>> Toronto is loosening up and finding its sexual identity. Which seems to be somewhere between an old-time whorehouse and a flaky New Age consumerism

a special report by SASHA

For all the years I have lived in Montreal, I have heard many ugly rumours about Toronto the Good. One, the food sucks (true, to an appalling degree) and two, Montrealers are just flat-out sexier.

Well, my research on the latter has proved inconclusive. Drunken necking in a bar on Queen Street with a shaved-head guy wearing leather pants and those stupid rectangle glasses should not count as formal investigation. The very idea alone is enough to put a person off the sexual climate in any city, so it wouldn't be fair to present it as evidence.

There is, however, an interesting trend taking root in Toronto regarding the selling of sexual products and the "healthy sexuality" lifestyle.

Toronto, in no small part due to its burgeoning population and stable economy, is home to a myriad of sex shops. When Seduction arrived, it fit in very well with the other tacky gag emporiums on Yonge Street. But there are some sex stores that offer more than the typical fare. Go ahead and call them New Age and get all snide about their hands-on approach, but their mission, although clearly grounded in consumerism, is also strongly mixed with education.

Come is a co-op affair

One such shop is called Come As You Are. It's the only co-operatively owned sex store in Canada. Run by two chicks and a dick and a dog, Come As You Are has been open for a year and half. Sandra Haar, an artist, writer and one of the owners, says that part of their business plan was not only to provide good, functional sexual products, but also resources, support and information. All their stock is tested, read and approved by the employees. They also sell academic books.

One of their policies is to make things available for disabled clients: their brochure is available in big type braille and on audio-tape. They try to buy from local manufacturers, and they offer a professional discount to not only sex educators and students, but sex workers as well.

Sound more like a health food store than your average sex shop? It doesn't stop there. Come As You Are holds workshops on everything to the G-spot orgasm to tantric male genital massage. If the idea of a Sex Workshop sounds as mouth-watering to you as say, Throw Up Soup, I'm right there with you. I attended a G-spot workshop conducted by York professor Shannon Bell, whose thesis was a film about her ability to ejaculate called Nice Girls Don't Do It.

Although the workshop was highly educational, there was an aspect to the frankness of it which I found disturbing. I'm more accustomed to the Montreal approach to a public display of sexuality. Where were the cops? Where was the big hooha in Journal de Montréal about a depraved professor and her kinky spectacle érotique?

Come As You Are actually manages to promote these events in an educational forum without freaking out the local lawmakers and stoking up the tabloid press. Thanks Toronto, for taking out all the sleaze. Thanks Montreal, for raising me in shameful delight of my sexuality. I'm years away from being comfortable with this "everyone fucks" philosophy.

A cup of tea and a bout of fisting

Good For Her is another "healthy sexuality" sex shop in Toronto. I know. The name. Let it go. Located on Harbord Street, its main mission is to provide a comfortable environment for women to shop for sensual products. They have "women only" hours on one weekday and Sunday.

Carlyle Jansen, who opened the store just over a year ago, also offers workshops through the store. Coming up in March: The Art of Vaginal Fisting.

"Hello, has someone offered you a cup of tea?" she asks as I browse. As for as the beverage approach, I'm more fond of a famous Montreal sex store owner and his bottle of Crown Royal for the big spenders, but I'm impressed with the complete lack of gag gifts (Come As You Are shares this policy) and the store's desire to keep their clients well-informed with honest product evaluations. For example, if you rent porn at Good For Her, you have the option of rating it for the other clients.

Lovecraft was opened by Anne Amitay 27 years ago, and is considered the mother of these small, independent sex stores. In fact, Cory Silverberg, a Come As You Are co-owner, worked at Lovecraft for nine years.

Mind you, the philosophy was less political, more practical. Amitay had kids to feed, and wanted to put her money into something that would work. However, she wasn't willing to compromise her taste, which turned out to be good. Lovecraft does sell gag gifts, but also has an exceptional selection of useful toys in a moderate setting.

Frontier town strippers

On the other side of the spectrum of sexual Toronto is something like the stripclubs. What a glorious fucking mess. Lapdancing has suddenly become illegal again in the province, but many dancers are undeterred and generally work by their own rules. Some clubs are nothing short of Hollywood's version of the frontier town whorehouse, with girls sprawled on clients laps, gorgeous goods hanging out everywhere, everyone laughing uproariously.

The Brass Rail on Yonge Street still has private booths (office dividers, really. A novel way to attract the business crowd?). It's loud and rowdy.

For Your Eyes Only, long considered the Chez Parée of Toronto, is only marginally more strict ,with doormen tapping the windows of the champagne booths to keep girls in check. Dancers have to be licensed to work in this province: for one hundred and eighty dollars, a woman gets a card that describes her work as "Burlesque Entertainer" and a file which is immediately sent to the cops.

Of course, clients appreciate the scratch and sniff aspect of some of the clubs in Toronto, but the business has lost the exclusive, snobby edge that it has in the more upscale clubs in Montreal (some would say for the better). Club owners are scrambling to pull things down to a legitimate level again, but no one seems to care. Fuck the good old days. Bring on the cash. The visual complicity between client and dancer no longer exists. The spell has been broken. Dances cost anywhere from 10­20 dollars and the high price attracts a lot of hard-playing Bay Street business boys with their "yeah baby!" Austin Powers impressions, high-fives and company credit cards. Here people are hungry to get the most for their buck: a quick grope, whatever. It's a brisk world of strained consent and nebulous borders, with the term "Burlesque Entertainer" as a laughable euphemism.

Bad dates by the books

There's been some serious violence against hookers in T.O., with eight murders in the past two years, and the end result being a lot of continued, hands-on support within the community itself. SWAT (Sex Workers Alliance of Toronto) has been around since 1992 and offers a 24 hour hotline for women at any level of the sex trade and publishes Bad Calls Booklets with descriptions of violent or thieving clients.

According to Anastasia, who's been in the business for 14 years and volunteers time and money to SWAT, the booklets are not only effective for the whores, but the cops as well, who use it as a guide to identify violent offenders. They are explicit when they can be, publishing names, phone numbers, license plate numbers and addresses. A Montreal-based sex worker drop-in centre called Stella has a similar monthly publication.

Now, civil libertarians might argue that this is not how things work in a democratic nation: that publishing this kind of information is pure vigilantism which could lead to trouble for an average client--the label of sex offender is not one that can be easily erased. The disclaimer in the booklet stating that the information may not be accurate doesn't solve this issue at all. What if a woman misrepresented someone out of spite?

It's a difficult call. But just as Web sites giving clients the option to complain about sexual services provide ample opportunity for ill-natured slagging, so can a project like this. Recourse is a troublesome task in a world that doesn't have average boundaries. I tend to side with the hookers, whose very lives may well depend on the availability of this information, and Anastasia's attitude that if she can save one woman, it's worth any price. Toronto's whore culture, for all its problems--problems which will always exist in any city withoutdecriminilization--takes active steps.

And how are relations between cops and hookers in Toronto? Anastasia says that individual officers have been trying to change things and that's a start. She herself has been invited to speak to students at the police college before, as she puts it, "they are conditioned to be jerks." Anastasia attributes her political attitude about her job to "the arty fart whores" who initiated her into the business. "You want to get anywhere in the sex trade?" she asks me, "look at the way the queers do things." Indeed, looking at the sex shops, which came out of a strong queer source making a genuinely positive mark for themselves in this city, I have to agree.

Marketing wholesome sex

As for Montreal's potential to welcome sex positive stores, there has been an effort, although it's in the very initial stages. Alison Carpenter, a psychotherapist from Montreal, has been bandying the idea about with a group of women for a while. The general ideas circulating are that they would like to open a store where women can feel safe gathering sexual information and the products to put their ideas into practice. At this point, though, there is nothing this precise available. People looking for a comfortable, touchy-feely environment to purchase their sex products often end up turning to catalogues from Toronto and Vancouver.

The problem, according to Carpenter, comes back to the ever present language issue--the English community simply isn't large enough to support such a venture.

Or is it more than that? Do Montrealers actually want to buy nice, healthy sex? Or are we happy with our sleaze? Stores like L'Androgyne on St-Laurent already offer good academic sexual material, and Il Bolero is well-known for its vast array of fine S&M products. Are we too cool to attend a fisting workshop or are we just happy being wild renegades and trying it out on our own, throwing caution to the staff at the nearest emergency room?

Montrealers may argue cynically that stores like this function well in Toronto because of the city's consumerist attitude that anything can be purchased, even a wholesome sexual persona. I myself love the sexual climate in Montreal, so deeply entrenched in its reputation as a famous old prohibition town, its kinky Catholic guilt and its beautiful bitchy population, but Toronto does provide a conscientious example regarding the business of marketing sexuality and the supply of support and options, no matter what the motive.

Shame that so many of the leather-trousered citizens don't inspire the kind of lust that actually makes these ideas appealing.