Sexy, Eh?

Michelle Bedard published Canada in Bed: An Irreverent Study of Canadian Sexual Attitudes in 1969. Its cover was a little risqué: a drawing of a couple in bed, under a Maple Leaf quilt, the man engrossed in some financial booklet while the woman, red-nippled and blond, expresses frustration. The book, which set out to examine satirically the “perilous shortage of love in Canada,” is really a bundle of sour notes on what Bedard considered a country of emasculated men, whom she proceeded to categorize by profession, ranking their potency and lovemaking abilities. Bedard described a confused, sexually frustrated society with something of a longing for the pioneer days when “beating back the bush, planting the corn, churning the butter and spinning the yarn, [left] no time for indulgences such as neuroses, psychoses, fetishes, perversions, homosexuality or even for plain old-fashioned bachelorhood.” Lord knows what she’d think now.

(Michelle Bedard was the...