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The Current Transcript for August 31, 2017

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

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MATT GALLOWAY: The grass has been cut, the halls polished, the classrooms prepped. Summer break is over and school is back and with it, if you are a parent, the headache of making lunch for your kids. But in the grand scheme of things, with math test scores slipping and a push to remake parts of the curriculum, you may not think that school lunchtime matters all that much. You'd be wrong as any teacher will tell you what students eat and how much is critically important to their success in the classroom. No one wants to have a mob of hungry kids in class at 2:00 p.m. So why isn't Canada making this a priority? As the school bell gets set to ring for another year we look at what's wrong with school lunches across this country, from making sure children have enough to eat, to ensuring that they actually have time to eat it. That's first stop up, and then unlocking the secrets of female desire in the lab.

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We have folks come in. We take all of these kinds of measurements to get a sense of what happens in the moment when people get turned on. What happens with their genitals? What happens with what they're feeling. There's quite a lot of variability in the kinds of things that turn women on.

MG: More from Canadian sex researcher, Meredith Chivers, who's disrupting the idea of what turns women on, in about half an hour, but we begin in the school lunch room. I am Matt Galloway and this is the summer edition of The Current.

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Canada needs national school lunch program, demand advocates

Guests: Zoe Traiforos, Sasha McNicoll, Chad Duplessie

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VOICE 1: The longest I went without food would be an entire day.

VOICE 2: Eventually it is just, you know. I don't know. You just feel it, mentally.

VOICE 3: You are just really concentrating on that ache inside of your tummy. Meals at home are sometimes very scarce. It's hard to feed all of us.

VOICE 4: Currently I live between two households. It became a big issue for me. Where I felt like I was slipping out of a suitcase.

MG: That is from a video by the Breakfast Club of Canada. It features children who sometimes don't have enough food to eat at home. As school bells start ringing again across this country. Many parents are getting back to worrying about what to feed their kids for lunch and wondering whether these kids will actually eat it. Lunchtime in schools can be a very brief, very chaotic experience for many children across this country, leaving educators and parents wondering whether the lack of a calm, intentional midday meal is keeping kids from meeting their full potential. Today we're going to take a look at the brown bag problem. What's happening with lunch at schools? And how to make it better? Because, believe it or not, Canada is the only G8 country without a national school food program. In a few minutes I'll speak with a food security advocate trying to change that. But first, let's hear from a parent. Zoe Traiforos is a mother of three., the founder and head of the nutrition committee at Howard Public School in Toronto. Zoe hello.

ZOE TRAIFOROS: Hello.

MG: As a parent why did you want to get involved in the lunch program at your local school?

ZOE TRAIFOROS: Well it just began out of frustration with the daily throwing out of soggy lunches and my concern about my children not eating during school.

MG: The Daily throwing out of soggy lunches.

ZOE TRAIFOROS: [Chuckles] Yes. I mean really it was a very irregular thing to find that they had found the time to consume whatever I'd sent them. You know I took quite a bit of time to try and send nutritious lunches and they just always came back half eaten at best, and the kids came home from school starving. When I had a moment, I decided to sort of investigate what was going on and why this was happening.

MG: In that moment, in your investigation, what did you find about why your kids were eating lunch but also why they were coming home starving?

ZOE TRAIFOROS: Well, basically, what I found was that the way we facilitate lunch in schools is not really a system or a program so to speak. It's more of a reaction to a societal trend where children are staying at school for lunch and they didn't use to. And so they sort of cram them in wherever they can. And there's a lot of children eating in gymnasiums. Sometimes they don't even have tables and chairs. It's overcrowded there's not very much supervision, supervision of one adult to you know a hundred children. They're eating in their snowsuits in the wintertime. They don't get a chance to wash their hands. And then you know there's peer pressure. It's chaos. So there's a lot of pressure to just get out there and play and there's really no leadership in terms of what meal time should be, and we're talking about very young children. You know some as young as five that are thrown into this situation and of course are frazzled and distracted and just don't get through their lunch. And that was sort of the case with my kids when they were young.

MG: They just - I mean this is a story that I've heard as well from our own kids, that they just don't have time to eat their lunch.

ZOE TRAIFOROS: They just don't have time. And when you address that issue - I slowly started to sort of address that issue and I spoke to the principal. I went to our trustee and I contacted the Student Nutrition Advisory Committee. Basically, it all comes down to the fact that the policy is that children should be going home for lunch, at that age. But the reality is that children- I would say more than 90 percent of children state school for lunch. And the board is not obliged to supervise these children. They will do it but technically they are not obliged to. So therefore there is no sort of… There's nobody advocating for funding to improve the situation. It's sort of seen as a parental problem.

MG: The board, just to be clear, the board isn't responsible for supervising the kids during the lunchtime period?

ZOE TRAIFOROS: Technically no. They are not. They will do it. They will do it, but they are not obliged to. They could technically cancel lunch supervision altogether and they have done that in the past. And parents would have to figure it out. That is the policy as it stands right now.

MG: As I mentioned in the introduction, I mean in the grand scheme of things some people might think that this doesn't matter. We've had a report come out in Ontario showing that huge numbers of kids are not meeting the standard when it comes to math knowledge. People are trying to remake the curriculum to make it more representative. Why does something like this matter?

ZOE TRAIFOROS: Well, I mean anybody who has children and is trying to deal with them when they're hungry, knows that it's a futile effort to try and teach them anything when they haven't had food. And that's basically I would say, I mean when I brought this up at the parent council meeting and the reason I joined the parent council was so that I could bring up this is sort of my passion, I couldn't believe how much response I got. I mean people are… This is a common thing this is not just a few children not eating. This seems to be a really dominant problem that nobody's addressing. And the teachers are aware of it but everybody's hands are tied because fixing this problem would require you know a change of policies, quite a bit of funding. So, it's a really large challenge to figure out how to deal with this appropriately.

MG: What then needs to be done to change this?

ZOE TRAIFOROS: Well first of all we have to acknowledge that our societal needs have changed and children now stay at school for lunch, and if they do stay at school for lunch then we need to respond by supporting parents and children by providing at the very baseline proper facilities for kids to be able to eat in. I mean the schools are now built without cafeterias. I have no idea why that happened. There are a few schools out there that have cafeterias but there is no capital funding for cafeterias in new schools. And that to me is shocking because if you think of any other segment of the population that was trapped in one institution, especially a young - you know the youngest most vulnerable members of our society, and you don't have access to fresh food, in that day you are spending in that institution. You know how is that fair ? You know.

MG: Zoe, we will leave it there. I appreciate you joining us. Thank you.

ZOE TRAIFOROS: Thank you.

MG: Zoe Traiforos is a parent, the founder and head of the nutrition committee at Howard Public School in Toronto. As I mentioned, Canada is the only G8 country without a national food strategy for schools. It's not just about the time the kids actually have for lunch, it's making sure that they actually have enough to eat. Sasha McNicoll is trying to change that she is coordinator of the Coalition for Healthy School Food at Food Secure Canada and she's with me in our Toronto studio. Hi.

SASHA MCNICOLL: Good morning.

MG: Does what you just heard from Zoe square with your own knowledge of what life is like in the lunchroom at schools?

SASHA MCNICOLL: Unfortunately it does. Yes. You know kids don't have long enough to eat. They often send their lunches home. And you know we don't have kind of leadership from the federal government to make sure that we've got kids eating healthy food in schools and that they've got the time to do that and that they're learning what healthy food means.

MG: Part of it, as I said, is time and making sure that the kids actually have time to get through the lunch that they have before they're sent outside to play. The other part of it is making sure the kids actually have enough food. What do we know about hunger and kids in this country right now?

SASHA MCNICOLL: Well, there's four million Canadians who suffer from food insecurity which can kind of range from meaning that they worry about having enough food, or that they're you know going as far as skipping meals or skipping eating for an entire day. That disproportionately affects children in this country. So, one out of six Canadian children lives in a food insecure household.

MG: And the impact on their performance in school is what, if they don't have enough in their belly?

SASHA MCNICOLL: Oh I mean it's huge. Hunger impacts cognitive skills. It impacts mental health. It impacts physical health. And that's actually not just because there are hungry children in Canada. One third of elementary school children and two thirds of high school students are not eating nutritious breakfast before they go to school. So this is larger than the issue of hunger in Canada.

MG: There are a lot of boards or you know corporations or foundations that will help try to close that gap and make up for the fact that maybe kids aren't going having had breakfast; with food programs, with breakfast programs. Is that enough?

SASHA MCNICOLL: No it's not because that's currently reaching only about 1 million of the 5 million children in Canada. And so you know, as you said, there are there are provincial governments or municipal governments and there are charities and corporations who are you know investing in school food programs and trying to ensure that children have access to healthy food at school. But it is really not meeting the needs of most Canadian children.

MG: What do we have when it comes to some sort of national food policy or program around what kids and how kids are eating in school?

SASHA MCNICOLL: There was a kind of an attempt at some federal guidelines for school food, but we don't have a national school food program and as you said we're one of the only industrialized countries that doesn't have one. And you know, that's really a pity because there was a recent UNICEF report that came out that ranked Canada as 37 out of 41 high income countries around providing access to healthy food for our children. And so, clearly, something needs to be done about this and the Canadian companion to that report suggested that a National School Food Program is one of the best kind of responses to that problem.

MG: Why don't we have one, then, if the need is there?

SASHA MCNICOLL: We don't have one because the federal government doesn't see education as its jurisdiction. And so you know, we have a federal system and that divides jurisdiction between different levels of government. That means that it falls to the provinces and territories. What the Coalition for healthy school food is trying to say is like: “Look this is important enough that we need federal leadership”, because Canadian children are not eating enough healthy foods and are eating far too many of the wrong foods. Only one third of Canadian children eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. And so we really need to address this because diet related diseases are the leading driver of health care costs in Canada. This is a huge deal and it's a lot easier to change that eating - It's a lot easier to instill healthy eating behaviors in children than it is to try and change them in adults.

MG: How would they do that then, if it is education of provincial and territorial responsibility? Are you asking them to come and sort of big foot in and say: “Well, we understand that you're overseeing this but this is so important we have to do something else on the side of that”?

SASHA MCNICOLL: So no we're not we're not asking the federal government to undertake this whole thing on their own. But you know there's a lot of issues that are provincial jurisdiction where the federal government will get funding for health for example. And so what we're asking for is for the federal government to kind of just try and ensure that there's some sort of level playing field across the country, and to give funding to provinces and territories to ensure that they're meeting the needs of more Canadian children. So we're looking at a kind of cost shared model to a national program where all levels of government, charities, and corporations and parents can chip in to kind of address this really big problem.

MG: Do you have the sense that within the federal government people see this as a priority?

SASHA MCNICOLL: That's an interesting question. I would say that people see the health of Canadian children as a priority. And you know we we've seen Health Canada kind of start to take some steps to address that. For example, they're restricting marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children which is a great step.

MG: I ask just because Zoe says, I mean to her point, times have changed. Kids used to go home for lunch and now they don't, overwhelmingly. There aren't cafeterias being built in schools. Part of this is provincial but if you if there is a federal involvement in this you just wonder whether they see it as something that is pressing, that is urgent, given how much time kids spend in school.

SASHA MCNICOLL: Yes. I'm not sure that they see the school food issues as pressing and. My job is to try to convince them that it is. If we compare the situation that Zoe laid out to other countries, like in Finland for example, children sit around a table at lunch with an adult. They eat healthy balanced meals and the adult talks to them about the importance of healthy eating nutrition and manners. And so they really use this program as a way to teach children about healthy food and to turn them into food literate adults.

MG: Sasha, thank you.

SASHA MCNICOLL: Thank you.

MG: Sasha McNicholl, Coalition for Healthy School Food coordinator at Food Secure Canada. She was with me in our Toronto studio.

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Here in France, lunch time is not just 20 minutes, where you have to stuff your face as fast as you can. They consider lunch a class. A full hour where you learn how to eat in a civilized manner, enjoy healthy food, and serve each other. On this day, the children are being served lamb skewers chicken over cuscus, a four course meal. That included a cheese course and dessert. Here's something I have never seen before; when does a kid share his ice cream?

MG: And apparently it's not just Finland. That's what Michael Moore discovered about how Lunch is served at one elementary school in Normandy, France. Sounds delicious but if you think that kind of approach couldn't possibly happen in Canada, well think again. The Eel Ground First Nation in New Brunswick has made a commitment to providing good food to its students, and while it may not be lamb skewers or couscous, it has become a model for what the future could hold. Chad Duplessie is the project coordinator for the Healthy Bodies Minds and Spirits program at the Eel Ground First Nation in New Brunswick and that's where we have reached him. Chad. Hello.

CHAD DUPLESSIE: Hi. How are you, Matt.

MG: I'm great, thanks. What are you serving to students at the elementary school in your community?

CHAD DUPLESSIE: Pretty simple food. Scratch made food made by community members [unintelligible] cooks. And you know we see things like turkey tacos, chili whole wheat rolls, steamed brown rice and honey garlic chicken. You know, roast beef, potatoes, steamed corn. You know pretty simple food but wholesome and hearty and cost effective.

MG: And it's free for all the students?

CHAD DUPLESSIE: It is free. We offer breakfast and lunch to each student. So that the technical term will be it is universal and it is free. In the end, well, we see a good uptake of 75 percent of the students taking part in the breakfast and lunch every day.

MG: If this program wasn't there, what would students be doing at lunchtime? What would they be eating, do you think?

CHAD DUPLESSIE: It's a bit of a question mark. I know previous to that the program kind of really getting running, and then the new school being built with the cafeteria, and so if we go back 10 - 12 years kids were let out at lunch, and they went home, to homes that - if we jump forward to our recent data here, 40 percent food insecurity in the community. So you know what's in the cupboard, who knows if there's anything. It's a bit of a question mark in the past, but we certainly know right now that the students are eating - about 60 percent of the students are getting their full vegetables and fruit consumption. And we also know that there are BMI rates are decreasing and we see other jurisdictions rising.

MG: And has that had an impact on student performance and student attendance?

CHAD DUPLESSIE: Students’ attendance absolutely. I don't have the data right here but I know it's something that the school, and the principal Helen Barnard, is quite proud of is, the attendance rate at the school. Part of that has to be the school lunch program but also the kind of holistic wellness approach to school does take.

MG: You realise how uncommon this sounds? We live in a society where people eat breakfast you know as they're driving. They have this sad desk lunch in front of their computer. We always say that we are a ‘hurry up and go’ kind of world and we don't have time to sit down. And yet you're doing, and what we heard in that clip with Michael Moore, is the idea of people sitting down and having a ritual around lunch. Why is that so important in this society that we're in right now do you think?

CHAD DUPLESSIE: It changes things. If you can take - you know we're talking about school food in big rooms and big schools and big infrastructure. But you know if you take it down to the most basic kind of home life, if you restructure your family to focus on food and taking the time to cook the food, and maybe shop a little bit more critically, and share the food. It starts to really change how we organize ourselves socially and domestically. And I think for the better.

MG: Who pays for this?

CHAD DUPLESSIE: The project is sponsored and funded by Canadian Feed the Children which is an international non-profit organization, and then of part of it, almost 50/50 with Eel Ground First Nation the chief and council.

MG: And it's money well spent according to the community. This is something that they see as a priority?

CHAD DUPLESSIE: Yes absolutely. We can't go backwards now. Once you become standardized it's hard to move back from it. But again, you know, in a community that has both health issues around obesity and overweight and in food insecurity it's paramount, right.

MG: Before I let you go, what do you think the messages is, to the rest of the country that's getting set for the return to school and wondering what that school lunch is going to look like?

CHAD DUPLESSIE: Get involved. I think the corporate kind of world has a pretty good stranglehold on this end and you need to advocate for what your kids are eating. And we need to look at it holistically we need to look at, I mean from a business case, we need to look at the marketing. We need to look at the environment in which the kids eat. There are best practices out there and it just takes some effort and obviously some funding from the provincial government in it. And I'd like to suggest that the way you talk about jurisdiction first nation communities fall under federal jurisdiction. These rates of food insecurity and obesity are much higher in 2004 and I guess at this point to me express that I am non-native and it's a real pleasure for me to work in this community with some real champions , and this including your cooks and our school principal in the chief in council.

MG: Chad, great to talk to you about this. Thank you.

CHAD DUPLESSIE: Yes, appreciate it. Thanks Matt.

MG: Chad Duplessie, project coordinator for the Healthy Bodies Minds and Spirits program at the Eel Ground First Nation, near Miramichi, New Brunswick. Your thoughts on this would be welcome. You can reach us at cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the Contact Us link. I am Matt Galloway. You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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ENCORE | What do women want? Sex researcher explores mysteries of female desire

Guest: Meredith Chivers

MG: Hello I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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MG: Up next what women, really, want.

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For us, we think that having all the knowledge you want or need is the key to a good happy, healthy and hot sex life. And the story did start is as a story for women and people who left them.

MG: That's Sam Wittle, the owner of an Ottawa sex shop and bookstore called Venus Envy. If, as she says, having knowledge helps you have a good sex life, well, there's still a lot that isn't understood about women's sexuality. Here's Sam Wittle’s take on female desire and a word of warning, the conversation this half hour will be a frank discussion about sex and sexuality.

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So we'll start here with our are safer sex condoms and lube Sections. This is our vibrator section here. We spend a lot of time talking about vibrators helping people pick out their first vibrator and more the second and third. One thing that turns women on is just having their pleasure being seen as important. Often what people need in order to kind of reconnect with their desire is, you know the same things people need to reconnect with pleasure in all aspects of their lives. So, ways to have less stress or calmdown the distractions or think about work less. Because you know it's hard to feel sexy and be in the moment when you're running through a grocery list or thinking about the millions of things you have to do that day or that week. So, yes, sometimes the sexiest thing you can do look is like hire a babysitter.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello.

MEREDITH CHIVERS: Hello.

AMT: What did you think of what we just heard from the women sex store?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: I think that that is some fantastic advice, and I think that first of all giving women the knowledge that they need to understand their sexual response and to connect with their bodies is so incredibly important. And that's certainly one of the things that drives the work that we do in my lab, doing the basic science that we need to understand how women's sexual desire and sexual response works. And as well, the idea of reducing stress, reducing distractions and getting into the moment and I'll definitely underscore hiring the babysitter that's a good idea as well.

AMT: [Chuckles] Okay. Just how complicated is female desire?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: I think that it's an unknown at this point to some degree. I think that the characterization of women's sexuality as you know, complicated or very complex is one that is often put out there as a comparison with men or male sexuality. And I think that part of the reason why we might think that is that we're expecting women's sexuality to behave like men's. And the more research that I do with my team here in Kingston and my collaborators around the world we realize that it's not, and that the models of male sexuality that have predominated for decades don't fit. And that we need to do the science to understand how women's sexuality is unique.

AMT: Well how has female sexual desire been understood or misunderstood in the past, then?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: Well dating back to the 50s and the pioneering work of Masters and Johnson the predominant model of sexual desire was that desire was the initiation of sexual response, that people had these spontaneous feelings of desire. They were like lightning bolts that zapped you out of nowhere and that that initiated a process of seeking out sex, either with a partner or partners or with yourself and then feeling turned on. And if you're lucky having an orgasm, for example. And over the years, as more data has accumulated in this you know querying this idea of spontaneous desire, and as psychologists have spent some time thinking about this problem, it doesn't really make sense that sexual motivation would emerge out of the blue. Sexual motivation isn't a drive like thirst or hunger. It may feel like we're going to die if we don't have sex but that's really not going to happen. So in psychological terms it's not a drive. But instead we are drawn towards the things that have previously been pleasurable or reinforcing. And so instead of desire being this spontaneous thing or something that's within us and some people have more, some have less. It is that desire can be triggered or it can be kindled or it can respond to sexual stimuli. And that's what we've been investigating in my laboratory is this idea that desire is responsive.

AMT: So tell us about some of the studies you conduct in your lab what sort of test do participants undergo?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: So we predominantly do sexual psychophysiology research. And what that means is we have folks come into our laboratory. They are in a private room and we'll attach a number of sensors to their body that measure for example their heart rate. But specifically we ask them to attach sensors to their genitals so that we can measure what happens to their genitals as they're getting turned on. We also ask people to tell us how they're feeling. Answer questions and use various kinds of devices to report how they're feeling in the moment. And we also have started using eye trackers. So these are devices that use cameras to follow where people are looking on a computer screen so that we can directly see what it is that they're looking at in real time. And we've also started using measures of neuro-sexual response, to get an idea of what's happening in the brain in those very early moments when people are first looking at sexual stimuli using electroencephalography or EEG. And so we have folks come in we take all of these kinds of measurements to get a sense of what happens in the moment when people get turned on. What happens with their genitals? What happens with what they're feeling? What is the relationship between mind and body? We're also really curious about the question of the kinds of things that turn people on because we've done research that suggests that there's quite a lot of variability in the kinds of things that turn women on.

AMT: Hmm. Okay so what are some of the less predictable things that straight women, to begin with straight women, react to in the lab?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: So we've seen women who report exclusive or sexual attraction to men show fairly significant sexual responses to both male and female sexual stimuli. And that effect is seems to be quite unique to women who report that they're exclusively turned on by men. So it's a bit of a puzzle it doesn't correspond with what they're reporting is their sexual attractions. But we see that their genital responses, their eye tracking responses, their neural responses tend to be equivalent to these male and female sexual stimuli. But as we sort of go down the continuum of increasing sexual attraction to women. So bisexual women, queer women, lesbian identified women towards these sort of other end of the spectrum of people who would say oh I'm sexually attracted only to women. As we move down that there seems to be more differentiation in their sexual responses, more to female sexual stimuli than to male.

AMT: And why do you think that is?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: It's a great question. We don't know the answer to that. I think that it's pretty fascinating sort of clue to see that it's only exclusively heterosexual women who are showing this non differentiated pattern when it comes to gender. I recently proposed a number of different hypotheses that could be pursued to try to explain what's happening here. And there were a couple that really attracted some attention and I'll talk about them now. So one of them is the idea of objectification of women in the media, that there's an overwhelming degree in the western world where we see sexualized images of women everywhere. And so the possibility is that for exclusively heterosexual women their sort of sexual psychology has developed being marinated and sort of saturated in these ideas of sexualizing women and perhaps that has the capacity to shift their ability to become turned on by women. Right now we don't have the science to support that hypothesis or reject that hypothesis but I think it's a really interesting one to pursue. So a second hypothesis that I think also is quite compelling is the idea that the sexual response patterns may be emerging because there hasn't been much reinforcement of sex in one way or another for heterosexual women. So it's well known that straight women are less likely to experience sexual pleasure and orgasm during penetrative sex with men. But if you look at queer women and their sexual relationships it's overwhelmingly larger percentage of women who say well of course when I'm having sex with my girlfriend I'm experiencing sexual pleasure and an orgasm. That's part of what we're doing. But for straight women that reinforcement or that reward might be less predictable. And so perhaps for queer women they've had more and more experiences of being attracted to and sexual with women that are then paired with pleasure. And this might then shape their sexual responses to be greater to female the male stimulation. For exclusively heterosexual women, you know unfortunately the status quo is very low rates of experiencing sexual pleasure with their male partners. And so they may not have that kind of an experience.

AMT: Hmm. And why would that be?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: I'm a whole number of factors can contribute to that. I mean communication between the couple is a huge point for couples to be able to have frank discussions about what feels good. I think another problem with the heterosexual, we call them sexual script so what people do when they get together and have sex, is that penile vaginal intercourse is the main event and most sexual interactions proceed along this trajectory where there's some foreplay that happens. But really the main event is getting to a penis and a vagina. And for a lot of women who have sex with men that's not necessarily what is going to give them the most sexual pleasure. And so it requires a degree of you know open communication and the couple and a degree of assertiveness on the woman's part to be able to say: “Hey! I'm happy to do this but I really need you to do these things for me as well, so I can also enjoy having sex?”

AMT: Okay. And you've looked at women whose bodies react to less predictable images, specifically the bonobo ape. What were you seeing?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: So to give some context to that study. The reason we did it was that I wondered whether this - what we called a nonspecific pattern of genital response - had really nothing to do with the genders of the people depicted in the film. So for my Ph.D. work at Northwestern University, I had shown a diverse group of women films of gay men and lesbian women and heterosexual couples having sex and their general responses were fairly equivalent to all of these different stimuli. And so we wondered if it had had to do with the fact that there's just a lot of sex happening. Maybe it's the sexual activity that they're watching which kindles and triggers what seems like a very automatic physical sexual response. And so we needed to come up with a stimulus that was frankly sexual but didn't contain any plausible sexual partner. And so bonobos were a great choice. They tend to mate in a very human like fashion almost like a missionary position. And what we found was that women had small but significantly different from non-sexual stimuli. Had these small genital responses to these bonobo films which suggested to us that simply just seeing sexual activity was enough to activate women's sexual response systems.

AMT: And into all of this, is an area related to sexual assault? And I want to ask you about that because of how women's bodies can respond sometimes. You've been contacted about your research by survivors of sexual assault. What have you heard? What are they telling you?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: Yes, absolutely. So I have, in the work that I've done, proposed that this very automatic genital response that women can experience when they see all kinds of sexual stimuli whether they're ones that they prefer or not, and in particular there are data suggesting that women when they listen to stories that involve non-consensual or violent sex or see films that depict this that they have these genital responses but they report that they don't feel turned on. And this also meshes with some of my clinical experience so I'm a clinical psychologist as well and have done therapy with women who've experienced sexual trauma. And some women have reported experiencing feelings of physical sexual arousal during a sexual assault. And as you can imagine this can be incredibly troubling for women who feel like in a moment where they were not consenting and they're experiencing violence and harm that their body is betraying them. And so one of the ways that I've reconceptualise this is that perhaps what's happening physically is a very automatic kind of response that is preparing women's physical body for sex whether it's wanted or not. And in some ways this might be akin to when people salivate when they see food. Maybe these genital responses that women are having, these increases in blood flow, that increased lubrication to the genitals might reduce the amount of harm that she experiences if she were ever forced to have sex against her will.

AMT: And in fact you've heard from women, have you not, who say that they realize that their body lubricated and they're really troubled by that, because it was a sexual assault?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: Yes. Absolutely. Yes so I have had several women reach out to me and expressed gratitude at the reframing of this idea that it wasn't their body betraying them but it was their body protecting them, that they had experienced during sexual assault either feelings of physical sexual arousal or in some cases orgasms, and were deeply troubled as to what those physical signs of sexual response mean in terms of consent. And in fact going back a decade there were cases where those physical signs of arousal may have been interpreted as consent. You know other people who have contacted me in waves of media coverage of this work have been lawyers internationally who have been faced with you know testimony that women were lubricated or experienced an orgasm during this sexual assault and so, isn't this a sign of consent? And of course it isn't. You know consent is a freely given verbal agreement to have sex that has nothing to do with what a body is doing.

AMT: It's fascinating and it's very fraught too, huh?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: It is very fraught. This is challenging work to do.

AMT: I just want to shift to ask about pharmaceuticals and all of this. Pharmaceutical companies have marketed products for women so-called sexual dysfunction. What would you make of those products?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: I think that there is a large untapped market that is motivating these investigations. I think we always need to keep in mind the potential for vast amounts of money to be made in that pursuit. At the same time as I said I'm a clinician and if it were possible to provide women with a pharmaceutical that could help women who have for a whole variety of reasons experienced a loss of their sexual desire I would absolutely support that. I do think that using any pharmaceutical needs to happen in the context of broader psychotherapy, given everything we know about the other factors I talked about; communication with your partner's sexual assertiveness and perhaps addressing you know other longstanding issues surrounding comfort with one's sexuality. But I'm not going laterally against the idea of a pharmaceutical. I do think however that the ones that have to this point been made available have not been particularly impressive in how they've performed.

AMT: As a feminist do you think women should have access to something like Viagra?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: I think women should have free access to whatever they want. Viagra in particular you know, sure. Viagra actually works for women in the sense that it increases genital blood flow. You know the trials and marketing Viagra for women out the data suggested that you do see these physical sexual responses but women didn't report that they were actually feeling turned on. So you know it really wasn't having an appreciable effect on increasing women's sexual arousal and so those trials as I understand it were halted. But yes I think that women should have free access to whatever they want.

AMT: I want to talk a little bit more about arousal and desire and what your work reveals about how that works for women. You've looked at women with low sexual desire and the responses they have compared to women with high desire. What did you find?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: So a lot of this work is very preliminary. We're just now beginning to analyze data from a longitudinal study where we brought women into the laboratory, who did have sexual difficulties and who didn't. And over a series of three months they came in for a monthly visit. They were exposed to a sexual or non-sexual film. And then we observed their sexual behavior. They filled out questionnaires, three days after they participated. The very preliminary data suggest that they responsive desire that we asked women about, so the desire that they felt after they got turned on in the laboratory, actually didn't look that different whether they had clinically significant low sexual arousal and desire versus not. These weren't women who had been diagnosed with a sexual dysfunction. But you know using self-report measures of distress and symptoms these women didn't show what we had expected which was lower feelings of desire for a partner or a lower desire to engage in solitary sex or masturbation after they watch these films. So really perplexing. We're not really sure what that means.

AMT: I was just going to ask you if you knew what it meant.

MEREDITH CHIVERS: No we have no idea. I mean I this is often my problem, which is we go in with a hypothesis that seems so reasonable and then we're faced with data that tell a very different story and then we need to do the science to follow up on those findings to try to make sense of what's happening. But I do think that these data might suggest that you know low sexual desire might reflect women’s more global impression of their desire, and maybe not the capacity for their desire to be triggered in the moment. Another perplexing finding that is emerged out of this research is that if you look at the sexual responses of women who are diagnosed with low sexual arousal, for example, their genital responses don't look any different from women who have no sexual difficulties in the lab. And that really suggests to us that women still have this capacity to experience physical sexual arousal and so could we then help women to reconnect with their body to experience that. And so I wonder if women still retain this capacity to experience this physical sexual response, and if desire isn't this spontaneous thing that initiate sexual response but actually emerges from people feeling turned on, that we might actually be able to kindle women's sexual desire by having them find the things that turn them on and then tune into their feelings of desire.

AMT: Okay. I hear what you're saying that's pretty fascinating. And lately there have been American researchers coming to Canada to continue their work. Why is that?

MEREDITH CHIVERS: Well I'll tell you my story so I was a graduate student in Chicago at Northwestern University. I am Canadian but I went to the U.S. for my Ph.D. work. The political climate around the time that I was finishing up my Ph.D. was - it was the Bush government. And there was a vote in Congress in the summer of 2003 to just unilaterally revoke funding federal funding for sexuality research based on moral and political positions. That for me it was all a sign that I needed that it was time to go home. There was no way that I was going to be able to fund the work that I wanted to do in women's sexuality in the U.S. And so I came back to Canada. And you know I'm so proud of our country and the number of incredible sexuality researchers that we have in Canada who frankly have been able to receive funding that otherwise they probably would have never gotten anywhere else in the world. You know the tri Council funding, so the Canadian Institute for Health Research, the social science and humanities research council, the natural sciences, engineering research councils of Canada have in so many ways allowed for Canada to become a world leader in sexuality research. And so I think that's why we're seeing folks from the U.S. deciding that maybe it's time to go elsewhere and maybe Canada is the right place to be.

AMT: It's fascinating work. Thank you for sharing some of what you've been discovering.

MEREDITH CHIVERS: Thank you so much for having me.

MG: Meredith Chivers is an associate professor in the department of psychology and director of the Sexuality and Gender Lab at Queens University. She spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti from Kingston, Ontario in June. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to CBC Radio 1. Coming up, it Shortcuts from the BBC. Have you downloaded the CBC Radio app yet? It allows you to take your public broadcaster with you wherever you happen to go. You can listen to old shows. You can listen to live shows. You can listen to radio right across this country on your smartphone or through your tablet. The app is free and it's available from the App Store or Google Play. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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August 31, 2017 Full Episode Transcript

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