Venus Envy is a Canadian sex shop that is also an independent bookstore, with stores you can walk into and a shop online. It was the second Canadian business to make woman-friendly surroundings and service the point, a deliberate alternative to the usual sex store. It is for kink-curious adults, queer readers, and customers who want education along with toys. The counter is not the sleazy kind. Shelves, workshops, and community work make it something other than a novelty gift shop.
The Halifax, Nova Scotia store opened in 1998 in the city’s South End and moved the next year to its current downtown site. Under one roof it is the local women’s and LGBT bookstore and an adult retailer. The Ottawa, Ontario store started in the Byward Market in 2001, moved to Centretown in 2005, and later settled at 226 Bank Street. The Ottawa floor is narrower than Halifax. The books stay on sex, gender, reproduction, and health, not a broad women’s or LGBT list. In March 2022 the Ottawa store closed indefinitely after a fire, a break in the capital’s map of feminist adult retail.
In 2015 the Ottawa store was fined by the city for selling a chest binder to a minor. The case is a clash between harm-reduction and identity-affirming goods and older municipal rules written for sex shops. It is not a sexual incident, and it is not material about sex with a minor. Councillor Catherine McKenney and Mayor Jim Watson publicly backed the shop and called for the bylaw to change. The fine was later waived. So the store could operate as an all-ages space, Venus Envy took sexually explicit videos off the racks.
The shop also teaches and sponsors. It works with the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health, formerly Planned Parenthood Canada, and with student and women’s groups, and it runs sexual-health and sex-education workshops. Both locations have bursaries for local students in post-secondary school. Venus Envy sells vibrators and lube, and it also sits inside feminist and LGBTQ health networks as a place that teaches. A beginner can walk in without feeling they have entered a peep-show economy coded only for men.
