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By now most Canadian media outlets have reported on the gauntlet thrown by the Economist: Vancouver is “mind-numbingly boring.” The cheeky blog post “Torporville” has certainly been click-bait. For Ottawans, this critique of a city’s blandness is all too familiar.

But the important question raised by the post is not about whether Vancouver really is boring, despite most reports so far. It is about the writer’s desire to dabble in others’ hardship — the nostalgia for a time when a wrong turn into Alphabet City could lead to trouble.

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For many people, the grit the Economist writer so craves does not end after a frenzied night at the bar. The folks on the street who once gave the writer a rush are dehumanized: they become objects for entertainment. Sex workers, in particular, get a bad rap as symbols of risk: “edge,” and “grit” for affluent travellers to blithely gaze at. When it’s widely known that street sex workers are criminalized and subjected to violence or killed in our misogynist culture, and that this misogyny intersects with transphobia and white supremacy with dire implications for people’s survival, the author’s pursuit of “edgy” experiences is too ignorant to entertain.