language Log has criticized Sax for over-interpreting and distorting research on gender differences. This stands out to me because I know Language Log to be home to particularly smart take-downs of bad statistics. The New York Times also published a fairly critical profile of Sax a couple years ago.

So I shouldn’t be surprised to find Sax up to his usual tricks in this Q&A. Take his claims about self injury:

…if you look at the literature, you see that more than one in five girls is cutting herself and/or burning herself with matches. […] In a very well-executed study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal two years ago, a demographically representative sample of young people 14 to 21 years of age was surveyed in Victoria, and there was an overall prevalence of roughly 16 percent. Although in the abstract there’s no mention of sex differences, if you pull up the tables you see that only eight percent of boys but 24 percent of girls were cutting or burning themselves.

In fact, that’s not exactly what the paper found. (You can read it here.) Sixteen percent of young people and 24 percent of girls had, at some time, injured themselves. But the way this statistic is repeated presents two problems. First, Sax implies that all self injury in these papers is cutting or burning, when in fact the authors also measured some kinds of drug and alcohol use, and other behaviours. This is an understandable memory lapse. But second, and more importantly, Sax’s statistics are for youth who had ever hurt themselves. When we look at how many youth had injured themselves more than three times, prevalence falls to six percent. (The paper doesn’t provide a gender breakdown for that smaller group.)

The difficulty here is Sax’s verb tense. The fact that he says “one in five girls is” and then later “24 percent of girls were” suggests an ongoing, long-term problem. As unpleasant as it is to imagine, I think we can accept that a large number of teenagers try out self harm, and that this is quite different from someone who injures repeatedly, over a long period of time. It is the latter scenario that Sax goes on to describe in titillating detail:

The girls themselves tell you, “I cut myself because it’s real, it’s not fake.” It’s not a cry for help: most girls don’t want adults knowing they’re cutting, which is why they cut in places we won’t see, like high up on the inner thigh. And they don’t want to kill themselves. There’s research which is quite astonishing to many people: when girls cut themselves, they are getting a release of endogenous opiates—they’re actually getting high.

This is a small misinterpretation, but it is important. A surprising result has unusual power in this sort of piece—it stops readers short, overturns their assumptions, and encourages them to reassess the rest of the article’s claims. And it’s especially disappointing coming from a magazine that just last year published a comprehensive package on how well teenagers are doing:

In light of these facts, [Reginald] Bibby [sociology at the University of Lethbridge] expects strong resistance to his findings from the very teen crisis apparatus he partially credits with all the good news. “The experts act almost annoyed when you suggest kids are actually looking a little better,” he says. Some of that blowback stems from genuine difference of opinion. But a lot grows out of popular wisdom coming out of the United States.

Unfortunately, with this piece Maclean’s has uncritically repeated that misleading popular wisdom. And from a cover this sensationalist, I think we have a right to expect more.

Jillian Tamaki

Last year, on October 21, Jillian Tamaki got a phone call from her cousin, the Toronto-based writer-performer Mariko Tamaki. Their muchloved co-creation Skim had made history by becoming the first graphic novel nominated for a Governor General’s Award, in the Children’s Literature (Text) category. Skim, loosely about sexuality, teenage alienation, and Wicca, had already received a torrent of praise and would later make the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books list. Now it was in the running for Canada’s pre-eminent literary prize.

But there was a snag. The Canada Council for the Arts had only nominated Mariko, who wrote the text. Tamaki, whose signature sketchy, half-finished illustrations filled the book’s pages, was not included in the honour. The writer was the author; the illustrator was not. “Obviously, I was extremely disappointed,” Tamaki writes in an email — the Brooklyn-based Calgary expat gently insisted on an online interview because she is “a bit phone shy.” “I suppose it can be argued that one could read the text and look at the illustrations of a children’s book separately, but that’s impossible with a graphic novel.”

A few weeks later, on November 12, genre heavyweights Chester Brown and Seth published an open letter to the Governor General’s Literary Awards, condemning the council’s exclusion of Tamaki and its implicit misunderstanding of how graphic novels work. “The text of a graphic novel cannot be separated from its illustrations because the words and the pictures together are the text,” they wrote. “Try to imagine evaluating Skim if you couldn’t see the drawings.” The council responded that it was too late to change the nomination, and the award eventually went to another work. But the letter — co-signed by a cadre of comics luminaries — quietly marked a touchstone in the uneven cultural ascent of the graphic novel.

Page from Skim by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki. Click to enlarge

“In a tiny way, I believe the letter nudged the comics community and the book community together, at least in Canada and albeit briefly,” Tamaki says. “It’s not often they have a dialogue. For about a week, we were talking about the nature of storytelling in this medium, which is unfamiliar to new readers.” Graphic novels have proven lucrative as blockbuster film adaptations, though literary approval remains more elusive. “But the book world is obviously making some big statements by nominating graphic novels in its more traditional categories,” Tamaki adds. “It says a lot, since I believe that some still probably believe that comics will never be ‘legitimate’ literature.”

It isn’t surprising that a medium marked by egalitarianism between art and text might turn off the word-focused lit world. “We forget that as ‘comics people’ sometimes: there is a large segment of readers who are picking up their first graphic novel and learning how to read them and judge them,” Tamaki says. Brown and Seth are right that it is impossible to imagine Skim without Tamaki’s drawings. One crucial moment is entirely wordless; the eponymous narrator kisses her adult teacher in a tangle of woods, the school faintly visible in the background. This illustration takes up a full two-page spread.

Despite Skim‘s success, Tamaki still considers herself a “comics newcomer.” She is an editorial illustrator by trade, whose list of clients includes the New York Times and the Guardian, as well as Canadian outlets like the CBC and The Walrus. “Illustrators are interpreters of others’ ideas, and I enjoy that challenge,” Tamaki says. “But oftentimes there is not a lot of yourself in illustration work.” Tamaki, though, is everywhere in Skim, in every pained adolescent expression and looming empty space. Her contribution escaped the Canada Council for the Arts, unaccustomed as it was to a foreign format. But her presence stays with the reader.

Last November, the findings of the first study on boys and Gardasil — the vaccine that protects girls from four types of human papillomavirus — were released by pharmaceutical giant Merck. The good news is it works, preventing 90 percent of male HPV cases. The bad news is that Canada, unlike Australia and some European countries, has yet to make Gardasil accessible to boys.

Photo by Davide Guglielmo

Since the vaccine became available to Canadian girls in August 2006, more than a million doses of Gardasil have been administered, in part through a government-funded program, and with no major reactions reported in Canada. But despite its apparent success, there’s been no mention of federal funding for male vaccinations, and Health Canada won’t comment on where Gardasil is in its long approval process, citing “proprietary information.”

Health Canada estimates that nearly 75 per cent of sexually active Canadians will be infected with HPV in their lifetime. This fact has Dr. Paul Randall, a Toronto-area family doctor, calling the vaccination of boys “a no-brainer.” He explains that the first step toward eliminating HPV is to vaccinate male carriers — largely symptomless, unknowing spreaders of the virus.

So what’s the problem? According to Randall, it’s the cost. At a wholesale price of $400 for the three administered shots, Gardasil is said to be the most expensive vaccine on the market. For the threeyear period from 2007 to 2009, the federal government forked out a hefty $300 million for Canadian vaccination programs, and if approved and administered for boys as well, Gardasil’s cost to our government is set to double.

Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc, an expert in adolescent health, isn’t surprised by the government’s inaction. She believes Gardasil likely will be approved for Canadian boys, but she doubts we’ll soon see boys lining up for free vaccinations. “We still focus on sex as the responsibility of the woman,” she says.

Vogels, an internationally syndicated columnist since 1994, realizes that audiences across the country have varying comfort levels when it comes to sex. “I write the way I speak, but I try to strike a fine balance between using real language and silly innuendo [and I try] not to use language gratuitously, to simply shock,” she says. Her assistant, Karen LaRocca, is in charge of tweaking her columns for their various destinations each week. For the alternative weeklies, it’s just a quick copy edit for length and clarity. But LaRocca made special arrangements for Halifax. “Right from the start, I’d had lengthy conversations with the section editor about what we could get away with in their small, very conservative market,” she says.

Earlier this year, while LaRocca was on vacation, Vogels wrote her columns, fed them into the email list and hit send with no special treatment. That week, in her My Messy Bedroom sex column, Vogels responded to a Globe and Mail “exposé” about teen girls and oral sex. Vogels’s take on teen sex: what’s the big deal? She related some of her own early sexual experiences and chastised the Globe article for being alarmist.

“We’re still not comfortable with girls being the sexual aggressors,” she wrote. “We still rely on girls to be our social sexual barometer. I mean, why aren’t we scolding boys for not refusing oral sex? Were these guys just standing around when girls’ mouths happened to fall on their dicks? Interestingly, not one BJ recipient was interviewed for the article.”

The Daily News received 75 letters in response to that column. “While many readers supported the column, others hated it. They said it was too graphic, the language too frank,” says Marilyn Smulders, editor of the HFX section, where the column appeared. Ultimately, the paper sided with the majority of outraged readers who argued that Vogels’s work was unfit for HFX, which includes entertainment features for kids and is distributed to local schools. It was a hard blow for Vogels, since The Daily News was the first daily to publish My Messy Bedroom and was originally one of the column’s biggest supporters. HFX now runs Dating Girl, Vogels’s tamer relationships column, instead.

Could this dust-up have been avoided if the column had been pre-edited, as was Vogels’s usual habit? She and LaRocca don’t think so. “We were willing to do that little bit of extra work if it meant having a presence in Halifax. All we asked in return is that they consulted us, in advance, if they encountered any problems or required further editing. Clearly, that didn’t happen.”

And although she is disappointed with the decision to pull her column, Vogels isn’t surprised. This isn’t the first time a paper was spooked by the views in My Messy Bedroom. Around 1995, the column was pulled from View magazine in Hamilton, Ontario. The offending column was titled “Cock Tales” and talked about men and their sexual preferences. It sparked outrage not only with readers, but also with advertisers. Since then, View has reinstated the column. “The mainstream media are really uncomfortable with talking about kids having sex,” she says. “It’s automatically assumed that any sexual experience will be traumatic.”

Vogels says she’s prepared to compromise but only to a point. “I’d rather censor myself slightly and still get the message across than have someone shut me up entirely. I don’t want to get too lofty about it, but really, if we shut down every opinion we’re uncomfortable with, we might as well shut down as a free-thinking society.”

For Haligonians and others wishing to peek into Vogels’s Messy Bedroom, her columns appear in all their uncensored glory at www.joseyvogels.com.