Around two years ago, for my student radio station Fuse FM, I interviewed the theatre company Sh!t Theatre for their performance ‘Women’s Hour’. The company, comprised of the hilarious duo, Rebekah Biscuit and Louise Mothersole, expertly demonstrated and mocked what women in Britain undergo in a more insidiously sexist society. However, due to a mixture of inexperience and bad sound quality the recorded version didn’t do the interview justice when initially uploaded to my student radio website. The interview was incredibly interesting from the both the standpoint of a journalist and a woman. Therefore, I took it upon myself to transcribe the interview in order to ensure the subject matter was aired and discussed.
Q: What was your inspiration for the show and its format?
RB: So the show is called Women’s Hour,
LM: Not to be confused with Woman’s Hour
RB: Yes, Woman’s Hour is the BBC Radio 4 series, which for very legal reasons we are not named after.
LM: Yes those two words next to each other are not allowed
RB: Actually I think Women’s Hour is grammatically incorrect in its spelling but that is why its Women’s Hour. Our show was originally commissioned at Camden People’s Theatre called ‘Calm Down Dear! A Festival of Feminism’ where we are associate artists and Women’s Hour used to be a 10-15 minute cabaret piece. A year later Brian Logan, the artistic director of Camden People’s Theatre whose voice you might recognise from the show, said ‘hey guys how about we give you a bit of money and you write the full length version of women’s hour to headline the festival’. But the festival started in September and we were in Edinburgh until the end of August.
LM: And we said well we’ve got two weeks, we’re happy to knock something out in two weeks if you’re happy to accept something, and he said ‘yeahhh sure’
RB: So we took that time pressure and made it part of the show itself as well as the ludicrous nature of the idea that you might be able to say everything that there is to say about women in just an hour, like the women are given just an hour everyday on BBC Radio 4 to talk about their thing that is to do with women as though they’re not to do with human beings.
LM: Yeah theres a sort of ‘time running out’ theme and theres a heightening of tension throughout the show as things become faster in pace.
RB: As it becomes quicker and quicker, Brian Logan the man who commissioned us, counts us down. But he’s a wonderful man and he was very much up for that as well as the sort of irony of himself as a man creating this festival.
LM: And dictating throughout the show.
RB: We used to do it so that wherever we would go that the man in charge of the venue would do the voice over.
LM: But unfortunately with all this female empowerment nonsense some of the venues we went to were run by women and the idea fell flat.
RB: So we just use Brian, which I’m sure he’s really happy about as his voice continues to resonate through the years through our art
Q: Regarding your section on the abusive youtube comments directed at women, a lot of it seems targeted because that person is female. Where would you draw that line between ‘neutral’ abuse because of a disagreement and abuse specifically because the target is a woman?
LM: I would firstly like to say how depressingly easy it was to gather the abuse.
RB: All the comments are from Youtube and Twitter during Gamer Gate and so all those comments are specifically directed because the target is a women. The Gamer Gate bit was when a female gamer spoke out about the way women are generally portrayed in video games and the backlash on Twitter was insanely over the top.
LM: And there was so much rape imagery.
RB: Its very specifically gendered and very specifically violent. The other comments were from videos of Lena Dunham, Vanessa Feltz and an article from the Guardian on The Ministry of Women.
LM: Where they literally said ‘Ministry for Women, what is the point’. I think the context of those comments, of where we’ve taken them from, demonstrates that it is a gendered series of trolling.
RB: Lena Dunham as well, no matter what you think about her work and her writing, she has made a hugely successful HBO series that has continued series after series. Yet all the comments are obsessively about how she looks and the fact that she isn’t specifically the way you might expect the star of a hit tv series to appear.
Q: Would you say that the internet encourages and allows this abuse to continue?
RB: It exposes a crisis in masculinity, or there is a kind of man who feels powerless and sees women empowered and women who won’t have sex with him and doesn’t understand why these women feel like they do.
LM: And to them that reflect on their own sense of masculinity and power.
RB: And they are perhaps lonely or want love and just lashing out on the internet and I think the internet gives a huge space that I find disturbing and worrying. But I think it does need to be talked and not necessarily in a manner that attacks the attackers. There must be some reason behind that because it is so over-the-top.
Q: Some people would say that feminism has done its job, the internet mainly, but its thrown about that we are equal. What would you say to that?
LM: We’re still not paid the same percentage for the same work as men, so we’re not equal financially. There was an article about women in the oval office using the shine method which is whenever a woman brings up a point another woman will jump in to show her approval and give the other woman named credit for it before a man can take credit for it later on. Its the fact that they feel the need to come up with this method to have an equal weight in a meeting it demonstrates that we’re still not equal.
RB: Our show is based on our own experience as women and what we see in this country. But if we look globally, theres absolutely no question that women don’t have equality, women’s access to any sort of birth control or family planning and the way girls are educated in different countries. In our culture its more insidious now, obviously we can get jobs but things like childcare, which women are the ones that give birth theres no getting around that fact, but there is not enough childcare support. Which means a lot of women don’t return to work. So you look at statistics where women who don’t get paid as much as men from mid 30s onwards, the women start having children and needing to leave work and some argue ‘well the women are the ones that have the children’ but you wouldn’t say to someone thats in a wheelchair that they can’t come into a building you just build a ramp. So society has to change, but thats not happening which means theres a lot more insidious discrimination in the workplace and then theres also the way we’re still portrayed a objects in the media
LM: In advertising
RB: Things like products that are made, like the Maybelline ‘baby skin and lips’ a literal picture of a baby’s face next to a woman’s face and you literally buy baby skin like make up to erase the fact the fact that you’re an adult.
LM: Basically a woman’s main aim is to infantilise herself. I also can’t help but realise that we’re looking through a window that has a building shaped like a penis, with a glass ceiling,
RB: Yes i wonder who designed that?
LM: Could it have been a man?
Q: Do you think theres a lot of contradiction in society? When girls are younger they are sexualised and encouraged to look older but when a women reaches a certain age they’re encouraged to infantilise themselves.
RB: That relates slightly to part of the show actually, where we play a clip from a show with John Cleese. Its a documentary series that we both watched, by the BBC, made in the early 2000’s called the ‘Science of Beauty’ or something and it was John Cleese, a white man in his 70s, teaching us all about what made a beautiful woman and it was all very scientific. He walks around on Elizabeth Hurley’s face and showed us why Liz Hurley was so beautiful he measured her out, her hips and so forth. He then stated that women are the most attractive between the ages of 14 and 24 because thats when they’re most fertile and thats therefore when someone would most want to sleep with them and impregnate them for the rest of the tribe’s good.
LM: So maybe every woman should just aim to be between the ages of 14 and 24.
RB: Maybe those are the golden ten years that we’re all aiming for, ignoring any other drive that might make you attracted or interested in as a human being.
Me: Well we can ask John Cleese if we become a little confused about it.
LM: Yes i’m sure he’ll explain it to us throughly
RB: Thats depressing as we race towards our 30th birthdays.
LM: Yes, and on that topic, in the show, there is a shot of an actual advert that says “get your girls first bikini wax!’ and theres what looks like a 12 year old girl leaping in her bikini. What I find really problematic about it is that its clearly photoshopped, but around the bikini there are tan lines. So either they saw the tan lines and decided to leave it or they purposefully put it in to create that hint of material slipping and sliding around.
RB: It reminds me of the sort of shame about being hairy and just to get personal with you Eleanor, I got my legs sugared which is a little bit like waxing when I was 13 years old and fainted in the beauticians place. My mom wasn’t there she’d gone to the shops, and I’d fainted and my mom returned to see this poor beautician giving me a chocolate bar because I’d passed out from the pain and I left with one leg completely sugared and the other completely hairy.
LM: I remember being about 12 and my mom examining my armpits and telling me I had to start shaving my armpits.
Me: Yeah i remember going through a similar thing with girls at school.
RB: Its all quite depressing…
LM: That pause is just us all staring into the distance…
Me: Well that concludes the interview!
LM: Now lets all go home and shave!
Sh!t Theatre’s new performance DollyWould, begins 19th March – 14th April 2018 at Soho Theatre, London.
eleanor margaret 