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The Current Transcript for January 6, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: I was just too shocked to move or say anything. I think he really, he really took something from me by taking advantage in that way.

MATT GALLOWAY: That's the Canadian actor Erika Rosenbaum. He she's referring to is Harvey Weinstein. Jury selection begins this week in the trial of the disgraced Hollywood mogul. In just a minute, we'll speak with Rosenbaum about what justice would look like and where the MeToo movement is today. Also on the way, what happens now? That is the question that people around the world were asking this weekend after the United States killed one of Iran's top generals. Untangling the rhetoric of war, coming up in about 30 minutes. And then.

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VOICE: You know I have no right to complain. I'm really very lucky. I had so many opportunities and I've been saying that for so many years and I started to look at the actual data around it and I thought, you know what? We were sold a bill of goods.

MG: In an hour, the writer Ada Calhoun on why Generation X women actually can't have it all. But the morning after Hollywood's award season kicks off, we begin with the trial of a movie titan. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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Next step of the #MeToo movement calls for men and women to collaborate, say survivors

Guests: Erika Rosenbaum, Leanne Nicolle

MG: Just a couple of words about this morning. I grew up listening to radio that you heard in this timeslot from Morningside and This Morning to for the last 17 years, of course, Anna Maria Tremonti and The Current. These shows helped me learn more about this country and our place in the world and they helped shape my love of radio. Radio, as you know, is the best thing, especially in the morning. This show is built every day by an amazing group of people and I'm honoured to be part of this team and excited and humbled to be behind the mic to present their work. My friends and family would tell you that I'm curious about just about everything, and I can't think of a better place to ask those questions that are swirling around in my head and hopefully yours than here. We've got a lot to talk about. So let's go.

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VOICE 1: The wall of silence surrounding Harvey Weinstein officially collapsing. Today, new accusations of sexual assault, including rape.

VOICE 2: My heart was racing and I was very scared.

VOICE 3: He held me down on the bed. I tried to get away and kept asking him to stop, but it was impossible.

VOICE 4: Now more than 65 women have come forward.

VOICE 5: I was raped by Harvey Weinstein here at Cannes. I was 21-years-old. This festival was his hunting ground.

VOICE 6: I said no a million times.

VOICE 7: I told him, no, no, no, but he insisted.

VOICE 8: The man who pinned me down had handcuffs on him today.

VOICE 5: And even tonight, sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for their conduct against women. We know who you are.

MG: It was no exaggeration to say that the Western world certainly knows who Harvey Weinstein is and it's not because he was one of the most powerful people in the movie business. Just over two years ago, he became the impetus for the MeToo movement, accused by dozens of women of being a serial sexual predator. His trial on charges of rape and sexual assault begins today. Weinstein has pleaded not guilty. We will explore the widespread impact of MeToo in just a moment. But let's begin with the Canadian actor Erika Rosenbaum. She joins us from our Montreal studio. Erika, good morning.

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: Good morning, Matt.

MG: How on the morning of this trial are you feeling?

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: Well, I'm feeling a lot. Hearing the voices of those women was a really solid reminder of why I'm here today, and I can't thank you enough for covering this story on your first morning at The Current. Congratulations, by the way.

MG: Thanks. It's really emotional to hear for you just to hear even those words.

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: Yeah. You know, those are those are my sisters. And this fight has brought us together in a in a very real and honest way. And, you know, we're having this conversation, even though we'd all like to just put it behind us, because there are still so many people staying silent about this. And. And, you know, the conversation has to continue for four women and girls to feel safe. This is just the tip of the iceberg. This one case, this one man, and it means a lot to a lot of people, I think. I think a lot of people are going to be watching. And and it's incredibly important that we continue to hear from the women that he harmed.

MG: You've spoken openly on this program and elsewhere about your experience with Harvey Weinstein. Just briefly recap what happened.

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: Well, what happened to me is very similar to what you heard just a minute ago with those other women. You know, I was a young, hopeful actress. I travelled to Los Angeles with quite a foolish idea that I might make it amidst the throngs of other young women travelling to Hollywood to make it as an actress. I was very young. I was broke. I had very few contacts. And I met him by complete accident at a party and I didn't know who he was. I knew the name, but I had no idea what he looked like. So I was chatting with him at a dinner table and you know, that first time that we met, he was very, very convincing, very charming, very knowledgeable and very confident that I was going to do well and he was going to help me. And it was very professional. And he acted like some uncle or or godfather figure that was going to just make it a little easier, make some introductions. And it was like I was given this golden wand for a second and that this was going to be my way in. And in those days, those are the stories that you heard. You make it by meeting the right person at the right time. And then like many of those other women, the door closed behind me in a private meeting and it turned into something completely different.

MG: How are you doing now with what you went through, but also processing that in the midst of this trial about to begin?

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: Well, today is a complicated day. In general, I'm doing very well, talking about this stuff is really difficult. Still, I find it very triggering. You know, I can hear my heart pounding because every time I speak about this, I sort of go back to this place where I felt very helpless and an angry. And, you know, I talk about this because I think it's necessary. And every time I do, somebody reaches out and says, you know, that happened to me, too, or I think I'm ready to go to the police. You know, women in my own family confided in me and about things that we had never spoken about before. So, I mean, I've learned over the last two years the power and using your voice, even if it is humiliating and and even if it's embarrassing and hurtful and if you'd rather stay silent. For me, it has been incredibly empowering to be able to share and allow others to do the same. But also, I feel I feel very hopeful because after all those years and all of those secrets and all the women that he hurt, you know, we are all on the path to healing and we are all getting help. And we. And we've met each other and we support one another. And and most importantly, we believe one another because our stories are so similar. And you know, he he walked into a courtroom with his hands cuffed today and he's finally standing up in front of Lady Justice and having to defend himself for what happened. And I mean, I'd say that that's a win already for all of us.

MG: And yet, in the midst of this, he does this interview with The New York Post last month in which he says that he was a pioneer in advancing the careers of women in the film industry. And he now feels like and these are his words, the forgotten man. What's it like to hear, to hear him say that in the midst of what you just said?

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: Well, I mean, it's incredibly discouraging that he got a platform to do so. From what I understand, he did it against the advice of his lawyers and I have to agree. I think that was not a great move for him. I think he's reaching and I think I think it's too bad, but not at all surprising that he can't see what he's done. I think his his behaviour in his predatory, repetitive behaviour over decades just goes to show that he you know, he was obsessed with power. It was not about anything else. He was obsessed with controlling women and having power over people that he felt he could control and, you know, it was a reach. I think he's he's feeling vulnerable and he wanted to defend himself. And yeah, I mean, it's discouraging. But what's more discouraging is that people are giving him an opportunity to do so.

MG: It's telling that this trial begins the morning after the Golden Globes. Big night in Hollywood awards season and you have a lot of the great and powerful there in the room. And he would have been there in that room in years past. And people wonder whether there's been a change in the industry since these charges were laid, but also since the stories about Weinstein's alleged behaviour came out. Have a listen to to Kelly McCormick. She's a Canadian actor and she says that she has seen a shift since the rise of MrToo.

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VOICE: I think the biggest difference before and after that, that moment in history is that women are starting to deal with these instances in real time, instead of adding it to the pile of baggage. We're sort of going, OK, here's a new one, here's a new terrible thing that's happened. What are my tools and where are my women and where are my people that I can reach out to and I can say, OK, this happened, what do I do? That makes my hands shake. It makes me so proud and emotional that I feel like I have a community and that I feel like we're all finally talking.

MG: Do you see that? Do you see, I mean, there have been organizations in this country that have been created to give platform and to give a venue for women to talk. Are you seeing that, Erika?

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: Yeah, I absolutely am. And it is very encouraging. You know, this trial aside, thi sea change has created this sense of sisterhood that I have never felt or seen before, not only in my industry, but, you know, amongst my friends and amongst women in business. You know, I've had conversations with women in tech, with women in nursing and I think that this feeling has really rippled out from from this one story and from and from this incredible movement. You know, we're conditioned through repetition to make allowances for these everyday acts of sexism. And I think we're finally stopping it in its tracks, were questioning it, and we're asking our partners and friends to question it. And I don't see us going back from that. I think the legal ramifications are incredibly important. But there's nothing going to change.

MG: This sort of tide that has turned beyond the conversation though, ave you seen actual change in your industry?

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: I have. You know, there have been women who have created something called MeToo. And they they've developed this online reporting system where women can go to a network called Rosa, where they can find tools and resources, they can report online. There's a similar system in the states where you can report and discuss it in private and anonymously so that you're not necessarily putting yourself out there. And I'm on every set that I've worked on. You know, this is a conversation. And not just because I'm there, but because people are talking about it. And actor has put up our code of conduct on every set that I've been on and in every actor meeting I've gone to.

MG: That's the union.

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: Yeah. And, you know, the support has been palpable. I really do think that our industry has changed for the better.

MG: As you mentioned, Erika, this has gone well beyond showbiz. It may have started there with these allegations and these charges, but it's much more than that now. One of the first voices in that discussion in this country in terms of broadening that was the voice of Leanne Nicolle. She only chose to speak publicly about what happened to her with the rise of the MeToo movement. And Leanne is with us in our Toronto studio. Good morning to you.

LEANNE NICOLLE: Good morning, Matt.

MG: What does this trial, the beginning of the Harvey Weinstein trial, mean to you?

LEANNE NICOLLE: You know, it's interesting to see the MeToo movement kind of come to this moment, because this morning we're all watching intently because whether or not justice is served, whether what side you're on, but when justice is served, I think in the court of public opinion, these perpetrators are losing.

MG: I said in the introduction that it was the rise of this movement and these accusations that made you want to speak openly. What was it in those accusations that prompted you to speak up?

LEANNE NICOLLE: I mean, the Harvey Weinstein and the brave women who came forward, such as Erika, after really created a platform to speak out. And I'm grateful for that, because when I filed the complaint against Marcel Aubut, the president of the Canadian Olympic Committee a year prior, was almost exactly a year prior. I actually didn't have the emotional competence to come forward because I was a broken woman and that created some space, but also gave me the opportunity to speak against that type of behaviour. I wasn't in it for personal glory. I don't think anyone wakes up in the morning and says, I just can't wait to be sexually harassed or are abused, so but in that moment when I did file, I did not have the emotional competency to speak out.

MG: As Erika mentioned, retelling these stories can be difficult and triggering and traumatizing. Just if it's OK, briefly explain what happened to you.

LEANNE NICOLLE: So there were many years, obviously, in my situation where the president of the Canadian Olympic Committee, Marcel Aubut, had used the abuse of power. I mean, Erika spoke very articulately about it. This is an abuse of power and used various methods of harassment in order to get what they want. And so this in September 2015, I did file a formal complaint against the president of the Canadian Olympic Committee, and that forced an investigation that brought forward over 100 volunteers who came forward and spoke about the harassment at the Canadian Olympic Committee under his presidency.

MG: We should say that that these allegations haven't been proven in a court of law, but he ended up resigning from the Canadian Olympic Committee and as president of that foundation as well. What's changed in sport when in the wake of of MeToo, and in the wake of allegations like the ones you're raising?

LEANNE NICOLLE: I think that this is industry agnostic, actually, because we saw.

MG: Across society.

LEANNE NICOLLE: Across society. Because now there is an awareness and an alertness, I would say, that we haven't seen before. Certainly in the entertainment industry, we see it. But in sport, in policing, in, you know, tech, as you mentioned, university campuses, sexual violence on university campuses is rampant. And so the opportunity to speak out. But in sport specifically. Now we have a hotline. It's mandatory to have a hotline that athletes and those being affected can call anonymously and it has to be investigated.

MG: Erika talked about the sisterhood, the fact that people are speaking amongst themselves. Women are talking amongst themselves. You're both here. What would you say to Erika about what you've learned in this experience?

LEANNE NICOLLE: Yeah. First, I would say that, Erika, I know it may seem this, but I think we're all equally as proud of each other for the rise. And this is a moment in history. This isn't an event, this is a rising. And I would say for for Erika to be watching this today must be incredibly emotional. I know when Marcel Aubut gave his formal apology, it was incredibly emotional, but it was an apology. And so, you know, this is a really tough time. But what I would say is with MeToo movement, there are two types, two streams, I would say. One, there are bad men who are perpetual perpetrators. It's ongoing. It is not an event. But there are good men who have behaved badly. And those are the ones that I think we can have empathy for and help change behaviour. And that's what will create positivity for the next generation, such as my daughter.

MG: And Erika, is there anything you'd say to Leanne?

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: Well, I think she's very brave. I know how difficult it is to put yourself out there. And, you know, she's a leader in her industry and and has taken that position and that platform to do something good for her children, you know, which is what I was trying to do. And I know that whatever your intentions are, it's incredibly difficult and it can be difficult on your family. And so I just have an immense amount of respect.

MG: Do you really see a shift in society Leanne? I mean, people have been fired. People have been held to account. There are, there's a trial that's about to begin today. But is there really been a shift in society in terms of how we deal with sexual abuse and how we deal in particular with men in power?

LEANNE NICOLLE: I think that there is a shift in society because those that are perpetual predators, they they have a greater risk. Now, the challenges is that they do have psychopath psychological and psychopathic behaviour tendencies. And and so therefore, they feel untouchable. And I think that's a very different thing. And that was the the untouchable nature of someone like Harvey Weinstein with his comments about a month ago. That just proves to you how it's not registering. Where I see the most behaviour change in my work is with men who do want to behave badly — sorry, do want to behave better. They do want to learn. They want language. They want tools. And this movement cannot continue without us collaborating with men.

MG: Erika, where do you see the movement going next?

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: Well, I mean, I think that this call to women to recognize their common experience and take on sexual coercion, which is something that Ashley Judd studied in, you know, at Harvard, and then came forward with her story. Something Jodi Kantor wrote about in her book. I think this is what is leading this movement and what is the hope for our future. You know, I agree that most men want to be allies. They want to do the right thing. When I talk to young people, I address the men directly. I address the young men in the room. And I say, you know, ask me questions. Let's discuss. You know, let's find a way to move forward with respect and integrity so that everybody gets the respect that they deserve. I think that we don't need to to look to the past and and blame all the time. I you know, I'd like you said I think people in positions of power have to be held to account. And looking forward, we need to work together to, to pave a path that is just and right for everybody. You know, looking forward I think that the problems that we're facing, the rising seas and the burning forests that, you know, these are these are problems that are so much bigger than any one nation, any one gender. I mean, these are problems that are gonna require all hands on deck and and a level of respect that allows us to work together unfettered by any of the nonsense of the past.

MG: Erika, it's great to speak with you this morning. Again, I can imagine it's difficult, but this is an important moment. And I'm glad to have you on the program this morning. Thank you.

ERIKA ROSENBAUM: I can't thank you enough, Matt.

MG: Leanne, thank you.

LEANNE NICOLLE: Thank you.

MG: Erika Rosenbaum is a Canadian actor. She was in our studio in Montreal. Leanne Nicolle is now the CEO of Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Toronto. The allegations against Marcel Aubut have not been proven in court. We asked for comment from Harvey Weinstein's attorney, but we have not heard back. Harvey Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to all charges and his trial begins today. Well, the CBC News is next. And then.

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[Sounds from demonstrations in Iran]

MG: Thousands of Iranians are taking to the streets, burning American flags, demanding revenge. They are angry about the killing of Qasem Soleimani, the country's most powerful military leader. We'll speak about the implications for the Middle East and beyond, coming up in about six minutes. My name is Matt Galloway. This is The Current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM.

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Back To Top »

Iran says it will retaliate against the US killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani

Guests: Nader Hashemi, Stephanie Carvin, Maziar Bahari

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

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MG: Still to come, they're exhausted in debt and overwhelmed. A whole generation of women, Gen X, to be specific, is facing a midlife crisis and author Ada Calhoun says it's not getting the attention it deserves. Well, we'll change that in about half an hour. But first, I'm heading north.

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MG: Coming up on The Current this week, special coverage from my trip to Thunder Bay. That city has become notorious for having the highest per capita opioid overdose death rate in the province of Ontario. Frontline workers say that not enough is being done and not enough attention is being given to a crisis that normally would be associated with Canada's largest cities, cities like Toronto and Vancouver. Tomorrow, my documentary about the people most affected by this crisis, the families of men who died and this former addict who fights the temptations which are everywhere. Here's an excerpt from that story, beginning with her description of the city of Thunder Bay.

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VOICE: It's as simple as that. Drug haven.

MG: We're at Amanda Rusnick's apartment, a stone's throw from where Tyler lived in the East End. The tracks cut through this part of the city and there are burnt out buildings and abandoned places on every block. The locals also say that there's a drug house on every street.

VOICE: I sold a lot of drugs. I did a lot of drugs.

MG: You could call her an expert on the city's drug trade. She's a former addict who's managed to stay clean for over a year. She got hooked on OxyContin and Percocet after suffering from an assault that left her in a coma. That was back in 2004.

VOICE: So it kept me extremely pretty much mummified.

MG: She went from having them prescribed to having to buy them off the street.

VOICE: My pill habit got extremely bad. I overdosed a few times and then I started into smoking crack. I would steal from people. I would beat them up. I look back at the way I was and I can't believe I was ever like that.

MG: You describe Thunder Bay as like a drug haven. How difficult is it to stay sober in a place where there are drugs kind of all around you?

VOICE: It's hard. It is hard. Like there's days when I just wish that I had drugs. If I get extremely stressed out, I'll want to numb myself.

MG: So far, she's resisted. She knows how risky the drug supply has become. It's well-known here that the opioid crisis is being fuelled by gangs from Toronto and Ottawa who see a lucrative market. Police say there's been a marked rise in fentanyl and car fentanyl flooding this city. The opioids are being cut into all kinds of drugs. They're cheap, they extend the supply and they create a bigger high, making them even more addictive.

VOICE: It's pathetic what these people are doing to the people in my city.

MG: You can hear my documentary from Thunder Bay tomorrow on The Current and we will have more coverage of this issue of the opioid crisis happening right across this country throughout the week, including an interview with the new federal minister of health, Patty Hajdu, who's from Thunder Bay. She's coming up on The Current.

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MG: You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM. My name's Matt Galloway. Relations between Iran and the United States on a knife's edge after the killing last week of Iranian General, Qassem Soleimani. Tensions though, have been building for a long time. Here's Janice Stein from the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy on how we got here.

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VOICE 1: So Iran and the United States have had a long, intense and very troubled relationship since the fall of the Shah in 1979. Probably the best known episode was the taking of U.S. diplomats hostage.

VOICE 2: This flag was apparently taken from someone's office inside the United States embassy to the Iranian demonstrators who set fire to it. This was a symbol of victory.

VOICE 1: Those memories are still very much alive, both in Washington and Tehran.

VOICE 3: Coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine.

VOICE 1: When President Bush invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein, he actually freed Iran from its most strategic adversary and enabled Iran to have freedom of action in the broader Middle East, which is what we see today. It has close ties with Hezbollah in Lebanon, close ties with militias in Syria, close ties with the popular mobilization forces in Iraq itself. So the region is really sharply divided.

VOICE 4: Today, diplomacy opened up a new path toward a world that is more secure.

VOICE 1: In this story, Barack Obama breaks through finally with an agreement reached with the government of Iran to limit its development of nuclear material.

VOICE 4: For the first time in nearly a decade we have halted.

VOICE 1: This could have been the transformational moment in the relationship between the two countries.

VOICE 5: This was a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.

VOICE 1: So this latest round starts to escalate when President Trump walks away from the agreement and imposes really draconian economic sanctions. We've seen a slow process of escalation. A series of missile strikes, which really quickened in the last several months, culminated in attacks which killed an American. In response, the United States launched strikes which killed approximately 25 Iraqis, and that led to a series of demonstrations against the U.S. embassy, which brought back those nightmares of an embassy unresolved. Taking us right back to 1979 and that's what led to this latest escalation, a huge move up the ladder in the targeted assassination of Qassem Soleimani.

MG: So the question now is what comes next? This is a question that is circulating around the region but also beyond. Nader Hashemi is the director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver. He is in our Toronto studio. Stephanie Carvin is an assistant professor of international relations at Carleton University. She's in our Ottawa studio. And Maziar Bahari is an Iranian-Canadian journalist and editor of IranWire. We've reached him in London, England. Good morning to you all.

NADER HASHEMI: Morning.

STEPHANIE CARVIN: Good morning.

MAZIAR BAHARI: Morning.

MG: We'll start with your reaction to what's happening today and what happened over the weekend. Have a listen to this.

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VOICE: We're always gonna do the right thing to protect America and I am confident that the decision we made to take down this terrorist, this designated terrorist could inflict so much harm over such an extended period, was the right course of action to reduce risk to America.

[Speech from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Zeinab Soleimani]

MG: That's the voice of Zeinab, the daughter of General Soleimani saying that the families of American soldiers in the region will spend their days waiting for the news of the deaths of their children. Before that, you heard the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in tears, leading prayers at the general's funeral. And before that, U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo speaking on NBC's Meet the Press. Nader Hashemi, did anything over the weekend happen that surprised you, given the lead up to this weekend and the tensions swirling around?

NADER HASHEMI: No, nothing did surprise me. I think we're seeing the predictable results of a deeply misguided and chaotic U.S. foreign policy wreaking devastation on the politics of the Middle East. I mean, one of the things that stands out for me that I think is most sort of catastrophic is the focus of Middle East politics now is shifting from protesters demanding their rights in Iraq, in Iran, in other parts of the Middle East. Now it's shifting to focussing on American policy and American aggression. And this is a huge win for the forces of authoritarian authoritarianism and extremism in the Middle East who don't want to talk about democracy and human rights. They want to talk about, you know, ideological narratives related to outside powers intervening in this is and this is happening before our eyes. And we can see it right now in terms of what's happening in Tehran today. The protests that rocked Iran in November are all completely forgotten and now there's a rallying around the flag moment, trying to elevate, you know, Qassem Soleimani, who is effectively, you know, a nasty war criminal. He's been elevated now as a national hero. And so once again, we're seeing, I think, U.S. foreign policy playing a very destructive role, particularly in terms of undermining the prospects for democratic change in the region.

MG: We'll come back to that. Stephanie Carvin, one thing that did happen this weekend was that Iran said it would no longer abide by the limits of the 2015 nuclear deal. That doesn't sound good.

STEPHANIE CARVIN: No, it doesn't, but I think it's also been somewhat exaggerated in the media. Iran, you know, we often see these images, we hear these voices, people talking about like children weeping for their fathers and we think that they're irrational, but they're a smart actor. They know that by sticking with the Iran nuclear deal that they, you know, are able at least to kind of keep a little bit of that moral angle that the United States does seem to be throwing away, particularly with Donald Trump's more extreme rhetoric that we saw on Twitter over the last 24 hours. So they have not actually said they're leaving the Iran nuclear deal, they are saying they are going to diminish, I think, their cooperation with it. But either way, that, of course, is not a good thing. That that deal is among a large, I would say the majority of international Asian scholars was seen to be a fairly effective way of containing the thing that the United States is worried about, which is that Iran getting nuclear weapons.

MG: So you don't believe that the comments made yesterday paved the road for Iran moving toward a nuclear bomb?

STEPHANIE CARVIN: No, I don't think so yet. But we're closer to that path than I would certainly like to be.

MG: Maziar Bahari we saw yesterday huge crowds in the streets of Iran around this funeral. How reflective do you think those crowds are of the support that he actually had or has in the country?

MAZIAR BAHARI: Well Qassem Soleimani was kind of a mysterious character in Iran and a unique character in Iran as well. He was as noted, he was a war criminal of course. He was part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards and it's very important to mention that there is no Iran in the name of IRGC. It is called Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. So he was someone who was fighting for the regime. He was part of the Revolutionary Guard Unity, 1980, 1988, 1988, Iran-Iraq War and then he's been in charge of foot force for the past two decades. So he was part of the regime. But at the same time, he was someone who the regime tried to portray as a national character in order to boost, first of all, the regime's own image, but also, they needed someone beyond the run of the mill Iranian functionaries, Islamic Republic functionaries. So there are some support, but at the end of the day, those mourners in the streets of Iran, they go back to their homes tonight. They're going to suffer from the economic mismanagement of the country. They are going to be suffering from what is happening in the country. And many of those mourners again they will join protest in a month's time, in a couple of months time. So it is true that Qassem Soleimani enjoyed a lot of support in Iran as a national hero, as a national character, but I think this show of sorrow, show of grief is going to be momentary. And people are going back to their unfortunately miserable lives and they will have to deal with that in the future. But in the meantime, the Islamic regime is going to milk Qassem Soleimani's assassination for whatever it's worth.

MG: People have been asking all weekend what happens next? Nader Hashemi, there's great speculation about what Iran might do. What do you think Iran is thinking about in terms of the targets it might be looking at when it comes to a response?

NADER HASHEMI: Well we've already seen I think a sample of what Iran is able to do and probably will do it in greater frequency in the coming months, trying to, I think, destabilise oil supplies in the Persian Gulf, attacking various military targets throughout the Middle East. But, you know, Iran is a relatively very weak power compared to the United States. It can't win a conventional war. So it will do what it has been doing for a very long time, pursuit of asymmetrical warfare, waiting for opportunities. I think the ball is very much in the Iranian court. They will determine when they'll lash out and right now, they're, I think, taking advantage of exactly what Maziar mentioned, this wonderful propaganda moment to rally public opinion around the regime, around the theme of anti-Americanism and away from themes of, you know, demands for political change both in Iran and across the region.

MG: Stephanie, people have been speculating about a cyber attack and you've been looking into the cyber capabilities of the Iranian regime. What do we know about what that government could do?

STEPHANIE CARVIN: Well, Iran has actually dramatically increased its cyber capabilities, really since it was attacked from the virus in 2010. And it has basically developed it both at state capability and a network of proxies that are able to essentially what they have been found in Western critical infrastructure, for example, includes dams. They've done attacks on banks. They've been found in universities. And I would imagine that there's a lot of concern in Western countries that these are the kinds of targets that could be affected in any kind of retaliatory strike.

MG: We saw a little hint of that this weekend when a U.S. government website was hacked and it was an image of the president being punched in the face?

STEPHANIE CARVIN: Yeah, I mean, that's on the very, very low level of retaliation. It's basically, you know, I would describe that as hacktivism, just trying to make a political statement. It just means someone's website security was out of date. So I wouldn't read too too much into that. But, you know, it got them headlines and that this is part of the propaganda war that the other guys here are speaking about. And so but I would expect something perhaps a little bit stronger, something not necessarily destructive, but potentially disruptive.

MG: Maziar, you tweeted in the wake of the speculation around what was going to be coming next. That the Iranian leadership, in your words, is genocidal, but not suicidal. What did you mean by that?

MAZIAR BAHARI: Well, what I mean is that at the end of the day, the regime is interested in its own survival. So whether the survival can be achieved through terror and mayhem, they're going to resort to terror and mayhem. And if they have to as Ayatollah Khomeini, the former supreme leader of Iran, said that at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, they're ready to drink the chalice of poison and accept negotiations with the enemy. At that time it was Saddam Hussein. And this time, they may have to come to the negotiating tables with a table with the west, including the United States under the presidency of Donald Trump.

MG: Donald Trump on the weekend was defending his decision to kill Soleimani. He said that and this is on Twitter ,as he often communicates, that if Iran strikes any American or American assets, the United States has targeted 52 Iranian sites, some of them linked to Iranian culture, and that they will be hit fast and hard, doubled down on this yesterday when he was speaking to reporters on Air Force One. Nader, what do you make of that?

NADER HASHEMI: I mean, this is classic Donald Trump. He's erratic. He talks tough. He has no sense of international law. He has no sense of the repercussions that might follow from these sort of you know chaotic policies. But I think he understands his core base of supporters really well. This plays really, I think, convincingly to that constituency, and it helps detract attention from his own internal problems, which are very vast. And it helps him, you know, navigate the coming election cycle.

MG: So you don't think he's serious about destroying cultural relics?

NADER HASHEMI: I think we need to take it very seriously, because, you know, he is very temperamental. I suspect that, you know, he might exercise that option. And, of course, of huge concern is he's surrounded by these war hawks, these sycophants who, you know, are egging him on to try and sort of take the war to Iran. It's important to also realize that, you know, right from the beginning of Donald Trump's pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement, he's effectively declared economic war on Iran. Collapse the regime so this could be just another sort of threat that he might, you know, he might actually pursue if provoked.

MG: People are already apparently feeling the effects of these threats here in Canada. Stephanie we confirmed reports through CBC yesterday that Canadian and U.S. citizens of Iranian dissent are being held and questioned at numerous U.S. borders, particularly in Vancouver. How worrying is that?

STEPHANIE CARVIN: I think it is disturbing. I mean, this is something that we saw in the immediate in 2017 after Trump basically got into power. And, you know, I think it's a mistake. It's you know, they're let's be honest, there is a Hezbollah presence in Canada. They have a facilitation and a financing network. And that is of concern to national security authorities, but to be if what's been said on Twitter and I have seen those stories is true, then just detaining families who are going on vacation does not seem like a particularly smart way to counter that particular threat. National security agencies have been, you know, following this for some time and there's good intelligence on it. Targeting families at the borders is not smart security.

MG: What should we be thinking about when it comes to the Canadian soldiers that are stationed in Iraq right now? 850 soldiers are there. The Iraqi parliament voted to remove all foreign troops from Iraq, including U.S. forces. Stephanie, what does that mean for the Canadian forces that are there?

STEPHANIE CARVIN: Yeah, I think force protection issues are probably paramount right now in terms of the concerns that the Canadian government has. I think it's actually I think it's 850 soldiers in the region. I think up to 500 in Iraq. But it's really something like 200 that are around there. But I think it's really two things. One is that certainly Canada is dependent on the United States for that kind of force protection. If the United States is kicked out by the Iraqi government, that's going to mean that the Canadian mission probably can't continue. And then the second kind of longer term consequence is that, you know, Canada's there trying to help fight ISIS. And that means that in the long term, the risk of ISIS gaining a footprint once again in the ungoverned spaces of the Middle East goes up. So, I mean, really, this is a pretty bleak picture that officials in Ottawa are looking at today.

MG: Maziar Bahari, NATO will convene an emergency meeting today. What could come out of that meeting that might turn the heat down a little bit?

MAZIAR BAHARI: Well, these prime ministers of the U.K., Germany and France last night, they released a communique, asking to de-escalate the tension between the United States and Iran. And Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran, was invited to Brussels in order to negotiate with the European officials in order. So I think the Europeans will try to ask the Iranians to cool down, not to speak irrationally. And I was talking to a friend of mine in Iraqi-Kurdistan this morning as well and he said that even the Kurdish officials, they've been asked by the Iranians to contain some forces within Kurdistan who may want to attack Western targets or American targets, because the Iranians at this point, they do not want to provoke the American government. And I'm sure the Iranians, they have relayed similar messages to their allies in Iraq, Lebanon and others. But the problem is that many of these groups that were created by Qassem Soleimani and others and other Iranian commanders, they do not listen to Iran and there is the possibility that even though the Iranian government, the central government in Iran, may want to contain these groups and stop them from taking action against Western targets, including Canadian soldiers in Iraq, those may just go ahead and attack those soldiers, whether they are Canadians, Americans. Yeah.

MG: Hence what you saw on Twitter on Friday when World War III is trending. I mean, take Twitter for what it is, but Nader Hashemi just in the last minute that we have, what do you make of the concern worldwide around what's going on right now? How worried should people be?

NADER HASHEMI: I think we should be very worried. You know, looking back through history, no one thought that the assassination of you know Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo would unleash a world war. So, you know, a lot of these, you know, policies that we're seeing pursued in the region, primarily by the United States, which you know, I think is really, you know, to blame here, primarily Donald Trump for pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement, which set us down this path, you know, could have unintended consequences. We have a, you know, a very authoritarian regime in Iran that I think is suffering an internal crisis of legitimacy and to a certain extent would want to sort of ratchet up the pressure with the United States. We have a deeply destabilized region already. We have a broken Iraq. We have, you know, a lot of fault lines that can become unravelled if the rhetoric that we're seeing from both sides that the Trump White House and the Iranian regime starts to, you know, manifest itself in terms of an actual real war.

MG: None of that is encouraging. We will follow this along as it precedes minute by minute. It's good to speak with you all this morning. Thank you.

NADER HASHEMI: Thanks.

STEPHANIE CARVIN: Thank you.

MAZIAR BAHARI: Thank you.

MG: Nader Hashemi, director of the Centre for Middle East Studies in Denver at the University of Denver. He was in our Toronto studio. Stephanie Carvin, assistant professor of international relations at Carleton University. She was in our studio in Ottawa. And Maziar Bahari is an Iranian-Canadian journalist and editor of IranWire. We reached him in London, England. Coming up in our next half hour, is it an excuse for bad behaviour or a midlife crisis? Call it whatever you want, but Generation X women are feeling stressed and overwhelmed. We'll find out why when I speak with the author, Ada Calhoun. She says that women in her age group were sold a bill of goods. It's coming up in about 90 seconds. Stick around. This is The Current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM. My name is Matt Galloway.

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Gen X women are facing a mid-life crisis. This author says we're not taking it seriously

Guests: Ada Calhoun

MG: I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: My name is Laura Hill and I'm 39.

VOICE 2: I'm Christine Gordon and I'm 56.

VOICE 3: Born in the 70s.

VOICE 4: Born in 72.

VOICE 5: I was born in 1977.

VOICE 6: My stress level is kind of high right now.

VOICE 7: I think about burnout. I just keep going and going and going and when does something again.

VOICE 8: I find the thing that's the most stressful my life right now is money, trying to get ahead in this city, trying to manage my side hustles, trying to get my bills paid. Trying to make time for myself after all that.

VOICE 9: As a working professional female, we needed to handle both personal life, work life along with a social life or sometimes our children's social life.

VOICE 10: I think a lot of my stress comes from work, you know, high growth technology company. You know, health is really taking a backseat.

VOICE 11: We've been competing to be successful at work. We're still managing the house. We still manage even our parents. Like for me, it's my mom. She lives with me.

VOICE 12: I definitely grew up expecting that I would have an illustrious career and a family. There was really no alternative. And I am now almost 40 and I have a decent career, but I don't have a family yet. Life is not at all what I was raised to expect that it would be. And it's kind of hard to kind of make peace with that.

VOICE 13: To be able to smoothly manoeuvre all of these together as a basket, I think it itself is a stressful day.

VOICE 14: I'm okay with that. I've made peace with not being able have it all. Like at 56, I expected that my mortgage would be paid off, but because of the city we're living in. I'm grateful for the fact that I even have a mortgage, that I could even afford to place.

VOICE 15: I wish that there was still more support for women. So can you do it all and give it all at the same time? I think you will definitely, definitely burnout.

MG: Born between the mid-1960s and 1980, Generation X women are now middle aged. They're often sandwiched between kids and aging parents, juggling careers and home life. And as you heard, feeling stressed out on many different fronts. The journalist, Ada Calhoun says that all that stress amounts to a crisis, one that doesn't get the attention it deserves. Her new book is called, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis. And Ada Calhoun joins us from New York City. Ada, good morning.

ADA CALHOUN: Good morning. Great to be here.

MG: Thanks for joining us. Does that sound, what you just heard, does that sound familiar?

ADA CALHOUN: Oh, it sounded very familiar. It sounded like right out of the pages of this book.

MG: Tell me a bit about how this starts. What was keeping you, if we go to the title, Why We Can't Sleep, what was keeping you awake at night?

ADA CALHOUN: Well, it was a couple summers ago and I wasn't sleeping at all. My husband and son were peacefully resting away and I was up every night around 3:00, 4:00 in the morning and just staring at the ceiling, worried about money. I had a lot of debt. I was trying to find a new job because all the freelance work had dried up. And I just I felt like, how did I get here? I thought I'd been working so hard since I was 14-years-old and, you know, what did I do wrong?

MG: This leads to a piece that was published on Oprah Magazine's website and the response to that was enormous. Were you surprised by how many people picked up on what you were saying?

ADA CALHOUN: Yes. I was very surprised. I really thought I was just saying, you know, there's something going on with with me and with my friends and with other when I talked to you for the story. But I I didn't think it was going to be quite so universal. I mean, it just got hundreds and hundreds of messages and hundreds of thousands of women were sharing it online and and saying this is something we need to talk about more.

MG: Were you immediately comfortable with that phrase mid-life crisis?

ADA CALHOUN: No, I wasn't. When this editor at Oprah.com asked me to write the story, she said, I read your last book, which was about marriage and trouble in marriage and she said, I think you're having something of a mid-life crisis. And I said, no, I'm not. You know, yes, things are hard. Yes, I was scared about money. I have all this fear and anxiety, but crisis is a little strong, isn't it? But then the more I dug into this, the more I realized that so many of the women I interviewed were doing that same kind of minimizing. They were saying, you know, I have no right to complain. I'm really very lucky. I had so many opportunities and I'd been saying that for so many years. And I started to look at the actual data around it. And I thought, you know what? We were sold a bill of goods.

MG: What do you mean by that?

ADA CALHOUN: I mean that we were told we could be anything we wanted, even president. We were told that we should reach for the stars, but we were given no support. And as a result, we were downwardly mobile. We have huge amounts of debt. We have tons of anxiety and fear. We were raised, many of us in very traumatic circumstances. Divorce affected something like 40 percent of kids of this generation and we were not set up to succeed by the world around us.

MG: It's interesting, you talk about this in the beginning of the book when you start to fish around for other people's stories and you ask somebody, do you know of anyone having a midlife crisis? How did she respond?

ADA CALHOUN: Yeah I called my best friend in Washington, D.C. She's a reporter, she's divorced, she has three kids, but she you know, she has from what looks like outside the sort of glamorous, lovely life, she's, you know, at the top of her career, she just adopted a dog. She has a live in boyfriend. And, you know, she was quiet. I'd said, like, you know, do you know anybody I can talk to? And then she was thinking and thinking. And then she said, I can't think of anyone I know who's not having a midlife crisis.

MG: What did that tell you? Just about I mean again, going back to to what you were going through, what did that tell you about what's happening in your generation?

ADA CALHOUN: Well, on one level, it made me rather sad to think that here we are struggling. But then it also made me feel like, you know, we're not alone. This is something that's affecting an awful lot of women. And that's something we really maybe should start talking to one another about.

MG: You focussed in particular on middle class women in this book. Tell me a bit about why that focus.

ADA CALHOUN: Yes. So one big theme of the book is about expectations. So women who are poor right now are going through so much. And the divide between rich and poor is so stark that I feel like that category, that demographic is dealing with, with so many stresses that are beyond the scope of a book this size. And then I feel like rich women. There's a lot of TV shows about them. You know, Real Housewives has them covered. So I wanted to focus just on this vast middle this middle class of women who grew up really feeling like the world was going to be their oyster and then hitting middle age and realizing that is not necessarily true.

MG: I want to take a look at the use of that word crisis, which again, is something that you admit you were cautious of embracing initially and then realize that if that's what you are in and that's what a lot of other people are in. Not everybody in this generation who stressed out would call it a crisis. Have a listen to these women. They're in Toronto and they're in Vancouver.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I'm not feeling a crisis. I'm feeling inspired as I get older to do new and different things and challenge myself. I'm finding this is an age where a lot of my friends are starting businesses, entrepreneurial businesses, and people are branching out and doing really bold things that none of us would have had the courage to have done when we were younger. Everyone's looking at their lives thinking, I need to do something more.

VOICE 2: I think often people are overrating their stress. They're making things bigger than they are, in fact and it's about keeping level headed.

VOICE 3: We have learned some tools to manage these stresses. I'm doing quite well on that perspective and quite happy in terms of personal life and professional life.

MG: Ada Calhoun, what do you make of that idea that maybe people are overrating their stress, that things aren't so bad?

ADA CALHOUN: I think that's wonderful for those women. They sound very happy and they should not buy this book because this book is for women who are having a hard time and who have been hearing that kind of gaslighting of like, oh, it's not that bad. Oh, it's not the depression. You know, there's no world wars. You shouldn't feel bad. And the book is really here to answer the question like, OK. So, yeah, we shouldn't feel bad. Were highly educated. We have all these opportunities. So why do we feel bad?

MG: You talk about this again in the book. You're on a panel with Susan Crosse Whitburn, an academic who said that, what, there's no scientific evidence for calling a midlife crisis beyond an excuse for bad behaviour.

ADA CALHOUN: That's right. She said that and I feel like all that Generation X women in the room were like uh huh like yeah, we've been hearing that for a while. I think it's very easy to say that it's not real and I'm like, you can call what ever you want to call it. But even Susan, she said, you know, she's like, yes, okay, fine, your generation is extremely stressed out. Yes, they are under a ton of pressure. Yes, a lot of these things are new. And I'm like then, let's just call it that. Let's just call it an exceptionally rough time for a certain group of people, if that makes you feel better.

MG: Do you think a similar comment would be made for men in the grips of a midlife crisis?

ADA CALHOUN: I don't think so. I mean, you look at all the novels and all the movies that get made about men's midlife crises, like every Michael Douglas movie. All the Woody Allen movies, like all of these movies that are that will spend hours and hours and you know the books like, you know, you can get thousands of pages about a man feeling wistful. But the second that a woman starts to say, wait a minute, this is a little much, everyone's like, oh, you're lucky. Stop talking.

MG: Is part of that just in terms of how midlife crises are characterized based on gender? I mean, you talk about how maybe this is a quieter midlife crisis in some ways.

ADA CALHOUN: That was something that I was really surprised by. I talked to a lot of therapists and experts and they said that men, when they act out, when they have a rough time in midlife, it's often mainstream. It's the girlfriend. It's the car. It's, you know, quitting their job. It's all these kind of dramatic things, women or just stare out the window of their car or they'll stare at. The feeling at 4:00 in the morning or they'll sneak in any kind of suffering around the edges, so they're still putting the gift basket together for the end of school. Present for the teachers on, they're still doing the PowerPoint presentation. They're really nailing it all and yet they have this feeling like it's not enough or like it's too much.

MG: Let's talk a bit about Gen X. I mean, I'm part of this generation as well. And we're at a point in our lives where ostensibly we are meant to be at the peak of our careers, where things are supposed to be going well. What's different about for women specifically, but also for men, I suppose, what's different for Generation X right now?

ADA CALHOUN: Well, you know, one thing that I kept hearing when I was doing his interviews was this level of anxiety, the sense of like instability and a lack of comfort or surety like nothing ever feels safe. And just one person after the other said this to me, and I had talked with a lot of shrinks who said that this generation was like the least parented generation maybe in American history.

MG: What do you mean?

ADA CALHOUN: That we were left to fend for ourselves from an extremely young age. You know, divorce was so high and there was so much financial stress in the country and so much actual danger that we grew up latchkey kids. We were at school looking at, you know, missing kids on milk cartons. We watched it kind of obscene amounts of television. I mean, I was at logging a good, you know, five, six hours a day on school days, you know, and all of this seems to really have combined to have kind of weakened our sense of feeling secure.

MG: How does that square with the success that women of your age, women in that generation, feel at this point in their careers? Are they feeling, are you feeling as though the success that you and maybe this is the bill of goods that that people were sold something that the success that they were promised perhaps hasn't arrived.

ADA CALHOUN: Yeah, I mean, I think one woman after another told me that their mothers, their second wave mothers had told them you could have it all, you should have it all, you know. And girl wanted to be a nurse and her mom said, don't be a nurse, be a doctor. You need to reach higher. You need to do more. You know, we really internalize that not as opportunity or possibility, but as a mandate. So if maybe we get to middle age and we only have a family or we only have a job or we only have both those things, but not this third thing that we think we should have. There's so much shame attached to it. Like we feel like we're letting down all of womankind sometimes. And I think that that shame is really toxic.

MG: That that pressure that you can be anything feeds back into a sense that if you don't do that, you're some sort of failure.

ADA CALHOUN: Yeah, well you can do everything and it's somehow in our many of our minds became you must do everything. And if you don't, what's wrong with you?

MG: When you're trying to do everything, what falls through the cracks? You talk about your family and you talk about your son and the tooth fairy.

ADA CALHOUN: Yeah. I was up until like 3:00 in the morning like trying to meet this deadline. And I wake up at 6:00 to take my son to school and he's like in tears, like, what's wrong? What's wrong? And he's like, the tooth fairy didn't come. And I'm like, oh, gosh, the tooth fairy didn't come. And so then to compensate for the tooth fairy, I find a bill behind his bed that the tooth fairy must have dropped.

MG: That's very ingenious of the tooth fairy to do that.

ADA CALHOUN: I thought the tooth fairy would appreciate the helping hand, but instead the bill was returned to me with a note that read too late.

MG: Too late?

ADA CALHOUN: Too late.

MG: How did that make you feel?

ADA CALHOUN: It's like I mean, at that point I was tired and I was jus so overwhelmed. I was like, well, you know, like, I'm sorry, kid the tooth fairy and I, we're doing our best.

MG: You're not in the house on your own. I mean, you mentioned when you're talking about how you couldn't sleep, that your partners there sleeping soundly. Where do partners fit in to this in the place of Gen X women who are in the midst of what you've characterized as a midlife crisis?

ADA CALHOUN: Yeah, I mean, I think Gen X men do so much more than their fathers did. And I think that's so great and it's so helpful. And it according to almost every study I read, it's definitely not half. So I think what I saw again and again is that women are doing a kind of a full load at work and they're doing almost a full load at home. And then I think a lot of times what I heard is that their partners feel so proud that they're doing so much more than their dads did. They're like changing diapers. My father never changed diapers. And then it kind of contributes to the sense that women are being told they should feel grateful when in fact, they're still doing just obscene amounts of work often.

MG: And what does that lead to in that relationship?

ADA CALHOUN: You know, I heard a lot of women talk about this resentment. Several women told me, like, you know, what is he even here for? Look at all the things I'm doing. You know, I'm the one who does all the homework help. I'm the one who's bringing in at least half the money. I'm, you know, doing all the cleaning. You know, what is this relationship giving me?

MG: Resentment and then some. I mean, it can build into something even larger than just kind of quiet resentment.

ADA CALHOUN: I've heard that a lot. And then also what I heard was terror about divorce because of how traumatic and acromonious so many of the divorces that we or our friends dealt with in their parents in the 70s and 80s. You know, we don't want to don't go back there. So a lot of times women told me they just hold it all in.

MG: And yet there's a line that you have in the book about how one woman says to you, I chose my life. I just never thought I would feel this average. There are people who might be listening who would say, I'm sorry, things sound great. And these are you know, these are choices that you made, choices to meet that partner, to get together, to have children, to choose that job, what have you. What is that bit about not feeling this average tell you about those choices?

ADA CALHOUN: It tells me that, you know, because of the expectations we had going into this kind of almost anything, even things that look really great from the outside might not feel great. Like I had this one woman who had this amazing, beautiful family tell me, like she was in tears and she was like, you know, I thought I was going to have this career, too. You know, what did I do wrong in this woman who has this amazing career and didn't have the family she thought she was going to have? And she was looking at me in tears saying, what did I do wrong? I think it really comes back to that idea that we had these expectations that were not realistic, given the context we were going up in.

MG: There are physical effects of this as well. And you write about perimenopause. What is that?

ADA CALHOUN: So perimenopause is usually about 10 years leading up to menopause, during which time the symptoms can be really intense. It can be like regular periods. It can be depression, weight gain, trouble, sleeping anxiety. It's all about hormonal fluctuation. And those can just affect almost every aspect of life. And, you know, I think there's there's a lack of information out there about it. A lot of times talking about it seems taboo. One woman said, you know, I don't want to talk about menopause at all. It's like saying that you closed up shop as a sexual being.

MG: Tell me more about that and how the women that you spoke with came to terms with it.

ADA CALHOUN: Well, you know, one thing I was really struck by is they've had trouble finding gynaecologists who understood menopause. And I did some research and it turns out that something like 20 percent of gynaecologists study menopause medicine. So like hormone therapy and that kind of thing. There was a study in 2002 that suggested an increase in breast cancer. The study was stopped early and it led to a lot of fear around hormones and people to sort of stop talking about it. In 2002, like one Yale professor told me, like that was the day the music stopped for the menopausal woman, because we know we stopped really learning about what was possible in terms of relief.

MG: As you started talking to women about, not just this specific issue, but more broadly, were you surprised at how forthcoming people were? These are really personal stories and their personal stories that could be and you've hinted at this, could be characterized as failures in terms of what people expected. Were you surprised that people gave it up as much as they did?

ADA CALHOUN: So you know, I've been a journalist for 20 years, and so I know how to really listen to people. A lot of the women that I talked to hadn't been listened to really hard in a while. One woman I called to see if I could interview her and she started crying right away. And I was like, oh no. Did I offend her by calling her middle aged, by using the word crisis? Like, what did I do? I said, I'm so sorry and she's like, no, it's just no one has asked about me in so long.

MG: And so having asked the question and heard what women of your generation are going through, what happens now? How do we as a society go about addressing some of the things that are raised in the book to make life feel easier for people?

ADA CALHOUN: Well, you know, I really do think the first step is looking hard at what is really going on and getting rid of that gaslighting, minimizing of like, oh, it's fine. You know, I'm so lucky. And that is a big part of the of the book and why I have so many numbers in there and statistics. And I think it's really important and long overdue. I think once we do acknowledge it, then I think it's about finding support for women. That takes a lot of different forms.

MG: Tell me there's a story of a woman who, what's her name, Johanna, who moves to Sweden. What does she see when she moves to Sweden?

ADA CALHOUN: This is a friend of mine from the playground and she gets there and there's free kindergarten and there's free you know, there's free childcare and free food for her kid and and all the support. And she can't believe it. Like, she is just she's like, I just have so much time to think again. I just heard that in her voice. I was really happy that she had she'd found that that was the kind of support she needed. She needed to be able to get back to work without worrying about her little girl.

MG: And so is that I mean, here in Canada, we have publicly funded health care. There is much more robust plan for parental leave. Is that what you're calling for, at the very least, for people to acknowledge is needed so that women don't feel as though they're burning it at both ends?

ADA CALHOUN: I mean, the book is not at all a policy book. And I think that it just it takes a different form for every woman what is actually going to make her feel secure in and taking care of enough to where she is able to not feel that sort of fear and shame and anxiety that so many of these women I talked to expressed. I think it's really about looking at her own situation and seeing, you know, what is going to make a difference. And I think that's going to be different for every woman. I do think having some kind of health care and child care and maternity leave is it's definitely not going to hurt any of these women that I talked to.

MG: You talk about this as a cautionary tale in some ways for millennial women. How should they take this book?

ADA CALHOUN: Well, you know, I think were the first downwardly mobile generation, but I don't know that we're going to be the last. And I look at millennials. My stepson is a millennial and some of my godchildren are millennials. And I see them and I see how hard they're working and I see that they're approaching burnout. And here they are in their 20s. And if they're already burnt out in their 20s, I worry so much about what's going to happen when they get to midlife and their parents are sick and they have little kids and they have these stressful jobs. And if the economy hasn't changed in a way that's going to help them. So what I hope is this conversation is something we can have now in a way that we can make changes and change expectations so that when those millenials get to be our age, that things look different for them.

MG: This came out of a direct experience for you, as you mentioned, waking up in the middle of the night, not being able to sleep and you write about how writing this book in some ways helped you address your midlife crisis. What did you do differently? What's happening now in your life?

ADA CALHOUN: It did help a lot. I will say, like just I mean, I was milking every expert I interviewed for things that I could personally use. Free therapy. So, you know, hormonally, I got some help. I started taking like low dose birth control pills, which made a huge difference as far as the perimenopause symptoms. So that was a big piece of it. I realized he needed a lot more support at home. You know, I started having my kids do a lot more. My husband does a lot already. But he you know, he cooks a lot more dinners. I got a lot more friends. I realized like I needed more women in my life. And I just started really nurturing friendships to the point where now I have this group of women. I know what I did before them. They're amazing. And I talk to them almost every day. And my expectations just dropped so much. So then now it's not like things are so much easier on the outside. Like, in fact, things are much harder. You know, my dad is sick. And, you know, there's a fire in my childhood home and my grandmother is in the hospital. But there's just there's this fall has been pretty apocalyptic. And yet I feel like I'm fortified.

MG: You say that the first step to peace in the middle age has been learning that the game is rigged. What does that mean?

ADA CALHOUN: That means realizing that it's not that we failed somehow, it's not that we made stupid choices and didn't work hard enough, there are circumstances. There is a context at work that makes it really tough. And midlife has never been super easy for women. It wasn't for our mothers or our grandmothers. They went through menopause. They dealt with grouchy teenagers. They dealt with the death of their parents, but now, with all the financial pressures and the expectation we should be able to do everything really easily and glamorously, it's too hard. It's too much. And we should recognize that.

MG: It's a really important book and it's really powerful to hear the stories of those women directly, but also to hear your own experience in terms of how it shaped this. Ada, thank you so much.

ADA CALHOUN: Thank you so much. It's been lovely.

MG: It's great to talk to you. Bye-bye.

ADA CALHOUN: You too. Bye-bye.

MG: Journalist Ada Calhoun is the author of Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis. She was in New York City. Well, that's our program for today. That was a lot of fun. Stay tuned to CBC Radio One for Q. Schitt's Creek's sixth and final season premieres this month. Annie Murphy plays Alexis Rose and she joins Tom Power to talk about what she's learned from starring in this comedy that has been a huge success, not just here in Canada, but right around the world. It is a big deal. There are people who gather in the United States for conferences, for events, to see the stars of Schitt's Creek, to talk about the storylines. People who have watched it again and again and again. You'll hear all about that, coming up this morning on the program. If you missed anything on this program CBC Listen is what you want to get a hold of. It's the new free app that lets you discover the very best in Canadian audio from CBC Radio, CBC Podcasts and CBC Music. You can listen to The Current from anywhere you happen to be and catch up on the highlights on demand at any time. Just go to wherever you get your apps and look for CBC Listen. We were just talking about Gen X, Gen X women to be exact, and the midlife crises that they find themselves in. Ada Calhoun points to artists like Liz Phair as being really important to this generation. She calls Liz Phair's 1993 album Exile in Guyville, a refreshing and relevant combination of sexual enthusiasms and romantic disillusionment. When it came out, it was a game changer and it sounds as relevant now as it did back in 1993. We will leave you with the first single from that album. This is Liz Phair and "Never Said." My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

[Song: "Never Said" by Liz Phair]

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Jan. 6, 2020 episode transcript

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