Madam Speaker, it is Monday morning and we are talking about sex in the House of Commons. Giddy-up, here we are.
The motion before us today asks the Standing Committee on Health to examine the public health effects of the ease of access and viewing of online violent and degrading sexually explicit material on children, women, and men.
Any human behaviour has its consequences, both positive and negative, and sex is no different, except that it is the most highly moralized behaviour that we have, particularly when it comes to female sexuality. For essentially the entire history of our species, female sexuality has been something to be feared, and sexual desire has been something to be suppressed and only used for purposes of reproduction, ownership, or shows of masculinity.
There have been two transformational changes in how we view sexuality that have happened in very recent history. First is the ability for women to manage their fertility. When legal and freely available, reproductive health options allow women to have access to them to bear some measure of control on whether and when they bear children.
This, in turn, has allowed women who have legal and widely available access to these options to gain higher levels of education and to enter the workforce, and for society as a whole to challenge deeply entrenched norms attached to how we are expected to behave based on the sex we have been assigned at birth. I highly doubt that I would be standing here, an elected member of Parliament, giving a speech on sexuality in the legislative chamber of a G7 country if it were not for this fact. This has also allowed women to explore their sexuality without the inevitability of child rearing.
Talking about women as empowered sexual beings with desires is something that would have scared the living daylights out of many, as little as a generation ago, and it still drives policies and edicts written by religious police in other parts of the world.
At the same time, we have been transformed by the connectedness that the Internet has blessed us with. We can reach out to somebody around the world with a few flicks of our thumbs. We can collect and manipulate data sets that were incomprehensible as little as 20 years ago. We can understand and drive prosperity in ways that we only dared to dream about in the wildest science fiction movies.
The advent of the Internet, Wi-Fi, and smart phones has also brought pornography off the shelves of stores with blotted-out windows and made it available on demand, on our phones, right here, right now. Today's porn is not our grandfather's porn either. We know that extremely violent and degrading images have become mainstream.
The tectonic collision of these two truly transformational changes is why the motion has been brought forward to us today, and I strongly applaud my colleague for bringing it forward in a timely manner before the House.
As women have become more sexually empowered, the reality is that our laws have not kept pace with the speed and access at which violent and sexually degrading materials have become available online.
As my colleague who is presenting the motion mentioned earlier this morning, it has been 30 years—well before global connectivity changed—since Canada has reviewed laws and health impacts of these types of images. As legislators, we have an obligation to ensure our constituents are protected and safe. We as legislators need to better understand the needs of our community when it comes to the availability of these types of images, the impact they have, what legislative gaps exist, and how we should address them. That is why the motion is so important and should be supported today.
Because we all have our unique sexual preferences, we need to resist the urge to move the debate to polar extremes: pearl-clutching versus total disregard for the fact that violent and degrading sexual images do in fact have a significant impact on our community. For me, we as legislators need to address issues related to sexuality in the context of the following principles.
The first is consent, with an understanding that sexual consent is something that should be enthusiastic and expressed by all partners, that it can be withdrawn at any point in time, and that there are situations in which consent cannot be granted. The second is safety: that we embrace and celebrate the promotion of safe sexual health. Third is pleasure and respect: that sex is something that should cause pleasure for all partners in the broad range of meanings and terms that we ascribe to that, and that partners engage in sex in the context of mutual respect.
My colleague's motion would allow us to review the impact of violent and sexually degrading images on our ability to protect our population in a sex-positive context, as well as a broad variety of other issues. Given that the government has committed to supporting the motion, some of the information that I would be keen to hear during the course of the study is the effect of violent and sexually degrading images on our ability to educate our children about safe sex, consent, and pleasure.
When I was in Copenhagen earlier this year for the Women Deliver conference, I had the opportunity to meet with a group called the pleasure project, and its reason for existence is to ensure that, when we talk about safe sex and the promotion of safe sex, it does not have to be clinical, saying safe sex is bad. They want to talk about sex as a positive thing.
When I look at the prevalence of degrading and sexually violent images on the Internet, I ask if those two principles can co-exist. That is something we should be talking about. I know my colleague has put respecting the jurisdiction of provincial legislatures in the motion, but when we have debates about sexual education, do we have the data we need on that topic?
The other concern I have and would love to look at is that these images essentially teach women that their only reason for existence in a sexual relationship is to be a vehicle of pleasure for a man in very violent and degrading situations. I would like to know what this means in terms of feminist theory and how it actually affects women's rights in terms of the shaping of their sexual identities.
I also recognize that this example is given in the context of the gender binary. I would like to know what these types of images mean in terms of fetishization and degradation of trans men and women.
We should also study, within the scope of this, the effect of this industry on the health and well-being of the actors in this industry. If any of my colleagues find themselves, as I often do, at 11 p.m. looking for something on Netflix, I encourage them to watch a very difficult documentary called Hot Girls Wanted. I know that some people in the pornography industry will say that it is not indicative of all of the industry, but I was shocked to see how young women are essentially lured into this industry and then used.
I would like to hear about how the industry brings actors into it, how they are treated, and whether or not this is something that is empowering for women, which I highly doubt. In fact I would be very happy to argue against that, because it is very degrading, and it is crazy that we have not looked at the effect of the industry on the protection of women and girls.
The other thing we could study as part of the motion is the ease and availability of these images of violence against women. My colleagues who have spoken to the motion already have talked about how, when these types of behaviours become normalized through the ease of availability of these types of images that we see today, there likely is a rise in violence against women. I would be very interested in knowing about how the ease of accessibility of these images actually increases violence against women—if it does, and I am sure it does—and then what the legislative gaps or programmatic gaps are that we as legislators have responsibility to deliver on.
It would also be very interesting to talk about the effect of these images on the development of sexual identity among all genders. I will give an example. I have an acquaintance who teaches elementary school, and I asked her where the kids are at these days. Her response was that she did not expect she would have to deal with talking about anal tearing with grade 6 girls when she started teaching, because these girls think, one, that it is sexually acceptable because boys have grown up watching this; two, that they cannot get pregnant doing it that way; and three, that it is something the boys want, so they should do it. I cannot imagine being confronted by a girl of that age telling me that she had been engaging in those behaviours without any sort of context on what that means, because her partner had been looking at these types of images that have been normalized within him.
My colleague from the NDP talked about a lot of different types of research out there and there is not a lot of conclusiveness, but I am hearing unanimity in the House that there is an understanding that this is a public health problem for this country and that a study would be very beneficial in terms of informing us on what sorts of legislative gaps we should be addressing, as well as programming that could be delivered.
My hope too is that the committee, once it finishes this, comes out with some concrete recommendation in terms of follow-up on further education.
My colleague also asked why we would table it here instead of in committee. Other motions have been presented in the House that talked about assigning a study to a committee, and they have been accepted here. This is an important motion and I strongly encourage all of my colleagues to support it.