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The Current Transcript for May 26, 2017

Host: Duncan McCue

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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In my teens I thought being a man meant being tough, not being able to cry. If I was ever sad I'd be more angry than sad. I’d be more tough, rugged.

DUNCAN MCCUE: For some men, to be masculine is to be macho and menacing. But men's roles have changed so much over the last few years, leaving many grappling with what it means to be a man. In half an hour, we're looking at the man in the mirror and asking if masculinity could use a makeover. Also today, how a startup incubator in Iran is using technology to talk about the taboo.

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Freedom of expression. Freedom of religion. Gender equality. IranCubator will support these rights and issues. There's an app for that.

DM: A newly released period tracker app in Iran is getting women to talk about much more than their menstrual cycles. Domestic violence, sexual health and women's rights are on the menu too. We'll hear about the promise and peril of melding technology and social change in an hour. But first, when interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose announced she was stepping out of the political ring, she called for a different way of doing things.

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I think we're demonstrating to Canadians that there is another party. But make no mistake—we need to continue reaching out to Canadians of all backgrounds to make our case for change.

DM: We'll hear what challenges lie ahead in uniting an increasingly divided Conservative Party. I'm Duncan McCue and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

Conservative Vote: Frontrunner Bernier's path to leadership far from certain

Guests: Eric Grenier, Gerry Nicholls, Althia Raj

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VOICE 1: We have a choice to build a much bigger Conservative Party. And that's my vision—a party that includes Canadians of all races, all religions, all creeds.

VOICE 2: I'm talking about immigration because countries around the world are talking about this issue that is so serious and important. And we have a government with their head in the sands as well as some candidates.

VOICE 3: I’m going to be a principled politician who believe in ideas and change things in Canada.

VOICE 4: We have two people who are breaching from what I view as the conservative path to victory, the one that elected me in ’08, the one that gave us a majority in ‘11. And I know what it takes to win.

VOICE 5: Any provincial government that wants to impose a carbon tax under the O'Leary government will simply have it removed from their transfer payments.

VOICE 6: Mr. O’Leary, you cannot come on this stage and start saying “I'm going to throw the provinces away. I'm going to do this.” Sorry. Go and read the Constitution of Canada. They have constitutional rights.

VOICE 7: Whatever type of conservative you are, whether it’s social conservative, fiscal, economic libertarian, foreign policy conservative, that we have a leader that takes the best of all those, works on the areas that we can agree on, not dividing our own caucus and dividing our own movement.

DM: Clashes from the federal Conservative leadership campaign trail. Tonight, 13 candidates vying for the top spot will make their final pitches to party members gathered in Toronto and by tomorrow night, a new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada will be crowned. Sounds simple but with a crowded ballot and a preferential voting system, there's no clear path to victory for anyone. For more on the vote and how it could go down, I'm joined by Eric Grenier. He's a senior writer and polling analyst with the CBC's parliamentary bureau and he's in our Ottawa studio. Hello.

ERIC GRENIER: Good morning.

DM: How is the vote set up, Eric?

ERIC GRENIER: It's a pretty complicated system. There are two things to know about it. One is the preferential ballot which means that people will be able to rank candidates from one to 10. There'll be 14 names on the ballot so people will be able to rank their candidates by their preference. And that will come into play because of the other thing to remember which is the point system. So every riding in the country will be worth 100 points. It doesn't matter if there are 2,000 members or 20 members in riding. That riding will be worth 100 points. So when that is all tallied nationwide, the candidate with the fewest amount of points will be dropped and their voters, their votes will be given to the second choice. And this process will continue until one candidate gets a majority of the points and that could take a while.

DM: Okay. You're already starting to boggle my mind. But you ran a simulation as you always do in such a great way. But this preferential voting system, it does make the outcome difficult to figure out. I mean how are people going to make their second choices and what will that lead to?

ERIC GRENIER: Oh, it's absolutely going to be very complicated because there are a number of factors people can take into account. One of them is whether they'll actually rank anybody second. If you really loved, for example, Kellie Leitch. She's one of the candidates who's been very polarizing during this campaign and she might have a lot of those supporters who may not rank anybody second. If she drops off the ballot at some point that she doesn't have enough points to move forward, her votes would just disappear. So there's that factor at play. There's also that second choice, third choice. And if it does go as far as 13 ballots which would be all the way to the end, people's 10th choices could come into play if they have ranked their candidates correctly. So we don't really know exactly how a lot of these second choices will go. It's clear where some candidates have some common ground. Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost, both social conservatives very likely to get each other's votes. But then someone like Maxime Bernier, Andrew Scheer, Erin O'Toole, it's not clear that they're anybody's consensus second choice. So as each candidate drops off, you could see all of those candidates, those leading candidates pick up a few votes. It all matters in terms of how many votes they can pick up and if Maxime Bernier ends up at the top of the list—which is what people expect—if those second choices will allow someone like Andrew Scheer or Erin O'Toole to close that gap before it gets to the final ballot.

DM: Does this type of preferential voting system, does it give any candidates an advantage?

ERIC GRENIER: It might give some candidates an advantage like Andrew Scheer or Erin O'Toole who have been trying to campaign as everybody's second choice. They're trying to be that consensus choice where they're saying that with them as leader, the party would not change as radically as it might under Maxime Bernier, who has a lot of libertarian policies or Michael Chong, who wants to bring the party more towards the centre. It could hurt though some of these candidates who are too polarizing to get a lot of second choices. That could be someone like Kellie Leitch. It could be someone like Pierre Lemieux or Brad Trost, who are those social conservatives who are unlikely to get support from say, the voters of Lisa Raitt or Michael Chong who are more on the progressive side of the party.

DM: Let's talk a little bit about the candidates. Who has the strongest standing ahead of the vote right now, do you figure?

ERIC GRENIER: It does seem to be Maxime Bernier. In the polling of conservative party members that has been done by Mainstreet for iPolitics, he has consistently led ever since Kevin O'Leary left the race by a wide enough margin that he looks pretty safe to be at the top of that first ballot. And he does have broad regional support. Very popular in Quebec, but also in a place like Alberta. So he has that broad base that does give him an advantage over some of those other candidates who have maybe more pockets of support rather than a national broad base of supporters.

DM: You mentioned that Maxime Bernier is the front runner. Are there any wildcards to look out for in this race?

ERIC GRENIER: I think there will be one moment that could be really determinant. That would be when Kellie Leitch—if she does drop off, if she doesn't perform as well as she would like to—where her voters will go. It's not clear who benefits from Kellie Leitch’s supporters if it is someone like Maxime Bernier or someone else like Andrew Scheer. Some of the other candidates, it's a bit easier to see where their supporters will go. Someone like Michael Chong. He has been supporting carbon pricing. His support is likely to go to more progressive candidates, more moderate candidates, whereas someone like Kellie Leitch, it's really not clear and she could end up having a significant amount of support by the time she drops off, let's say 15 per cent of the vote. That could be enough to really move things around. So I think once she drops off, if she does—and again there's a lot of moving pieces here so it can end up differently—that could be very decisive in terms of deciding who will become the next leader of the party.

DM: There's so many moving pieces. So what are you going to be watching for in the first ballot results?

ERIC GRENIER: I think it will be to see Maxime Bernier’s strength. If he ends up being somewhere around 20, 25 per cent only having a few points lead over someone like Andrew Scheer, he might not get enough second choice support to put them over the 50 per cent mark. Andrew Scheer seems more a better place to pick up that second choice support. But if Maxime Bernier is well over 30 per cent, it's unlikely another candidate will be able to catch him before the end. So I think that will be what to watch for. If he ends up somewhere between 25 and 30, it could get close by the end.

DM: Thanks for sharing your pointed analysis as always.

ERIC GRENIER: Thank you.

DM: Eric Grenier is a senior writer and polling analyst with the CBC's parliamentary bureau. He was in our Ottawa studio.

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I think ultimately the biggest threat is division. We’ve gone through, in the not too distant past, a decade of division in the conservative movement in Canada. There’s something trying to call us back to that division to create two separate conservative parties. I think that’s the biggest threat.

DM: That was Jason Kenney, former federal Conservative cabinet minister and current leader of Alberta's Progressive Conservatives. He's not the only one warning the conservatives about the consequences of ideological rifts within the party. The divide has grown beyond the well-worn differences between Red Tories and reformers. The winning candidate will have new divisions to worry about, depending on who's elected, could lead the party in an entirely new direction. For more on this I'm joined by two Ottawa watchers. Gerry Nicholls is a communications consultant columnist for The Hill Times and former vice president of the National Citizens Coalition, a conservative advocacy group. And Althia Raj is Ottawa bureau chief for HuffPost Canada. They're both with me in our Toronto studio. Hello to you both.

GERRY NICHOLLS: Hi.

ALTHIA RAJ: Good morning.

DM: Gerry Nicholls, let me start with you. Is division the biggest threat to the Conservative Party right now?

GERRY NICHOLLS: Well, I always tell people that there's no such thing as a conservative party. What you really have is sort of this vast coalition of tribes and clans and factions which probably hate each other as much as they hate you know the liberals and the NDP. You have your social conservatives, your libertarians, your populists, your Red Tories. They all make up part of this sort of coalition. And I think one of Stephen Harper's underappreciated skills as leader of the Conservative Party was that he was able to keep these guys together. Albeit he did it with savage discipline, but he kept them together. And I think this is going to be a challenge for whoever becomes the next Conservative leader. Keeping those disparate factions united, that's going to be your challenge.

DM: Althia Raj, which candidates have been most divisive in your mind?

ALTHIA RAJ: Well, Kellie Leitch originally, with her plan to screen newcomers that some people really saw as basically like a nativism wing of the party emerging. From what I've seen on the ground, I think she was able to capture a lot of new people into the party, not necessarily that there was this group that already existed. But most recently basically we were talking about Maxine Bernier who seems to be the front runner and he is the libertarian. He basically envisions himself as the new Reform Party leader, a Preston Manning type character and much of the policy platforms that he has really are kind of lifted from the Reform Party platform book from 1997. So he's calling for a complete withdrawal of the federal government in health care. He wants tax points that are sent to the provinces. He is calling for massive reductions in corporate taxes, the elimination of capital gains tax. He basically really wants to see a shrinkage of the Canadian government. That does not sit very well with basically the rest of his caucus. His most controversial policy is ending supply management. That is why most of the Quebec MPs do not support him, even though obviously he's a high profile lawyer from Quebec. If he wins, he will have a very hard time getting that caucus together. Some of the people in the caucus believe that they can help sort of massage his policies and change him, but he has run basically repeating “I will not make compromises,” “principles before anything else.” And it's hard to see how you can keep a very differing group surrounded and united against a platform that most of them don't support when you have a leader that says I won't make compromises.

DM: Gerry Nicholls, we talked about the division between Red Tories and reformers in the past. How much is, the kind of new populism that we see in Europe and the US, how much is that factoring into this race and is that going to make it difficult for the leader?

GERRY NICHOLLS: Yeah. This is what's interesting about what's happening to the Conservative Party and to the conservative movement in this country is kind of the rise of populism as an alternative to Maxime's style conservatism which he's putting forward. I would say he's not so much like Preston Manning. I think he's trying to be like Canada’s Ronald Reagan or Canada’s Margaret Thatcher, sort of a small c, principled conservatism, as Althia said. I'm not sure that brand of conservatism resonates anymore. I mean that's where I would put myself, but I'm not sure that that resonates with Canadians. I'm not even sure it resonates with conservatives anymore because of this rise of populism which is really emotionally based and which has shown itself to be somewhat successful. Think of the election of Donald Trump. You think of what's happening in Britain with Brexit. So a lot of people might be saying you know what, this is the way of the future. This is what we should be embracing, not so much this pro-free market stuff but this kind of emotionless thing about immigration and tough defence and law and order and all this kind of stuff. So yeah. I think the Conservative Party is kind of really to pro-establishment to really embrace the kind of Trump-style populism. But I think it's out there and I think it's growing and this could be maybe the way of the future for the Conservative Party. I think that's what's interesting about this race is under Stephen Harper, he was the party. The Conservative Party's ideology was whatever Stephen Harper decided it was going to be and now that he's gone, there's really nothing there. So the party is kind of building itself from scratch, figuring out what it wants to be when it grows up.

ALTHIA RAJ: That populism that you're both talking about, I think it's appeared in the leadership race obviously with Kellie Leitch and it appeared in the leadership race with Kevin O'Leary. But basically after Kellie’s proposals were kind of pooh-poohed by everybody else, the other candidates and there seemed to within the actual membership that already existed, no real appetite for her message and also no real appetite for Kevin O'Leary's message. Basically those new voters that those two candidates brought into the race, nobody’s speaking to them anymore. This has now really become a fight for a new version of status quo.

DM: Let's talk about the frontrunner Maxine Bernier. Is there a sense in Ottawa that he's the guy that can bring the party together?

GERRY NICHOLLS: The thing about conservatives and you said I worked for a group called the National Citizens Coalition which is kind of a microcosm of the conservative movement. And what I found there was that it's really, really hard to get conservatives to all agree to something because of the divisions we talked about. It's a lot easier to get them to find something they all hate. And I think this is what Maxine Bernier has got to do. He's got to find that or whoever wins—I don't want to prejudge it. Whoever wins the leadership race, they've got to find out what's our common enemy? What can we rally the forces against and fight against? So I think he's got to do that. And I think also if he starts moving up in the polls, if it looks like he's a challenge to Trudeau, that will take away a lot of the other problems because people basically, ideology aside, they want to win. And if they think that Max Bernier is a winner, they'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

DM: The prime minister's popularity is still pretty high. Is this a race of people lining up to lose to Trudeau, Althia Raj?

ALTHIA RAJ: I think a year ago we would have said that. There is a feeling that especially with the big named cabinet ministers in Harper's government—James Moore, Jason Kenney, Peter McKay bowing out of the contest—that there was a sense of oh, maybe this is just like a temporary person, then we'll have another leadership race after the 2019 election and that will be the real leader. I don't get that sense at all now. I think that whoever wins—unless it's a complete catastrophe along the lines of Michael Ignatieff in 2011—that that person is going to have [unintelligible]. And if it's Maxime Bernier and there's a rejection of his proposals, his libertarian viewpoint then I think obviously there will be a new leader. I mean you can't go back to the electorate twice with the exact same vision. But if it's somebody that is seen as that you can build on what they brought you even if it's perhaps a bit of a dip, if it's not a catastrophe, I don't think that this is a temporary blip. They do not feel that 2019—the they being the conservatives here—is not winnable. There is a sense that he can he can be beaten especially if the Democrats have a good leader.

DM: Althea mentions Maxime Bernier's libertarian views again and I want to ask you about that Gerry Nicholls. How do you think Canadian voters will respond to those libertarian views?

GERRY NICHOLLS: Well, Maxime has a lot of really interesting ideas and the problem is that the last thing you want in politics is interesting ideas. I sometimes work for candidates and they'll give me a list. Hey Gerry, here's my list of 15 points I want to do. And I'll say that's really good. But you're giving people 15 reasons not to vote for you because people have sort of a risk of bias and if they look like somebody is changing the system up too much, it can kind of scare them. And when you're talking about libertarianism, what are you going to do to health care, what are you going to do to all these other policies. Supply management. It can spook people. Does that mean he can't win? No. People like Ronald Reagan have won. Margaret Thatcher won. Mike Harris won. But what you have to do is you have to sort of get away from the policy of libertarianism and find something that is emotional, something that resonates with people on an emotional level. Ronald Reagan: I'm going to fight the commies. You know that's how he got elected. Margaret Thatcher was I'm going to battle the left-wing unions. It was an emotional thing. Mike Harris: I'm going to undo the damage that Bob Rae did to the province. So I think if Bernier does become a leader and he does sort of stick to his libertarian principles, he's got to find out those issues that do resonate with Canadians because things like supply management, that won’t resonate with people. Really? He'll get a lot of votes from economists maybe, but that's about it. He's got to find something that hits people in the heart.

DM: Best guess about what's going to go down? Althia Raj, I’ll start with you.

ALTHIA RAJ: Well, I don't want to make predictions because that’s not my business.

DM: Oh, come on.

ALTHIA RAJ: No, you can make predictions. I mean I think what to watch for is really how high Maxime Bernier is on the first ballot. Maybe a shocker to all of us, he won't be that high. And then who the second and thirds are; if Lisa Raitt—

DM: What happened to Lisa Raitt?

ALTHIA RAJ: Yeah, we used to be talking about her. Well, I think she got in too late to be honest. You know like we haven't really talked about the very disciplined and organized campaign that Mr. Bernier has been running. but basically he's been planning this since 2009. So when you have that much of a leg up, he's been pounding the pavement across the country, giving speeches to chambers of commerce, connecting with voters. We talked about his popularity in Alberta for example. Well, that's because he laid the groundwork. And Lisa, for someone who seemed interested in leadership, really she didn't really do that type of groundwork and none of the other candidates have either. So I mean whether or not he wins will depend a little bit on if those voters come out. But anyways, to sort of round up my rambling point, if there are surprises we are going to see that I think very early on, on the first ballot.

DM: Best guess as what's going to happen?

GERRY NICHOLLS: Well, Maxime Bernier leads in all the things you're supposed to lead in—money, organization. He sort of managed to craft himself a really good brand. So my prediction is Maxime Bernier will win. Am I confident about that prediction? Absolutely not.

DM: And just in a sentence or two, what do you both think should be the task for the new leader?

ALTHIA RAJ: Unity.

DM: Unity?

ALTHIA RAJ: Absolutely.

DM: Going to need to bring the party together.

ALTHIA RAJ: Yes.

GERRY NICHOLLS: I think he's got to find a definition of conservatism that will resonate with the Canadian public.

DM: Thank you both for joining us in studio here.

GERRY NICHOLLS: My pleasure.

ALTHIA RAJ: Thank you.

DM: I'm trying to find my—there it is. Gerry Nicholls is a communications—I was fascinated by listening to you. Gerry Nicholls is a communications consultant columnist for The Hill Times and former vice president of the National Citizens Coalition and Althia Raj is Ottawa bureau chief for HuffPost Canada. They were in our Toronto studio. I should add if you want to weigh in on the new Tory leader, give us a call this Sunday on Cross Country Checkup. Our question: what's the future of the Conservative Party under its new leader? Or you can always leave a comment at www.cbc.ca/checkup. CBC News is next, then how redefining masculinity could change the world.

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Masculinity is behind most news stories. Most of the problems in the world, you sort of think “I wonder what that’d be like, if men changed their behaviour?”

DM: Provocative British artist Grayson Perry has been wondering what it means to be a man today. The author of The Descent of Man will test drive his idea for the new man in our next half hour. I’m Duncan McCue and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

Man in the mirror: Why artist Grayson Perry says masculinity needs a makeover

Guests: Mike Fitzpatrick, Grayson Perry

DM: Hi. I’m Duncan McCue and you’re listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

DM: Still to come, domestic abuse, sexual health and women's rights are hard to talk about openly in Iran. Luckily there is an app for that. We're talking about the “IranCubator” in half an hour. But first, why masculinity needs a makeover.

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Hello, men. Do you like cars? Big TVs? Rock? Fixing stuff? Sport? Barbies? Footie? Your mom? Your mate’s mom? Bar fridges? Nature? Practical jokes? The next day? These thongs? Those thongs? Beards? Mustache? And meat lovers’ pizza with extra meat? Then you’ll love Triple M’s Grill Team with Gus, MG and Matty Johns. They’re the manliest men on radio.

DM: That commercial for a show on Australia's Triple M radio trots out just about every cliché of what it means to be a man. Triple M owns 33 stations across Australia aimed at men who love sports, rock and comedy. But the broadcaster has begun to question whether its take on manhood needs an update. Around the world, ideas of masculinity are being disrupted and redefined. To discuss how, we will start with Mike Fitzpatrick. He's the head of content for the Triple M group of radio stations in Australia. He's in Los Angeles. Hello.

MIKE FITZPATRICK: Morning, Duncan. How are you?

DM: I’m doing well. What made you question the version of masculinity the Triple M shows were putting out there?

MIKE FITZPATRICK: Well, anyone who reads the news or is connected to pop culture in any way can see there's a shift happening in masculinity. Looking at types of men that are making headlines, they seem to be very extreme. On one end, you've got someone like Donald Trump and at the other end, you have someone like your prime minister and the two seem poles apart. And so we question whether or not— that ad you just heard was made 10 years ago—whether that’s still a relevant indication of what it is to be an archetypal man.

DM: You have sons yourself and there was a moment I understand that they were listening to the station in the car. Well, what did they ask you?

MIKE FITZPATRICK: There was a moment in the car and we were listening to that particular show. And one of the hosts said something, to my knowledge I can't remember exactly what it was, but I remember being asked an uncomfortable question. I'm pretty sure something related to sex and I'm pretty sure it was something a five year old shouldn’t have been asking their father after hearing it on the radio. And so I just questioned at that moment whether or not we were sending the right message to our young boys about what it is to be a man. If we build better men for the future, then we build a better future for everyone.

DM: The Australian press has also accused some of the programs at Triple M of having a kind of sexist boys club culture in the workplace and there was a former female employee who suggested that the male hosts were joking about their wives’ breasts off air, things like that. How did that play into your thinking about bringing about a change at the station?

MIKE FITZPATRICK: Yeah. Well, very much so. I mean we are a traditional male environment on air. Two years ago, all of our presenters were male on a couple of our stations. There were no females on the air. It was a station where men could feel like they’re escaping. So if you were in the car on your own driving to work, you could feel like you are surrounded by your mates and you could say anything and we could say anything and you’d feel comfortable. But what I was concerned about was what happens when your wife or your girlfriend or your daughter is in the car. Is that the right message you want to be sending to everybody, that it's a boys club? And it’s obviously not. We’re seeing that the traditional view of masculinity is shifting and is changing and has moved a lot in the last 10 years and to stay relevant and continue to engage with men in 2017, we need to shift our thinking as well.

DM: So you start to think more about the daughter being in the car and less about the mates. You did some research. How did you study what masculinity means to Australian men?

MIKE FITZPATRICK: Well, we did a pretty robust study. We looked at hundreds of men in diary entries. We had some researchers go and live with some men—multigenerational, cross-generational, men in different walks of life, lower socioeconomic, white collar. We spoke to academics and looked at academic studies around the country as well and what we found was essentially that men can fit into—we’re not this simple I’d like to add, we’re quite complex—but men can fit into three segments. The first segment is those who are very steadfast with traditional values, who are afraid of a change. They can see there's a shift happening. They have no idea how to get there. They know there probably shouldn't be but they'll just stay where they are because they're pretty comfortable. Masculinity is defined by being strong and being tough and being a provider. Those in the middle are a group we called discover and they're much more open minded. They're constantly adjusting their behaviour and what it means to be a man is constantly being questioned by them. They're much more self-aware and they're resilient as opposed to being strong and stoic. They know it’s okay to fail and learn and that it's all right for the world to see that. And the most progressive segment we named embrace because that's exactly what these men do. They embrace the change. Who you are isn't defined by your gender. It's defined by what you do.

DM: So if there are more and more men who have evolved and who are comfortable not being a manly man, if you want to say that, how did you change your radio station to suit that group?

MIKE FITZPATRICK: Like the evolution of anything, it doesn't just change overnight. A lot of it is tonality. You know how we speak to men, what we say, the topics we choose to talk about.

DM: Is there a kind of topic that you choose now that you never would have imagined having on the air a couple of years ago?

MIKE FITZPATRICK: Yeah. You know we talk a lot now about male mental health. I mean suicide is a really large—it’s at epidemic proportions. It kills more people than drunk driving. Encouraging men to talk to their friends and open up is a topic and a narrative that happens on our station frequently now.

DM: Instead of joking about going out and having a bunch of alcohol.

MIKE FITZPATRICK: Yeah. Correct. And we don't walk away from who the station is because we have an audience there that expect some of that from us. But we're much more responsible with the topics we choose to talk about. We look at our presenters. Some of our presenters over the years haven't really fit the mold of evolving men. And so some of those presenters are no longer with us and it helps us with our casting choices now that we can choose men who do really fit the embrace segment or discover segment and are looking to change rather than being that Fred Flintstone style character.

DM: So you're only starting to be less Fred Flintstone. How do you think those changes are going to make a different world for your sons when they're listening in the car with you?

MIKE FITZPATRICK: In the study, when we present the study, there's a video at the start where we asked a bunch of boys age from 10 what they think being a man means. And the constant themes that come up are you’re tough, you don’t cry, everyone has to listen to you. You need to be strong. You don't show emotion. You go out with your mates. You drink beer. Boys who are four and five and six years of age have a very traditional view of masculinity. The majority of which they're getting from their father and their fathers’ friends, but the rest they're getting from the media. So I think we have a responsibility to ensure that these guys know there's more to being a man than just that.

DM: Thank you very much, Mike. I didn't want to push you to break you down in tears so thank you very much for joining us.

MIKE FITZPATRICK: [Laughs] Thank you very much.

DM: Mike Fitzpatrick is the head of content for the Triple M group of radio stations in Australia. He was in Los Angeles. Now there are few activities more macho than mixed martial arts and boxing. So for some other perspectives on masculinity, our producer Ines Colabrese visited Grant's MMA Rival Boxing Gym in Toronto and asked some of the athletes there what it means to them to be a man.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Exactly. Feel it. Feel it. You have a fight in two days. You have to loosen up, man.

VOICE 2: I guess to be a man is to be solid, firm in your beliefs and your morals. And to man up. Right? Just to do the right thing, right?

VOICE 1: Yeah, yeah. You've got to stay loose, man. Ali was loose all the time but he was a coiled spring also.

VOICE 3: You've got to be a gentleman. I'm in the fight business. You see and hear a lot of domestic problems. I tell them: if you have to put your hand on a woman, you're a punk. There's no moral respect I can have for you to get respect for a woman by hitting her or pushing her or doing that type of stuff. It's not cool.

VOICE 4: In my opinion, being a man is just being. It's not about toughness even though yeah, you want to be tough, but excelling in all different aspects of life whether it be with a girlfriend, with your family, with your friends. In my opinion to be a man, you have to take care of the people that are in your life and in return they take care of you.

DM: That was Ryan Grant who runs Grant's MMA Rival Boxing Gym in Toronto and some of the guys at the gym. Men may project their masculinity without thinking it through consciously, but drag kings—women who dress in male drag—take on the role deliberately when they hit the stage. Our producer Kristin Nelson visited drag king Amanda Dorey in her Ottawa home.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: In the den is my drag room. All my costumes are normally in there. It's kind of a mess right now because we've been doing a lot of shows.

VOICE 2: So the key parts. What have we got here? Walk me through it.

VOICE 1: We’ve got the bind.

VOICE 2: What’s a bind?

VOICE 1: It compresses your chest. In our troupe we have six members and some of us have more out front than others so it really comes in handy.

VOICE 2: So do you put on a mustache or a beard?

VOICE 1: Yeah, yeah. I use liquid eyeliner.

VOICE 2: I see one key item here.

VOICE 1: The packer. Sorry. The packer. That's a necessity. It's not often something we talk about. It provides the very nice illusion of having a bulge down there.

VOICE 2: What's your take on masculinity then?

VOICE 1: I believe it's a very broad term. I don't believe it's as rigid as it as it generally used to be. You can bend it, you can play with it. Like drag itself, some people don't understand that we are portraying hyper masculinity.

VOICE 2: But then you're an expert in it. What does it entail to perform it then?

VOICE 1: You've got to puff up your chest a little bit. You've got to walk around with a strut. You've got to have a confidence that not necessarily I have on a daily basis. You’re walking out in public and you see like the general male population and they just seem to have an air of confidence. On stage I try to portray that and trying to schmooze on the girls a little bit more.

VOICE 2: How does it feel?

VOICE 1: It's actually a lot of fun to be honest. Like being overconfident, it's not me at all but it's David so I just go with it.

DM: That was Ottawa’s Amanda Dorey. Her drag king stage name is David Coppafeel. Well, Grayson Perry has been thinking a lot about what it means to be a man and wondering what masculinity does to the men who display it, as well as to women and to society as a whole. He's a British artist and the author of The Descent of Man as well as host of the television series All Men, both of which look at what it means to be a man today. Grayson Perry joins us from London, England. Hello.

GRAYSON PERRY: Hello.

DM: You identify as a transvestite. You sometimes dress up in women's clothes and you've got an alter ego, Claire.

GRAYSON PERRY: Yes.

DM: How does that shape your view on masculinity?

GRAYSON PERRY: Well, I’ve been dressing up since I was maybe about 12 years old so I was forced to question what masculinity was. I mean some people saying that dressing up gives me an insight into being a woman and I say that's rubbish. That would be insulting to women. But it does give me an insight into the performance of masculinity.

DM: In your show you say you're a man in a dress but you're also competitive. You’re aggressive. How do you balance those more traditional ways of being a man with dressing as a woman?

GRAYSON PERRY: Well, I think you can still be competitive and aggressive in a dress. It’s pretty easy. [laughs] It doesn't take a lot effort. You just have to lose your temper with somebody in the traffic.

DM: Who was your model of masculinity when you were growing up at home?

GRAYSON PERRY: I had very poor models. My father left when I was four and then my stepfather who was quite violent and he wasn't very good with language sort of came in. And so I kind of constructed my own role model really. I had a sort of fantasy figure that started as my teddy bear but kind of grew into this kind of imaginary hegemonic figure called Alan Measles who I still work with today in my art.

DM: You dedicate the book to him.

GRAYSON PERRY: Yeah. We all carry within us, whether we know it or not, a kind of perfect idea of the role we want to project to the world and sometimes we’ve got to question that. A lot of people are unhappy because they're not living up to the role they've kind of set themselves to live up to.

DM: Who is the character that you call default man in your book?

GRAYSON PERRY: Well, he's the kind of guy who works in an office in front of a computer and he probably wears a suit. He probably thinks now that he's given up the patriarchy because he's taken his tie off. He's the kind of guy who's getting all of the advantages that come with being a man. But he would never attribute his success to that. He would assume that it's his own efforts. He's the kind of guy that rides on the back of the patriarchy from centuries of kind of it being in power.

DM: And so you talk about how we’ve prioritized, Western culture has prioritized the rational, so the profit motive and self-determination and ambition. Are those the kinds of things that have helped default man stay in power if you will?

GRAYSON PERRY: Yeah. I mean often they talk about lady logic when somebody gets emotional. And as we've seen perhaps in the US election and certainly in the referendum in Britain, these sort of things are incredibly emotional. They're not about rational ideas and often the losing side lost because they were trying too hard to hit the voters over the head with facts and rational arguments when in fact it was all about emotion. And men have got to realize that they're are just as prone to these unconscious irrational forces as anybody else and the more you're aware of them, the less you're a victim of them in a way.

DM: How are we doing in terms of being aware of those more emotional values? I mean you talk about traditional man still being very much a part of the male character.

GRAYSON PERRY: You know gender is such a powerful thing. It's taken centuries to evolve into what we have nowadays. And so it's going to take a while to change it. But you know it's great. People are talking. I really like the guy Mike from Triple M. I thought it was great what he was talking about, the fact that he's introducing these conversations to his nation.

DM: There's more talk about that now, Grayson, but there also seems to be a bit of a nostalgia for men. I mean so many of us are now working in front of computers. We’re working class joes who are out hauling bricks and things like that. How have the new kind of masculine stereotypes reflect a nostalgia for those good old days when a man was a man?

GRAYSON PERRY: Yeah. I mean I think nostalgia is a big part of traditional masculinity now because it is looking back to those days when masculinity was a necessity to sort of survive in a job. And now I think masculinity’s sort of like woodwork. You know some people, that's their job. They are a carpenter. They need to be able to do it. Some people do it at the weekend as a hobby. And other people don't need it at all. You know they'll get someone in to do that kind of stuff. So masculinity now I think, it's always been fluid but it's more fluid now than ever and it's the kind of thing you can pick up when you need it.

DM: You mentioned the weekend bicycle warrior and the bearded hipster is being kind of a reflection of more traditional men. How do the clothes that were wearing today and in 2017 still reflect those traditional identities?

GRAYSON PERRY: You start with a suit in many ways. The male suit, I always think of it as like a bird hide. You know it's something men can hide in as a sort of invisible that they can observe the world from inside of and nobody's really going to notice them. So men often are very frightened of colour because that means they might get looked at. And also men in their clothes, often they want to kind of kid themselves that their clothes and accessories and things they buy have a function. So they love watches with loads of knobs that do all sorts of things. They love waistcoats with loads of pockets. They love camouflage. They have high performance wear that one day they might need if they happen to climb Everest but actually they're just going to go down a hypermarket.

DM: I am going to climb Everest. That's why I’ve got those pockets in my shorts.

GRAYSON PERRY: Well, that's just it. I always think of those kind of clothes and accessories as kind of a perfect metaphor for masculinity. The phrase I came up with is that one of these days it’s going to come in. It’s going to come in and we may need it. So men hold on to all these kind of old fashion things because they think one day they might need it when in fact, it's a lot of baggage that they're carrying around that's dragging them down.

DM: If we're going to change as men, do we need a costume change, do you think?

GRAYSON PERRY: I think it might help. I'm not saying that all men have to dress up like me in kind of like very noticeable sort of feminine garments. But if you try something, before long it becomes natural and then before long you realize you start changing your behaviour. So maybe you could start with your wardrobe shift. But when we talk about shifts, first things like political correctness seem mad and then all of a sudden they seem like every day and then they're just background normality. And to try something new often feels odd but it will soon become normal.

DM: So you say that it has to do with some concerns about political correctness, but that there are some real effects of traditional rigid definitions of manliness that are harming men. What are some of the harms that are happening?

GRAYSON PERRY: I think the crucial thing is mental health. You know men are brought up—really the only emotion that’s encouraged in men is anger. But we have a whole range over time. We all had the same deck of emotion. We grow up with it. And the way boys are conditioned, it's a heavily policed role. We heard today just now about how four, five, six year olds who already got a very rigid idea of what the gender role is. They're already closing down the options that may have an effect on their mental health in the future because they're scared. Men often, they're incredibly courageous when it comes to physical things—they might sort of jump off a high diving board or something—but you ask him to do something that needs emotional courage and often men are real cowards.

DM: Men do like to take risks. That's often a common characteristic amongst men. How do we encourage men to take emotional risks as opposed to physical risks?

GRAYSON PERRY: I think when our friends try something out, maybe a little risky behaviour, we don't mock them. We don't laugh at them. We kind of take them seriously. Because if someone is going to try something, if they're going to get hit back with kind of oh, what are you? You’re worse, the first time they try it, then they're not going to do it again. And then they're going to bury it and then it's going to snowball and then it could be tragic. So I think it's like listen to your friends and take them seriously when they have some sort of problem they want to share.

DM: When you are out and about filming your TV show talking about men and how they perceive men, what was the reaction when you tried to push them away from talking about sports like football and instead getting them to talk about their feelings?

GRAYSON PERRY: Men are quite difficult because they don't have the vocabulary often. They haven't grown up in the same kind of groups as women have. Men tend to socialize in large groups particularly when they're younger and they dive down to the lowest common denominator of contact so often sports and motor cars and things like that are like their kind of default conversational topic. But you know if you are in a group and you're brave enough to bring up a kind of an emotional topic that might be tender for them, actually men respond really well to that kind of permission giving. And they go oh, that's me. I'm like that. And if you go to some of the websites for kind of like things like, there was one called piston heads I visited and you can see. They would be talking about kind of winter tires and body kits and all this kind of stuff. But then suddenly there'd be one “my dad's just moving into an old people's home and how do I handle this,” and “I've just moved to a new area and I need to make friends.” People were really sweet to each other around it. And so I think men, it’s just below the surface. They're dying to talk about it off and they just don't know it and they're not given permission.

DM: So if you're trying to encourage men to open up the hood, to open up their emotional lives, how do you see the image of the ideal new man?

GRAYSON PERRY: He's like a kind of really healthy engine where it revs up and down. If he needs it, if there’s a situation where he really needs to be a macho man, he can go vroom and he can go straight there. Our emotions need to be kind of very proportionate to the situation. So instead of losing your temper at the slightest provocation, you get slightly irritated. That's all right. And you nip it in the bud. A lot of men think that happiness is being ecstatic. It's not. Happiness is having an okay day and having a beer with your mates. You know it's just a normal day.

DM: Is there a role model out there in popular culture that men can look to be a man in the new world?

GRAYSON PERRY: That's a difficult one. I always struggle. You know the one I use in my book as a really good example was President Obama. I thought he was fantastic. The way he was so easy and he was funny and he was such a great family man and he seemed to be really warm and loving with lots of different people from all parts of the world.

DM: I was struck by the end of the book. You draw up the list of men's rights and they include a right to be vulnerable or right to be weak or right to be wrong. How hopeful are you about men and whether or not we'll get there?

GRAYSON PERRY: I think if they have a taste of it and they realize the thing that makes us happy as human beings is having good relationships and all relationships rely on an element of vulnerability. You've got to allow the other people that you're trying to relate to to affect you. That's how we work together as human beings. You know if we put up a rigid barrier, we're not going to have good relationships and we're not going to be happy. So I think men need to understand that there is reward. That's why I made that manifesto really, because men often think that feminism and change is threatening to their happiness and I say look guys, there's a new world perhaps you’re not fully aware of just around the corner. Become one of these discoverers.

DM: Thanks for sharing your manifesto.

GRAYSON PERRY: Thank you.

DM: Grayson Perry is the author of The Descent of Man as well as host of the television series, All Man. He was in London, England. Now it's your turn. What does being a man mean to you? How has your definition of masculinity changed? Let us know. Tweet us @thecurrentCBC, post on this story on our Facebook page or e-mail us through our website by clicking on the contact link at www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Coming up in our next half hour, a period tracker app in Iran is being called a stealthy Trojan horse, sneaking in taboo tips on sexual education and women's rights. But there is both promise and peril to melding technology with activism. I'm Duncan McCue and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

App brings sexual health info to Iranian women

Guests: Soudeh Rad, Firuzeh Mahmoudi, Alix Dunn

DM: I'm Duncan McCue and this is the Friday edition of The Current. Hamdam—it's an app designed to help women in Iran track their menstrual cycles. It's not very different from period tracker apps available to women here in North America except there's more to it. Hamdam was rolled out earlier this year and besides its tracking function, it's doing some stealthy undercover work too. It gives Iranian women information on sexual health, domestic abuse and divorce—topics that are taboo in Iran. It's just one of the apps by a digital startup called IranCubator which we'll hear more about in a moment. Soudeh Rad is the activist who came up with the idea for the Hamdam app. We've reached her in Oslo, Norway. Hello.

SOUDEH RAD: Hi.

DM: Your app has been called a Trojan horse because it looks like a simple app for tracking your period but there's more to it than that. Can you explain how it works?

SOUDEH RAD: True. I think when it comes to women’s health, many people think about periods and that's it. So that is why also Hamdam is called the Iranian or Persian period tracker but it's not only a period tracker. Once you open the app you're going to see one-third of the screen related to everything about menstruation and periods. But there are also links to know more about women's rights, about the domestic violence, about different pillars, let’s say, of women's rights as the Iranian women living there.

DM: Why is it something you thought Iranian women needed?

SOUDEH RAD: Well, at first I would love to have an application about women's rights because of my background of being activist, a feminist activist since like 10 years now. And it was like yeah, today Iranians are not really going on the web, www, but they really need an app so that they would just push this button and they would get everything I would tell them. And then later I realized that actually the sexual health part and sexual rights are so important in that context that I really needed to put that in. So during the journey from the idea to implementation, we learned a lot and I did also. So that's why the Iranian women are really excited about having finally their own period tracker application which is also their companion in their rights and also informing them about different laws and different equipments that they can have to be able to live a little bit more equal in that country.

DM: When it comes to menstrual cycles and sex education, what kind has been typically available to girls and women in Iran?

SOUDEH RAD: I should say unfortunately nothing and if there is anything, that is so biased. So the sexual health and anything related to women's body is such a taboo one. We also see different news that is coming out of Iran, there have been also religious parties just pushing women to wear and cover their bodies as they want. So the control over women's body is so high that you can even see it in the street and everywhere. What we have in Iran about sexual education, it is really so limited. So women are really going to this workshops, let’s say, just before to get their marriage and that is something they have to learn to know how to give pleasure to their husbands and how to be a good woman. And there's nothing really said about the STDs. There's nothing really said about the contraception. I mean these are maybe available in that country and that culture, but the government is not really promoting this right.

DM: What about within families though? I mean between from woman to woman, is there talk or discussion about contraception or periods at all?

SOUDEH RAD: Well, it's a yes and a no. Many young people know about their sexual health the first time to hear about is what their friends who are the same age and then it's also the second hand or third hand information coming from someone else. I came out of Iran when I was only 10 and my mom in those days was only like in her 30s and we never had such discussion. And we live and we still do live in Europe, but still the Iranian culture does not really let my mom to come and talk about these things openly to me. Now I'm 36. We still do not talk about periods and so on. So the person who could help me with that was my grandma and this is also what she told me once she knew about the app and she heard about it. She was like now you're going to be the grandmother for so many little girls.

DM: That's great. The grandma. An app grandma. So what kind of reaction are you getting from the women who are using the app?

SOUDEH RAD: Well, so far all of them have been so positive and really heartwarming. I should say this is the only Iranian period tracker app available on the market and it’s for free. And when I say Iranian, it's not only the translation of the application you might know about. But it's also equipped with the Iranian calendar which is actually difficult to implement. It's also the language we're using in Hamdam is really as if this was the companion, was the best friend because Hamdam means companion. So I get a lot of positive feedback not only about the period tracker part but also about how we are raising awareness about domestic violence and we’re putting in name of the things many women are already living under. So I got this message on Instagram—that can be really crazy to get feedback on Instagram—that thank you so much. Now I know that my partner was actually abusing me. I'm leaving him after so many years because I know now that this is not only the bruise on my physical body but he left me also bruise on my mental body. This is what she said exactly.

DM: Is it risky for women to use the app or to be caught using it in Iran?

SOUDEH RAD: The information in application are not banned inside the country so no one can say you are doing something wrong there. Of course we're talking about the sexuality but the language is such that anyone can use it. We did not use any picture. For breast cancer check, we did not put any pictures. I explained exactly what they should do so that something, I mean a girl of 13 years old somewhere in villages, if she's got the app the parents do not tell her oh, this is pornographic or this is something that you should not have access to. So it's one about the language and second about all the information women should have inside the country and it’s not against the regime. It's just giving them more access in a friendlier and more understandable language of what their rights are. So that is why I'm not really so far concerned about the app being banned and it has not been banned yet either.

DM: Thanks for telling us about your app.

SOUDEH RAD: Thank you.

DM: Soudeh Rad is an activist and the founder of the Hamdam app. She lives in Paris, France but we reached her in Oslo, Norway. The Hamdam app came out of the IranCubator project. It's a contest that asked activists to submit ideas for apps that could help create social change in Iran. Firuzeh Mahmoudi is the founder of IranCubator. She's also the executive director of United for Iran, a nonprofit based in San Francisco. She's in Berkeley, California. Hello.

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: Hello. Good morning.

DM: How does the Hamdam app fit into the broader goals of the IranCubator project?

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: So IranCubator project as you mentioned came through United for Iran, our nonprofit where we work to improve civil liberties in Iran. And a few years ago, we decided that the sweet spot for making change in Iran is where technology meets civil liberties and civil society together to bring about change. So we launched IranCubator which is a civic tech incubator where we work with civil society and activists to build technologies, mostly mobile apps, to be used in Iran for improving civil liberties.

DM: What kind of apps have you launched this year and what do they do?

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: So there's a wide range of apps. One of them was Hamdam, of course. Other apps, one is called Sandoogh967 or in English, essentially ballot box 2017. It's about informing voters which was very useful prior to the presidential election that just took place last week.

DM: It's been described as kind of a Tinder style app for learning about the candidates. How does it work?

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: The Tinder portion has to do with the fact that you provide various categories for the users to survey. To do a survey, they swipe right or left like Tinder and then based on the decisions they've made or the choices they’ve made in the survey, the potential presidential candidates are ranked according and the categories include politics, international politics, economics, culture, women's rights, civil liberties.

DM: Why is that important in Iran?

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: It's important to have, I think anywhere when individuals vote. It's important to have information on the candidates that are accurate and one can rank them up based on one's own personal beliefs and all of it to be in one place captured concisely and objectively.

DM: You've also got an app that's a database of political prisoners. Can you tell me about that?

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: So that is less of an app. It's more of a website. It's called The Iran Prison Atlas. We started that project in 2011 and now we're constantly evolving one version for I believe. The Iran Prison Atlas is a database of Iran's political prisoners, the prisons they are held in and the judges that sentenced them and it's a very interactive integrated database. So one can look at a profile of a political prisoner. Let's pick Narges Mohammadi who is a prominent human rights offender who's serving a 10-year sentence currently for defending political prisoners, or you can scroll down on her profile page and find her judge, the infamous [unintelligible] and go to his profile or her prison Evin, or one can zoom out to look at systematic patterns of abuse.

DM: And is it crowdsourced?

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: No, it's not. We capture information from individuals and when people contact us and we look at that information, verify it. It's critical for this information to be 100 per cent accurate of course.

DM: Who are you targeting with these apps?

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: So the database is different than the apps. I will respond with regards to the apps. So because the apps serve a wide range of groups in Iran if you will, so citizens of Iran. And our hope with IranCubator has been not to only support Iran's human rights defenders and political prisoners which is critical work, but also engage hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iranians at the level of risk they want to take and in areas they are interested in. So with this app, we are working with various civil society members who if you will are owners of the app to empower them and support them in building these apps to continue their efforts and the network that they have and the issue area indicate who we're working with. So one app may support Iran's 2.2 million drug users. One may work on specific categories of woman. Like we mentioned, one other female, a woman-focused app has information on legal rights, right to custody, divorce, as well as information on physical abuse in marriage and gives the woman an opportunity to do a survey to see if they're in an abusive relationship. So it depends on the app.

DM: I'm wondering, have there been attempts by the Iranian government to block these apps? I mean Twitter and Facebook are blocked by the Iranian government. How are they reacting to these apps?

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: That's a really good question and we're regularly monitoring that. So in addition to building the app and ensuring adoption which is always hard work for any tech team, for us that's half of the work. A lot of the work focuses on thinking through if the app’s going to potentially be blocked, if it's going to be tempered with bad data potentially, depending on the app that may be relevant and doing security audits and penetration testing for the more sensitive apps. We have been actually pleasantly surprised that most of the apps thus far have not been blocked by the government. We do have plans to mitigate that if that does happen. It's costly and it would require us to launch a new version of each app. But for now that hasn't happened and part of that is because the situation in Iran has shifted a bit. I would say overall, civil society in Iran has shifted to work more on civil liberties issues, not necessarily more sensitive targeted issues and part of that has to do with Iranians being rightfully nervous looking at Syria and Iraq and wanting Iran to stay fairly stable. On the other hand, the government has also opened up a bit and allows some level of activity to take place.

DM: But activism is still rare in Iran. So how risky is it for Iranians to be using these apps?

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: Right. So for example the app we just launched, it was promoted by centre-right media outlet inside Iran called KhabarOnline. So far we haven't seen a lot of harassments for our apps. And you're right—generally targeted activism, what we consider activism is not encouraged and fairly more rare these days in Iran. What we do have is what they call lifestyle activism.

DM: Could anyone be in danger if they're found using the apps?

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: We don't think so. A lot of these apps are not as sensitive and individuals who get stopped just quickly by the moral police on the streets, they may quickly look at the phone and then let them go. If someone's going in and being imprisoned they're going through all of their content, then I think they have a bigger issue and we haven't seen it. We're not worried, although we do take all the precautions we can by doing audits and doing what we call security by design.

DM: You're based in the US now. Your colleagues are also Iranians who have left the country. Would you be able to do any of this work from within the country?

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: I think that would be much more difficult. I think the reason we can do this work from the outside is because we have the capacity and the security to do this work from the outside. It's not easy to fundraise—anyone who runs a nonprofit knows that—and we're not going to prison for it from the outside and we are able to do that to build the capacity to do the work.

DM: Well, thank you very much for sharing information about the project.

FIRUZEH MAHMOUDI: It was absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.

DM: Firuzeh Mahmoudi is the executive director of United for Iran and the founder of the IranCubator project. She was in Berkeley, California. Iran isn't the only place harnessing the power of technology to fuel civil society. Similar efforts are under way in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia. My next guest is warning against the potential dangers that could pose to activists. Alix Dunn knows all about the perks and perils of using technology to bring about social change. She's the executive director and co-founder of The Engine Room, an international organization that helps activists and organizations make the most of data and technology. She also sits on the technology advisory council of Amnesty International. She joins us from London, England. Hello.

ALIX DUNN: Hello.

DM: What do you make of IranCubator?

ALIX DUNN: I think it's a really important initiative. I think that the last question you asked around if it would be possible to do this kind of work from within Iran I think is a really important question and I think the response makes it clear that that wouldn't be possible. These kinds of initiatives I think I have a lot to offer and it sounds like from the example of the Hamdam app that it is facilitating conversations that otherwise might not take place that are very important on issues that are otherwise seen as taboo.

DM: Why is it important?

ALIX DUNN: Which aspect?

DM: In terms of allowing countries to have a voice and citizens to have access to information that they might not be able to get.

ALIX DUNN: I think it's a key part of being a citizen in a country to be able to both understand and access information about how your government and society works and doesn't work and to be able to share your thoughts on that with friends, family, people in your villages, towns, cities and across the country. And so I think a key part of an informed citizenry that's able to hold their governments to account and also for us to evolve as a society that can have tough conversations about difficult issues.

DM: What concerns do you have about apps like the one that we just heard about that are being used inside countries where the government could crack down on their use?

ALIX DUNN: Yeah. I mean I think given my line of work, it's probably clear that I think technology has a lot to offer but I think being strategic about how we use technology to further positive social change means that we need to be reasonable about what we can expect from technology and to be aware of possible unintended consequences or risks that we expose ourselves and others to when we build things. The ethos of the technology industry is to move fast and break things. But that operates under the assumption that breaking things won't cause harm. But as these sort of creations move out of the laboratory and into the homes of real people with real needs, when they break, it can cause harm. And I think that the failure of technology to deliver what it promises has sometimes really significant consequences. I don't think we should make choices for others about the risks that they're willing to take to secure their rights. But I think we need to consider risk carefully in how we design and disseminate new technology. I would say with the Hamdam app in particular, I could imagine quite easily a scenario where it does become synonymous with a women's rights app and having it on your phone is no longer an innocuous app that no one has heard of but rather a signal or a sign that you are more actively advocating for something that might get you in trouble and might put you in harm's way.

DM: Are there any examples where new technology backfired?

ALIX DUNN: A lot. I think generally speaking, how we use technology sends signals about who we are. So if I'm using encrypted e-mail, well, what do you have to hide, or if I am downloading an app for domestic abuse victims what does that say about my personal life, or if I'm using an app like Grindr, what does that say about my sexuality and information that I might otherwise consider private.

DM: The Haystack app caused quite a concern. What happened there?

ALIX DUNN: So the Haystack app was designed in 2009 and amid considerable hype was launched and beta tested within Iran. And the idea behind it and to great fanfare was that Iranian citizens could circumvent blocks on certain online content and not only access that content, but also hide the fact that they were accessing that content. And quite quickly after security researchers accessed the raw code of the application, it was clear very, very quickly that the application did not do what it said that it had done. But it was too late. One, Iranians were using the app. Two, the international community was wildly endorsing it. And three, it sort of perpetuated this issue I think within technology that the industry itself is built on hype. So to get your app to scale, you have to say it will do everything you can possibly imagine and while that might work in consumer markets and might not cause harm in commercial markets, it can cause serious harm when the stakes are this high.

DM: Apps are often created in the West for use in other parts of the world. Does that raise any issues for you?

ALIX DUNN: Yeah. I think fundamentally the idea that effective solutions can be built by people who are not experiencing the problem both decreases the chances that we'll be building things that people can use to solve the problems that they face. But also it exacerbates an existing power dynamic where local communities are not in charge of the agenda of the solutions that are being built for them. That is not always the case in technology that's built in the West. There are many, many wonderful technology projects that incorporates the views and the advice and the involvement of local communities. But I think that that divide both undermines the quality of these initiatives and it also makes problems worse.

DM: How concerned are activists that it won't just be activists using them but that governments are using the technology and apps to spy on their citizens?

ALIX DUNN: I think it changes from context to context. But I think that what I'm seeing is a general trend that people are developing much more sensitivity and awareness to the way that their use of technology can be interpreted by state actors or actors like advertisers that have ulterior motives to using our data and information. And I think that over the next decade, we're going to see dramatic advances in data science capacity. As we sort of sprint into the future with reckless abandon, it's hard to know how our data is going to be used to either influence us or even explicitly control us in the future.

DM: You talk about the future. What kind of change do you hope is going to come out of some of the innovations in technology?

ALIX DUNN: I hope that we're able to use technology to better connect with colleagues, with communities, with friends and that trend will increase, increased connections across borders will result in projects that otherwise wouldn't have happened and that will empower civil society to accomplish things and tackle problems that before now we haven't been able to because we've been living in our silos and our sort of islands for lack of a better word. And I think generally speaking, technology has the power to do things that we can't really anticipate and I'm quite excited for that and seeing how all of that unfolds.

DM: Thank you for joining us.

ALIX DUNN: Yeah. Thank you.

DM: Alix Dunn is executive director and co-founder of The Engine Room and sits on the technology advisory council of Amnesty International. She was in London, England. We have a minute to tell you about some of the stories you'll hear next week on The Current. Anna Maria Tremonti will be back on Monday. Tune in for her conversation with Scott Anderson. He's a long-time war correspondent who writes for The New York Times magazine. His new book is Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart. He met Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and recalls the most memorable moment of their meeting. Hear Scott Anderson on Monday. Also, Anna Maria will look at back pain and why it's so hard to treat. If you're one of the majority of Canadians who’s suffered from back pain, you won't want to miss that. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. Canadian singer-songwriter Serena Rider is set to release her new record Utopia as well as headline this year's CBC Music Fest. She'll join Tom Power and play a few tunes from the album. We're ending the show today with a sad update to a story we brought you in 2014. Amy Reed was a doctor and mother of six who had surgery to remove fibroids from her uterus. Surgeons used what's known as the morcellator. It's a device with a spinning blade that slices up tissue so that it can be removed easily. After her surgery, Amy Reed found out the blade had spread cancer cells in her uterus. It was a cancer that had not been detected. She and her husband went on to lobby to stop the use of the device. In 2014, the US Federal Drug Administration and Health Canada put a warning on morcellators to discourage their use, but they're still used today. Amy Reed died on Wednesday night in her home in Yardley, Pennsylvania. We'll give her today’s last word. From Alison Motluck’s documentary for The Current, “A Divisive Device”, Amy Reed recalled getting her devastating diagnosis. I’m Duncan McCue. Miigwech. Thank you for listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

A week after my surgery, eight days, I got a phone call and it was the woman who had done the surgery and she said to me are you home alone, which is never words you want to hear from your surgeon. And she said your pathology came back as leiomyosarcoma. So I asked her what is this? What does that mean? I've never heard of leiomyosarcoma. And she said well, it's very rare. I'm not really sure what that means. I'm reading up on it now. And I hung up the phone and started calling my husband and my mom and I did my probably “only look on the web for leiomyosarcoma” for several months and I saw them talking about life expectancies in less than five years and I put the computer away. I had gotten a call from the gynaecologic oncologist that I had initially met with, the one who told me I didn't have cancer. And he said I'm very, very sorry. This is incredibly rare—one in 10,000. He said you are just incredibly unlucky. He said it's such a rare cancer we really don't know what the best course of action is. And that's how I was left. Initially my biggest fear was like oh my gosh, I'm going to have to have another operation. What about work? What about everything? And then it hit me, like you idiot. You have cancer. Like forget about all that.

[Music: Piano]

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May 26, 2017 full episode transcript

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