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The Current Transcript for February 17, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: It's kind of the most radical thing that you can do today, I think, because it just feels great to, you know, to contradict to what is expected by it, to you know, which is to speed up.

MATT GALLOWAY: In a world that seems to be moving faster and faster at every turn, the idea of deliberately slowing down might seem like a luxury. In 30 minutes, Erling Kagge is here to make the compelling case for walking in an era of running. And later on the show, today is a moment when several provinces celebrate Family Day. How would you feel about spending that quality family time talking to your teenage son about sex? No? Not so much?

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VOICE: It is not something that we as a culture have learned how to do, but we don't have the luxury anymore of silence, because if we don't, the media will educate our kids for us.

MG: In an hour, a reprise of our conversation with the author and journalist Peggy Orenstein about her groundbreaking book, Boys and Sex. But as coronavirus cases continue to build around the world, we begin this morning in the market where the outbreak began and with an animal trade now under the microscope. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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Experts call for global ban on live animal markets, wildlife trade amidst coronavirus outbreak

Guests: James Gorman, Cassandra Koenen, Dan Challender

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VOICE: Chinese authorities have traced a new deadly virus back to this seafood market in the city of Wuhan. It was apparently selling other live wild animals, including skinned birds, snakes and raccoon dogs, sparking concern that the virus might have been transmitted from animals to humans.

MG: When Chinese scientists first identified a new coronavirus last month, it didn't take long for them to trace the illness back to that live animal market in Wuhan. But the important work of pinpointing which animal the virus originated in and how exactly it jumped to humans is proving more difficult. James Gorman is a science reporter for The New York Times. James, good morning.

JAMES GORMAN: Good morning.

MG: For people who have never been, just very briefly, describe what these wet markets look like.

JAMES GORMAN: Well, they are, the animals are stacked one on top of another in cages. You have many, I'm going on the basis of people who've described it to me.

MG: Yeah,.

JAMES GORMAN: But there are, you may have snakes, palm civets, raccoon dogs and you may have chickens. Pigs, you can have. And in this case, there's all sorts of seafood. So it's really and many of the animals are stressed. So some may be ill. That's where the problem of viruses comes in.

MG: And so in that environment, how has the coronavirus been linked to that sort of market?

JAMES GORMAN: So there's a particular market in Wuhan and after the outbreak, they tested it and they, this is the Chinese researchers tested it and we know a little bit about what they found, but we don't have all the information. They said they found examples of the exact same virus sets in people on surfaces in the market that would be tables or animal cages. They apparently did not find it, at least as far as we know, and this is very murky and one of the difficulties in figuring out what exactly is going on in any of the live animals. But details on whether and how they tested the animals, we don't have those.

MG: The suspicion and you've written about this is that the coronavirus may have emerged from something called a pangolin.

JAMES GORMAN: Yes, a pangolin is a very unusual mammal. It has scales. It looks a little bit like an armadillo, although it's not that closely related. Sometimes it's called a scaly anteater and it's probably the most trafficked animal in the world. It's valued in China because it's a delicacy in terms of to eat and also the scales are supposed to be of medicinal value. So there's a huge, huge trade in pangolins. And they're not just, they're imported into China from throughout Southeast Asia.

MG: Why would people believe that this mammal is responsible for the coronavirus?

JAMES GORMAN: There have been coronaviruses have jumped to people before. There was the case of SARS, there's the case of MERS, these are respiratory viruses, somewhat similar and the SARS virus is very similar. In fact, the actual name of the new outbreak of the virus itself is SARS coronavirus 2. So there are viruses that are very, very similar in bats, but they would take a very long time to evolve to jump to people. They're like 96 percent similar and bats are the place where most coronaviruses or not most, but many have a reservoir. That is they don't bother the bat. But there were some pangolins that were studied last October and they did some genetic testing on them. These are pangolins that had died. Some of them had died of respiratory diseases and they found parts of the viruses in them very similar to the virus that's affecting people now. So the speculation is that probably or perhaps the pangolin and the bat virus merged. This is this happens in wet markets often, but that's a speculation because of similarity. There's no conclusive evidence. It could have been another animal. It could have been directly from a bat. It's not clear.

MG: You say that this has happened perhaps in other markets. Wet markets aren't the only kind of place where this sort of wildlife trade exists and where people have been concerned about the outbreaks of disease. Where else has this happened?

JAMES GORMAN: Well, it happened in the Middle East with MERS. And there the virus came from camels. Again, the reservoir is in bats. There are reasons why bats have so many viruses, but it was people who had and this was in 2013 I think, might have my dates wrong. But that was they found by talking to the people who were ill from it that they had all had contact with camels. So somehow the virus had jumped from bats to camels to people. In the case of MERS, I'm sorry, SARS, this is 2002, the one virus that this is very similar to the virus had left from it's called a spill-over. Had spilled over from bats to something called a palm civet, which people call it a civet cat. It's not really a cat, but it's a small mammal. Again, it's sold in wet markets. And from the civets, it went to people.

MG: There are also these bushmeat markets in parts of Africa. Tell us about what's happening there on the continent.

JAMES GORMAN: Well, in Africa, it's a little different. You know, in China, these animals are valued because they're traditional cuisine or they're considered delicacies. In Africa, it's more of a subsistence,or it started out as more of a subsistence thing, where people are hunting monkeys or chimpanzees and contact with chimpanzees is how we believe AIDS started, the HIV virus. Also, that's where Ebola comes from and Marburg virus. I mean, there are a number of viruses. Now there are also now markets in some of the big cities selling bushmeat, but it's not as evolved a trade as it is in China, and it's more related to subsistence. The same dangers exist everywhere. Essentially, when humans come into more contact with animals in greater numbers and we live in dense numbers and we're gonna contact, we're gonna come in contact with new viruses, some of those viruses are going to be able to make the jump from animals to us.

MG: So just before I let you go then, the I guess the logical answer to some of those questions is that you close the markets, that you control the wildlife trade and that you ban trade like this and this is something that's being raised in in China. Is that realistic? Is that practical?

JAMES GORMAN: I think it's the only way it can happen. I mean China is doing that now. They did it back in 2002. They stopped the trade in palm civets, but then the trade re-emerged. Whether they'll be able to stop something that's culturally, ingrained in the culture really depends on whether there's a change in the culture. And there's evidence on social media that people in China who are, you know, outraged by the government handling of the outbreak and who are very fearful are starting, there's starting to be a movement that you can't eat wild animals. We have to stop this. And if that happens, then the trade would at least diminish.

MG: James, it's good to talk to you about this. Thank you.

JAMES GORMAN: Thank you.

MG: James Gorman is a science reporter with The New York Times. Talking about what happens to these animals that are in markets like that and in that trade isn't easy. Hearing it? That is a whole other layer. And just a warning, this next thing that you're going to hear is disturbing.

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[Sound of grey parrot being caught by hunter]

MG: That is the sound of a grey parrot caught by a hunter in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cassandra Koenen is Global Head of Wildlife Campaign at World Animal Protection and she's with me now. Good morning.

CASSANDRA KOENEN: Good morning.

MG: That's really hard to hear.

CASSANDRA KOENEN: It is.

MG: What? What were we hearing?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: What you were hearing was a poacher that had gone out into the wild to capture an African grey parrot that was ultimately sold into the exotic pet trade.

MG: And the parrot was in great distress then.

CASSANDRA KOENEN: It was. They use very difficult tactics where they'll put glue on trees to trap these animals. And what we were actually hearing was the the parrot having its flight feathers really hacked off before it was shoved into a box.

MG: And what, the parrot ends up in a box and then where does it go?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: It follows a journey out of the wild back into, in this case, it was back into Kisangani, then into Kinshasa for flights out into most likely the Middle East, into the exotic pet trade. But it's a journey where there's way stops and at these places you'll see anything from horn bills and macaques and crested cranes and all of these animals that are caught by happenstance, by hunters and all traded into it, most likely into the exotic pet trade.

MG: How widespread is that exotic pet trade?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: Well, the wildlife trade in general is between $30 and $42 billion a year. The illegal trade is about $20 billion of that. And it's increasingly, the exotic pet trade is an increasingly problem around the world.

MG: And where do these pets end up? I mean, you say the pet trade. These are wild animals. Where are they ultimately ending up?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: They're actually ending up in our homes here in Canada, in other places around the world where people will keep them as pets. In here in Canada, it's against the law to to keep a raccoon or a skunk, but we don't seem to have a problem keeping other people's backyard wildlife in our homes. So you'll see people with ball pythons, with iguanas. There are 1.4, our studies have shown that there are 1.4 million exotic pets here in Canada in people's homes and backyards.

MG: James was talking about the pangolin, where that animal ends up, sometimes used in traditional medicine. What are people doing with otters? You're part of an investigation into where otters are ending up.

CASSANDRA KOENEN: We were. So we started hearing these interesting stories about people who were having pets in their homes in Japan in particular of baby otters. There's also a whole industry of otter cafes where you can give them their money and spend a half an hour feeding an otter, interacting.

MG: What, an otter cafe?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: An otter cafe.

MG: So this is like a pet cafe, like a cat cafe, but with otters?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: Exactly. That's exactly what it is. So we did an investigation and traced them back to where they were getting pulled out and it's part of an illegal trade coming out of Indonesia. And these animals are ending up in these cafes and in people's homes in Japan.

MG: In the wake of what's going on around the coronavirus, China has introduced what it says is going to be a temporary ban on the wildlife trade. What do you make of what China is proposing?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: We absolutely think it's the right first step to put this temporary ban in place. But really, it's not about one country. It's a global problem that needs a global solution and it's really time to bring an end to the global wildlife trade.

MG: Dan Challender has been listening in, post-doctoral researcher with the University of Oxford's Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade. Dan, good morning to you.

DAN CHALLENDER: Good morning.

MG: When you hear about those bans and again, Cassandra saying that that's an interesting and a good first step, how effective is a ban like the one that China is proposing, given what you know about this wildlife trade?

DAN CHALLENDER: Well, I think it's difficult to comment on the effectiveness of the measures that China's taken in response to the COVID-19 outbreak because it's still happening and the measures have only just been implemented. But I am concerned that the outbreak of COVID-19 is being used as a platform to say we should have bans on wildlife trade more broadly because there are a number of problems with bans. They typically fail for a number of reasons, due to imperfect enforcement and typically, individuals motivated by wanting to make a financial profit, being willing to harvest and trade and processing and retail and individuals willing to consume products. So you get an illegal trade when bans occur. So I think we should be really cautious about calling for bans.

MG: Tell me more about that. I mean, you would think that if you ban the trade, that that is going to be better for the animals. What could go wrong if you have these bans in place?

DAN CHALLENDER: Well, bans do sound intuitively positive, but what we've found through history, especially with wildlife and prohibitions on alcohol in the U.S. in the 1930s, for example, is that when you do have a ban, they can be ineffective, because there's individuals that will harvest wildlife that are willing to trade wildlife, transport, process wildlife and consumers that are willing to consume wildlife. So when you do have a ban in place, if it isn't enforced well, and typically wildlife trade bans suffer from imperfect enforcement, then you get an illegal trade, and that's difficult because it's hard to monitor, it's clandestine and it's difficult to tell the impact that it's having on the populations of species in the wild, which could be severely negative.

MG: A black market in this trade then.

DAN CHALLENDER: Exactly.

MG: You mentioned the imperfect enforcement. Is that the role of government? And are you talking about assessing how governments do it at curbing that wildlife trade?

DAN CHALLENDER: I am and that's one of the key things that governments can do here is to enact legislation and then enforce it. But there's all sorts of problems with enforcement, not least whether a species that is subject to a ban is subject to passive enforcement. So is this a species is added to a list and law enforcement agents are expected to just enforce that alongside all the other species mandated to protect? Or were they actually targeting individuals that are involved in harvesting and trading in a given species? So that's a big problem. There's lots of problems in terms of capacity as well, both in terms of human resources and technical resources. And there's also political realities associated with this. In many parts of the global south, for example, countries are prioritizing education, health care and all the other things that governments have to deal with, and wildlife crime often gets knocked down the agenda.

MG: That the trade in wild birds or other kinds of animals isn't a priority if you're dealing with those more pressing issues?

DAN CHALLENDER: Exactly. And even where it is a priority, there's political reality to the amount of funding that's available for governments to invest in this. Absolutely.

MG: Cassandra, you mentioned Canada and that this isn't just an issue that is outside of our borders. How widespread is the wildlife trade here in Canada?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: Well, I think it's a lot more prominent than people think it is. It may not be wet markets like we're seeing in Asia or the bushmeat markets that we see in Africa, but what we do have here in Canada are these large pet expos where you you know, they're billed as family events and you go out to them and it's just tables and rows and rows and rows of iguanas and snakes and ornamental spiders in the same containers that you would buy your gummy bears in at your grocery store. So and it's a growing market. We also, you know, have traditional medicine here in Canada as well, where people are looking for products with tiger bone, with bear bile, even seahorses in the, you know, in the belief that it will have some medicinal purposes. And we unfortunately are not regulating the laws around the ownership of wild animals in a way that we should be.

MG: How do those animals get in? If you're using them for traditional medicine, how do they end up here in Canada in the first place?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: Yeah, so our customs border services are capturing the illegal stuff. So, you know, we went down and spoke to them and and they are stopping, seizing pangolin scales.

MG: How does somebody smuggle pangolin scales into the country?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: Well, I don't know. I wouldn't be able to speak for sure exactly how someone is doing that. But it's not hard to get animals into wildlife. So examples with African grey parrots, they stuffed them in boxes with green parrots, put a green kind of shield around the box and people think it's a green parrot coming into the box. You'll find budgies stuffed in hair curlers so that the hair curlers they put in your hair, they'll stuff, a budgie into that. They'll put them in golf, you know, golf ball containers. Like it's really remarkable what people will do to get an animal in.

MG: You've written to the minister of the Environment and Climate Change calling for greater regulations. What specifically do you want here in Canada?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: There are a couple of things that we want. One, most importantly is that we're not tracking where these animals are ending up or once they're in the country, if they're not a listed species, which most of the wildlife that is being traded is. So we're looking for better regulations. And the reality is it's easier, you know, there's more demands for a cat or dog licence than there is for an iguana or a snake.

MG: Dan, if the bans don't work, what else would work then to protect these species?

DAN CHALLENDER: Well, I think as it pertains to the case in China, but also where wildlife markets occur elsewhere in the world, we need to ensure that these markets, if they're going to exist, because bans are a poor policy choice, then they need to be better regulated, they need to be sanitary, so public health issues are addressed and they also need to ensure that there's adequate animal welfare. And that's probably a better policy response than a blanket ban.

MG: Politically, how difficult is it to go into another country and say, I mean, James was talking about cultural change, to say these markets, which may be a big part of your culture, need to be shut down because we're concerned about the not just the health effects, but the welfare of the animals as well. How politically difficult is that, Dan?

DAN CHALLENDER: Well, I think it is politically difficult, especially because, you know, some of the issues that we're seeing in China with the breakout of COVID-19 are not limited to China. There's other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, and parts of South and Southeast Asia that are dealing with similar things. And it's about governments taking responsibility for this themselves and working with partner countries to ensure that the wildlife trade is regulated and doesn't affect the species in the wild.

MG: Cassandra, how do you go about doing that in terms of changing people's attitudes, leading to that cultural change that James was talking about?

CASSANDRA KOENEN: I think a lot of it is about education. I think it's important that when issues like this arise and when we're faced with situations like this, that we're educating people about the dangers of eating wild animals, of trading in wild animals and how that happens. But I do think there is a responsibility that we need to speak to governments, that we need to put more money into enforcement, we need to put more money into health care and education around these issues.

MG: Cassandra, thank you.

CASSANDRA KOENEN: Thank you very much.

MG: And Dan, thank you so much.

DAN CHALLENDER: Thank you.

MG: Cassandra Koenen is the Global Head of the Wildlife Campaign at the World Animal Protection. Dan Challender, postdoctoral researcher with the University of Oxford's Oxford Martin Program on the Illegal Wildlife Trade. The CBC News is next. And then, slow down, think more, rush less. And the best way to do that, according to Erling Kagge, is to walk. He walks a lot, like to the North Pole and through entire cities. He says that shorter treks are just fine as well. You don't need to walk to the North Pole to get the benefits of walking. We'll talk to him about slowing down, coming up after the news, in about six minutes time. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current on CBC Radio One. Stay with us.

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In a fast-paced world, walking is a 'radical' act, says Norwegian explorer

Guests: Erling Kagge

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway. And you're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come this morning.

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VOICE: Boys will talk about putting up a wall and, you know, they were allowed happiness and anger and anything else, a number of them use that phrase, you know would go behind the wall or a number of them would use the phrase, I trained myself not to feel.

MG: Peggy Orenstein talked to boys, a lot of boys, for her latest book about boys and sex. It's a book about their emotions, about alcohol and about hook-ups. My conversation with Peggy Orenstein is coming up in half an hour. But first, an antidote to the culture of rush, rush, rush.

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MG: It's mid-winter, a holiday in much of the country, perhaps on a holiday Monday like today, a good day for a walk.

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[Sounds of walking in snow]

MG: Whether it's in a forest, down a city sidewalk, up a mountainside or along a shoreline, the ancients knew that walking solves everything. It's a bit of wisdom that we are prone to forgetting today though. Erling Kagge is hoping to remind us of its power with his latest book. It's called Walking: One Step At A Time. He's somebody who walks the walk, having literally walked to the ends of the earth. He is the first person in history to reach both the north and south poles and the summit of Mount Everest on foot. When he's not exploring, he's an author, philosopher and a book publisher in Norway. Erling Kagge, good morning.

ERLING KAGGE: Hi. How are you?

MG: I'm well, thanks. How much have you walked already today?

ERLING KAGGE: I walked to this studio, which took about 25, 30 minutes and then I walked to my office in the morning, which was about 35 minutes. So it's you know, it's quite nice and I really liked the sound of those steps at the beginning of this interview. Thank you.

MG: What's the walk like in Norway these days? I mean, describe what you're walking through and what it feels like.

ERLING KAGGE: In Norway, like Canada, very much, you know things are very much about speed. People always in a hurry. Everybody tells you, you know, I'm short on time and I think, you know, walking like I did this morning and to this studio, like walking do it kind of slow pace. Seeing the buildings, people watching, smell the air, feel like you know that you're kind of moving slowly. It's kind of the most radical thing you can do today, I think, because it's it just feels great to, you know, to do contradictory to what is expected by you, to you know, which is to speed up.

MG: The most radical thing you can do today?

ERLING KAGGE: I think it is so because the government would like it to speed up. All commercial interests would like you to speed up. The education system would like you to speed up and everybody's speeding up. In Norway today, probably like in Canada, people spend about four hours every day on social media, and if you live until 84 years old, that means that you will spend 13 years of your life, day and night, on social media. And then you cannot hurry up in between. And that's one of the beauties of walking that, you know, if you're not holding anything in your hand, you kind of live independent of everybody else. You kind of step aside. And as in the English language, if you move, you're being moved and you have motion and you feel emotion.

MG: So describe your walk into the studio. What did you see on your way in to talk to me?

ERLING KAGGE: It's getting dark in Norway. It's you know, it's quite a bit up north. I didn't see the sun at all, but you know, it had the dawn, so it had kind of the light from the sun. And I'm seeing people hurrying back from their offices. People are quite stressed. And of course, if you're going to get to kindergarten in time, you know, if you are in a hurry. But to me, it seems like most people in the streets are also kind of hurrying up between their offices and their homes. And it's not that much to do at home, but it seems like, you know, they're always in a hurry. And the cars are queuing up and people get restless. So it's interesting to see.

MG: You start this book in describing your daughter learning how to walk. I think it's a moment that that any of us parents would remember and recognize and something that we think fondly of. Why did you want to start there?

ERLING KAGGE: Because becoming a father to me, after being to the North Pole, South Pole and top of Everest was a total change in my life. At the same time, as I became a father, my grandmother somehow did not manage to walk anymore. So, she moved into a home for elderly people, laid down in her bed and never walked again. And that was kind of the day she died. Although physically she lived for another few months, but the spirit was gone. And at the same time, I saw my daughter, second daughter, started to learn how to walk, and somehow walked out of the house into the world and start to wonder what was hidden between herself and the horizon. It reminded me about, you know, that we're kind of all born explorers, that we are born to walk and that walking is much more, you know, it's not only about getting from A to B, it's also about experiencing the world. I think today somehow we're thinking too much in the sense that iwe're thinking, thinking about the past or thinking about the future. But walking is very much about experiencing the present, experiencing yourself, the world and to see the world in slow motion.

MG: That's a very meditative concept. The idea that you're in that one place and that you're not thinking about what's happening in the future or what's happened behind you.

ERLING KAGGE: Yeah, and it's a beautiful feeling. And, you know, I think it has always been hard to grasp that feeling, but today it's even more complicated because you have so many choices and we have getting so much distractions throughout the today. So we're kind of living in the age of noise and I think what we need more and more is to reconnect to nature. Not like I did for many years to live in nature all the time, but, you know, every now and then, get in touch with nature and listening to the wind and feel the cold and, you know, smelled all the different, you know, vibrations of nature. And that, again, I think will make us, you know, to feel more satisfied with life.

MG: Tell me about walking to the South Pole. You did this in 50 days by yourself with no radio, no noise around you. What was that like?

ERLING KAGGE: First when I start walking into this huge white continent, everything is flat. As I said, everything is white all the way up to the horizon. But as the days and weeks pass by, you start to see it's not totally flat after all. You have small formations, different structures and variations of white, a little bit greenish, yellowish, bluish reddish appearing in the ice and the snow. And then you start to communicate a little bit with nature, an the idea that you send some thoughts out there, and you get some other ideas back again. And of course, you can wonder if Antarctica was changing or if I was changing, but of course, Antarctica remained the same, but I was the one who was changing on the trek towards the North Pole. And I think that's the same kind of experience as you have if you go into wilderness in Canada and Norway too, but of course, if you're absolutely by yourself, no radio contact for weeks, and eventually for 50 days, of course, that feeling is much, much stronger. And also, that expedition learned me a great lesson on the importance of silence, the importance of walking. To me, walking is very much about silence, inner silence and as I said also about the importance of being in touch with nature and not only with man made environments.

MG: I think for a lot of us when we go for a walk and maybe it's if we're in the midst of all of that noise and the business of our lives, if we take the time and we go for a walk, that's when you can solve the problems that are swirling around in your head or you come up with the idea that you've been thinking about, but haven't been able to land. What do we know about the connection between walking and thinking?

ERLING KAGGE: Today, we know quite a lot. In the old days, like in you know, in Greece with the great philosophers two thousand, two and a half thousand years ago, they walked all the time. Socrates, of course, he walked the streets. Aristotle walked the streets. And the reason they walked so much was because they knew they were thinking so much better. It was super good for creativity and I think, you know, any advice that has lasted that for more than 1000 years, we should take seriously. And today, quite a few American universities that have been doing research on this, of how walking influences creativity. And it's kind of confirmed what Socrates experienced that as soon as you start walking, you don't need to walk for more than 50 minutes, your creativity will increase by something like 60 percent.

MG: And there are examples of people who I mean, they've accomplished great creative things in the time that they were out walking. Right?

ERLING KAGGE: Absolutely. And of course, you know, a guy like Steve Jobs, he kept on walking, having his meetings while he was walking. And you know, I feel the same way. And if I, you know, my brain stopped working properly, I'm tired or frustrated or kind of hit the wall with my ideas, if I get up on two legs and just walk around the block, my head clears up. And I also think it's like, you know, I think in terms of memory, if you walk slowly, you tend to remember things much better than if you're sitting still or moving really quickly. And to me, that was my experience with intelligence that my IQ somehow seems to work better than when I'm walking rather than running or sitting down.

MG: I mean, that's the other thing is, is that there are a lot of us who we might go for a run, but most of us spend our days sitting down. You're at desk, you're behind a desk, you might be unable to get up and walk. And if you do get outside, you're not walking, you're jumping in the car, taking transit and zipping around as fast as you can because your life is really busy. What do we miss if we are not walking and walking slowly in particular?

ERLING KAGGE: I think you know what you eventually will miss is to fulfil, you know, the potentials you have in life to get to know yourself. And of course, one of the old advices in the world is to get, you know, try to get to know yourself. And I think all this about you know having speed in your life, like you said, you leave your office and you jump into a car because you feel in a hurry that you all speeds up is all about living through other people. It's all about adapting to society's expectations about you kind of, you know, creating to a gross national product. And it's about forgetting yourself. And walking, moving slowly, is about the opposite. It's about seeing the world in a slightly different angle. And it's about, you know, being able to think things through and experience the world in a slightly different fashion and to get to know yourself.

MG: What have you seen while you've been walking that you wouldn't have noticed that you wouldn't have seen if you were on a bike or running or in a car?

ERLING KAGGE: It's hard say in a few seconds, because I've been walking now for 55 of my 56 years. But like, for instance, like in the States, like a few weeks ago, I walked from upstate New York at the beginning of Broadway, all the Broadway through the different cities north of the main New York City, Yonkers and then into Bronx and walked all the way through Harlem, midtown to southern part of Broadway. Of course, that's a long walk.

MG: How long did that take?

ERLING KAGGE: It took me 24 hours. I slept a few hours with some friends up in Bronx. The thing is, we saw exactly the same as everybody who's driving the same distance will see, but we saw it in slow motion. We saw it from the angle of the side of the road and we got a chance to see the buildings, the grass, the trees, the concrete, the pavements, all the faces, saw how people walking. We got all the smells, we felt the weather and we got to kind of really in touch with New York City. I mean, it was no great discoveries, but many small discoveries. And also, you know, you asked me about, you know, walking the streets in Oslo. I think it's just also important to see the people you're living in. I think it's almost you know, it's a little bit of a democratic problem that people stop seeing each other. And Of course, that's when they talk about walking in cities, but of course, if you walk in nature, if you walk in the wilderness and even in a park, it's even so much richer.

MG: You did this in Los Angeles as well. You write in the book about trying to walk across Los Angeles?

ERLING KAGGE: Yes. Everybody in L.A. that drive all the time and you know, they explore the city through the windows of a car, that's almost like seeing a city on TV. And what we did, we went from eastern LA, walked down to Sunset Boulevard and then walked to Sunset all the way out to the ocean and tried to, you know, experience the city by walking. And of course, in LA most people who walk, the few who walks they are junkies or maybe a bit insane or whatever. And we were even stopped by police because it was suspicious that someone was walking.

MG: Sorry, what did the police say to you? Why did they stop you?

ERLING KAGGE: They stopped us because, you know, first of all, they kind of you know, asked us kind of, you know, in a strict way what we were up to. And we told the officer that we're three Norwegians trying to see a city in a different fashion than everybody else. So he thought it was a bit funny, he was a nice guy and then he asked us if we want to take selfies with him. So it was a nice meeting.

MG: They didn't put you in the back of the car and drive you, rather than let you continue to walk.

ERLING KAGGE: I don't think the police in LA are, you know, looking for well educated white Norwegians.

MG: You might have a point there. You tried to walk across Boston. What happened there?

ERLING KAGGE: Yeah, I tried to walk. I had a few hours extra and I tried to walk from my hotel downtown Boston to the airport. That was quite complicated actually. I followed Google on my phone, which I think, you know, quite often it's a mistake because you will never lose your way and you will always be punctual. You always follow the best route, which I think is a mistake, but on this occasion I followed Google Maps. It took me straight into the river in Boston. And I couldn't swim across the river, so I had to actually give up. I didn't make it. I managed to walk to the North Pole, but I didn't manage to walk to the airport from Boston from downtown Boston.

MG: Is there some charm in getting lost? I mean not ending up in the river obviously, but is there some charm in going for a walk and not knowing where you're going? Not looking at the phone, waiting for the phone to say, you know, take five more steps and then turn left, but actually just going and perhaps getting completely lost in a city or in the country?

ERLING KAGGE: Yeah, I think so. And I think because today, when you see people, you know, in the forest or in the city, quite often they just look down at their phone all the time, partly because, you know, either they're texting or they're reading the paper or they're navigating. And, you know, then you hardly experience anything. You know, to use your mind to navigate and also kind of get the feeling that sometimes you're lost, you're wondering if you're going to walk to the left or the right, it's a great feeling. And If you use Google Maps all the time, you're not getting that feeling.

MG: A lot of us will go for a walk and we'll have the headphones in, the earbuds or whatever, and we'll be listening to a podcast. Is that time well-spent when you're out walking?

ERLING KAGGE: I think it's time well spent if it's a great podcast, but I think it's even better spent if you're not listening to anything. That you're kind of you know listening to yourself, because that's what we do too seldom today, because it's you know, you always have to choose between silence and noise throughout the day and then we choose noise because that's the easiest option. But sometimes that's, you know, a good choice, but quite often I think it's a wrong choice.

MG: To a lot of people this might sound really interesting, but also a complete fantasy. That they live busy lives, they need to take the car because to your point, the day-care is closing, they have to zip across town or down the road to get the kids before the day-care closes. They have dinner that they need to be making. There's a hockey practice that happens that night and they don't have time to go and walk anywhere. What would you say to people who say that they just don't have time to walk?

ERLING KAGGE: In general, I would say they are wrong. But of course, it's you know, it's exceptions like, you know, say sometimes, of course, if you have, you know, three kids are going to three different directions, etc., of course, you know, there's a season for everything. So maybe for, you know, for some periods of your life you're simply too busy for walking too much. But of course, you can still walk the stairs, you can still walk a little bit between meetings or, you know, whatever. But then on other times of your life, you'll have more time to spend. But I think, you know, I've travelled to more than 100 countries and met thousands of people and I think most people underestimate themselves and also underestimate you know the possibilities they have to walk for half an hour, rather to, you know, spend eight minutes or ten minutes driving the same distance. I think, you know, most people have time for that.

MG: You write in the book about this idea that walking creates time. What do you mean by that?

ERLING KAGGE: If you walk, time is prolonged because you experience so many things while you're walking. So you feel that the time lasts much longer, while if you drive you hardly experience anything and you feel like, you know, time is short. And we need this variety in life because, you know, when you get as old as I am 56, not to mention if you're 60 or 70, 80 years old, your friends start to complain a lot about life being short and they're so unhappy about life being short, but the thing is, life is long if you use it in a good way.

MG: When did you figure this out? You were working as a corporate lawyer before you entered a different universe and became among other things, a book publisher. When did you realize that you weren't taking full advantage of the time that you had in front of you?

ERLING KAGGE: I grew up in the sixties and seventies in Norway and of course, at that time, you listen to your parents and they send their child into the forest in the mountains and often the ocean at a quite early age. So I kind of I got to experience early on, but you know, I didn't really start to understand it big before I went, you know, as you mentioned, walked to to the South Pole. That was, you know, that was a great experience. But also when I started work, as I said, as a lawyer, and I got three kids and eventually they were all three teenage daughters and my life was all about noise. Then I started to kind of, you know, start to see life from a different perspective. This experience of silence. It's easy to think about, you know, having silent moments about living an even more egocentric life, but to me, my experience is that silence to have inner silence is about the opposite. It's about understanding the world in a different way. It's about finding respect for the people, you know, much more respect and it's about loving life and loving the earth even more.

MG: Winter has arrived. It not just in Oslo, but here in Canada as well and it's cold and perhaps people don't want to get out and walk because the weather is awful. You suggest that perhaps that's part of the pleasure in getting out and walking. What do you mean?

ERLING KAGGE: Yeah I think that's, you know, the experience. Everybody who's kind of, you know, get you know, put some proper clothes on and get out, despite the better, not because of the weather, but despite the weather. You know, they will have the great experiences. I think that's something everybody who walks, you know, they share the same experience. When they eventually get out, the weather is so much nicer outside and it feels when you're sitting inside thinking about it.

MG: That it's better outside, even if it's nasty outside than it looks if you're sitting inside and not going outside?

ERLING KAGGE: Absolutely. I mean, if you stay in a tent and you freeze, you know, you freeze like hell and it's blowing heavily outside, you know, it's so tempting to stay in the sleeping bag and freeze a little bit for five minutes, not to mention five hours. But, you know, the greatest challenge being a polar expert today is the same as it was 100 years ago, is to get up in the morning and then eventually get out of the tent. The weather's always nicer outside than it feels it is inside the tent. And the same applies I think when you live in a house.

MG: It might be a hard sell for people who are warm around the fire and looking out the window and seeing winter blowing around outside.

ERLING KAGGE: I'm more optimistic than you actually. I think, you know, it's I think this trend about being connected at all times, being available, accepting to be disturbed at, you know, 24 hours a day, I think that trend will slowly turn and people will see the beauty of you know, listening to themselves and to the nature, at least parts of the day.

MG: And to your point, I mean, you know, the fire is also nice when you come in and when you warm up after being outside in that weather.

ERLING KAGGE: That's very good, because if you sit in front of the fire every day, day after day, you know, that gets very boring. And I think that's a major problem for many people today that, you know, they lack excitement in life and I think, you know, by walking, you'll find some more excitement in life.

MG: Where do you want to walk next?

ERLING KAGGE: I will walk home. My girlfriend is visiting from London, so I will walk home and give her a big hug and hopefully she'll have some dinner for me.

MG: You've inspired me to walk home from work today and I will do that. Erling Kagge, it's great to talk to you. Thank you so much.

ERLING KAGGE: Thank you.

MG: Bye bye.

ERLING KAGGE: Bye Matt.

MG: Erling Kagge's latest book is called Walking: One Step At A Time. He was in Oslo. We'd love to hear from you about the power of walking. What is your favourite walk in the country and what is it that that walk gives you? I spent part of the weekend walking through the forest in very deep snow and that was restorative in some measure. Where do you like to walk in this country of ours and what are those walks give you? You can email us at thecurrent@cbc.ca, tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or head to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the Contact link. And if youre tweeting us, send us a photo of the walk and where you happen to be out strolling perhaps on this Family Day, if you're marking that today. Coming up in our next half hour, Peggy Orenstein knows that most of us would rather poke ourselves in the eyeball with a fork than talk to our boys about sex, but she says this is a conversation we need to have or else those boys will learn about sex elsewhere and nobody wants that. My conversation with Peggy Orenstein coming up in 90 seconds after the break. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current. Stick around.

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Talk to your sons about sex the way you would about table manners: often, says author

Guests: Peggy Orenstein

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: See hooking up to me is, like to girls I know, like girls like taking more personally than guys like for me, for example, a few months ago, I hooked up with some lady at the party. I didn't really have a good time. She didn't really have a good time. Honestly, it was as boring as [beep]. I mean excuse my language. But, honestly, I feel like us, guys, it's like, oh, cool. As girls it's on a girls standpoint. It's like damn. Like you start catching feelings, I guess, because it seems like more something more personal than anything else.

VOICE 2: I also feel like a lot of the hooking up is happens at parties and stuff when people are like under, intoxicated and under the influence.

VOICE 1: Because when you're intoxicated you have a way more confidence than when you're not. Like honestly. Like. Yes. You wake up the next morning like, what the [bee] did I do. I mean excuse me. And you're like what do I do? Then they're like, you know, you do this and then you're like, man! And then you start your day off by going to McDonald's, getting Egg McMuffin, you know.

MG: Drinking, then hooking up, then grabbing a breakfast sandwich. Perhaps no big deal for 16 year old boys in Vancouver. That's a pretty typical 12 hour cycle for teens, according to Peggy Orenstein, the author and journalist who spent much of her career looking at sex and relationships from a female point of view. She was on this very program a few years ago talking about her book, Girls and Sex Navigating the New Complicated Landscape. Well, now it's the Boys Turn. Her new book is called Boys and Sex: Young Men on Hook-ups Love, Porn, Consent and Navigating the New Masculinity. A note for listeners, perhaps not surprisingly, this conversation will include some frank discussions about sex. Peggy Orenstein is in our New York City studio. Peggy, good morning.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Good morning. That was a great clip.

MG: I was going ask what goes through your mind when you hear those two teenage boys talking about hook-up.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: They could have been any boys that I talked to. You know, one of the things that I've always focussed on language and I have long had an obsession with that phrase, catching feelings, like it's a disease, like, you know, you don't want to catch an STD. You don't want to catch chlamydia. You don't want to catch gonorrhea. You don't want to catch feelings. It's a very telling thing.

MG: At the risk of sounding like the middle old May, a little middle-aged man that I am or even older than the middle aged man that I am. What exactly is hook-up culture?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: So there is a difference between a hook-up and hook-up culture. The word hook-up is an intentionally ambiguous word, and it can you know, it could mean anything. It could mean making out. It could mean oral sex. It could mean intercourse. And the fact that it's ambiguous allows kids to over estimate what their peers are doing and perhaps kind of obfuscate what they're doing. And it can put pressure on young people to feel like they should be doing things that maybe they don't want to do, having unwanted sex, maybe be a little push a little harder if they're guys than they might otherwise. But the idea of casual sex obviously is not new. It's been around forever. But what hook-up culture is the idea that casual sex or sex precedes intimacy. So the physical precedes the emotional rather than being a product of it. And a hook-up has become the kind of path to a relationship to young people, even though the great majority of hook-ups don't lead to a relationship.

MG: You could imagine some parents even hearing that clip off the top. Hearing those two teenage boys talking, you could imagine the parents freaking out because it sounds as though those kids are talking another language. You talked about, you know, catching feelings that the parents may not understand the hook-up culture. It might reject this idea that young people are having sex all the time. Are those parents wrong?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes and no. As I said, a hook-up can mean anything. And the fact is, among college students, which is where most of the research is, is done. About 30 to 40 percent of hook-ups involve intercourse and 25 to 30 percent go no further than kissing and groping. And with high school students, the majority are, you know, the intercourse [unintelligible]. So, you know, kids are not having more sex than they used to if you define it by intercourse, but they are engaging in other acts more than they used to. And when we don't label those acts as sex, then we actually open the door to disrespect and potential misconduct.

MG: You speak with more than 100 boys and young men for this book.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I did.

MG: How did you manage to get them to talk as openly as they do to you about something as traditionally awkward as talking about sex?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I think it's just that I gave them permission, and I have to say that when I started, I was kind of reluctant to write about boys. I've been writing about girls for 25 years and I didn't think they would talk. And I you know, I actually thought I would have entire transcripts consisting of ah-ha ha. Something like that. But so I was surprised. It was one of the biggest surprises to me, how eager they were to talk and how eager they were to explore, not just to describe what was going on with them, but they actually had a lot of insight and one expressed a lot of anxiety and conflict and feeling that, you know, they maybe they resist that idea of catching feelings on a surface level but beneath that, they're having a lot of feelings. And having the opportunity to discuss that I think was so rare for them that they went for it. And I also found that those experiences, they would say to me all the time, you know, this was an amazing conversation. This was like therapy. And they felt sort of even that short conversation that we would have on, you know, in the shorter interviews, that it was transformative. And I thought, wow, if they can have that talking to a stranger. Imagine if we could create an environment where they could actually have those authentic conversations with the adults in their lives or with one another.

MG: There's this moment in the book where you're talking to one of the boys that you profile, Wyatt, and you develop this kind of ongoing relationship with him talking about hook-up culture. You're in the midst of this conversation and then you get a text from another boy that you've been talking to called Nate. What happens in that moment?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: That is one of my favourite moments in the book, because you can never predict something like that. You know, you can't make that happen. So Wyatt, I had been talking to him for about a year and he had gone through sort of the whole hook-up scene where he was very active. And then at first I liked it and then started to feel that it was really hollow and not representative of who he was and not what he wanted. And we were talking about that. And Nate texts and he's off looking at colleges where he'd been admitted and is seeing this hook-up scene at one of the schools that he's at. And that's something that he wasn't wanting for himself. He'd had a bad experience. It wasn't what he'd want. He wanted something more connected. And he just said, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to go to Bone Town? - That was his phrase - and worry about connecting with somebody later, or am I just supposed to forget about that part? And so I asked Wyatt, who was on Skype. This is what Nate is saying. How would you respond to him? And they ended up having this conversation through me about basically being your authentic self and being able to not necessarily have to follow that script that you're being given. And it was so meaningful to Nate. And he you know, he said, thank you. That was just what I needed to hear. And then he sent me a little heart emoji. And I really sat with that for a while because this was amazing that he got to have this experience and he got to have who he was validated and have that support. And it really just happened because of this weird happenstance of both of them being part of a book.

MG: What did that exchange tell you about how boys experience hook-up culture?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Well, despite what the guys said at the top of your show, most of the boys that I met and most of the boys, when you look at research, are at best ambivalent themselves about hook-up culture. You know, as one guy said to me who had hooked up with 10 girls his first semester of freshman year of college and had intercourse with five. So he was fairly active. He said, you know, it can feel like you're having two distinct experiences and there's not a lot of eye contact. There's not a lot of even conversation necessarily. And it's like you're acting vulnerable but not being vulnerable, which is weird. And he said, you know, it's not necessarily a problem for me, but it's not especially fun.

MG: Did that surprise you?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I've talked to enough students to know that whenever we have conversations about hook-up culture, they tend to devolve into what they don't like about hook-up culture. And when I'll ultimately say, well, so why do you keep engaging in it? They sort of say, well, you know, it's still sex. Like it's still your social life. It's better than not. It's kind of because it's what what's on offer, I guess.

MG: How does alcohol complicate hook-up culture? You write that it doesn't just complicated that in many ways hook-up culture is dependent on binge drinking.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes. Yes. Lisa Wade talks a lot about that American hook-up, which is a great book on hook-up culture. Alcohol creates what Lisa Wade calls a compulsory carelessness because you have to drink in order to get past the awkward of think of hooking up with another person. And it also is what establishes meaninglessness in a hook-up. If you hooked up with somebody sober, you know that that would actually mean something. Boys are also acutely aware now that having sexual interaction with somebody who is intoxicated is assault. And so the trick becomes finding somebody who is drunk enough and being drunk enough yourself to say yes, but not so drunk that they can't give consent. And that becomes really complicated. That's the kind of thing that terrifies parents. That is the kind of thing that terrifies parents are that they really need to talk to their kids about. And the thing is, I think we've talked a lot about and to girls about the perils of alcohol for them. But we haven't talked enough about the impact of alcohol on boys, because boys have a tendency to over perceive 'yes' particularly when they're drunk and to not hear 'no', especially when they're drunk. And also and I think the boy at the top in your clip was saying it, you know, it gives you the courage to do what you might not otherwise do, including push harder than you might otherwise push. Drunk boys are also less likely to step in if they see something happening as bystanders than they would if they were sober. So alcohol doesn't just put girls at risk. It puts boys at risk of harming somebody else. And it's really important to talk to boys about that and about the gender and power dynamics that can happen within hook-up culture.

MG: A lot of this helps create what the modern definition of masculinity is, or at the very least, how these young boys and young men interpret the idea of masculinity. When you were speaking with with these boys and men, what did they tell you about what makes that, quote unquote, ideal guy?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It was really interesting because on one hand, of course, a lot has changed and boys see girls as deserving of their place in the classroom. They see them as deserving of, you know, their place in the playing field in leadership. They have female friends. So in the public realm, there's been a great deal of progress, but privately, not so much. And whereas girls have a much broader idea of what it means to be female, boys, when you say, hey, what's the ideal guy? Their description really sounds like they're channelling 1955. And it's all about sexual conquest, athleticism, dominance. There is a kind of new thing of being simultaneously aggressive and chill, which I can't quite understand. And then, you know, the real biggie, emotional suppression, stoicism.

MG: Not crying.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Not crying so that whole piece of resisting vulnerability. When I used to talk to girls, a big theme of that work was about how girls are disconnected from their bodies. And boys were disconnected from their hearts. That whole thing that you mentioned of not crying, you know, boys would talk about putting up a wall and, you know, they were allowed happiness and anger and anything else. A number of them use that phrase, you know, would go behind the wall or a number of them would use the phrase I trained myself not to feel or, you know, the taboo against crying.

MG: What was it? There's a story in the book about the boy whose parents gets divorced.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes. That was just going to say that. One of the boys talks about wanting to cry when his parents were divorced, got divorced and he couldn't. So he streamed three movies about the Holocaust back to back and said, well, that did the trick. But, you know, he had to do that in order to connect with his feelings.

MG: This idea of the ideal man it's, as you said, really complex. There's a lot that's going on. Our producer in Vancouver went out and spoke with a 22-year-old man about what he thinks around this image of the ideal man. Have a listen to what he said to her.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I'm Japanese and Japanese is generally smaller than Canadians and Americans. Right? So the more taller and muscular man, they're more like manly. I think masculine man is more like manly.

MG: I think he's saying that there's a real bias when it comes to what's considered manly. And you explore this in the book as well.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah, there sure is. I love that you have these clips, they're so fantastic. I talk a lot about boys of colour and particularly about African-American boys and Asian-American boys who are kind of flip sides of the same coin. And in terms of how we think about masculinity, so African-American boys are kind of hyper sexualized. But then the other side of that is that they are - that can flip over and they are quickly seen as more predatory and Asian-American guys are seen as less masculine and asexual. And one of the guys who is Asian-American that I was talking to was telling me about his experience on swipe apps and swipe apps, you know, are kind of rife with sexual racism. And he matched with a girl who they talked for a little while and she said, well, you know, we could be friends, but no offence. I don't date Asian guys. And he was like, how is that no offence? Of course that's offence.

MG: Of course it is. And then now on the other side of it, you tell the story of - was it Xavier?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes.

MG: Who is a young black guy who's trying to figure out - again back to the hook-up culture - how he figures into that partying, drinking scenario as a young black man.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Right. And that, you know, with the African-American guys that I spoke with were in largely white schools. So they were operating in that realm and they felt a pretty intense sense of anxiety all the time around that. And so one of Xavier's friends, Emmett, said to me, I don't like to go party. I'm not I want to be in a room with a bunch of drunk white kids because anything could go wrong. And if I'm the only black guy at the party, you know, I'm the only black guy at the party. So there was this sense that he was going to be targeted and potentially, as they would say, you know, lose my whole life for, you know, not only walking, talking, you know, pulling out your I.D. when black, but also potentially for being in a room and being the only black guy. And if anything, you know, he was like, if something gets broken, if a girl complains anything, it's gonna go straight to me.

MG: What about the issue of such sexual orientation? What's it like? What did you learn about what it's like to be a young gay man right now?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Well, there were a couple of things that were really interesting about that. The first was how it related to straight people. And one of the things that came out really clearly was that gay boys presented a kind of model of how to navigate consent and negotiate sexual relationships, in part because they had to. You know, what was going to happen in an encounter was not assumed or obvious. One gay boy said to me, I don't really get these straight guys who are so resistant to talking about consent because if you're talking about it, that means you're going to be having sex. And that's great. So what's the problem? Dan Savage who writes a syndicated column on sex has said that gay men tend to use what he calls the four magic words, which are what are you into? And I loved that because it's exactly the sort of open-ended question that we ought to be encouraging people to engage in when they have a sexual encounter. What are you into is a conversation and puts everything out on the table as opposed to the way that we tend to think of it, which is that it's a yes or no response to a set of predetermined ideas. And usually that one person is suggesting.

MG: More broadly, how do you see young men talking or are they talking about the issue of consent? It seems as though society has had an evolution, certainly growth when it comes to matters of consent. But when you're talking to those young men, are they part of that conversation?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: They were struggling. They were certainly thinking a lot more about consent. But how they related to it, you know, kind of was along a continuum. And one of the issues is that we tend to think that only monsters assault people and that if you assault people, you immediately become a monster. But that tends to ignore the sort of coercive behaviour, lower lover misconduct that a lot of good guys engage in. And the fact is, you know, a good guy can do a bad thing.

MG: Can we talk briefly about porn and what porn has done to how boys and young men see, not just issues of consent, but sex and sexuality?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes. I mean, you have to know that if you have a teenage boy, he's certainly seen porn. And that it has become an absence of parental conversation and conversation in school, one of the main sex educators. And, you know, curiosity about sex is natural and masturbation is important. But what's changed is that with the rise of the Internet and smartphones and particularly sites like Pornhub that drop the paywall, young people can see anything that you can imagine and a whole lot of things nobody wants to imagine right at their fingertips. And the picture of sex that they're getting-- you know, there's all kinds of porn. There's queer porn, there's feminist porn, there's ethical porn. But that is not really what they're looking at. They're looking at what you can get for free. That's the most accessible. And that typically shows sex as something men do to women. Female pleasure as a performance for male satisfaction. Distorted bodies. A lot of acts that, you know, wouldn't really feel good to most people. And when we're not talking to our kids, when we're not telling them what is real about that, what's not real about that, what's missing from that, inevitably they're taking that into the bedroom with them.

MG: You end the book by talking about talking to our kids about this. And there are a series of lessons for parents. We started in talking about parents being freaked out by maybe what they heard around hook-up culture. What's the lesson to parents in terms of how to talk to boys and young men about sex?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: So, look, I know you would rather poke yourself in the eye with a fork than talk directly to your son about sex. Right? Maybe you can't even talk to your partner. You know, It is not something that we as a culture have learned how to do, but we don't have the luxury anymore of silence. We have to do it because if we don't, the media will educate our kids for us.

MG: And you have to do it. I mean, as you say, you wouldn't talk about table manners in one conversation and expect your son to be polite, that this needs to be a series of conversations.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes. Yes. I mean, you would not sit down and say, okay, you know, you need to have good manners when you leave the house. Make sure to put your napkin on and say, please pass the food and excuse yourself before-- it's like you give a whole list and then walk away and think, okay, I've told my child. I've done my job. No, you would not do that. So in the last chapter of the book, I devote that to talking about not giving you a script, but the kinds of conversations that you need to have with your boy. And most of them would work with girls, too, about sex, but not just sex. You know about consent, but not just consent. Sexual pleasure, about media, about porn, about making gender dynamics visible, about a whole series, about masculinity, about a whole series of ideas that they're going to and messages that they're going to confront that we need to disrupt and help them critique and understand better. Like I was thinking about how I have a daughter and when she was little, I was constantly bringing up distortion, body distortion in animated films. So I would say, you know, we'd watch some Disney film and I'd say, hey, look, her eyes are bigger than her wrist. Are your eyes bigger than your wrist? Is your head bigger than your waist? You know, and just having these like sort of constant little conversations and I thought, I wonder if I would have done that if I had a son. I don't know. And he is growing up in these same, you know, culture where that is saturated. I mean, that's for little kids. But as they get older, you know, it's saturated with sexualised imagery that. And this is mainstream media, video games, TV movies that the same sexualized imagery that that girls see, the same ideas of female sexual availability and sexual submission, the same ideas of male sexual entitlement. And we've gotten so much better about talking about that with our daughters over the years, because we see the harm that that can do to them. But we have been really silent with our sons. And I think that's one place that is not that threatening for parents to change. And I would also, since I'm on this subject, just put out there that rather than thinking of this as excruciating and awkward, you can think about these conversations as a way to be scaffolding towards a deeper relationship with your son and an adult relationship and showing them that you can show up and have difficult conversations, because if you can't have difficult conversations with them, how are they going to learn to have them with other people?

MG: That's great advice. Peggy, thank you. It's a real pleasure to talk to you.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It's been great. Thanks so much.

MG: Peggy Orenstein is the author, most recently of Boys and Sex: Young Men on Hook-ups Love, Porn, Consent and Navigating the New Masculinity. When we aired that interview first in January, the response was overwhelming. People talking about how gratified they were to hear her talking about this and how it offered them some tips in some ways in how to have those conversations. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Peggy's point is that people would rather perhaps poke themselves in the eye with a fork than talk to their young boys or girls about sex. How have you overcome that barrier? You can e-mail us at thecurrent@cbc.ca, tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or go to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the Contact link. That is it for the program for today. Coming up on CBC Radio One, it's Q. Tom Power will be speaking with Mandy Patinkin, singer and actor, about music, about life. This is an amazing conversation if you didn't hear it when it aired earlier. It's quite something. You'll hear that coming up in just a few moments on CBC Radio One. You can listen to anything here on CBC Radio through the CBC Listen app. That's where you can get some past episodes of The Current as well. Last month on The Current, I spoke with Clarence Hynes and Craig Avery, two men who believe that they were switched at birth, raised by the other's biological parents. It was a wild conversation and Craig's wife, Tracey, was part of that discussion. She said something that caught our attention.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Since this story has come out, there's been people contacting us, saying that they have had similar situations with Come By Chance Hospital, that two people that we know of contacted us and said that their parents or someone they knew had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital, that they discovered it in the night and had to take the baby back and get their real baby.

MG: That's quite a thing to hear and so CBC reporter Mark Quinn actually tracked down one of those families. Muriel and Cecil Stringer had a number of babies at Come By Chance Hospital in Newfoundland. One of them, Kent, was born in 1962, the same year as Craig and Clarence. Their story ends the show today. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: We left to come home. The nurse brought the baby out for me to dress, but mom was there, so she gave the baby to mom. Looking at the baby and I said, he don't look like my baby. And she said, oh, that's probably be because of the different clothes on him. My baby had dark hair and a little pointed nose. The nose didn't look right to me. So anyway, we came on home and when mom took, mom still had the baby and when she took the sweater off, she said, oh, my, it's not your baby. There was a strap right around his arm, plastic and it was written on his arm, Baby Boy Adams. She said to go and phone the hospital.

VOICE 2: First thing she said was how come you didn't know your own baby? That's very rude. Yeah.

VOICE 1: Oh I was freightened. I was thinking what if he didn't have his band on his arm and I was, it scared me. It really scared me, yeah. He was a sweet boy. He still is.

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Feb. 17, 2020 episode transcript

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