Canadian Content: The Adult Film Industry & its Canadian Contexts

Believe it or not, Canada might be the most important country determining what porn you’re watching today! I say that because the most popular porn sites in the world were created, and continue to operate, in Canada. PornHub, YouPorn, RedTube, and Brazzers just to name a few. While Canada has an extensive porn history and shapes the ways in which we consume and distribute porn today, oftentimes it’s overlooked in favor of its flashier cousin in the south known as the San Fernando Valley. This episode looks to change all of that with a panel that was recorded at the 2018 Society for Cinema & Media Studies in Toronto. This panel features a friend of the show, Professor Peter Alilunas talking about the pornographic history of Toronto’s most famous street, Yonge st. He specifically details the history of a theater on that street known as Cinema 2000. It was a screening room showing pornography on VHS starting in 1969! The second presenter is Cait McKinney. She’s a professor in the department of communication studies at California State University at Northridge. And in her talk, she details the history of a long-lost 1984 film titled Slumber Party. The film was made by a group of radical feminist lesbians. Cait also considers the role that lesbian porn played in the feminist porn wars in the 1980s. A topic that is rarely considered. The third paper is presented by Nikola Stepić. He’s a PhD student in Concordia University’s Humanities Department. And his paper covers how gay pornography shot in Montreal’s Gay Village acted as a type of visual tourism for the neighborhood, attracting people from all over the world, helping make Montreal the gay destination is it today. The final paper is by Patrick Keilty. He’s a Professor at the University of Toronto and his presentation covers the short history of Montreal’s emergence as a global porn capital, followed by a theoretical consideration of the digital interface we as viewers are presented with as we’re surfing these various sites emanating from this city. Here is a link for the pictures from each PowerPoint. Be sure to follow along!

Peter Alilunas: “‘Closed Due to Pressure from the Morality Squad’: The Cinema 2000 and Pornography Regulation in Toronto”

Cait McKinny: “Digitizing Controversies in Toronto’s Lesbian Porn Archives”

Nikola Stepic: “Quebec Exposed: Gay Male Pornography as Virtual Tourism”

Patrick Keilty: “Silicon(e) Valley: Montreal’s Porn Industry”

New York magazine article about the rapid rise of the porn industry in Montreal: “The Geek-Kings of Smut.”

More info about Jon Ronson’s podcast series titled The Butterfly Effect, which details Fabian Thylmann’s role in creating a porn empire in Montreal and more!

More info about Peter’s book Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video.

Cait McKinney’s Twitter

Cait’s work with the LGBTQ History Digital Collaboratory

Cait’s No More Pot Lucks article: “Out of the Basement and on to the Internet: Digitizing Oral History Tapes at the Lesbian Herstory Archives.”

Cait’s Drain Mag article: “Can a Computer Remember AIDS?”

Nikola Stepić’s Twitter

Nikola’s HuffPost article on the porntastic movie The Canyons: “Stuck in the Canyons.”

Patrick Keilty’s Twitter

Article about the University of Toronto’s Sexual Representation Collection run by Patrick Keilty

pornocultures.podomatic.com

facebook.com/AcademicSex

@PornoCultures

More info about the host

Canadian Content: The Adult Film Industry & its Canadian Contexts