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The Current Transcript for August 16, 2016

Host: Connie Walker

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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There's so many questions. There's so much anger, confusion and sadness because he was a young man. He had so much ahead of him. He had so much life in him. He had so many other things he wanted to do and could do.

CONNIE WALKER: A cousin of Colten Boushie, the Indigenous man who was just 22 years old when he was shot dead on a farm in Saskatchewan last week. By all accounts, he was a promising young man with a bright future in front of him. His death has devastated his family, friends and community but it has also become a flashpoint, stoking racial tensions in the Prairie province and unleashing hate-filled rants online. We go to Saskatchewan first up today, where the death of Colten Boushie is prompting some difficult conversations. Then… She's 16 years old and navigating the worlds of sex and love has never been so complicated as it is for her and her generation.

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If I want to look hot, I definitely wear something that shows my stomach. If I wear something that's too revealing, then I'm like a slut.

CW: Journalist Peggy Orenstein went straight to the source, interviewing dozens of young women like her for the truth about young women and girls and sex today. That's coming up in half an hour. I'm Connie Walker and this is the summer edition of The Current.

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Racial tensions flare in Sask. following killing of 22-year-old First Nations man

Guests: Jason Warick, Eleanore Sunchild, Rob Feist

CW: As we begin our first story, a warning that some of what we'll be discussing may be disturbing to listeners because what we're talking about is not only a young life cut short, but some truly ugly sentiments unleashed in its wake. Debbie Baptiste's son Colten Boushie was shot dead last week near Biggar, Saskatchewan. Here she is describing her son's generous spirit.

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He took training for construction driving so he got the boots there. And he just got these last month for his wildlife firefighting training. He said just in case the res burnt down, he was ready to go. He has a reading award. He had so many… he was so kind at school. He was helping other kids how to read and write. [crying]

CW: That was Debbie Baptiste speaking with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. Colten Boushie and his friends had pulled off a rural road and onto a farmyard last week when the shooting took place. Fifty-four-year-old Gerald Stanley, who was associated with the rural property, has been charged with second degree murder in Mr. Boushie’s death. And in the days since, the case has set off a firestorm, exposing what many say are long simmering racial tensions in the province. On social media, a slew of hateful comments like these have been proliferating in plain sight.

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COMMENT 1: Time to go all cowboy and Indian on these useless leeches in society that live off of everyone else.

COMMENT 2: Farmer that killed one person for trespassing? Shame on you. You should have just shot all four of them and buried them out back.

COMMENT 3: One reason Saskatoon has the crime it does: Natives.

CW: In a statement posted on Facebook on Sunday, Saskatchewan's premier Brad Wall condemned what he called hate-filled comments on social media. He wrote that racism has no place in Saskatchewan and urged the province to trust the RCMP to investigate. But some feel the RCMP is part of the problem. The Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations says that the RCMP’s initial press release about the shooting of Mr. Boushie only helped to ratchet up the racial tensions by mentioning that the others in the car had been taken into custody for questioning as part of a theft investigation. They were later released without any charges. Here is FSIN Chief, Bobby Cameron.

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We looked at it and immediately knew that this was going to cause a lot of tension and a lot of arguments and a lot of emotions because it led readers to believe that a crime was about to be committed, so therefore justifying why the young man was shot and killed.

CW: On Friday, RCMP Superintendent Rob Cameron responded to those concerns.

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It is deeply concerning to us, as the provincial police service, to hear one of our media releases categorized as bias. We have heard the concerns of FSIN and we welcome the opportunity to discuss and work together to address them.

CW: For more on this, I'm joined by Jason Warick. He's a reporter with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix who has been covering this story. He's in Saskatoon. Hello.

JASON WARICK: Hi.

CW: So Jason, who was Colten Boushie?

JASON WARICK: Colten Boushie was a 22-year-old man from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation about 150 kilometres west of Saskatoon. He grew up in Montana and several years ago, his mother brought him and his two brothers back to live in their home community of Red Pheasant where they lived for the last several years. He had done all kinds of different odd jobs in manual labor. He had recently got a whole bunch of certifications and firefighting and CPR and First Aid, catering, short order cooking. He wanted to go work in the northern mines or camps eventually.

CW: You've spoken to some of his family members. How did they describe him?

JASON WARICK: They said that he was a gentle guy, very helpful they said. His cousin noted her recent Edmonton wedding. He came there and he set up all of the equipment and decorations for the round dance. He stayed up all night and missed all of the events being the fire keeper outside the hall. He is described as quite a generous guy with elders on the reserve and whatever needed to be done.

CW: What do we know about how Colten Boushie died?

JASON WARICK: The facts that the RCMP have laid out are that a car of five people from the Red Pheasant reserve ended up on the property of an area landowner or farmer and Boushie ended up being shot fatally. And Gerald Stanley subsequently was charged with second degree murder. Everything else from there is opinion and supposition right now. The witness that I spoke to, who was in the backseat at the time, says they had stopped in the yard because they had a flat tire and were looking for some help. The witness says that a man busted their front windshield with the butt of a gun before a couple of them ran and then heard gunshots, which likely were the fatal shots to Boushie. Some of the dispute or some of the controversy is around how the RCMP has described this incident in the initial news releases. They did mention the fatal shooting but they also made the unusual point of noting that some of the people in the car were under investigation for theft. None of those people have been charged. They've all been released. There have been no charges that we know of other than the murder charge.

CW: I definitely want to get to the RCMP in a bit but just getting back to the witness, who was it that you spoke to and how does he describe what happened that day?

JASON WARICK: Sure. Eric Meechance is a cousin of Mr. Boushie and Mr. Meechance says that they and others say that they had been swimming and partying at a nearby lake or river and they were on their way home. And that's when they got the flat tire and they were riding on a rim and they decided to pull into the nearest farm and ask for help and that's when the fatal shooting occurred.

CW: Gerald Stanley has been charged with second degree murder. What do we know about him?

JASON WARICK: People in the area, including the organizers of a local Bible camp, all say that he was quiet and friendly and there had never been any incidents on his land or with him that anyone knew of.

CW: So how has this case been playing out on social media in Saskatchewan?

JASON WARICK: Well, whether it's social media, which is always a little more extreme or in the real world, this case appears to have exposed some real ugliness. And as always, it's hard to tell how representative it is of the general public but there sure is a lot of hate being expressed online and in other forms. And there is a large amount of very vile, very hateful things going on. A lot of people—

CW: What kind of vile comments? Who are they directed against?

JASON WARICK: People are saying that it was bound to happen and implying it was justified because of the high property crime rate in the area.

CW: I mean I've seen quite a few comments on social media actually saying exactly that. You know, somebody made a post about “You should have just shot all four of them and buried them out back.” That's not an isolated one. I mean, I saw a few of those.

JASON WARICK: Yeah it is shocking how vile a lot of the commentary is and the Battlefords area does have one of the highest crime rates in Canada. But to equate that or to link that somehow to this issue seems a stretch at the moment, particularly when there's been no indication that any of the five in the vehicle were threatening or were violent toward the person charged with murder. Premier Brad Wall posted his disappointment in a lot of the racist comments that have been posted and he's urging tolerance and forgiveness and now even the victim's family, Colten Boushie’s family is hoping that everyone will join them in their healing. When I spoke to them following the funeral on the weekend, they were urging people to come and join them in a peaceful rally that they're going to hold at the North Battleford courthouse on Thursday.

CW: What kind of support has there been for Colten Boushie's family so far?

JASON WARICK: They say that they've had Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people come and express their support personally, by phone. People across Canada are now reacting to all of that ugliness.

CW: And what about for Gerald Stanley? What kind of support has he been receiving?

CW: Well, he does have a lot of support. I've talked to many people. They are strongly behind him and some of them are behind him personally because they know him personally and some of them say that they're behind him because it's about time someone stood up to all that property crime that's happening in the area, which is a shock.

CW: But is there any indication there was any property crime occurring here?

JASON WARICK: That's the problematic part, is there is no indication that there was violence or threats but there was not even any indication of that there was any theft.

CW: What does the shooting revealed about the racial tensions in the community or even in the province?

JASON WARICK: It's caused a lot of people to really sit back and think because it's saddened so many people in that small region where there are a lot of farming communities and a lot of First Nations all together there.

CW: Thank you very much for joining us, Jason.

JASON WARICK: You're welcome.

CW: Jason Warick is a reporter with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix and he was in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Stories of racial tensions with Indigenous communities are all too common right across the country but there is a sense that in Saskatchewan right now, things have reached a boiling point. We have two guests standing by now in the province to share their perspectives. Eleanore Sunchild is an Indigenous lawyer based in the Poundmaker Cree Nation. She's been speaking out since Colten Boushie’s death. Rob Feist is a non-Indigenous lawyer who is based in North Battleford. He wrote a widely shared Facebook post on the racism that he says permeates rural areas of the province, such as near Wilkie, Saskatchewan where he grew up. We’ve reached Eleanore Sunchild on Poundmaker Cree Nation and Rob Feist in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. Hello. Thank you both for joining me.

ELEANORE SUNCHILD: Good morning.

ROB FEIST: Good morning, Connie.

CW: Eleanore, what went through your mind when you first heard about the shooting death of Colten Boushie?

ELEANORE SUNCHILD: I was very shocked and I couldn't believe that that actually happened. I knew that there were issues in this community with racism. It was unbelievable to hear the details. I talked to the family the first day after the news release from the RCMP came out. They informed me that the news release was not true. So I assisted them in contacting some media to tell their side of the story.

CW: Just in general, how has the Indigenous community in Saskatchewan been reacting to Colten’s death and to the racism that's emerged since?

ELEANORE SUNCHILD: They've been very concerned about what's happened in our community. They've rallied around the family and around the issue of racism. I think that we're all touched by racism in some form in this province. It happens on a daily basis. So it really has triggered a lot of people in dealing with the racial issue in our province.

CW: Eleanore, you mentioned that you've spoken to the family about some of the issues with the press release that was first released by the RCMP and you wrote that the RCMP engaged in victim blaming. How do you think that race affected the way the police force characterized this incident?

ELEANORE SUNCHILD: I don't think that the police needed to speculate that the individuals in the vehicle were committing a crime when clearly no charges were laid. It seems that what happened was that they drove into the farmyard seeking help because they had a flat tire. Would the same have been said if it was a group of non-Native people who drove into a yard seeking help? I don't think so. I think that they perhaps were racially profiled and the RCMP did not have to say that they were investigating these individuals for property crimes when clearly no charges have been laid.

CW: Rob Feist, you grew up on a farm in rural Saskatchewan. What kind of racism did you grow up seeing and hearing?

CW: You know, it was almost a constant thing in our small communities. Wilkie, where I grew up, is the next town down the CP line from Biggar. So, you know, we mixed and intermingled. I’m cautious to say that, you know, everyone in rural communities, every farmer is a racist. That's not true. There are many good folks out on farms and many people who are just as concerned as the First Nations community and the non-First Nations community. But we would hear regularly. And it was almost safe to be racist in our community when the doors were closed. You could make, you know, the jokes you wanted to make, the comments you wanted to make about First Nations people. [chuckles] I remember a time, when I was in probably Grade 8, we were driving on a class trip through Edmonton and two of the dads in the car. We saw a group of First Nations pedestrians walking across the road. And you know the joke—and I heard the joke repeatedly as I was growing up—it was just common. You know, people said, you know, 10 points for each one you hit and the dads laughed. And we were a group of, you know, six or seven, 12 or 13-year-old kids. It was something that struck me at the time. I hadn't heard that in my home and thinking about it years later, the kids who were in that car certainly learned a lesson and that lesson was something that was reinforced and we saw again and again in our communities that racism, casual racism—and it's just the casualness of it—is somewhat okay.

CW: Eleanore, in your view, is there something particular about the racism against First Nations that shows itself in rural areas or farming communities in general?

ELEANORE SUNCHILD: Well, I think that there's a myth that most Canadians were taught—both in rural communities and urban—and that is that Canada has always acted with good intentions towards its Indigenous populations, that Canada was inhabited by uncivilized Indigenous populations and that the country has thrived from the peaceful settlement of these lands. The truth is that the government entered into an agreement to share the land with the Indigenous nations of this land and Canada did not honour these treaties. Rather, they displaced, marginalized and brutalized Indian people, forcing Indigenous peoples on to reserves, taking their children to residential schools, foster care, sterilizing and murdering our women, making it illegal to practice our culture and traditions and the list of historical wrongs goes on.

CW: And you think that history hasn't been taught to the non-Indigenous population in Saskatchewan.

ELEANORE SUNCHILD: No, it hasn't because it is uncomfortable. It's a truth that Canadians have not heard and that they were not taught. It is hard to hear that Canada was founded on the brutalization and killing of a people. And what else I think, Connie, is that there has been limited contact between rural communities and the Indigenous communities that neighbour them. And I believe that this originates other settler colonial stereotypes such as the lazy, drunk, dirty, untrustworthy, freeloading Indian and this attitude was relied on to justify the taking of the land and the brutalization of Indians. Now, non-Native people say well, that was in the past, I didn't do anything to the Indigenous peoples. It’s not my fault, it’s not my problem. Yet, these stereotypes and racism are passed down from generation to generation since colonial times and they are used to justify racism today.

CW: Is that level of racism in Saskatchewan getting better or worse, Eleanore?

ELEANORE SUNCHILD: I don’t see it getting better.

CW: Rob, do you agree? I mean clearly there are, as you mentioned, some people from farming communities who don't endorse that kind of anti-Indigenous racism. How do some people escape having that kind of perspective?

ROB FEIST: [sighs] You know, I think there are good people out there and I think over time, we have made very incremental progress. I don’t disagree with Eleanore that the problem is still ongoing and very serious. There needs to be a conversation and more than a conversation. Eleanore's entirely right. There needs to be recognition of historical wrongs that were done to First Nations people. We have just—I would say it’s fair to say—a widespread lack of knowledge and almost a willful ignorance among some groups of the things that have affected First Nations people in Saskatchewan. A lot of the non-Indigenous population does not know about residential schools, doesn't know about the Sixties Scoop, doesn't know about those issues that have hit folks. So, broader education and bringing more First Nations people their culture, their way of life to the non-Indigenous population would be helpful. I don't disagree that it's a serious problem. I think that some change—has it gotten better? [inhales] Not quickly enough. [exhales]

CW: Eleanore, what do you think it's going to take to move past the type of racism that you've seen

CW: Thank you very much, Eleanore and Rob, for joining me today. We'll have to leave it there.

ELEANORE SUNCHILD: Thank you.

ROB FEIST: Thank you.

CW: Eleanore Sunchild and Rob Feist are both originally from rural Saskatchewan. Eleanore joined me from Poundmaker Cree Nation and Rob Feist is in North Battleford. I'm Connie Walker and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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ENCORE: Young women missing out on pleasures of intimacy, says author

Guests: Peggy Orenstein

CW: Hello, I’m Connie Walker and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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CW: Now, let’s talk about sex. On one hand, it’s a topic that’s never been less taboo. Sex is everywhere in our popular culture: in music, advertising, on television. But according to journalist Peggy Orenstein, as much as we celebrate sex today, we’re not doing a great job at having real, frank discussions about it. And that’s especially true when it comes to parents and their daughters. So for her latest book, Peggy Orenstein decided to delve into the real sex lives of teenage girls by conducting in-depth interviews with more than 70 young American women aged 15 to 20. And what she learned was enough to bust some popular myths and misconceptions. It was also a cause for some concern, especially when it comes to whether young women are finding respect and even pleasure in their intimate lives. Peggy Orenstein’s book is called Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape and she joined Anna Maria from New York City this past March. And warning: what you’re about to hear is some frank talk about young women and sex.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: You went to a Miley Cyrus concert for research. What was going on, on stage?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I went to a Miley Cyrus concert so you don't have to. [laughing] There's lots of nakedness and lots of sex, but it's like a performance. There's nothing actually erotic about it. It's just kind of so much flotsam and jetsam being thrown at you. I always think Miley is so interesting because I think she kind of embodies every girl's dilemma writ large, like how do you walk this line between being slutty and being a prude? And how do you be hot but just hot enough and get attention for your body but not too much attention for your body? And it's really a complicated thing that girls are going through.

AMT: What did you hear from the young women you interviewed about pop stars like Miley Cyrus or Nicki Minaj, who are very then sexual in their music and their performances?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: We would get into real arguments and one of the things I wanted to do in the book was—I mean—look, it turns out there's a generation gap and I'm on the wrong side of it. [laughs] And you are too probably.

AMT: Yeah, yeah.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: And all of us. I mean I have a daughter. All of us parents are. And so how do you figure out how to talk to your child about it without sounding like a fusty old handwringing person? To me, I mean hot is so narrow. It's so commercialized. It's such a superficial version of what’s sexy and what's attractive. And whereas for our generation, that was something that we would kind of have protested against, this idea that how your body looks to other people, is more important than how it feels to yourself. Girls today embrace that as a source of power and self-confidence. So, one girl showed me a picture of her and she was wearing what I thought of as the party uniform, the little crop top and the little high heels and short skirt and she said, you know I'm proud of my body and I never feel more liberated than when I'm wearing skimpy clothing. But then a few minutes later, she said that she wouldn't wear that skimpy clothing if she weighed a few pounds more. So then what you have to talk to girls about and ask about is, so who gets to be proud of which body under what circumstances? And how liberating is it really, if humiliation lurks just around the corner?

AMT: We spoke to two 16-year-old women from Toronto to get their perspective on their sexuality. We're not naming them to protect their privacy. Listen to what one of them had to say about what she thinks about when she gets dressed.

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If I want to look hot, I definitely wear something that shows my stomach. But like I feel like it has to be— there's like a kind of like a fine line about that because again, if I wear something that's too revealing then I'm like a slut or I'm asking for any kind of attention that I get from men…

AMT: Okay, she could have been in your study.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: She sure could have been. You know the thing is, what one girl said to me that I thought was so brilliant was, usually the opposite of a negative is a positive, but when you're talking about girls and sex, you're either a prude or you're a slut. One girl said to me isn't there a difference between dressing sexy because you need validation and you don't feel good about yourself, and dressing sexy because you do feel good about yourself and you don't need validation? And I said well, sure maybe, tell me what that difference is. And she just kind of drooped and said, I don't know, you know I spend my whole life trying to figure that out and I think it’s sometimes at the expense of my well-being. And we know that it actually is at the expense of well-being because one of the bait and switch aspects of thinking that sexy is the same as confidence and it’s the same as sexuality is that self-objectification for girls is linked with all kinds of the issues that we worry about. It’s linked to cognitive deficits, it’s linked to depression. It ironically reduces sexual pleasure.

AMT: Now, the women you talked to were mostly in college or college bound.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes.

AMT: Why did you focus on that demographic?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I wanted to talk to girls who had opportunity, who were the beneficiaries of the feminist movement because I thought if even those girls who are leaning in in the public realm, are toppling in the private one, then you can't deny that there's a problem.

AMT: We spoke to Kim Katrin Milan, who runs the People Project, where she talks to marginalized youth about sex and sexuality. Listen to what she says.

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Especially like younger immigrant women, they’re often taking care of a lot of people in their families. They’re taking care of their elders and their family and maybe a generation of kids. And I think that that changes the kind of priorities that they have and the decisions that they're making for their own kind of like body and pleasure. I feel in those cases that their desires often come last. Often the more marginalized women, like young trans women, young women of color who are really low-income who are often street involved, they have to think about their safety first and foremost before they can even really start to explore their sexuality and their desire.

AMT: Peggy Orenstein, what do you think you might have missed by not looking at that wider demographic?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: You know, what I think is interesting and what I think is the same, is that regardless of whether you're talking to girls who have opportunities or girls who are marginalized, what they're talking about is a sexuality that ends up being boy centred, if they’re heterosexual, that ends up being for others and that puts their own pleasure last. And I don't think that that's less true or more true for either demographic, but it's for different reasons.

AMT: Now, let's talk about hookup culture. It's become a bit of a catchphrase. What did it actually mean to the girls you spoke to?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: That's the thing you know, hook up, it’s another one of those things that's really ripe for a media panic. It really doesn't have a meaning. Every time a girl told me she hooked up with somebody, I'd have to stop and go wait, what do you mean by that? Because it could mean anything from kissing to intercourse and you know all forms of behavior. So what's different about—I mean obviously kids didn't invent casual sex, right? It existed. But what's different [laughs]—

AMT: Every generation invents casual sex. [laughs]

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: But what’s different is now it's normalized as being—the idea that sex precedes rather than arises from intimacy has been normalized. For me, again, just like with the dressing thing, I'm not trying to take a moral perspective. I'm trying to look at this in a more pragmatic and practical way and look at the forces at work. And so when I think about hookup culture, I don't want to tell girls the context in which you should and shouldn't be having sex or hooking up or relationships. I want them to know what they're likely to get out of a hookup and what they're likely not to get out of a hookup. I want them to know you know in a hookup, you might get an adrenaline rush. You might get a war story. You're probably not going to get great sex and you're probably not going to get practice with intimacy. But regardless of the context in which girls have sex, whether it's a liaison that lasts ten minutes or a relationship that lasts ten years, what I want is for girls to have experiences that are ethical, reciprocal, responsible and pleasurable.

AMT: I've got another clip here. Many of the girls you talked to said they enjoy hooking up. This is what one of the young Toronto women we talked to had to say.

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So I'm kind of just like doing things whenever it's there, whenever I'm bored or something, which sounds kind of bad, but like nothing really like commitment based or relationship based. But I do things with people who I'm just like with or hanging out with a lot. I personally prefer it, at least right now just because I don't feel like I have time for relationships, I don't feel like I can give myself to someone else if that makes sense, like emotionally. So I think I prefer just kind of doing really casual things instead of like having a commitment.

AMT: How does she compare to the women you talk to?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: She was definitely representative of one group. I mean there was a whole range of how girls related to hook ups and for some of them, it was what they wanted right now, exactly for those reasons. They felt they didn't have time. They wanted to focus on themselves. No longer are girls looking for husbands in college. Other girls felt it was unhygienic or that why would you want to be sexually involved with somebody that you didn't even know? So, all of them were thinking about it and they all had to negotiate their sex lives and their relationship lives in the context of the hookup culture, whether they chose to engage in it or chose not to engage in it. And one girl said to me, you know you just want to be like just slutty enough. You want to have had your one night stands and had your adventures but not so much that you know, you’ve like screwed every guy in the fraternity. And the other thing they said over and over was, “My parents have no idea.”

AMT: Okay, well, let's keep talking about this. Let's talk about oral sex. You write that it's becoming a casual thing. Why is it seen that way?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I heard so many stories. It was basically, oral sex was a one way street. Most of the time it was girls performing sex on boys and they did it for a lot of reasons, to gain popularity, to improve or what they felt was improving a relationship, to get a boy to like them, whatever they were doing. There are many different reasons. But I started saying to them, because I started getting so frustrated that I would kind of drop my journalistic remove, and I would say, look, what if every time you were with a guy, he asked you to get a glass of water for him from the kitchen but he never offered to get a glass of water for you. Or if he did, it was like [scoffs] okay, if you really want me to get the water.

AMT: [laughs]

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: That's exactly what happened, they would laugh and they would say I never thought about it that way. And I'd say so you're less insulted by the idea of being asked to perform oral sex than being asked to get a glass of water from the kitchen. And just like that interaction, I think really helped a lot of girls even though that wasn't really supposed to be my role as a reporter, but it helped a lot of girls sort of go hey, wait a minute. Maybe there's something that I should be questioning here.

AMT: It's fascinating. And again, we have a clip from one of the young women we spoke to in Toronto. She was asked whether oral sex is looked at the same way for a boy or a girl. Listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

I think mostly nowadays, it's not really. I think a lot of the emphasis is on pleasing the guy just because again, I feel like guys are very entitled when it comes to sex and it's really like about what they can get and not about how you can like please the girl you’re with. And I think girls kind of know that and have internalized that through like—they've just been told that our whole lives. So when it comes to having sex with guys or just doing anything kind of sexual, they're really focused on just like pleasing the guy so that they don't have to like I guess, worry that they're not doing something right or that they're not like good enough, I guess?

AMT: Peggy Orenstein, what are the effects of those unequal expectations?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: We don't talk to girls about their anatomy and we don't talk to them about their pleasure, basically ever. It's silent. So when kids are born, we're much more likely to name all our boys body parts even if it's just you know like here's your pee pee, something. But with girls, we go right from navel to knees. So when you don't name something it becomes taboo and then they go into their sex education classes, their early classes and they only see the internal parts of the woman and they learn boys have erections and ejaculations and girls have periods and get pregnant. The clitoris is never mentioned. No surprise, fewer than half of 14- to 17-year-old girls have ever masturbated. And then they go into partnered experiences. Why would you expect them to feel that they have any sense of entitlement? This is a social justice issue, just the way that who does the dishes in the house is a social justice issue that touches on ideas about equity and economic disparity and violence and all these things. A researcher at the University of Michigan coined this term intimate justice that I just loved. And it's questioning these power dynamics in our most personal relationships so, I mean, I think those are sticky issues for adult women, but especially for girls in their early formative experiences. Your early sexual experience should not be something that you have to get over. When we think about sexual satisfaction we think we're talking about the same thing with young women and young men but what research shows, is that we're not. And young women are more likely, not exclusively but more likely to measure their own satisfaction by their partners’ pleasure. So they'll say if he was satisfied, I was satisfied. And conversely when we're talking about bad sex, the language is really different. Girls talk about pain. They talk about humiliation. They talk about degradation. Boys never use that language. Not a single young man in the studies used that language.

AMT: You make the point too that anal sex is the new oral sex.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: That's something that's really been on the rise. It's basically doubled since 1990, anal sex among young people. When there was a study of 16 to 18 year olds that found that mostly it was boys who were pushing for that and mostly it was not that they saw it as an intimate act to share with a partner but as a competition with other boys. They expected that their female partners would need to be and could be coerced into it. You know it's a metaphor in a way for a new behavior that was once taboo and now becomes expected that you are uncool or frigid or whatever if you won’t engage in it. But it's one that normalizes female pain and is again, very much about the boy directing what's going on.

AMT: Well, is there a widely held attitude among boys, from what you learned from the women you were talking to, that it's okay to coerce the girls?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Girls would say the boys were much more clear that they were not supposed to coerce into intercourse but oral sex was fair game. So they talked a lot about the shoulder push, where the boys put a hand on either shoulder and silently kind of push down. The girls, because it was not just the boys who were unwilling to perform oral sex, the girls also were unwilling to let them because they felt uncomfortable about their genitals. And so where the boys would push down, the girls would describe scooping up under a boy's armpits and pushing up to push them away from there and away from any possibility of doing that and away from sexual pleasure.

AMT: Well, then this gets into the whole issue of navigating consent, right?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Right. You know I wanted to find out very much what happened after yes and also how those issues of entitlement were playing into assault on campuses and in high schools. We don't talk as much about assault in high school.

AMT: Do you think that we are giving young women enough credit though, in terms of how empowered they can feel?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: No. I mean I think that's exactly—you know in Holland-- one of the things that I did at the end of the book and this struck me so much, not only as a writer but as a mom because I do have a girl who's almost 13 myself. There's comparisons between Dutch and American college students and the Dutch girls had fewer negative outcomes in their early sexual experiences. They were less likely to get pregnant. They were less likely to contract disease. They had less regret. They were more likely to be sober. They also had more positive outcomes. They enjoyed sex more. They could communicate with their partners.

AMT: And they could do this because really what you point out is that they were communicating with their parents.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It was interesting because it wasn't necessarily that the parents were more comfortable or uncomfortable talking about sex, American versus Dutch. But the American parents only talked about risk and danger and the Dutch parents talked about balancing joy and responsibility.

AMT: After all this research, how is it affecting the conversations you're having with your own daughter?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Well, my daughter is prone to saying, Mom, stop working on your book whenever I talk to her. [laughs] The poor thing is a guinea pig. But it has really radically changed how I think about talking to my daughter and I no longer think about it as “The Talk.” I think about sexuality as something that you know comes up in everyday life and something that we can talk about across the broad spectrum of pleasure, joy, responsibility, risk, danger. I want to be on my daughter's team. I want to be her advocate and yes, I know it's hard. I know it's embarrassing. I know it's mortifying. I know it's not how we were raised. But once you start talking, it really does get easier and I have to say, it's really meaningful not only in how we talk to them, but in our relationships with them.

AMT: And you know you are talking about girls and sex but of course, those conversations need to happen with boys and their parents as well.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Absolutely. And boys need to be talked to about the effect of alcohol on them and they need to be talked to about the whole spectrum of consent, coercion and assault. They need to be talked to about female pleasure. They need to be talked to about reciprocity and egalitarianism. They need to be talked to about ethics and responsibilities. So it's not something that just needs to happen with girls.

AMT: Hmm. Lots to think about. Peggy Orenstein—thanks for your work.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Thank you. Thank you for having me on, I appreciate it.

CW: That was Peggy Orenstein speaking with Anna Maria Tremonti last March. Her book is called Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. If that conversation struck a chord with you, let us know. What has your experience been talking about sex with your daughter or son, or with your parents? Tweet us @thecurrentcbc, email us from our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent or find us on Facebook. That’s our program today. I’m Connie Walker. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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August 16, 2016 full episode transcript

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