Name John Ince Role Author, activist | Party The Sex Party Books The Politics of Lust | |
John Ince (born (1952-05-30)May 30, 1952) is a Canadian activist, politician, author, and lawyer. He is a founder of The Sex Party, a sex-positive movement political party of which he was party leader from 2005 until 2012.
Contents
Sex-positive activism
In 2002, Ince opened The Art of Loving, a sex shop in Vancouver, Canada. It sells art, instructional books and videos and pleasure products. It also produces almost one hundred sexual seminars a year, some led by Ince. He produced an erotic event at The Art of Loving that garnered international media attention in 2003.
In 2005 Ince and many other erotic arts activists founded The Sex Party, the world’s first officially registered sex-positive political party. Ince was party leader from 2005 until 2012. He and others ran as candidates in two provincial general elections in 2005 and 2009.
In 2010 Ince and Marke Brunke founded VancouverMensGroups.org, a website, to facilitate the formation of groups of men who are interested in connecting at a deeper level than usually occurs at social events.
Legal career
Ince began practicing law in the early 1980s focusing on environmental issues but gradually moved to the human rights field, specializing in sexual issues. He represented performers and individual citizens fighting sexual censorship laws. One of his cases, Luscher v. Canada, was successful in striking down as unconstitutional a federal law that had prohibited sexual material from entering Canada for over one hundred years. He represented the Canadian polyamory community in the 2011 constitutional reference case concerning Canada’s polygamy laws.
Books
Ince's first two books concerned the then emerging field of environmental law. Both Environmental Law and Land Use Law were first published by the West Coast Environmental Law Association and then by the legal publisher Butterworths.
Ince’s third title, Sea Kayaking Canada’s West Coast was co-authored with Hedi Kottner. It was in print for 20 years and was the first paddling guide to the sport of ocean kayaking.
Ince wrote The BC Guide to Buying Rural and Recreational Property in 1993. It is the only detailed guide to the process of acquiring property outside cities in British Columbia.
Ince worked on and off for almost twenty years researching his 2003 publication The Politics of Lust, (Prometheus Books) which argues that irrational sexual fear is pervasive in our culture, that it is largely unrecognized, and that it affects our political orientation.
His book, Joyshift: the journey to primal happiness was published in September 2015. It argues that the ingredients for happiness were genetically set in the hunter-gatherer era, and describes a daily practice to make use of these "primal nutrients of happiness" in modern-day life.