BY SARAH BARMAK

ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA PARINI

Published Jan. 18, 2018

Tanya Pillay was looking forward to an evening walk on the beach. It was 1994, and she was at a friend’s cottage on Lake Erie, visiting from her home in Simcoe, Ontario. Pillay was nineteen and had just graduated high school. Mark, an acquaintance of hers from school who had already started university, was at the cottage party as well. “When he said, ‘Hey, would you like to have a walk?’ I was happy,” Pillay says. “I thought, ‘Oh cool, he’s really smart, he’s really successful.’”

The beach was dark when they arrived. It wasn’t long before Mark (whose name has been changed and who did not reply to multiple requests for comment) was trying to kiss her and pulling at her clothes. “He was a very popular, attractive guy,” Pillay recalls. “There was a part of me that thought I was supposed to like this and want this.” But she didn’t. Pillay was confused by how quickly he was moving and how little her reactions seemed to matter. It felt too soon—there was no sense of intimacy. Then, Mark somehow had her down on the ground. “He had a way of almost gently or lightly pushing me,” she says. “Like a gradual erosion of my balance.”

Pillay objected, saying they didn’t have a condom, that she didn’t want to do this there, on the sand, in the dark. Suddenly, Mark pushed her head down toward his lap, saying that it was okay if they didn’t have a condom, that she could just go down on him. She said no, but he kept pushing. She felt like she was in a trance. “He was so unrelenting,” she says. “I just kind of thought, ‘I’ll let this happen.’ I didn’t know how I could make it not happen.” She remembers the roughness of the motion injured the inside of her cheek. At some point, there was intercourse—a part she doesn’t remember well.

When it was over, they got up and got dressed. “We basically chatted like old acquaintances,” she says. “It was all casual and cool.” But the night changed her: she felt like something about her had been contaminated. Yet Pillay didn’t think of what had happened as a sexual assault—not until her best friend suggested it a few days later. Pillay had thought an incident could only be called an assault if it matched “the cliché—if you’re violently attacked and restrained.”

Sexual consent—the decision to take part in sexual activity, expressed via words and behaviour—was once largely taken for granted in heterosexual relationships. Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde didn’t discuss whether to have sex; they just looked deeply into each other’s eyes and kissed as the camera panned away. If two people were alone together in a car’s back seat, or in a bedroom, it was generally assumed that sex could follow. A woman’s interest wasn’t necessarily part of this paradigm (“Close your eyes and think of England”), and if a woman did say no, her partner might treat it as a tease, an expected game of playing hard to get. Sexual assault was viewed as a rarity and an intrusion from outside—a violent attack by the stereotypical stranger in an alleyway. As the term “date rape” came into popular parlance in the 1970s, many people sat uncomfortably with the realization that sexual assault was more common than that Bonnie and Clyde scene suggested. Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony about United States Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas’s “sexual overtures” toward her gave voice to a related epidemic: workplace harassment.

This past fall, we reached another collective tipping point, a public acknowledgement of how thoroughly the texture of women’s experience is shaped by sexual harassment and sexual assault. (Women are the victims in 87 percent of self-reported sexual assaults, according to Statistics Canada.) A flood of revelations exposed the extent of attacks routinely perpetrated by powerful men—actors, journalists, restaurateurs, politicians. Dozens of women went public with long-standing allegations that they had been raped, sexually assaulted, and sexually harassed by Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. Comedian Louis C. K. and television host Charlie Rose, among many other prominent media figures, were removed from their jobs after facing multiple allegations of sexual harassment or assault.

The #MeToo movement, which was initially developed more than a decade ago by American activist Tarana Burke, took on renewed energy soon after allegations about Weinstein broke in the news. The hashtag circulated rapidly on Facebook and Twitter, a way for people to publicly identify as having experienced sexual harassment or assault. #MeToo was tweeted more than 5 million times, by people in more than 200 countries, in 2017.

This latest watershed was about behaviour that, for the most part, our society readily defines and at least publicly agrees is wrong: A stranger exposing himself on the subway. A boss fondling an employee who is hoping for a promotion. A woman meeting a friend of a friend at a party who rapes her later that night. But what this conversation exposed, too, is a less discussed kind of assault—less discussed not because it is less bad but because it is found within the context of “normal” sexual dynamics. Violations by dates and spouses and boyfriends, in situations where some sort of sexual interaction is part of the relationship. To say no, only to have someone push for more. To agree to one act (protected sex) and have your date do another (unprotected sex). To play it cool after you’ve been assaulted, because you’re supposed to get along. To have a partner feel entitled to sex. To let sex happen because the persistence required to refuse, to get out of the room, to make him leave, is too great.

Enabling some of this murkiness is a long-standing cultural trope that sex is hotter in silence. Our romantic comedies, erotic thrillers, songs, and literature are steeped in the idea that explicitly asking someone what she wants—whether she wants—will mean sacrificing the mystery, the seductiveness, the sexiness of sex. Others maintain that such transparency simply isn’t feasible. Laura Kipnis, a Northwestern University cultural theorist, makes the argument in her 2017 book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, that attempts to stamp out all unwanted sexual experiences from young women’s lives are doomed to fail because women “are often experimenting to find out what they do and don’t want or like.” (The 2015 essay on which the book is based sparked student protests after its publication.) Students’ sexual experiences are awkward, full of fumblings, ambivalent motivations, and unequal power dynamics, she writes; people don’t know whether they want sex or not, and they may change their minds about it afterwards. As a result, she argues, “this makes anyone who’s ever had sex a potential rapist.”

The notion that sex will always be fraught with ambiguity makes it more difficult for us to understand that sexual experiences that take place under pressure or duress are a form of assault. This is the type of sexual assault at the highest risk of being normalized—dismissed as “just a part of life”—and the type that rarely makes it to court. This is dangerous: when women can’t identify that what they’re experiencing is wrong, much less illegal, they find it harder to report it to authorities afterwards. A 2007 survey submitted to the US Department of Justice found that 35 percent of sexual-assault survivors who did not report their attacks did not do so because it was “unclear [to them that] a crime was committed or that harm was intended.”

The experience of front line workers bears this out. “I’ve had survivors say to me, ‘It was weird because I didn’t feel right—I don’t want to do this, but I still went along with it,’” says Yamikani Msosa, a specialist at Ryerson University’s Office of Sexual Violence Support and Education in Toronto and an executive member of the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres. “There are a lot of times survivors are like, ‘I didn’t have the language….I had no idea that this was sexual violence….’ It can be so confusing and overwhelming sometimes, especially when [the perpetrator] is…someone that you care about.”

Many of these less visible assaults are known to sexual-assault researchers under the name coercion: being verbally, emotionally, or psychologically pressured into unwanted sexual contact. The category has been included in questionnaires given to sexual-assault survivors dating back to the 1980s, including those developed by University of Arizona professor of public health Mary P. Koss, which have been widely adopted. (“Have you given in to [sexual contact] when you didn’t want to because you were overwhelmed by a man’s continual arguments and pressure?” went a 1982 version of the question.)

There is no recent national randomized study of coercion rates in Canada. A 2015 survey conducted by Charlene Senn, a professor in the University of Windsor’s psychology department and women’s studies program and an expert on sexual violence, and several colleagues, found that at least 25 percent of 442 first-year female university students had been coerced or faced attempted coercion into penetrative sex by men, through tactics including manipulation and threatening to end a relationship, in a twelve-month study period. The US National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey published in 2017 found that 13 percent of American women were victims of coerced penetration, which it defined as unwanted penetration after non-physical pressure, such as being lied to or “being worn down by someone who repeatedly asked for sex or showed they were unhappy.” It also found that perpetrators of coercion were more likely to be current or former intimate partners of their victims and that 6 percent of men had experienced coercion. (Neither study addressed rates of coercion for types of sexual contact other than penetration, such as groping.)

Bordering on coercion is a category of experience that researchers call compliance: sex that you don’t particularly want to have but aren’t being directly pressured to accept. Sex researchers recognize that there are many situations in which (primarily) women agree to sex even if they’re not particularly turned on—expecting that they might become aroused in the process, wanting to emotionally connect with a partner, or because they know their partner wants to—and generally consider these instances consensual. There’s a difference between desire and willingness, and the latter can be present even if the former is not. (Women aren’t the only ones who do this; research has shown that men also have sex when they don’t feel like it, says Senn. This is often because they feel that desiring sex is expected of them, as men.) The line between consensual compliance and non-consensual coercion gets fuzzy when women agree to things they wouldn’t have if they had felt more empowered to decline—for example, if a woman has sex with her husband because she knows he’ll be in a bad mood otherwise. He hasn’t directly pressured her; she’s decided, based on previous experience, that not having sex is worse than the alternative.

“Most sexual-violence researchers embrace the idea that this is a continuum of sexual behaviour,” says Senn. Mapped out by experts and theorists such as Liz Kelly, a sociologist and director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University, this continuum is not a ranking of the severity of assaults—a frequent misinterpretation that Kelly is quick to correct—but instead shows how common, and how well-recognized, different forms of assault are. On the more common end of the spectrum are acts (street harassment, for example) that are the least recognized; at the other end are more widely understood and condemned acts (gang rape, stranger rape) that occur much less often. Coercion falls toward the more common and less recognized end of the spectrum.

Coercion has been rendered as murky as it is in part by our culture of silence about sex. Pornography and sexual imagery are ubiquitous; frank discussions about our actual desires, fears, and experiences are not. The way sex is depicted in popular media is “very different from having real communication about desire,” says Senn. These cultural norms mean society is more likely to tolerate male behaviour that is manipulative or aggressive and to interpret female behaviour as compliant, because these interpretations fit traditional assumptions about each gender. (It’s James Bond holding down and forcibly kissing Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, or it’s the lyrics “Tell me more, tell me more, did she put up a fight?” which are played for laughs in the Grease hit “Summer Nights.”) These norms make it easier for men who want to take advantage to do so, because they can argue later that some level of pressure in heterosexual sex is acceptable. It also means that existing law about sexual assault is sometimes misapplied, because lawyers, judges, and jurors fall prey to these assumptions as well.

Canada’s Criminal Code defines consent as a voluntary agreement to engage in a sexual activity. It also clarifies what falls outside this definition, by offering five examples of conditions under which sexual situations do not qualify as consensual: if you communicate, through language or action, that you are unwilling to engage in sexual activity; if someone else consents for you; if you are incapacitated; if consent has been induced through an abuse of power, authority, or trust; if you withdraw consent partway through. In other words, both your words and your body language must be positive—must affirmatively signal that you are assenting to sex. You can’t be falling-down drunk. And you can change your mind at any time.

The definition of consent, spelled out in section 273.1, was added to the Criminal Code in 1992 after lobbying by experts who had spent years working with survivors at sexual-assault centres. Section 273.2, added the same year, limits an assailant’s ability to invoke a common defence: that they had simply misunderstood and believed a victim was consenting. The law stipulates that such a belief cannot arise from “recklessness or willful blindness”: one can’t ignore signs that someone isn’t consenting and then argue afterwards that they didn’t realize the person was unwilling. An accused attacker must also demonstrate that they took “reasonable steps to ascertain” that someone was consenting.

By providing examples of conditions under which interactions do not qualify as consensual, the law explicitly addresses some common situations in which the appearance of consent can be manufactured, including many instances of coercion. “The Criminal Code states that you don’t need to say no and punch someone in the face for that no to be heard,” says Julie Lalonde, an Ottawa-based sexual-assault educator. “Silence means no. Someone pushing you away means no.”

Experts say the 1992 changes put Canada among the leaders in sexual-assault law internationally. “It requires active consent, as opposed to an absence of a lack of consent,” says Ontario lawyer Pamela Cross, who specializes in cases of violence against women. “Shifting the onus from the potential victim to the person who wants to have the sexual contact [is] an important step.” Many states in the US, for example, do not require that consent be affirmative.

By embedding consent in the definition of sexual assault, Canada’s law makes the crime less about weighing acts than weighing intentions: it’s not bruises that show you were assaulted; it’s that your wishes were ignored. This is a big change from how rape was originally conceived in the English laws that shaped Canadian jurisprudence: as a crime against another man’s property. (The word “rape” comes from the Latin rapere, which means “to seize.”) In older laws, feminist historians point out, it wasn’t a woman’s preferences that were pivotal to the definition but the assessment that she had been stolen from her family or rightful husband. The rape of men was not recognized in law under this conception. In Canada, marital rape was not illegal until 1983.

For all that it was hailed at the time, the law has not fully taken hold. Many Canadians don’t know that the Criminal Code includes a robust definition of consent, nor is that definition reliably driving judicial decisions. Nova Scotia provincial court judge Gregory Lenehan infamously commented that “clearly, a drunk can consent” in the 2017 case of a woman found unconscious and partially undressed in the back of a taxi, her clothes wet with urine; her taxi driver was acquitted of sexually assaulting her. (Nova Scotia’s chief justice ordered an investigation into the decision in September.)

The willful ignorance about the difference between consensual sex and coercion is something that many experts say can be reduced. Doing so will take a revolution in our sexual education—something Senn and others call “emancipatory sex ed.” Constance Backhouse, a professor of law at the University of Ottawa and an expert on the legal history of sexual assault, says this kind of remedial education would ideally happen at all ages and levels of society. “Crown attorneys need training,” she says. “Police need this kind of training. We need sexual-assault 101 courses in universities. We need education in high schools, in middle schools, in primary schools. It has to run really deep.”

On its surface, consent education has evolved along with the law. In the 1990s, there were “No Means No” campaigns: posters, pamphlets, and buttons with that slogan were distributed on college and university campuses, exhorting (mainly male) students to listen to norather than treat it as a challenge to overcome. Now, the posters on dorm walls display an inverted, more action-oriented, version of consent: Yes Means Yes. But the definition of consent now widely espoused by sex educators—generally termed enthusiastic consent—is far from universally accepted.

Enthusiastic consent means that agreement should be communicated clearly and consistently throughout a sexual encounter. Although it’s often caricatured as a sort of legalese, a requirement that someone stop and ask, “Can I do this?” before every new kiss or touch, it simply means that consent should be expressed in both words (“yes,” “more,” “I want this”) and body language (turning toward someone, kissing back, touching them, undressing yourself, initiating activities). This is why silence, or the absence of a no, does not indicate consent.

According to a 2015 survey of men and women by the Canadian Women’s Foundation, 96 percent of Canadians believe consent is important, but there isn’t agreement about what it means. Thirty-four percent of respondents did not think it was necessary for consent to be ongoing (demonstrated throughout a sexual encounter), and 39 percent did not think consent needed to be enthusiastic (shown through participatory behaviour in addition to words).

We also often get drunk beforehand—a bad state in which to read someone’s subtle cues. Half of all sexual assaults in Canada among college and university students, Lalonde points out, involve alcohol. Yet young men frequently push back when she suggests they shouldn’t have sex with very drunk people. Lalonde holds workshops for university students and, she says, “the second we say there’s such a thing as a girl being too drunk to have sex with her, a switch gets flipped.” Men say, “‘No no no. Now you’ve lost me. You’ve gone too far.’” (She believes this reaction reveals an underlying insecurity about their ability to find sexual partners without alcohol.)

A healthy consent culture doesn’t just empower people to articulate what they don’t want. It helps them articulate what they do want. Charlene Senn has designed a sexual-assault resistance education program for female-identifying first-year students called Flip the Script. It has four three-hour modules; one of them helps participants identify and resist coercive language and another helps them imagine what sexual activities they are interested in. “What many young women tell us is this was the first time they had considered their own desires outside of a context of someone asking them to do something,” she says.

Clarity about what kind of touch attracts you and feels good helps people be more unequivocal about the acts that feel wrong. In a randomized, controlled trial, the results of which were published by Senn and her co-authors in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015, participants in the course saw a 63 percent drop in the probability that they would experience an attempted rape and a 46 percent drop in the probability of a completed rape, compared with a control group that only received standard campus brochures about sexual assault. (The researchers found indications that resistance programs “may increase a woman’s ability to detect and interrupt men’s [threatening or coercive] behaviour at an early stage.”)

It’s important for people to identify their own desires before they have sex with someone else, Senn says, in order to provide an anchor—something for them to hold on to in the midst of other people’s expectations. In interviews she’s conducted with women about their sexual experiences, Senn says, “Where someone is pressuring them to engage in behaviour, such as anal sex, they’re pretty sure they don’t want to, but they’re being told other women do it, that they’re a prude.”

Sexual-assault resistance and self-defence programs for women have been proven to be the most effective ways to reduce assaults, despite decades-long attempts to design programs that teach men not to commit assault. “Many of our good ideas failed,” says Senn. “Especially the work on how to stop men from perpetrating. There have been many, many studies starting in the 1970s and 1980s trying to make a difference and they don’t.”

Programs for women raise a concern that we’re still largely leaving the task of sexual-assault prevention to them—that it remains the responsibility of potential victims to defend themselves rather than of perpetrators to control their own behaviour. But instead of placing the onus on women to prevent rape, Senn says, programs like hers reduce self-blame among the women who have taken them. “We make it clear in the program that there is no risk of sexual assault if there is no one present who is willing to commit it,” she says. Her program is also meant to be one part of a multi-faceted effort against sexual assault.

One initiative that has proven to be effective is bystander education: programs that teach people of all genders to step in when they see their friends crossing a line. It sets out to train people to challenge abusive behaviour they see among their peers—to interrupt if they see a man at a bar who is pressuring a woman for sex or groping her, for example. Together with Anne Forrest, the director of women’s studies at the University of Windsor, Senn has done research on such efforts at that university and found students who took a bystander course said they were more willing and prepared to intervene when they identified a situation that could lead to sexual assault. Beginning in 2018, the Bringing in the Bystander program will be offered to all first-year students at the University of Windsor.

When educators do speak to young men about what clear and enthusiastic consent is, the responses can be powerful. Lalonde, the Ottawa-based educator, works with as many as 5,000 young people a year, and says she sees the realization dawn on men when she speaks. “You see it in people’s faces, that they’re rethinking experiences that they’ve had and saying, ‘Oh shit.’”

If our trouble with consent is in part due to our discomfort with speaking sex out loud, that is also where growth can occur. In her work on campuses, Lalonde frequently battles misperceptions that conversations about consent are “unsexy,” she says. “There is at least one person in a room at every presentation I give who makes some comment about [consent rules] being impossible to follow.” She often tries to convince participants with a joke, saying, “What woman in this room would be turned off if a guy was like, ‘I just really wanna kiss you right now?’…And the women laugh. Like, no, that would be amazing.” She takes on a flirtatious verve as she explains: “It’s not about, ‘Ma’am, may I please hold your hand now?’ You can be cute about it. You can be suave about it.”

Carly Boyce runs consent workshops across Ontario and encourages people to flirt while purposefully leaving space open to hear no. While most experts say that consent education should start in childhood, beginning with basic concepts such as bodily autonomy (teaching a child she doesn’t need to hug family members if she doesn’t want to is one common way of introducing consent), Boyce says that workshops, including hers and Lalonde’s, can offer remedial epiphanies. Our society “imagines sex as a transactional experience rather than as something you’re creating together,” she says. But “if you imagine sex as something you’re creating with another human, you don’t just need them to acquiesce.” Even “I don’t know” can play a key role in flirting and seduction, Boyce says—addressing criticisms that demands for explicit consent leave no room for people who feel ambivalent or who are trying something new.

The proof that other models for consent can exist is that they already do—often outside the conventions of traditional heterosexual sex. Fae Johnstone is an Ottawa-based educator who teaches other educators and service providers how to work with queer and trans youth, and says that consent is more frequently, and openly, discussed in lgbtq communities. In part, this is because so many lgbtq people are survivors of sexual assault and don’t take consent for granted, she says—those identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are assaulted at a rate six times higher than those who identify as heterosexual, according to Statistics Canada. (Though Canadian data is limited, the 2015 US Transgender Survey reported nearly half of transgender people in that country were sexually assaulted in their lifetimes.)

There’s also less of a culturally ordained script that dictates what sex is supposed to look like among lgbtq people, says Johnstone. “There’s the assumption [in conversations about heterosexual sex] that it’s the man who would ask consent, and that’s not the reality that a lot of queer and non-binary folks experience, where consent is negotiated between partners.” Traditional models of heterosexuality have a built-in narrative for how sex is supposed to go: first kissing, then touching and undressing, then oral sex, then vaginal intercourse. (It’s why someone knows what you mean if you talk about “going all the way.”) In a culture that takes that script for granted, it may be easy to assume that one act will lead to another and that when someone consents to one part, they are agreeing to that whole sequence. Absent these presumptions about who will do what to whom, says Johnstone, partners talk more about what will happen, before it happens and throughout a sexual encounter. “It’s not just about saying yes or no,” she says. “It’s yes to what? No to what?”

Many kink and polyamorous communities, by their very nature, also have more nuanced and clearly articulated practices for consent. Parties in which explicit sex takes place often have detailed consent guidelines—especially ones at which bondage takes place, where no doesn’t always mean no, but consent is still paramount. (Some hosts distribute consent menus for guests to fill out, asking them to circle the names of sex acts they’re open to that evening.) It is common at such gatherings to hear that “consent is sexy” and that whips-and-leather bondage in which consent is explicit is safer than “vanilla” sex in which it is assumed.

Those accused of sexual assault, especially coercive assaults, often defend themselves on the grounds that it was all a big misunderstanding—that they believed the victim was consenting or that an initial reluctance ultimately gave way to agreement. The hitch in this theory of crossed wires is that it’s not supported by studies. The majority of sexual assaults are not the result of misunderstandings, says Senn. “We know most women who experience a rape actually [give] strong verbal cues,” including saying no or stop. A majority of women “make those strong verbal statements and the men proceeded anyway,” she says. “We also have research on perpetrators that shows there’s good reason to suspect that their claims of not understanding that there wasn’t consent are actually self-serving. In other words, the most coercive men are the ones who are making those claims.”

Melanie Beres, a sociologist from Edmonton who teaches at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has found that even if we don’t have nuanced language for consent, people often do understand when a partner doesn’t want to have sex. Beres’s research shows that both men and women have a genuine understanding of sexual cues, including non-verbal indications that someone isn’t consenting. In interviews she conducted with men and women between the ages of nineteen and thirty in Jasper, Alberta, she found people had nuanced views of ways partners could communicate non-consent, including physically tensing up, pulling away slightly, or stopping kissing for a moment. At the same time, she saw evidence that women and girls are socialized to protect men’s feelings from a very young age, no matter their own desires—to be nice, to smooth things over. One female respondent quoted in Beres’s paper said as much: “I think a lot of girls—a lot of times it has happened to me, too, I didn’t really want to have sex, but I didn’t know what else to do. So you just end up having sex.”

The problem, says Beres, often isn’t with interpreting consent but with cultural norms that encourage men to go ahead in its absence. There is a difference between not understanding someone’s no and understanding it but feeling entitled to a yes anyway.

The post What Consent Means in the Age of #MeToo appeared first on Sarah Barmak.

BY SARAH BARMAK

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALANA RILEY

This feature was originally published in the June 2017 issue of The Walrus.

When your job involves showing erotic films, ­explains Meredith Chivers, director of the ­Sexuality and Gender Lab, or SageLab, at Queen’s ­University, it helps to reassure test subjects if you dress ­plainly and professionally. “I’m wearing a lab coat; I’ve pulled my hair back into this little ponytail; I’ve no makeup on whatsoever,” she says, laughing.

In a private room, volunteers lie back on pillowy La-Z-Boy recliners. When they’re ready, they notify Samantha Dawson, a PhD candidate who studied under Chivers. Dawson wheels in a flat-screen monitor. It comes across a little like the TV setup at a hospital bed, but with one big difference: the observer is asked to answer questions, rating their reactions on a scale of zero to nine.

How aroused do you feel?

How bored do you feel?

How disgusted do you feel?

Do you wish to masturbate?

Under the sheets placed on female subjects’ laps, delicate wires lead up to two cool, light-sensitive gauges. A tampon-shaped device sits ­inside the vagina, while a bulb-shaped accessory (scientists have ­nicknamed it “the nose”) nestles against the clitoris.

In the video that comes up on the screen, a tiny blond woman in a white bikini by the side of a swimming pool graciously accepts oral sex from a kneeling man who looks passably like Vin Diesel. (This ­particular video is used because of the generous screen time it allots to female pleasure—rare enough in porn to be considered niche.) On a black panel just below the screen blink small, unobtrusive infrared lights. Those lights are busy watching the test subject’s eyes. They’re watching her eyes as she watches the porn.

In another room, an eye-tracking computer processes the results at the high speed of sixty data points per second. This equipment is making a video of its own—a video that is porn for psychologists. It’s the same clip featuring the swimming-pool tryst, but this time, the actors’ bodies are covered with graffiti-like red dots. The dots show where the subject’s gaze is falling in real time. The bigger the dot grows, the longer the viewer has been staring, increasingly absorbed by the sight of a body part or an act. Sweeping lines mean she is shifting her gaze, not interested enough in anything to settle on it. Dots in the wrong place—in the margins of the screen, for example—mean she is averting her eyes in distraction or distaste.

Chivers and her team of researchers at the SageLab are trying to understand how we literally see sex. This eye-­tracker brings them as close as they can get to climbing inside someone’s head—retracing her desire. It’s the private ­experience of lust made visible, even more intimate than the curving graph that shows blood flowing to the clitoris. On the eye-tracker, red dots bloom and multiply over the actors’ bodies, growing larger on the man’s face, the woman’s face, on her breasts, on her genitals. A tent forms in the male actor’s black nylon trunks, and it is eventually obscured by an interested red dot.

Sex researchers have historically relied on a combination of genital measurements and written questionnaires (which are dependent upon respondents’ clarity about their desires and honesty about expressing them to scientists). Chivers and others are increasingly using eye-trackers, brain scanners, and other gadgets to get a more direct look at our largest sex organ—the brain itself. Such instruments are useful because they can track the desires we hide even from ourselves. The work is also important because it expands on the counterintuitive findings with which Chivers made her reputation, on the nature of what turns women on. Her work has brought Kingston, Ontario, and Canada more ­generally, to the forefront of sex science.

“We are starting to see this [research] as something that Canada gives the world,” says Jim Pfaus, a psychology professor at Concordia University. Pfaus, who is originally from Maryland, says ­Chivers’s work with erotic video and genital ­response surprised some of their American counterparts—in part because it came to be at all. “When she wrote the paper on that, everyone was like, ‘Holy shit,’” he says. ‘“You got the funding to do this?’”

She did. Chivers is a “triple-­crowner,” an academic who has been smiled upon by all three Canadian federal granting agencies: the Natural Sciences and ­Engineering Research Council of Canada (nserc), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (cihr), and the Social Sciences and ­Humanities Research ­Council (sshrc). To qualify, her work had to be considered both an advancement of basic science and biomedicine and also ­socially relevant. Since she founded her lab in 2009 with a Canadian Foundation for ­Innovation grant of $183,000, ­roughly 500 test ­subjects of all sexual orientations have sat in its La-Z-Boys.

Chivers, forty-four, first caught mainstream attention in 2009, in part for her work’s shock factor. She had found that heterosexual women’s genitals become aroused when they view a bizarre range of sexual stimuli, from lesbian sex to copulating bonobo apes. Her studies established that vaginal blood flow and lubrication don’t always mean a woman feels subjectively aroused. One existing hypothesis was that vaginal wetness could sometimes just be a protective reflex. The grim theory—that women’s genitals might have adapted to react to possible sexual violence in their environment, lubricating to protect delicate tissues from injury—made ripples.

Her findings may seem disquieting. Yet when her discovery was reported in the media, Chivers says, women wrote to thank her. “The experience I have is that women nod ‘yeah’ and men cringe because of the implication,” she says. Paradoxically, the knowledge that their minds and bodies weren’t always aligned during sex freed these women from feeling as if they were personally broken. It gave the lie to such harmful misogynist myths as “If you’re wet, you must want it” and “Your mouth says no, but your body says yes.”

“Women have contacted me and told me stories about being sexually assaulted…and living with this haunting feeling that [the lubrication] somehow meant that they wanted the sex that happened,” says ­Chivers. “A lot of women haven’t had the opportunity to have these conversations at all.”

More recently, Chivers has been testing new models of desire, studying non-binary gender populations and measuring clitoral blood flow. Her new project isn’t ­strictly about genitalia—it’s about the connection between the genitals and the mind. That’s where the approximately $50,000 eye-tracker—the producer of the red dots—comes in. The innovative technology is one thing that led Dawson, an Australian, to study with Chivers at Queen’s. “Sam came to work with me in 2012, and I basically handed her an eye-tracker,” says ­Chivers. “I’m like, ‘Figure out how to use this.’” The tool doesn’t measure ­physical arousal—it takes note of visual interest. Their current joint study compares the eye movements of men, women, and women with sexual dysfunctions as they watch erotic videos. Some female test subjects’ gazes don’t land on genitals or faces—their red dots land on trees or the swimming pool in the background, or flee to the margins of the screen. Chivers and Dawson want to know whether distracted watching correlates with sexual dysfunctions such as distressingly low desire and arousal. Could negative ­associations with sex—learned through trauma or taboo—run so deep as to rewrite the mind’s attentional process?

“You’re getting a real-time, whole-body reaction to erotic cues, not just the genital,” says Pfaus, whose own work at Concordia studies sexual behaviour and the brain’s reward system. “That’s important, because we think about sex even as we’re doing it…. The thinking for so long has been that if the genitals aren’t part of it, it’s not sexual. We’re starting to understand sex as a whole-body phenomenon.”

Chivers and other leading sex researchers, such as Lori Brotto at the University of British Columbia, believe that one of the most promising therapies for women’s sexual dysfunction is an ­unlikely one: mindfulness. Originally based on ­thousand-year-old Buddhist principles, mindfulness has lately come to be seen as a panacea for everything from honing ­golfers’ focus to managing depression and severe pain. In this context, it would work as a bridge to sexual awareness. Just as the little red dots produce a kind of ­secret transcript of our erotic attention, so, too, can desire itself—or the ­absence of it—tell us much about who we are. ­Approached in this way, sexuality is a window ­into one of the greatest human mysteries: communication between the mind and the body, and how we can better align the two.

To Chivers, even this is just one big project in an even more ambitious picture. Her ultimate career goal is nothing less than to create a complete, evidence-based picture of sexuality. “There is a huge gap in our knowledge about humans,” she says.

A 2013 survey in Britain found that a higher proportion of women than men—more than half, by one ­measure—­report some form of sexual complaint, from lack of interest in sex to pain during intercourse. The most common diagnosis is female sexual interest/arousal disorder (fsiad), an umbrella term that encompasses low desire and the inability to become aroused when adequate stimulation is present. (To clarify: fsiad is considered a disorder ­only if the patient is distressed about it). As many as 28 percent of women experience problems becoming aroused, according to a literature review in The ­Journal of Sexual Medicine. For many patients, problems overlap. Difficulty in reaching orgasm is another common issue.

Doctors can’t treat sexual dysfunction, however, if they don’t have a baseline for what “normal” female sexuality looks like. And to date, they don’t. This is somewhat remarkable considering that the West has been studying sexuality since at least the time of ancient Greece. Most of the research, though, has focused on men—who were thought for centuries to rightfully hold the active role in courting and copulation. ­Taboos around female sexuality discouraged study until very recently (even ten years ago, studies on sexual disorders were found to focus on the male experience by a ratio of approximately three to one). ­Descriptions of women’s complete clitoral anatomy are missing from many basic contemporary medical textbooks, while pages of them are devoted to penile anatomy. The internal clitoral structure—which extends into the body and contains as much sensitive tissue as a penis—is only beginning to be fully diagrammed in medical literature. (Research on transgender and non-binary people lags even further behind.)

When half of the population doesn’t fit the accepted model for sexual desire, what does that mean?

Right now, Canada is the best place in the world to find out.

The urgency of the work being done by Chivers and other Canadian scientists has intensified of late. On ­November 9, 2016, Justin J. Lehmiller, a faculty ­affiliate of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and the director of the ­Social Psychology Graduate Program at Ball State University, posted on his blog: “As I watched last night’s U.S. election results come in, I was stunned and shocked. When I woke up this morning, I was terrified.”

Lehmiller, who also writes a column for Playboy and is often approached for commentary by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and cnn, had woken up to an America that seemed less liberal, more suspicious of “sexperts” like him and of why the taxpayer should fund them. It wasn’t just the election of ­Republican Donald Trump to the White House or social conservative Mike Pence as vice-president—it was also what had ­happened overnight in his home state. ­Indiana had just elected as its governor Eric ­Holcomb, who in an ad against his opponent back in 2000 had railed against giving Indiana University—and so, by association, the Kinsey Institute—state funding to “collect pornography and conduct studies on bestiality, homosexuality and pedophilia.”

Lehmiller’s blog aired publicly the angst many American sexologists were sharing privately. “Are there any job openings up there right now?” read an email Chivers received from a researcher in California. Before the election, another colleague from the United States was asked to pull a study involving the measure of genital responses. Chivers is saddened that American universities are already self-censoring sex ­studies for fear of, as she puts it, “­drawing the eye of Sauron.”

Research on sexuality, gender orientation, and gender identification is generally dependent on granting bodies that are themselves dependent on government funding. That makes it vulnerable to political shifts. “I think people are worried,” says Chivers. “And I think they have every reason to be, given the history.”

In 2003, Chivers earned her PhD at Northwestern University in Chicago. She was likely on track to spend her career in the US, just another bright Canadian drawn south of the border. Then came the blacklist. A religious lobby group called the Traditional Values Coalition compiled the names of 157 sex researchers doing federally funded studies on everything from the Native American transgender population to Asian sex workers in San Francisco, and denounced their work as “prurient.” ­Chivers’s supervisor, Michael Bailey, was on the list. Officers from the ­National ­Institutes of Health (nih) scrambled, demanding that the named researchers ­offer “­additional information” about their already-funded studies and explain how they might result in medical benefits for the population.

Pat Toomey, then a Republican representative from Pennsylvania, authored an amendment in July 2003 seeking to strip funding from four projects that examined sexual behaviour. To the horror of the US scientific establishment, it came just two votes shy of passing.

A similar witch hunt against publicly funded sex research was depicted, a year later, in an episode of The West Wing. Concerns about academic freedom sent a wave of young sexology draft dodgers north to Canada. Chivers was one of them. Another was one of her future collaborators, Lori Brotto. In 2004, Brotto, a native of Surrey, British Columbia, was finishing a post-doc at the University of Washington under Julia Heiman, a pioneer in the study of ­female sexuality and orgasms in the 1970s.

When Heiman was hired to be the director of the Kinsey Institute, she invited Brotto to take over her work in Seattle. But after eyeing the political climate and various other factors, Brotto turned down the offer (“I couldn’t have asked for a better setup,” she says now). Today, Brotto is the director of the ubc Sexual Health Lab and a professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. She has earned more than $14 million in grants for her studies. She’s looked at questions as diverse as ­whether asexuality is a sexual orientation, and what effects cancer has on women’s sexual function. She also puts ubc at the forefront of the development of mindfulness as a sexual therapy.

In Montreal, Pfaus has earned the spotlight for studies involving stimulating rat clitorises with a tiny paintbrush (they have “orgasm-like responses” and will ­vocalize, as if squeaking for more). The notion that America is a land of greater opportunities is a misconception, because American academics often have to pay part of their own salaries out of their grants. At Concordia, Pfaus’s grants go entirely to research. Then, there’s America’s peculiar Puritanism.

“You can’t even use the word sex in your grant in the US,” he says. “You’re not ­allowed to use the s-word unless you have an adjective in front of it that makes it bad. You can talk about ‘risky sex’…. But you can’t talk about pleasure.”

North Americans are becoming more comfortable talking about sex as an ­aspect of well-being—we’re slowly catching up with parts of Europe, where fulfilling sex is more often presumed to be an aspect of good health. (French women are entitled to receive ten to twenty sessions of pelvic floor physiotherapy after childbirth to help ward off incontinence and speed the new mother’s return to l’amour.) ­Evidence is mounting that a happy sex life is correlated with a wide array of positive health outcomes, such as more sleep, lower stress, and healthy relationships. It’s ­associated with better overall ­physical health and has the ability to relieve pain. Still, even some European countries such as the Netherlands, which once cranked out jaw-dropping imaging studies of the brain in the midst of stimulation and ­orgasm, have seen budgets slashed for sexuality studies in the era of austerity. Chivers and her cohort in Canada are at the vanguard of a generation of scientists aiming to reduce dysfunction and optimize fulfillment.

The chill on sex research in the US is once again propelling some young international students to study in Canada. Dan Tassone, a student in the first year of his master’s program in clinical psychology at Queen’s, is from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In high school, he read a New York Times Magazine story on Chivers and her work. “My initial thought was, ‘I didn’t know you could quantify something as ­complicated as sexuality,’” he says. Chivers is now his thesis supervisor. “People in Canada are just more willing to have these kinds of conversations,” Tassone says. His ambition is to take recent discoveries about the fluidity of women’s sexual orientation and pose the same questions about men. We tend to think of men’s sexual identities as steady and solid, he says. But we don’t know for sure.

Chivers and Dawson’s use of eye-tracking is part of an innovative experiment that might not have received funding anywhere else but here. It’s an inquiry into the basic underpinnings of our sexual impulses—pure knowledge without a stated public health benefit, such as improving reproductive outcomes or battling stds. Such abstract knowledge is typically underrated in a world of quantifiable data and shareholder value. However, researchers know that these experiments will help us develop better therapies, because we’ll know more about what basic sexual function looks like.

Chivers pours cups of roasted hojicha tea in her stylish office, where the only hint of her life’s work is on her windowsill—two sculptures of genitals she bought during a fertility festival in the village of Komaki, Japan. She points out a detail on a ceramic figurine of a phallus: it has a tiny vulva nestled between its polished testicles. Sex is never simple.

Chivers has made a career of ­noticing details other scientists have ignored. Wrinkles in the accepted model of how sex works are welcome—enticing clues that the model might be flawed. A phrase she repeats often is “We don’t know.” She says it not with regret, but with a note of possibility. We don’t know. See how much ­remains mysterious? See how much work there is to be done? Her contentment with incongruity would be an asset to any scientist. Whenever a subject is as weighted with cultural beliefs as sex is, it is crucial to develop a sense of ease in the midst of the unknown—along with the ability to keep twelve different hypotheses in play.

Born in Ottawa, Chivers picked up a love of science from her father, an air force colonel and engineer who worked with ­fighter jets. As a child, she’d listen to Quirks and Quarks on cbc Radio; at ten, she wanted to grow up to be a neurosurgeon. “I was such a nerd child,” she says. For a grade-seven project, she built a maze for her two hamsters and systematically timed how long they took to run it under different conditions, ­offering them various rewards.

While earning her bachelor of science in psychology at the University of Guelph, Chivers had the first of two epiphanies that would shape her later work. In a second-year human sexuality course, her class was shown close-ups of genitalia on a huge projector screen. A naked penis provoked no reaction. When a vulva appeared, however, the room erupted into a disgusted “Eeeeeeeew!” Chivers looked around. The repulsed squeals were mostly coming from women. She realized two things: Women have complicated relationships with their bodies. And she felt more at ease with the topic of sex than most people did.

Amid the wider gay and lesbian activism of the 1990s, Guelph was a particularly open and sexually diverse campus. Excited by new research on the biology of sexual orientation, Chivers continued to focus on psychophysiology—how the body and the mind interact.

A second epiphany came in 1997. ­Chivers (who identifies as queer herself) heard about a researcher in Holland named Ellen Laan, who was conducting some unusual studies on lesbian sexual response. When Chivers read Laan’s work, she was surprised by its conclusion that gay and straight-identifying women had similar genital responses to both gay and straight erotica.

“I went, ‘Wait a second!’” Chivers says. “My [graduate] supervisor at the time was like, ‘I have no idea.’” In the 1980s, studies revealed that some women display low concordance: what they said turned them on sometimes differed from the stimuli their bodies responded to. But few researchers had understood what those results meant. Were women turned on by everything? Did it mean that sexual orientation works differently in women? Or was something else going on, something harder to see?

Chivers focused on solving the puzzle. She did multiple studies while obtaining her PhD and then founding her lab at Queen’s, replicating Laan’s results and getting noticed. In 2010, she conducted a metastudy of 132 other papers on ­genital response.

When it comes to sex, it should be said, men and women are far more similar than they are different. But this study, which Chivers co-authored with her ­husband—the forensic psychologist ­Michael Seto—along with Ellen Laan and two others, pinpointed one big difference. Men’s self-reported ­arousal showed a “correlation coefficient” of 0.66 with their ­genital behaviour. In other words, if men had an erection, they likely also felt that they were aroused. Female subjects had a strikingly lower concordance correlation coefficient: 0.26. Different studies brought additional evidence to light. ­Vaginal blood flow increased for women while they watched videos of lesbian, man-on-man, and heterosexual sex, and went up somewhat less while they watched ­bonobo sex. But women’s subjective arousal, what they saidturned them on, was more selective, leaning toward straight couples and ­depictions of female pleasure. In other words, their minds and vulvas were out of sync. Another study showed that gay women, interestingly, had a slightly ­higher degree of concordance than straight women, though it wasn’t as high as men’s.

The news came as something of a surprise. Conventional wisdom says women are more “in touch with their bodies.” Yet the data said the opposite was true. It would be easy to surmise, upon reading Daniel Bergner’s 2009 New York Times Magazine feature on Chivers’s work, and his bestselling follow-up book, What Do Women Want?, that women might secretly be cauldrons of indiscriminate, bisexual lust, but are politely lying about it—or repressing it.

The real story is more complex. If a woman’s vulva signals arousal but she’s not feeling it, says Chivers, that doesn’t mean she’s lying. “I believe people and what they tell me,” she says. So why aren’t women and their junk on the same page? Or rather, why do men have such an unusually acute attunement to their penises’ needs? (­Another researcher, Rosemary Basson, tells of asking male subjects to rate the hardness of their erections on a scale of zero to ten without looking down: “They’ll say, ‘I’m five and three-quarters.’”)

First, says Chivers, genitals are not the only arbiters of sex. The mind is a powerful sex organ, particularly in women (the “thinking orgasm,” or climax without any genital contact, is thought to be more common in women than men). The hypothesis that vaginal engorgement and lubrication could have evolved as an automatic, protective response to sex—whether a woman personally wants to have sex or not—has gained wide acceptance among academics.

By its very definition, desire tends to evoke the idea of wanting one thing—one gender or another, a specific person, a certain activity. Yet our minds and bodies and what we tell others about them have always fallen in and out of sync. Psychologists have often observed that the seemingly unified “self” is made up of multiple processes that can sometimes come into conflict. The left and right hemispheres of our brains have been said to have separate experiences, and some neuroscientists hold the theory that the brain is made up of segmented, modular elements that interact. We are not one thing—none of us are. Even the phrase “mind and body” is a simplistic shorthand for the myriad entangled systems that make up a human being. ­Chivers is attempting to apply this thinking to the world of sexuality.

If some dissonance within us is normal, then how much is problematic? Why are some women (gay women, for example) more tuned into their bodies’ responses than others? Research has found that women who masturbate more often have a higher concordance rate: they’re more sensitive to their genital signals. Masturbation holds a clue to men, too. Men on the whole masturbate more frequently than women; far more men than women do it multiple times per week. Men, with their higher concordance, also tend to just check in with their genitals more often, adjusting and prodding them throughout the day.

Chivers has also found that the ­higher a woman’s rate of sexual dysfunction is—distressingly low desire, the inability to orgasm, and so on—the lower her concordance. If your body is aroused but you’re bored, or you’re fantasizing but your body is numb, it can lead to the sense that sex is happening, but that you’re not ­really there for it.

Chivers does not know what drives wedges between women’s minds and ­bodies. But she and Brotto have ­hunches. They believe a child’s environment could play a role in shaping her judgments about her sexual feelings—that sex is gross, wrong, or traumatic—and that could lead to dissonance. Repeated negative messages could lead girls to dissociate from their bodies, to avoid the normal process of touching and exploring themselves and forging ­genital-neural pathways. This feedback could result not just in girls ­ignoring their sexual impulses, but also in their being ­unable to make sense of them at all.

The researchers also wonder why men’s concordance is so high. Anatomy could play a role here, since boys’ genitalia (and genital responses) are more prominent. “Women’s genitals are hidden, number one,” says ­Brotto. “Number two, many of the messages women grow up with—‘Don’t touch,’ ‘It’s dirty,’ ‘Keep your hands to ­yourself’—may contribute to women ­being less aware.” Boys may get negative messages about masturbation, says Chivers, but with a key difference. “Part of that narrative for men is ‘You shouldn’t do it, but we all understand if you do,’” she says. “[There’s a perception that] men need it more than women do.”

Layered on to that are media messages to girls about how women should look in ­order to be desirable. These encourage them to micromanage their attractiveness ­rather than dream about what actually turns them on. Lost in a performance of sexiness, girls lose touch with what they find sexy.

Distraction is the number one thing that prevents women from feeling desire during sex, even if they’re getting enough stimulation and foreplay, says Basson, a researcher and doctor at ubc who ­studies and treats desire and arousal disorders. Cosmopolitan reported on a US survey in which 32 percent of women between the ages of eighteen and forty who had difficulty reaching orgasm said they were too “in their heads.”

Arousal could be seen as a form of trance—a form of intoxication that depends on ignoring the “real world” (laundry, a pinging smartphone, whether you booked the kids’ dental appointments). “If you want to have sex, but when you’re in it you’re thinking about the paint chipping off the ceiling, you’re not in it,” says Pfaus.

Of course, any scientist would admit that sometimes, there’s just bad sex. Sex that turns on part of you, but not enough of you. Or sex that feels good, but that you hate. This division between the body’s needs and the soul’s recoil from the ugliness of most porn is perfectly described by Emily Witt in Future Sex, her recent book about the perils of contemporary pleasure: “My aversion to pornography was not because the images didn’t stimulate, but because I did not want to be turned on by sex that was not the kind of sex I wanted to have.”

Maybe some women (and men, too) require more than just sex to be fully turned on. Maybe they’re more sensitive to ­context, emotional cues, words. Maybe they just need better sex. Pfaus has found that the memory of unsatisfying sex will quash the libidos of female rats; if he blocks rats’ opioid receptors during sex, they won’t seek it out again later.

A skilled and sensitive partner, unfortunately, can’t be prescribed or sourced out by a doctor. What medical practitioners may soon begin recommending is the distinctly unsexy-sounding therapy of sitting with your eyes closed.

Mindfulness meditation has been ­touted as a way to build concentration and to calm the stressed twenty-first-century mind everywhere from schools to corporations, but it’s rarely been associated with sex. In some ways, it’s a surprising association to make, because of the popular image of ­carnal passion as arising spontaneously out of an uncontrollable and almost animalistic desire. But one of the claims made by psychologists who study mindfulness is that the practice can build neural pathways between the head and the body—bridging what we think and what we feel. Inspired by its uses in the mental health field, ­Brotto first got the idea to apply mindfulness as a therapy for women’s sexual dysfunctions while doing postgraduate work. Her current clinical studies show that a monkish spiritual technique may be the most effective treatment ever seen for sexual dissatisfaction.

Mindfulness is thought to help practitioners more fully experience sensations without being hindered by anxious ­interior judgments: I’m not feeling very much. Am I taking too long? How do I look in this ­position? Should I turn the light off?

Chivers, who had, coincidentally, learned to meditate as a teen, saw the therapy’s potential. A 2016 study by her and Brotto found that just four sessions of mindfulness boosted a measure central to concordance called “interoceptive awareness,” the ability to sense internal processes in the body such as heartbeat, digestion—or pleasure. Emerging fmri data ­suggests mindfulness can do this because it ­changes the ­insula, the part of the brain involved in body awareness. Brotto and Basson have done clinical tests showing the therapy is effective at reducing even more ­serious suffering: provoked vestibulodynia, the ­debilitating pain that is experienced by some 12 ­percent of women during intercourse or similar activity —and that ­patients are often told is untreatable.

Brotto is writing a mass-market book on mindfulness techniques for both women with diagnosed dysfunctions and untold others who may simply benefit from being more present during sex. This drug-free sex therapy comes at just the right time, since the only fda-approved drug that is promoted as a treatment for female sexual-desire disorders, Addyi, has been plagued with criticism and low sales since it appeared in 2015.

The tides seem to be shifting to welcome a more complete model of how sex affects every part of us—a new, research-driven sexual revolution. Depending on how political winds blow, it may not be long before it spreads from this corner of the world to others.

“[Chivers and Brotto] are setting the standards for sex research for the next twenty years,” says Pfaus. “When the money starts flowing back in Europe and the US, when attitudes change, you’re going to see their models being used by people as a bedrock.”

Undergirding all her data is Chivers’s hope that if the public knows scientists are studying female sexuality, that will send a message. “It isn’t that you can have great sex, or here’s 500 ways to have better orgasms. It’s that your sexuality matters.”

The post Building a Better Female Orgasm appeared first on Sarah Barmak.

This article appeared in Chatelaine on August 9, 2016.

Three years ago, I became curious about why female sexuality is so often described as a mystery. Are women really “complicated” — or do we tend to dismiss women’s sexuality as more complex because we see male sexuality as the norm? These and other burning questions led me to research and write a book, Closer: Notes From the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality. I found there’s plenty of information out there, but researchers don’t do a good job of making it available to women — and that’s part of what’s causing all the bad sex! Here, seven findings for a more fulfilling sex life.

1. The orgasm gap is real
A Cosmopolitan survey last year found 57 percent of women aged 18 to 40 usually climax during sex with a male partner, while their partners come 95 percent of the time. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Another study at Indiana University in 2014 found that gay women climax 75 percent of the time with a familiar partner, suggesting lesbians understand the equipment better — if men were more educated, the hetero gap might lessen.

2. Pleasure often plateaus before it peaks
Women may take as little as a few minutes to climax, but between 15–40 minutes is typical. Right before climax, women experience a plateau — a period where pleasure doesn’t seem to be building anymore. It can last several minutes before tension builds again. It’s normal — your orgasm hasn’t deserted you; don’t give up.

3. Your clitoris has legs
The clitoris is way bigger than most of us think. Far from being just the pea-sized nub of visible flesh it’s billed as, the clitoris is like an iceberg. Most of it is made of responsive tissue submerged deep inside the body. It has long crura or “legs” that straddle the vaginal canal, and has about as much erectile tissue as a penis does. If stimulated properly, it can lead to new heights of pleasure.

4. Desire can be a gradual process, not a switch that flips on
We tend to think of sex as something that starts with burning desire and ends with an orgasm. But that’s a rather goal-oriented model of sex that doesn’t describe many women’s experience. Women often report what’s called “responsive desire,” where they decide to begin an encounter out of curiosity, because they want to connect with a partner or because they think it may ultimately be pleasurable and then, if the stimulation feels good, they may develop the desire as they go. This is completely normal. It contrasts with Hollywood-style “spontaneous desire,” where lust seems to arise out of nowhere (and is more commonly a male experience, although men and women can experience both kinds of desire).

5. The harder you try, the harder it gets
Sixteen percent of women have trouble reaching orgasm or have never had one, according to one survey (the 2013 National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, or NATSAL, from the UK). So if this is you, you’re not alone. It may sound contradictory, but sex experts advise that trying harder to climax often makes orgasm harder to reach. Instead of gunning for the big finish, try taking a deep breath and focusing on whatever pleasant sensations are already in your body, no matter how small. If you climax, great. If not, don’t worry! Great sex is more than just a reliable orgasm. Check out Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski for more orgasmic tips.

6. The manual on female masturbation is as old as time
If you think we just discovered the female orgasm in the age of the vibrator, think again. Many ancient cultures valued female pleasure far more highly than we do today. Medieval South Asian cultures penned tantric poetry about cunnilingus, and even more ancient Chinese texts listed painstaking techniques for pleasuring women.

7. Women are taking matters into their own hands
They’re seeking out more varied and less strictly heterosexual experiences than ever before. The total number of sexual partners reported by women over their lifetime is going up, as well as the proportion of women having woman-on-woman sex, according to the NATSAL. Ladies are also watching more porn and seeking out alternatives to dating, including spiritual sexual practices that focus solely on female pleasure, like orgasmic meditation.

The post I researched the female orgasm for 3 years. Here’s what I learned appeared first on Sarah Barmak.

When Janet Mock set out to write a memoir of her quest of self-discovery as a young, transgender woman, she knew it would be full of adversity, bravery and heartache. What it really needed, though, was romance.

“Oftentimes when we discuss the politics of LGBTQ people, we erase the element of sex and intimacy because of the politics of respectability,” she says.

“I’m also a woman who is craving love and someone who is worthy of having partnership and love. I think that (often when) we paint trans women’s lives, we often see that as something that should be secret or fetishized and objectified.”

There is plenty of heat in Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More by Mock, who was welcomed into the world as a boy, but realized with more and more certainty as she grew up that her true gender was female. Mock opens her tale on the night of her first date with her boyfriend, Aaron, whom she had met days before while dancing at a Lower East Side club. Though she barely knew the man with skin “the color of sweet toffee, the kind that gets stuck in your teeth,” she wanted to tell him who she really was.

“He smelled like sweat and cilantro and looked a lot like that one thing I yearned and feared: intimacy,” she writes.

Since the Feb. 4 publication of the New York Times bestseller, billed as the first memoir by a trans person who transitioned while young, Mock has done a whirl of interviews with People,The Colbert Report and a contentious two-part appearance on Piers Morgan Live. A subtitle under Mock’s name reading, “Was a boy until 18” on her Feb. 4 appearance sparked furor (“@PiersMorganLive get it the (expletive) together,” she later tweeted), prompting her to come back for a second, more heated turn on the show.

Redefining Realness chronicles her life growing up in a poor family in Honolulu, the child of African-American and Hawaiian parents. She moved to California, where she began a rocky process of discovering her identity, getting sex reassignment surgery at age 18 and moving to a successful journalism career in New York City. Petite and feminine, with an eruption of bronze curly locks, Mock could have “passed” as female — but revealed her identity as a trans woman in a splashy 2011 profile in Marie Claire.

She’s lived her life in the spotlight ever since.

Mock spoke to the Star on Wednesday on the road from Washington, D.C., back home to New York, where she was looking forward to a few days’ respite before the next stop on her hectic book tour. The night before, she spoke to a crowd of 500 at D.C.’s Martin Luther King Memorial Library.

Aaron, her boyfriend and the man who figures so much in her story, was in the driver’s seat. She dedicates her book to him, crediting him with a crucial role in helping her love and accept herself.

Although an understanding of the issues faced by trans youth is growing, medical transition procedures for teens are hard to access, and the appropriate age to begin treatment is controversial among medical professionals. Mock calls that “medical gatekeeping on trans people’s lives.” She writes about self-medicating with hormone pills at 15 before deciding to seek a doctor’s guidance.

Beginning hormone treatments as a teen, she explains, allows a trans person to experience one process of puberty, rather than having to have a second later in life.

“It’s a decision that shouldn’t be governed — it should be made between a young person, their doctor and their parents.”

Trans women and men enjoy greater rights in Canada compared to those in many parts of the world, but there is a long way to go. A Statistics Canada study found that 20 per cent of trans people in Ontario had been physically or sexually assaulted because of their identity. The same study found that they have disproportionately lower incomes; half of trans people in the province live on less than $15,000 a year. Trans youth in Canada struggle acutely with discrimination — the Public Health Agency of Canada reports that 20 to 30 per cent have attempted suicide.

Legislation to protect transgender Canadians from discrimination is currently awaiting Senate approval before becoming law. The NDP-sponsored Bill C-279, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity, was passed by the House of Commons in March of 2013.

It’s no surprise that change has come more swiftly online. On Feb. 13, Facebook earned praise from Mock and other human rights and LGBTQ advocates when it announced it would give users choices other than “male” or “female” for their gender identities. Its extensive list of options now includes “trans” and “agender,” and users also have the ability to choose the pronoun they want Facebook to use in referring to them: male (he/his), female (she/her) or neutral (they/their).

Now, Mock is looking past print toward the bright lights of TV. Speaking with admiration about Ellen DeGeneres as a pivotal role model for gay women, she is pondering what a TV show of her own could offer trans youth.

“I think the media offers us the possibility to dream of what our lives could look like, especially for young people,” she says, thinking about the recent blooming of positive trans characters. “I think about Laverne Cox’s role on Orange is the New Black, Harmony Santana’s role in (the movie) Gun Hill Road. Having those mainstream portraits that people can have access to enables them to think of trans people in different ways. Instead of being the butt of the joke, we’re at the centre of the story.”

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It is a wintry December day in Montreal, and a film crew in tattoos and toques is waiting patiently for a three-year-old tropical parrot named Isa to fly. Aimed squarely at the bird is the Phantom, a camera originally invented for ballistics research that can produce ultra-slow motion video by shooting at about 4,000 frames per second.

A trainer beckons Isa with a peanut. She takes to the air, flying three metres. But when the crew looks at the footage, they can only see the corner of a crimson wing in the frame. The shot is useless. Parrots tire easily—Isa will only make about 10 flights today, and she’s already done six. The plug of one of the 5,000-kilowatt lights is starting to overheat, and the smell of burning rubber is in the air.

It’s a low-tech dilemma for Moment Factory, a Montreal multimedia company adept at solving high-tech problems. They are filming a capsule, or short clip, to add to the catalogue of images, sounds and interactive elements that will fill a brand-new terminal at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The $450,000 Phantom is on rent from the U.S. because its high frame rate means a 1½ second shot can be slowed to a hypnotic pace and made to last as long as it takes to wait for a flight.

But first, the parrot has to want the peanut.

Suddenly, Isa is flying, but too far. She wheels left into a storage space, disoriented and tired. “No, no, no,” someone shouts. After a hair-raising U-turn, she alights on producer François Morel, a tall fellow with snow-white hair, who laughs it off. She is coaxed back in front of the green screen and convinced to fly once more. There are cheers: they have a shot.

“Coupez!”

Still, there are countless more shoots to go, and many more pretty things to fly out of control.

Five months and 29 days after Isa’s flight, on June 20, Antonio Villaraigosa cut the ribbon on the new US$1.9-billion Tom Bradley International Terminal, one of his last hurrahs as mayor of Los Angeles. Due to construction delays, the work isn’t completely finished. But when it is, Moment Factory will have plastered the terminal’s Antonio R. Villaraigosa Pavilion—consisting of a departure lounge and shopping area the size of three football fields—with video of cityscapes dissolving into ink, floating flower petals, beautiful dancers and yes, parrots, all inspired by the destinations of the disembarking flights. The images sprawl across unconventional screens, including a four-sided elevator tower the height of a three-storey building completely covered in glowing LEDs, the first of its kind anywhere. The tower can look like a colossal clock, which becomes a high-rise with shatter-glass sides, then a night sky. Touch the sides of the tower, and your hand will set off interactive sensors that shoot a star straight to the top.

That an up-and-coming Montreal firm won the contract to supply films to the movie industry’s hometown airport was a huge coup, says consultant Mike Rubin, whose consulting firm MRA International initiated the plan to turn the newest LAX terminal into a cutting-edge media experiment. It is part of the airport’s US$4.1-billion multi-year revitalization, the biggest public works project in the history of Los Angeles. Moment beat 14 competitors from around the world, including L.A. itself. Which confirmed what they already knew: they are unlike most other firms on earth.

Moment Factory partners, Eric Fournier, Dominic Audet, and Saschin Bessette.

“We’re in show business,” says partner Éric Fournier, in an effort to neatly define a category-defying company. Founded in 2001 by three friends from Montreal’s rave scene, the firm helped drop 1,200 light-filled beach balls on a crowd of 100,000 unsuspecting fans during Arcade Fire’s song “Wake Up” at the Coachella music festival in 2011, a stunt that garnered a skrillion online views. They made a 19th-century church in Barcelona seem to dissolve into rainbow-hued flowers by beaming 16 projectors at its stone façade simultaneously. They hit the big time last year, when Madonna enlisted them to transform the playing field around her Super Bowl halftime show into a whirling sea of Vogue covers and three-dimensional geometric shapes. After it aired, they began fielding two to three calls a day from prospective clients, and their staff grew from 50 to 110. The private firm doesn’t share revenue figures, but they have seen 400% growth between 2007 and 2011, according to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50. They hope to open offices in L.A. and Europe, and plan to put their in-house multimedia software, X-Agora, on the market.

With 300 projects completed for clients from AMEX to Jay-Z, the company aspires to move beyond special effects for concerts, product launches and other events that live only for a moment. They want to build semi-permanent, large-scale media monuments—like the old bronze statues in public squares, except they run on software. Their new video installation at LAX could redefine them. “This might be where Moment Factory goes from being a provider of entertainment services to an actual player on the cultural field by creating these mid-range to long-range projects,” says Prof. Patrick Leroux, who studies Montreal’s circus and arts groups at Concordia University.

The assignment from L.A. made the Super Bowl look like community theatre. With a production schedule of about five months, Moment needed to produce four hours of top-quality content that would represent the essence of L.A. to the world—the equivalent of making 62 short films, each with different producers, actors and themes, some in 3-D. Screens would be triggered not just by passengers’ movements but by flight data, representing the cities the planes were bound for. Finally, they had to do it in secret, and while juggling 30-odd other projects, including Light, a new nightclub in Las Vegas with Cirque du Soleil that opened this past spring.

They knew they could do it. They just needed a plan.

Sakchin Bessette (or “Saky,” as everyone calls him) skateboards through the bright, drawing-covered interior of Moment Factory’s offices in a hoodie and pink T-shirt. It’s late December, the day of Isa’s big shoot. If the company’s co-founder and creative director is worried about the project he’s overseeing, it isn’t apparent. Dozens of skateboards litter the floor between desks. Saky and co-founder Dominic Audet got the staff using them, and now they’re the normal way to get to meetings.

Suddenly, there is a loud bang. Staffers scream. Bessette has fired a snub-nosed toy gun, raining a payload of glitter all over the hallway.

What would he do if he only had one more shot?

“More!” he says, demonstrating his ebullience, if not actually answering the question.

Bessette began his career doing slide projections at raves, then turned that partying ethos into a business in 2001 with Audet and pal Jason Rodi. Cirque’s then-creative director of new ventures Jean-François Bouchard noticed their work and hired them to help with a Halloween bash at the home of Guy Laliberté, the circus’s co-founder. Laliberté wanted to transform the inside of a domed tent into the interior of a jack-o’-lantern, a trick accomplished with a technique borrowed from planetariums. Before the event, they put a camera into a real pumpkin and shot Laliberté peering inside. At the party—after a dramatic rumble—they projected the video onto the ceiling of the tent, creating the illusion that the boss’s gigantic face was peering down and greeting his awed guests. “He liked that,” smiles Bessette. It was a move that became Moment’s calling card: find a way, any way, to elicit a reaction.

“I remember [Bessette] walking around, he looked like a kid back then,” says Jean-François Bouchard, CEO of advertising wunderkind Sid Lee, who works with Moment on projects like Mosaika, the summer multimedia show projected directly on the bricks of the Parliament buildings in Ottawa. “You couldn’t predict that they would become an international powerhouse.”

In 2007, Rodi left and Fournier, a former vice-president at Cirque, joined the company. The following year, they were hired by technology-savvy hard rocker Trent Reznor for a concert tour. For a transparent video screen that sat in front of Reznor, the firm created swirling images that responded to his movements, but kept his flickering form visible to the audience. The feat garnered an award and a slew of new concert gigs. Moment got a reputation for unusual ways of solving problems—and provoking surprise. They were hired the next year by the city of Lyon, France, to produce an outdoor tribute to the history of cinema; it was to be staged in a park with barely any trees, meaning there was no place to hang a screen. So Moment suspended from cranes a 500-square-metre net made of chain mail. (The company has a library of glass, plastic and metals to help them solve such conundrums.) Invisible in the dark sky, the net was just substantial enough to show the gargantuan images projected on to it. The crowd thought the movie was being shown on the sky itself, laughs Julie Armstrong-Boileau, the firm’s communications head.

In 2010, Microsoft hired Cirque du Soleil acrobats to perform at the launch of their Kinect gaming system. The circus performers gave Moment yet another boost by subcontracting them to provide visuals—a prime example of what Sid Lee’s Bouchard calls “the Montreal Force,” the tendency of French-Canadian media companies to share big clients, rather than compete for them. Moment created virtual, moving “water” Microsoft fans could walk on and nearly upstaged the games themselves by projecting decorations on to a mechanical, performing circus elephant.

Colourful as their projects are, Moment’s headquarters remain in a vacant-looking, brown industrial building in Outremont, a couple of streets outside the city proper, but a stone’s throw from the hip Mile End neighbourhood, home to gaming firm Ubisoft and graphic novel publisher Drawn & Quarterly. The average age of Moment’s indefatigable employees is still around 29 (Aliya Orr, interactive director of LAX, is all of 26). But through ever more high-profile assignments, especially in the futuristic realm of “experiential design”—permanent multimedia environments like LAX meant to engage the public for years—the young company has enjoyed its own coming-of-age.

So when Moment heard last year about an opportunity to work on an airport that could calm its passengers, they were intrigued by the challenge. Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) was building a new LAX terminal with a dramatic, curving roof by Fentress Architects and an equally dramatic proposal: make it ad-free. They envisioned a billboard-less interior focused on the passenger experience, and would sell naming rights to it to make up revenue. Marcela Sardi, a Baltimore-based specialist in media installations had designed intriguing video screens, and now they needed content. Moment’s job was to use video to transform the supercharged, distraction-filled hub of stress that is a modern international airport into an environment that would calm and soothe—a spa for the senses. “One of the client’s preoccupations is to avoid the ‘Times Square effect,’” says Moment’s Hans Samuelson, the LAX project manager responsible for co-ordinating the media elements. Among the project’s loftier goals is mitigating the awfulness of modern air travel. “Travel these days is all about logistics,” says Bessette. “It’s not about romance. In the 1940s, when you were travelling, it’s like, ‘My God, I’m going on this boat, or I’m going to take a plane.’”

Above their offices, Moment set up a secret penthouse studio dedicated to LAX and began to plan. The concept was so new that they had few references to crib from. Other than Times Square, immersive screen-filled settings on that scale didn’t exist. For inspiration, they looked to Singapore’s Changi Airport, which dulls the irritation of travel with fern gardens and ponds filled with fish. But Moment had LED screens to work with, not fish. Moment initially pitched the idea of having video games on the screens, but the airport rejected them as too diverting for an audience that, after all, is trying to get somewhere else. Moment proposed more Zen-like, relaxing games—sifting through sand, piling bricks. Those got the thumbs-down, too. With Sardi, they settled on video that ferries stressed-out passengers through an engineered mood experience.

The first thing passengers see after security is smiling L.A. locals jumping in slow motion on the Bon Voyage Wall, explains Samuelson, leaning over a miniature version of the terminal miniature that takes up a room of the hidden penthouse studio. “We think of it as a good-mood gateway. You’ve had this tough experience, you had to take your shoes off …you want to give people a moment of excitement and adventure.” In the midst of the hall is the 22-metre-tall, four-sided Time Tower, so large that a single image on it must be stored across five separate computers. This is Moment’s attempt at a landmark structure—something on the order of Chicago’s Crown Fountain with its giant, water-spouting video screens or the 186-square-metre HD screen that fills the lobby of the Comcast Center in Philadelphia. For its attempt at a digital monument, Moment built a structure capable of as many effects as a television has stations. At times it will barely flicker, seeming to be made of solid glass. But when the clock strikes the hour (the average span passengers wait for their flight), the tower will launch into a three-minute routine called Dance Time. At this moment, it becomes an Art Deco clock, its face opening to reveal a Busby Berkeley-style extravaganza. Showgirls spin like gears, in a nod both to old Hollywood and the time distortions of air travel. There are other tricks. The tower is a functional elevator taking people up to a premium lounge. When an elevator lands, it will set off a subtle glow. Sometimes shadowy figures will appear to travel up and down its height—a trompe l’oeil effect, as the inner elevator isn’t actually visible from outside. “Hopefully that’ll mess you up for a minute,” says Samuelson.

When their time in the terminal is ending, passengers will pass the mind-bending Portals, two rows each containing 10 LCD towers. Arrayed along two concourses from the lounge to the gates and fitted with motion detectors, the Portals’ video ripples and changes when passengers walk past. Even better, they play music tied to the flight that is actually about to take off. A Dubai-bound pending flight will mean passengers trigger the Arabian string instrument the oud; a Chilean destination will cue the charango. The faster people run to catch their flights, the more the Portals come alive. It may produce the eerie sense the building knows where you’re going.

All this sleight of hand is made possible by X-Agora, the in-house software that helped Moment win this contract and which they soon hope to put on the market. It is a central brain that can juggle stills, music, interactive, text and video. By layering real-time data over a film clip, X-Agora will ensure that the clock which appears in Silent Era, a black-and-white film short, will always show the correct time.

To gather the footage they needed, Moment’s directors spent the winter filming on California beaches and in far-flung flight destinations such as Rio de Janeiro. Surrounded by paradise, they learned the usual rules of moviemaking don’t apply. A typical shot in a movie lasts a few seconds, but quick cuts will seem shocking at three storeys tall. So directors opt for shots at least 15 seconds long; the largest screens have no cuts at all—images fade in and out dreamily. Another problem is speed. When a screen is 25 metres high, a happy child jumping on a beach appears to be plummeting like a rock. They don’t want passengers to be afraid, says Marie Belzil, one of the five team members overseeing the project’s multimedia production and a former creative assistant to the great Canadian theatre director Robert Lepage, so everything moves slowly.

By April, the staff at Moment has built a laboratory to test their work. In a cavernous, disused government warehouse, they construct a nearly full-size model of the terminal and test-drive their clips. The scale reveals that the videos need to be slowed down even more. On a Friday night in early May, they decide to reward their exhausted staff and do what they do best—throw a party. Giggling employees pass through a mock security entrance manned by “flight attendants” into a cavernous space filled with music, beer, food and versions of the airport’s screens, with all their movies running at full tilt.

It’s one way of blowing off steam when so much is on the line. After all, the LAX project is already supposed to be close to completion. Instead, on-site testing has not even begun, because the airport’s construction of the high-tech screens has been hit by delay after delay. “I can’t paint if the wall is not there,” says LAX executive producer François Morel, in the midst of the party, worry in his voice piercing the booming techno. The video looks ready. On a testing screen behind Morel, Isa the parrot flies through a jungle in Phantom slow motion, every needle-thin barb of every candy-coloured feather vivid and distinct. She is destined for the Storyboard, a cluster of irregularly shaped screens about 37 metres wide. Belzil, who made many of the clips whirling around her, has brought her toddler, who holds her hands over her ears. Outside, employees smoke, joke in French and wait for a school bus to take them away. It’s a fun party, but are these 20-somethings the best judge of what will relax airport visitors of all ages—children, seniors?

A few days later, Moment is finally at work in L.A. The airport as a whole is an architectural touchstone already, its white 1961 flying-saucer “Theme Building” a designated historical monument. They’ve traded their skateboards for hard hats and safety goggles. Each morning, they descend through three storeys of concrete to the workspace they’ve nicknamed “The Bunker.” For months, Morel—an elder (read: over 40) member of Moment who jokes that his white hair makes the LAWA reps feel more at ease—has puzzled over what he calls the logistical nightmare posed by the work site. A half-built U.S. airport is not an ideal place for a gang of Canadians. Moment employees had to travel down months early to be fingerprinted and pass security background checks. But magnetic security badges failed to arrive for all but four of 15 or so people who need to be there. This has had a number of unfortunate consequences. One is that everyone goes to the washroom at once. “Every time we need to move, we’re talking to the others saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to this place, does anyone need to go to the bathroom or see this feature?” says Morel. Those lucky staff with badges must escort everyone to the porta-potties, he says, “like children at school.”

The schedule has been scrapped. Moment had initially planned for an on-site setup, or integration stage, of four to five weeks; it will instead take four months. With the project still far from completion, they are now firmly in the realm of Plan B: get a minimum amount of content ready for the mayor’s ribbon cutting. But amid the team’s countless headaches, their content itself has been a saving grace. It looks, well, good. On the afternoon of June 6—two weeks before the ribbon cutting—20 VIPs mill about the terminal, waiting to seeing the Time Tower lit up for the first time. For the past week, workers on cranes have been laying the roughly 28-centimetre-square tiles, each of which corresponds to one very big pixel, on the tower. Deep underground, someone pushes a button. On the four-sided monolith, Dance Time begins to play. Around the massive room, the construction workers rushing to build the duty-free shops stop hammering. They take pictures on their phones.

At the official launch on June 20, someone sets a large table in front of the Time Tower’s missing interactive base, camouflaging it. Relieved, Moment’s staff watch people watching their creations and hear the mayor laud their work.

Melissa Weigel, Moment’s senior multimedia director, hopes this inaugurates a new era for the firm. “I think that this is the breakthrough for the journey that we’ve been on for a while,” she says. “I hope there is more to come.”

The success of the environment won’t be clear until the airport opens to regular passengers in August or September. It has already drawn praise from L.A. observers, however. “The stuff is not Times Square, boorish in-your-face stuff,” architecture journalist Sam Lubell told Canadian Business. “It’s creative, unusual things that grab your attention.”

The best accolades of all have been ordinary people’s reactions, says Samuelson. At 2 a.m., the night before the gala launch, his team finally stopped testing Silent Era, the video which always shows the correct time. The night guard of a duty-free shop approached them. “‘Couldn’t you guys start it up again? Why did it have to stop?’” Samuelson recalls the man saying. For his crew, it was a moment of quiet triumph.

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