Discussing Sex and Love Around the World With Christiane Amanpour

The world has long known Christiane Amanpour, CBE as one of the most trailblazing journalists of our time. She has reported from the frontlines of virtually every war and global crisis in recent memory, from the Persian Gulf War in 1990—the assignment largely credited for putting her on the map—to the nearly four-year Siege of Sarajevo, the longest of a capital city in modern history. Of that particular event, which she described at the time as “my generation’s war,” she was both lauded and criticized for revealing, in the utmost detail, the savage nature of conflict, and working her personal reflections into her reporting. While some appreciated her candor, others accused her of editorializing events. In Amanpour’s view, though, she was simply reporting what she saw, and had no qualms about calling out Bosnian policy. From that point on, she became a polarizing harbinger of change beyond just her field, causing governments worldwide to take note, act on and be wary of her every move. And yet, they’d never guess this next one.

Tonight, she will debut Sex and Love Around the World, a new series which reveals a thrilling new side to both Amanpour and her reporting. CNN’s veteran chief international correspondent travelled to six cities—Tokyo, New Delhi, Accra, Berlin, Beirut, and Shanghai—to talk to women about, well, their sex lives, as well as their attitudes towards love. The premiere episode, which takes place in Tokyo, opens with a cocktail dress–clad Amanpour, who breezes into a dimly lit restaurant where a group of Japanese women are gathered around a table. Leaning in toward them, Amanpour says, in her velvety voice: “Okay ladies. Let’s talk about sex.”

In a kind of world tour between interviews with sex workers, erotic comic book narrators, BDSM enthusiasts, polygamists, and an all-girl biker gang fighting sexual harassment—just a few of the subjects included in this riveting series—Amanpour leads the charge in telling important female-focused stories. Her honest reporting confronts the cultural taboos that surround sexually empowered women across the globe. And while Sex and Love Around the World is in many ways her effort to showcase women as agents of their own lives and change, the episodes also discuss, in intimate detail, the obstacles they continue to face, as their sexuality is constantly scrutinized. In response to their brave accounts, and before the camera, Amanpour unfurls a new, vulnerable side of herself, which in turn elicits special, immensely personal, and often harrowing stories from each of her interviewees. It is these honest exchanges and the way Amanpour shares her own reflections which provide the most noteworthy moments of the show.

Below, Amanpour chats with Vogue about her experience.

You have done amazing, award-winning reporting on global issues from every pocket of the world. Why turn your lens to sex and love, and why now?

I think firstly this is going to be really eye-popping. It’s transparency for issues that we’ve never really talked about on television. For me, the interest was in looking at the other side of the coin of the human experience because everybody knows me as a global war correspondent immersed in crises—a very hard life.

I just started to think about how all these people I’ve been reporting on must have inner lives of intimacy and love and sexuality and how you keep those sides of your life intact, even in the worst situations like war. That’s what I really thought about, and then I expanded it to people in countries that do not have enshrined rights for women in any field, whether it’s in the political, economic or social. These communities of women don’t have their legal rights, nor do they feel they have the rights to expect and demand happiness, fulfillment and satisfaction for themselves. And that’s what sort of got me really interested in embarking upon this global odyssey to talk about it all. It was amazing because I, myself, was a little shy and awkward. You know, the questions I asked weren’t the usual ones I prepare for the camera. I wondered, when I started off, if the women would actually open up and talk to me. So I think that’s what really blew me away the most—that so many people wanted to talk. It just made me understand, in a blinding flash, that for all of us—all of us, even in the West—the topic of sexual intimacy, of sexual pleasure and satisfaction—for men and women—is pretty much universally taboo in the contexts of serious and natural discussion. And as I say, I was just blown away by the people who have silently thought about this a lot, and now are able to talk about it in public.

You traveled to six cities to learn about love and sex subcultures within them. How did you select these cities? And how did you feel interviewing women about such personal topics?

It was a group discussion—a vote in certain ways between Zero Point Zero (our production company, which is just fantastic), CNN, and myself. The head of ZPZ assigned all women to direct the episodes. It’s incredible, and of course this is the Anthony Bourdain company, which has put his brand of exploring the world from a different viewpoint on the map. So they’re really good at this and they know a lot of cities. I know a lot of cities, but not these ones. I’ve never visited Tokyo, for example, Shanghai I’ve visited when it was still a Communist village back in 1998. I hadn’t been to Accra. I didn’t know the majority of these cities, and we wanted to represent every part of the world—except America. We have not done America. We’ve got the Far East—Tokyo and Shanghai—South Asia—New Delhi, India—We’ve got Berlin and we’ve got the Middle East. We tried to incorporate as big a cultural, political, and religious demographic as we could. This is almost all exclusively done through the eyes of women and from the perspective of women. I was really focused on that, because that was the point! It wasn’t just to do [a show about] sex around the world, it was to talk about all the strains women feel are put upon them, from a ground level up. We [wanted] to put their wants and needs on the table, which is very rare for most of these women in most of these cities. It's a huge thing.

Was the inception of this series in any way related to recent women’s empowerment movements like Time’s Up and Me Too?

Well no, because we we were planning this way beforehand, so I’d like to think that we were incredibly clairvoyant and forward-looking! We were predictors of the future [laughs], but the truth is that it’s been broadcast in the middle of this moment because it is a global movement that has a lot of potential. It’s a game changer and it could present a tipping point, not just for Western women but women around the world. So I think it’s fantastic that it’s all coming out, and so many of the issues in the Me Too movement are uncovered, as a matter of course, during our interviews. We didn’t focus on women as victims. We focused on women as agents of their own personal politics and space . . . their own reform and change in what they could do for themselves, and what they felt they had the right to ask of their partners and families.

That was something I loved about it, particularly with the more vulnerable subjects like the female sex worker in Tokyo who, though in a sexless marriage, kind of owns her own space.

Well that’s a very astute observation because it was, in my mind, one of the saddest interviews. But you’re absolutely right—once you get to the bottom of the sadness, then you start climbing out and realizing that yes, she owned it and she figured out how to make herself happy and find someone else, but of course within the conservative, constrained paradigm of Tokyo’s society. It’s not open, she can’t talk about it and still lives with her husband. She still wishes that if her husband had been at least half alert to her wants and needs that they could have remained together in a relationship.

Turning the lens to journalism: Do you feel that there is something female journalists in particular should be doing more of in 2018, regardless of their specific field?

I do, and you know I speak for myself also, because I’ve been very conscious of focusing on women wherever I go, even in the most extreme crises of warfare or famine or whatever it may be. I’ve often and mostly trained my lens on the storytelling of women and girls. They seem to be the major victims, particularly in the wars they face now, which are primarily amongst civilians. I’m not writing great big pieces on armies against armies like I did for the first Gulf War I covered. Nowadays, they’re all these civil wars, or wars of religious nutjobs or insurgions railing against women . . . those kinds of things, where civilians are at risk on an individual level. I have really found that women and girls are the principal victims, particularly in the areas of forced marriage and sex trafficking, of pornography and prostitution and things like that.

So what can we do? I think we can do more of the kind of reporting on women and girls which doesn’t only focus on the darker aspects of their experiences—although that’s of course important—and instead help to move the ball along in the way the younger generation is breaking with the past, by turning our lens instead to strategy and moving towards the light. The younger generation of women and girls who I met in this series are not content, even in highly rigid societies and communities, with being told what to do and what they can expect out of life (which is pretty much always nothing or subject to the man’s satisfaction, first). Now they’re changing that paradigm and it’s having an effect. In India, for instance, there [has been] a vast decrease in the incidents of child marriage due to a massive education campaign. Plus they’re getting a lot of information online about what women around the world are doing for their rights. They have a window through the internet that previous generations never did, many of whom felt there was no way they could change the world as they found themselves in it. And these young women are saying, now, “Hold on a sec. It’s not like this everywhere in the world, so why should we live like this?” It’s really eye-opening stuff and tender in many instances . . . quite humorous at times, and a little bit outrageous.

Are are there any categorical learnings you’ve taken away about the hearts of women from these interviews?

Every step of the way I felt this immense connection to everyone I spoke to. In different ways, each one of them brought up issues I’ve experienced, or I’ve been concerned with or I’ve reported on or I've known needs to be corrected. And again, this is happening in an era of mass correction—that’s what the Me Too movement is. It’s a mass reckoning. It’s a correction of the most violent abuses by predatory men, but it’s also a correction of the casual and everyday sexism and misogyny all over the world, including the very developed world like the United States and parts of Europe. So this is very necessary, what’s happening right now, and I think women around the world feel it, and are all joined in this struggle. I think men around the world feel it, too.

Finally, it was wonderful as a viewer and longtime admirer of your work to see a more playful side of you—one of the best parts of the series is that there’s a fair bit of humor. Did you have fun?

I had so much fun, I can’t tell you. It was a really different side of me that came out, and certainly one that I don’t display in public. It was a learning experience, there’s no doubt about it. And I’ll tell you one other thing. In these highly stressful political times that we’re living in right now, it was a great opportunity to see a whole other side of life and existence. It’s not all about what we see on the news all the time. People have other issues that they’re dealing with that are equally or more important, on a personal level, and that gave me a lot of hope, and even a respite, as I say, from some of the more stressful politics and things that we face on a daily basis. And very importantly, these women are not victims, they are agents of change, of their own lives and bodies. Each episode has a different flavor, and in that way they’re each a kind of shot in the arm of hope, for what we can all achieve.

Catch Sex and Love Around the World at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on CNN.