This past week­end, while I was vis­it­ing my par­ents in St. Catharines, I watched tele­vised scenes of po­lice cars on fire, thugs in black smash­ing store­front win­dows and cops in riot gear beat­ing and ar­rest­ing pro­test­ers. After I re­al­ized it wasn’t a movie (what? I had just woken up), that it was hap­pen­ing in my beloved Toronto, my stom­ach knot­ted up in […]

I love vin­tage ads. They cer­tainly didn’t beat around the bush back then. They told you, in very frank and ex­plicit terms, why you needed to buy this prod­uct — you were too fat, you were too ugly, you were sin­gle!
In these times of sub­lim­i­nal mes­sag­ing, where the misog­yny be­hind an ad is hid­den in sub­text and “art”, […]

Last week­end, I went to a club to cel­e­brate a friend’s birth­day. The mu­sic wasn’t par­tic­u­larly mov­ing me (my friend, Catherine, kept scowl­ing over a house remix of Oasis’ “Wonderwall”), so I started to people-watch.
The key to people-watching is sub­tlety – you don’t want to be too ob­vi­ous about it, and you don’t want to leer, stare or ogle. But even the […]

Like most women my age, I have al­ways har­boured fan­tasies about a uni­formed man com­ing into my place of work, lit­er­ally sweep­ing me off my feet and car­ry­ing me off into the sunset. In An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere dons a white naval uni­form and does ex­actly that to Debra Winger. We all re­mem­ber it — it’s stored in our men­tal fil­ing cabinet, […]

Monday, April 19:
I know what has hap­pened to your sex­ual life. This cruel dis­as­ter is called im­po­tence.
Um, I think the Chinese, Haitians and Chileans would dis­agree with what you con­sider a ‘dis­as­ter’.
Bonus email!
Sexual im­po­tence in men is one of the most poorly ex­plored med­ical im­pair­ments.
Yes, there are only three med­ica­tions for this on the mar­ket. Why stop there? […]