By Anonymous, Contributor
The idea of femininity is one that, for a long time, upset me. I remember distinctly hating to wear the dresses my family bought me. I didn’t want to be exposed. I didn’t want to perpetuate the notion of what a woman should be within society. I didn’t want to feel objectified by men, I didn’t want to be regarded as “weak”, “fragile” or “sensitive”. However, that didn’t mean I didn’t want to be noticed by men. I was “straight”, so I assumed that, as a woman, I wanted attention from men.
There have been countless times when I’ve been told by my family: “Dress nicely so that boys will notice you.” Sometimes I would cave, and I would receive the standard compliments that one would receive from a heterosexual male: “You look hot/ nice/ pretty/ beautiful.” Other times, I’d find my strength in going against the world’s expectations, and put on a suit instead. I did not receive any typical compliments, but seeing men gaze at me in half jealousy and half admiration was good enough. Afterall, I looked hot and powerful.
Boys, I wanted you to notice me—but I also wanted to be noticed for who I am, not for conforming to societal expectations of what a woman should wear.
In grade 10, I started to wear snapbacks. In grade 11, I started to wear muscle shirts. In grade 12, I started wearing suits and called myself heteroflexible. In my first year of university, I began to wear men’s t-shirts and men’s joggers. In second year, I made it a habit to check out the women’s section and the men’s section in clothing stores. I went from calling myself heteroflexible throughout my high school years, to declaring myself as bisexual in university.
Fashion, sexuality and gender expression have always been a messy knot in my brain. I frequently dress like someone who, if you took one look at me, you’d know I am not straight. Maybe you could even infer that I’m bi.
You’re told not to judge a book by its cover. But what if I want you to?
Symbolic interactionism describes how our world is made of symbols which convey meaning to the people we interact with. Fashion is the pinnacle of my interaction with the world.
Every day, what I choose to wear is a reflection of who I am. Sometimes, I want to go undetected—that’s a day for dark jeans, t-shirts and a sweater. Other times, I want to be noticed—that means wearing a suit or a dress. Other times, I feel incredibly gay and just throw on a Henley, typically a shirt for men, and men’s joggers.
Our world has always had an invisible hand in how I present myself. I am well attuned to how I dress and how that will draw different kinds of stares and gazes; however, as someone who is interested in both men and women, this has become a habit of practiced expression.
Our world has always had an invisible hand in how I present myself. I am well attuned to how I dress and how that will draw different kinds of stares and gazes; however, as someone who is interested in both men and women, this has become a habit of practiced expression.
I used to feel almost guilty about how I dressed, I never felt feminine enough for those around me. As I grew more comfortable with my sexuality, I realized that I didn’t need to dress to attract men to me. How I dress on a daily basis, with a style between androgynous and masculine, is both more comfortable for me, and the ladies like it.
I remember dressing to go to a party one night and turning to my friends saying, “I’m going to wear a crop top, because that way people know I’m a little bit of a slut. But I’m going to wear flannel shirt over that because I still want people to know I’m hella gay.”
Dressing myself is a calculated strategy. I choose my clothing carefully to convey hidden messages. Yet, sometimes I question how whether or not my acceptance of these messages contributes to perpetuating stereotypes around gender and sexuality. Stereotypes can be harmful. Actively assuming details about a person can feel intrusive, belittling and insulting. Yet, I purposely use stereotypes associated with sexuality to communicate with the world. I’ve cut my hair shorter, I wear flannel, I cuff my jeans and I keep my nails short. These are all stereotypically associated with being “bisexual” or “gay”.
Stereotypes become harmful when you actively use them to make harmful assumptions. Not every flamboyant man is gay, and you have no right to tell him he is. Not every girl with short hair is a lesbian, you don’t need to tell your friends she is.
Don’t judge a book by its cover, at least, not actively.
Yet, when I wear a French tucked t-shirt with a leather jacket with my cuffed ripped black jeans, I am trying to tell the world I am not straight. It’s me telling the world that typical compliments about my general appearance won’t woo me. Maybe compliment my graphic t-shirt with the teenage mutant ninja turtles on it, then I’ll entertain a discussion with you.
This article is part of our Sex and the Steel City, our annual sex-positive issue. Click here to read more content from the special issue.
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By Nina Joon, Contributor
Why yes, the rumours are true. I, Nina Joon, completed (finishing with a 12) my second one-night stand and I am here to shout it loud and proud. After years spent huddling under a blanket of sexual apathy, agonizing over the inevitable awkward intimacy during sex, I have finally reached a state of no-fucks-given.
As a product of both millennial and generation Z culture, I am no stranger to the supposed perils and triumphs of hook-up culture. Now, after two engagements in the action, I think it’s safe to pronounce myself as a voice of the people, offering advice and insight into this tumultuous sexy time in our young, hot 20-something year old lives. This, my friends, is an ode to the sweaty club grind-ups and confusing “booty-Facebook-message-hookups” that you’re still trying to dissect literally months after they happened.
The classic tale of a one-night stand often begins in the club, in the middle of the month, during techno night. You’re on the dance floor, body glitter sparkling from the disco ball reflection. While looking down to admire your amazing shuffling skills, you spot a pair of humbling red converse high tops with laces caked in mud. Is this a skater? Is this a longboarder? Questions cloud your mind, so you look up to see whose face belongs to these shoes. Not to your surprise, it’s an absolute cutie sipping a rare brew of Collective Arts, dancing slowly to the tempo of the music.
You nudge your friend (hereby referred to as Derby) and point to this mysterious gem nestled on the dance floor. Derby’s eyes light up in excitement.
“Aye! Good shout mate!”, they claim, confirming your feelings of attraction to “red-shoes”.
You run with that bout of validation, slyly dancing your way into red-shoes’s line of vision. The music’s pumping, your earplugs are the perfect amount of hidden; this is your moment.
“Hey, I heard it’s your birthday! Happy birthday!” you shout to cutie’s face.
To be clear, it is not their birthday, nor is there any available information that would lead to that conclusion. You just hope that the mere randomness of your comment will spark intrigue in red-shoes.
“Huh?” they respond back.
“Oh my god, sorry, haha, you look just like my friend whose birthday it is today . . . my bad!”
Red-shoes uncomfortably laughs but you feel their gaze as you dance back to Derby and continue to shuffle for a half-hour straight.
It’s getting late now and you’re wondering where this cutie has gone. Derby is on their third hook-up of the night, copping two numbers and one Instagram handle. While sipping a glass of communal water, someone taps on your shoulder. You turn to see red-shoes staring into your soul with their glassy beaming eyes.
“Hey, you’re a really good dancer”, they say.
Stunned, you quickly make a fart noise and say “Lawl, no way! Thanks! I like your um, shoes, tee-hee”.
Together you start to talk, eventually moving to a booth and then locking lips in a dark corner.
After back and forth flirty banter, during which you offered red-shoes a cherry Halls and they declined, the question comes up.
“Your place or mine?”.
You’re living at your parent’s house, so that’s not even an option. To your surprise, red-shoes calls a Lyft, signifying their uniqueness, to which you self-congratulate yourself for knowing how to pick ‘em. During the car ride home, you keep your distance from red-shoes as a sign of respect to the driver, feeling shy because you harbour culturally-internalized shame towards sex. It’s all good though, you’re learning to overcome it!
Red-shoes leads you into their low-ceiling basement bedroom that smells like weed and 5 gum. As the making out escalates, you progressively get more excited. Then you remember you’re a #feminist who doesn’t shave. Despite knowing you’re beautiful and loving your body, you can’t help but recognize this is not a cultural norm and worry how red-shoes will react. As expected, they don’t even notice and the night seamlessly continues on to become an X-rated episode of Degrassi.
After hardly two hours of sleep and being awoken by red-shoes’s deaf cat jumping on your chest at 7 a.m., you decide it’s time to go home. Your cutie is slow to wake up, rolling around looking all hot as they enjoy the luxury of being a deep sleeper. They drive you home in their Prius, dropping you off in a Mac’s Convenience Store parking lot. While washing off last night’s face, you remember you left a recently thrifted sweater at cutie’s. You send a text asking for it back and never hear from them again.
In your hungover state, you struggle to submit a weekly discussion post on Avenue while smiling about last night’s events. Maybe you’ll see red-shoes again, maybe you won’t. Your sweater might be lost forever, but the smell of that nicely renovated kitchen will live on in your memory. You close your blinds and nap until 4:30 p.m., excited to do it all over again.
This article is part of our Sex and the Steel City, our annual sex-positive issue. Click here to read more content from the special issue.
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By Rachel Lieske, Contributor
The popular astrology app CoStar is known for daily insights that are customized according to a user’s astrological chart. Every day at 10:37 am, CoStar sends me daily affirmations, recently with a recurring theme surrounding “pressure in love.” I usually shrug off the AI-generated insights, but the idea of “pressure in love” echoed in my mind—it felt symbolic of young love, and everything it represents, and caught my attention.
There’s a common narrative that persists around young love. Finding love that lasts in your adolescence is the one way to create a fairytale ending. Needless to say, a fairytale ending is merely a fictional account. There is a lot of love rhetoric echoed in our culture like “you’ll find love once you stop looking”, but aren’t we supposed to be finding love now, just as many of our parents did at our age?
Like any frantic Gen Z, I texted all of my friends and asked them if they felt “pressure in love” and if they felt that there was an inherited timeline to find it. As it turned out, most of my single friends were pessimistic about finding love and felt a pressure weighing them down. Here’s what they had to say.
“There’s a lot of pressure regarding the demographic and social aspect of it all. If you’re in a city that is full of people your age and your living the typical university lifestyle then it should be easy to find a significant other, but it’s really not.” - Allie, 20
“[University] seems like a perfect time to meet people, and a lot of people are finding love. At the end of the day, media makes love seem like this whole encompassing thing that everyone craves but I’m not so certain it’s the end all be all.” - Robyn, 19
“I think the pressure comes more internally than externally, especially when I see people who have had lots of relationships in high school and university and I feel like now there’s less time to find my ‘soul mate’. If those people have been through so many relationships and haven’t found the one, how can I with less time?” - Taylor, 20
“There’s a lot of cultural pressures because for me, my parents are Russian and there’s an unspoken standard that you will find a person to marry within university and if you can’t, it’s like, ‘Okay, what’s wrong with you?’”- Devon, 21
Coincidently, most of my friends who were in relationships said that they never felt pressured to be in relationships. Instead, romantic love randomly found its way into their lives. However, they experienced a different sort of pressure; a pressure to experience single life fully in university.
“There’s more of a pressure to not find love because of single culture being so dominant with university nightlife and online dating!” - Alex, 20
“Finding love shouldn’t have a timeline to it. It shouldn’t be a race. If you don’t find love by 25 it doesn’t mean that you’re undesirable!” - Vanessa, 20
“I felt more pressure to be dating than to find true love. I didn’t feel like I needed a soulmate, but I didn’t want to get to a point where I felt so much less experienced than everyone else that dating would feel impossible later on,”- Quinn, 20
“The short answer is no, I don’t feel the pressure to find love in university but I’ve been in a relationship most of my time at school, in which the first one was very all-consuming and overbearing so I actually felt the pressure to be single for once.” -Mary, 20
It’s undeniable that our adolescence is a time of experimentation when it comes to love. We may make dumb decisions that we come to regret, but we can use the lessons from our successes and failures to help navigate the world of dating. Although past successes and failures help us navigate new relationships the pressure still persists: to find something real, raw, lasting and most importantly, loving.
Other pressures come from trying to understand how to balance personal growth and romantic growth. In the infancy of our adult lives, we underestimate how many commitments we already have, and how large of a commitment love is. At some point, we have to give up on some of our commitments, and most of the time it’s a battle between love or loss.
When we open our hearts to love, we also open our hearts to loss. Inevitably we might feel a combination of both. Choosing love is an act of bravery that deserves credit for its commitment to vulnerability and its gamble with loss. The pressure can be grave and intimidating but somehow always finds its way into our lives, in this quest for love or something that feels like it.
This article is part of our Sex and the Steel City, our annual sex-positive issue. Click here to read more content from the special issue.
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Content warning: graphic discussion of sexuality and discussion of sexual dysfunction disorder
2015 was an exciting year: we found liquid water on Mars, I started at McMaster, we had a federal election, and Ontario unveiled its new sexual education and health curriculum.
The new Ontario government is reverting to the previous version which debuted in 1998. I was living my best life back then, but little did I know that I would suffer greatly at the hands of the 1998 sex ed curriculum.
Not to spoil my story but to give some context, I have to actively tell myself that I am worthy of love.
Words like consent, clitoris, sexual dysfunction and gay never came up in my sex ed classes. Instead, I was told to be afraid, to fear and be ashamed of my body and the consequences that my actions can have on it. The only way to truly love yourself is to be modest, chaste or to be fearful and in awe of the power of God.
The 1998 sex ed curriculum was bad but together, with traditional Catholic views and easily impressionable youth, you’ve got quite the unholy trinity.
It took me too long to acknowledge how harmful and false my formal sex education was. In elementary school, I was told over and over that sex and sexuality are only for straight, married couples. In grade 4, I asked my teacher how babies are made. My class yelled at me, “oh my god why would you ask that?”, or “you just want attention!” My teacher sent us away to collect her thoughts.
After recess she sat us down, took a deep breath, and said that babies are made “through sexual intercourse”. We giggled, while relief washed over her face. In hindsight, I am certain that she consulted other teachers on how to handle such an inappropriate and controversial question.
The rest of elementary school was filled with poorly labelled drawings and insistence of fear. It worked. If you fear God and follow His teachings, you won’t hurt yourself or others. This seemed reasonable; I do try to avoid pain where I can.
One such instance of this is my refusal to wear tampons. When I finally found my vagina, with the assistance of my mom at the ripe age of 13, I found it too painful to insert the tampon. Skipping 5 weekly practices once a month really sets you back as an athlete.
Another question my classmates and I had was that if sex before marriage is so bad, then why isn’t it one of the Ten Commandments? How foolish we were to think adultery was only possible in current relationships. By having sex before marriage, you are robbing your future spouse of the chance to share that with you and only you.
In high school, we watched a video of a woman repenting for her premarital sex. She was so ashamed and so sorry, but her darling fiancé forgave her. He was still excited to share their marriage, but he is so glad that he doesn’t feel the shame she feels. An ashamed woman and her righteous man, I bet you’ve heard that before.
Masturbation is a sin, birth control causes cancer and you can get pregnant if you’re fooling around in your underwear. I was educated enough to know how false the birth control claim was but the same can’t be said for the pregnancy claim.
I was 13 when I heard that and about two years later, those were the thoughts on my mind as the cute boy in his underwear laid beside me. My first and only condom demonstration would come years later, courtesy of my neighbour in my first year of university.
Now, back to my discussion of pain.
I am so sorry that you received such poor health education. We deserve so much better. I am healing but it will take time. The years of fear mongering from my schooling left me with a sexual dysfunction disorder that currently prevents me from penetrative sex.
A male-identifying friend I made at McMaster once told me that sex was such a vital part of a relationship and that he likely wouldn’t stay in a relationship if, after three weeks, they weren’t having sex. I have hidden from romance and relationships for so long because these experiences, from elementary school to now, have made me feel as though I don’t deserve romantic love.
I’m lucky to have so much love in my life, from family and friends and from myself, but my inability to relate to the media I consume and the “normal experiences” of young women is unsurprisingly difficult.
I have always been grateful for teachers, I still am, but they need the necessary tools to allow us to succeed. We need an updated curriciulum. I needed it 15 years ago and we all need it today.
Nima Nahiddi
SHEC
Going through SHEC’s SEX 101 pamphlet, I was surprised by the fact that 40% of university students have not had sex within the past six months. Movies and TV shows give us a picture of high school and university students having frequent – if not outrageously unrealistic – hook ups. And although I know that real life isn’t anything like Glee or Gossip Girl, maybe all this time I’ve been subconsciously influenced by the media into thinking that many of my peers are like the actors I see everyday on screen.
I decided to look around for more statistics about the sex lives of Canadian university students and get a better picture of what really makes up the average student’s lifestyle.
The most recent survey I found was a joint publication by Trojan Condoms and SIECCAN (The Sex Information and Education Council of Canada), which was full of mixed signals. Trojan Condoms is a huge corporation, with a specific agenda to sell more products. But, SIECCAN seems like a reliable scholarly journal that specifically publishes research on Canadian sexual health. Assuming they’re reliable, here are some of the statistics that I thought were particularly interesting:
It is nice to know that the majority of participants felt good about their sex lives (this includes those who choose not to have sex) and thought that having or abstaining from sex positively affects their overall health. These numbers paint a picture of a very sex-positive environment in Canadian universities. Moreover, the number of ‘casual’ sexual encounters was surprisingly lower than I had expected (maybe I need to change what kind of TV I watch).
At first, I thought the fact that only one half of participants use condoms was a very low statistic. Perhaps this was Trojan’s ploy to get us all to buy more condoms?
The study notes that the main motivation for condom use is birth control, and so I can understand that there are other methods of birth control. I personally know a few couples in monogamous relationships that choose a hormonal contraceptive method over condoms. If most people who are having sex are exclusive, then why is this cause of concern?
As many news articles around the study suggest, condoms are not only for birth control but the best method of STI prevention. With the recent rise of chlamydia and gonorrhoea – both of which don’t often have signs or symptoms – it seems as though condom use should be on the rise for Canadian university students. At this point, I realized Trojan’s marketing campaign has worked very effectively on me. However, there’s also an alternative message that I received from the study: get an STI check before you stop using condoms with your partners. Even if you only have one partner at the time, you can still give or get STIs from past experiences. You can also never be certain that your partner is only engaged with you – especially since you can both have different definitions of the term “exclusive relationship.”
I decided to go check out Trojan’s website to get more information on condoms. Underneath the flashy condom and sex product advertisement, there’s a link to their website “weknowsex.ca”. This turned out to be an amusing and informative experience. I recommend it for individuals who want very basic information about sex and STIs. The website is also very easily navigable. It felt very honest that the first fact to appear was “only way to stay 100% safe is to not have any type of sex. Otherwise, stay protected.” Even if the Trojan-SIECCAN study was commissioned to boost sales, I feel as though their goal of “be safe, instead of sorry” also benefits those who choose to buy their product.
P.S. Remember to visit SHEC if you want more information about birth control methods, STIs, condom use, free lube and free condoms!
