Yet, the concerns they raise extend far deeper than political ideologies alone. Drinking two liters of water per day, dedicating two hours for pilates, then cautiously counting the calories eaten and limiting one’s sugar intake may be considered a ‘clean-girl’ routine. However, this choreographed ‘care’ for body optimization is part of a system known as body politics– the practices and policies through which powers of society regulate the human body. This relentless scrutiny of intake shows little concern for well-being. Appearance alone takes center stage. 

Bodies are viewed as primary indicators of self-control and self-discipline. Indeed, people often feel entitled to comment on someone else’s body– the thinner one is, the merrier one is assumed to be, as exemplified by the Ozempic intake trend. Even in 2006, sociologist Spencer warned about a drastic change in women’s weight, due to the rise of model culture, which in turn instigated diet culture. Models, whose jobs are to embody ideal body figures, were becoming slimmer than most women. As a result, women began to reshape themselves to resemble them, commodifying skeletal thinness. 

Sociologists warn about the cultural internalization of necropolitics, a concept defined by Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe as a form of political power that operates through the social and literal deaths of individuals and populations. In its commercial form, necropolitics can be understood as the extreme control over and potentially deadly neglect of one’s body to conform to cultural beauty standards. Indeed, lifeless, frozen, perfect bodies surround us in pictures, ads, snaps, and stories. The media never fails to remind us of the materiality of our bodies– framing the human as bound above all by flesh and appearance. Furthermore, the number of people suffering from body dysmorphic disorder—a mental health condition in which one cannot stop thinking about one or more perceived defects or flaws in appearance—has never been so high. 

Bodies have become projects, where every change is intentional—weight loss, tattoos, surgery, muscle building, and so on. Through this notion of the body-project, bodies now lie at the core of identity, as sociologist Chris Shilling explains. In High modernity, which is inseparable from the rise of capitalism, individualism, and consumerism, images of perceived legitimacy replace social class realities. 

What in our current culture leads us to hate our bodies so much? Why do we want to control them so obsessively?

The crux of this lies in how politics has bled into culture: widening class divides, glorifying elites, and turning bodies into shortcuts for social climbing. Video essays point out how the rise of model-cleansed bodies echoes the rise of populism in modern politics– here silent racism often remains, since the preferred elite body stays a non-racialized, ‘modernized’ one. Even if they claim to stand far from each other on the political chessboard, both the extreme right and extreme left represent the interests of ordinary people against what is framed as the elite. 

However, altering one’s body became a means of copying and thus passing as one of  the elite– a social class elevator, and one of the main ways to attain social advantages. So you might not have noticed, but your body in itself is an ideological tool– subtler, and perhaps stronger, than protest. Politics leak into our identities, even when we resist its messages – rendering our bodies simply means to reproduce the status quo. 

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The McCord Museum’s current exhibition, Pounding the Pavement, perfectly captures the city’s eclectic spirit in a collection of Montreal street photography, running until October 28th — demonstrating how street culture, particularly vibrant in neighborhoods like the Plateau, binds together the city’s many diasporas, later widened by the influx of international students. 

In truth, Montreal is now a place many call “home.” 

Ironically, the streets are also marked by the presence of unhoused First Nations people, who make up roughly 12 per cent of Montreal’s visible houseless population. Indeed, long before its colonization, the island was home to the Mohawk and Anishinaabemowin peoples — known by their names Tiohtià:ke and Mooniyang. However, the current influx of international populations has reshaped the city both geographically and economically, further pushing Indigenous peoples to its margins.

Originally, the Plateau thrived as a multicultural hub for working-class European immigrants between the 1850s and the 1970s. Slowly, it became the original bourgeois-bohème hub, welcoming Montreal’s artistic immigrant scene — and the very underground local Québécan culture.  

However, the Plateau’s reputation has shifted. 

It is now one of the most coveted places to live in Montreal, often branded as the city’s bougie heart. And, according to Radio-Canada, the Plateau now stands as Montreal’s most expensive neighborhood. 

For many long-time Montrealers, the Plateau has lost the prestige it once carried, and has become far removed from the European bourgeois-bohème image it originally sold. As the neighbourhood became an alternative to traditional student housing and, increasingly, as an English-speaking enclave, its identity was reshaped when many streets were given anglicized names in the early 2000s — such as Gilford Street, once Chemin des Carrières– at the cost of erasing Quebecois history. A new wave of gentrification has accelerated this transformation, driven by private residential and commercial investments that inflate housing prices, raise living costs, and displace residents, while commodifying the essential character of the Plateau neighborhood. 

This represents a shift from earlier attempts to profit from the Plateau’s cultural cachet — most notably before October 2018, when the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough restricted short-term rentals like Airbnbs — toward a new model of gentrification, where living in the neighborhood has become an expensive and transitory experience. Gentrification in the Plateau doesn’t rely on big chains displacing small businesses. Instead, it thrives on aesthetic consumption: the rise of pricey, vintage shops along St-Denis, the sudden appearance of eight-dollar matcha pop-up concept cafés, and the opening of costly niche bookstores on Duluth. 

Under this veil of aestheticism, the process of gentrification raises serious concerns about housing discrimination against Indigenous peoples in Montreal, where wealthy international students are often prioritized for leases, reinforcing enduring colonial patterns of exclusion. Indigenous peoples represent only 0.6 per cent of Montreal’s total population, but they made up 12  per cent of the city’s unhoused population in 2018 — marking them as the first and most vulnerable victims of gentrification even before the process fully unfolded. Indeed, Indigenous homelessness is rooted in Canada’s colonial history. Indigenous communities have been subject to land dispossession under the 1876 Indian Act, systemic disempowerment through the denial of self-governance, and the cultural violence of residential schools that severed their ties to land, language, and education. Today, many Indigenous families continue to face discrimination in housing services, despite legal entitlements to support them. Here, Indigenous homeless people’s high visibility in areas like Park Avenue or the McGill “Ghetto” — ironically named, given its soaring rents — underscores how gentrification reshapes socio-spatial representations, pushing them further from places like the Plateau. 

Homelessness among Indigenous peoples can take on chronic or cyclical forms, often intertwined with mental health struggles, addictions, or unstable employment. Yet, beyond individual causes, it is best understood as the product of historic and ongoing displacement, cultural genocide, and spiritual disconnection. What disadvantaged minority neighborhoods truly require is sustained, targeted reinvestment that provides resources and opportunities while safeguarding affordable housing. Indigenous peoples, however, face compounded barriers — they are 27 times more likely to be homeless than non-Indigenous people, with Inuit individuals being 80 times more likely.

The Plateau’s gentrification lays bare a bitter truth: the housing gap between international students and struggling Indigenous people is wielded as an excuse to make the class and ethnic divide even wider. Home should not be reserved for the lucky few. 

The post The Cost of a Matcha in Tiohtia:ke appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Terms such as ‘prude’ or ‘pious’ are now thrown around for those less interested in sex; those who embrace multiple partners face accusations of being a ‘fuckboy’ or ‘fuckgirl’; the ones who leap from relationship to relationship are labeled a ‘serial monogamist.’ Every set of sexual judgment collides across boundaries as our former stigmas lose their grip, encountering students from 152 different countries who each arrive carrying their own.

More strikingly, gendered archetypes arise. Chief among them is hybrid masculinity, defined by sociologists Tristan Bridges and C.J Pascoe as the incorporation of marginalized identities or progressive characteristics, such as queerness, feminism, or sensitivity, into performances of masculinity, while retaining social privilege and dominance. These gendered dynamics often mask compulsory heterosexuality behind the façade of wokism and feminism. It is mostly cosmetic: the ‘performative male’ fantasy doesn’t dismantle patriarchy’s grip on sexuality. 

Compulsory sexuality – the social expectation that everyone should be sexually active, interested in sex, or pursuing relationships– is further reinforced by the social, loud, party-centered environment of residence life. Sex is always just around the corner, talked about, overheard through thin walls, and constantly fantasized. With little else to do outside of classes, students fill their time by socializing before, between, and after lectures, and partying through the weekends. Our bodies suddenly become the center of social life. In residences, bowls of condoms appear during Frosh or Halloween, insinuating that sex will happen. The result is an edgy cocktail of hormones, peer pressure, substances, and newfound freedom, pushing boundaries, and lowering inhibitions.

College sexuality today is less about why you want to have sex and more about how you want it, on top of conditions that keep getting worse. COVID-19 introduced fears of proximity itself, producing tighter social boundaries and reducing sexual encounters. In the background, national politics – such as US abortion restrictions – loom heavily over American students, reminding them that sexual freedom is never guaranteed and always conditional.

And yet, paradoxically, while campus life is saturated with sexual talk and expectations, researchers and journalists have been warning of a ‘sex recession’. To explain it, some point to the rise of modern hookup culture. Bargained over on dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble, sex increasingly functions as a kind of online currency, reducing intimacy to a quick, one-off encounter that many find unappealing. Others accuse the impact of the #MeToo movement, which has exposed how deeply patriarchal structures shape sexual encounters, often leaving women feeling dispossessed of their own sexuality– here, what is framed as “sex” may in fact be experienced as a form of dispossession, closer to violation than to intimacy. At the same time, safety concerns have led to a redefinition of what “safe sex” means, not just protection from disease or pregnancy, but the pursuit of sexual experiences that are emotionally secure and consensual.

Beyond this, broader cultural anxieties weigh heavily: climate change, the rise of authoritarian politics, and mental health struggles all contribute to stress and disengagement from partnered sex. Instead, many young people turn inward, exploring sexuality alone through pornography or other sexual media. Indeed, sex has never felt more politicized, more fraught, and more carefully negotiated.

Ultimately, college sex teaches us that sexuality is not merely what happens to the body, but an experience of the self in the midst of the world.

The post The Politics of College Sex appeared first on The McGill Daily.