Women’s Hour: An interview with Sh!t Theatre

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.

The Importance of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Like many people at the minute I have been hooked on The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. When the first episode of the series aired on Channel 4 in the UK I instantaneously bought the book, I was so in awe of the world that Atwood had conjured before my eyes. What struck me as fascinating was the notion that the rights and freedoms that people of Western society enjoy could be so easily removed.

Regardless of how much a person might believe that this could happen, the removal of what we take for granted for the, apparent, benefit of the human race is a scary topic. The anger which I felt when watching the first episode is indicative of how comfortable I have become with the freedoms I enjoy in the UK is my right and nothing can affect that.

I remember the strong feelings of outrage when witnessing families separated, because one member happened to be a divorcee, and the indignation whilst watching the objectification of women so that they can fill their “biological destinies”.

This all boils down to the fact that, perhaps arrogantly, I view how I live my life as my right rather than something that has been allowed by the State. I have forgotten that the way I live now is the result of subsequent laws and policies of either like minded people that just happened to be in government or organised public protests by those that were brave enough to stand up for what they believed was right.

At the heart of it, this feeling all boils down to control.

Perhaps thats what makes Atwood’s novel so popular, it plays on this infatuation. The idea our society could drastically change is an inviting one as it offers a different future that we can’t foresee, and in some ways this idea is freeing.

However freeing the thought, it certainly does not mean that we want to be in this society, we prefer to be a tourist, enjoying it from afar and being tantalised with the slim possibility that our lives could one day follow a similar path. The privilege we enjoy in this practise is because its a piece of fiction at the end of the day, despite the real life inspiration Margaret Atwood took.

Therefore, The Handmaid’s Tale is perhaps one of the most important pieces of literature of our time to read, as it deals with relevant societal issues. Atwood has created such an adaptable text that a woman from 2017 can read a text originally written in the 80s and see the importance of the messages communicated in relation to current politics.

Society’s Contradictions for Women

Last October I went to see the play Women’s Hour by the wonderfully talented Louise Mothersole and Rebekah Biscuit. The play, not to be confused with Woman’s Hour, a show on BBC Radio Four, was a depiction of the many things that women face in our society today.

What was most important was how the piece illustrated the way a numerous amount of contradictions exist within our society regarding the position of women. For example, sanitary products are classed as a luxury item, despite the fact that these products are essential for a woman in order to leave the house.

As well as this, advertising in our country exists promoting gender neutrality next to advertisements of gendered kinder eggs, complete with the stereotypical toys and colours for a boy and a girl.

The work of Louise Mothersole and Rebekah Biscuit was hilarious and truthful but it got me thinking about how we as women, in Western society, live and develop surrounded by these contradictions that constantly inform our lives. This was highlighted in the response to Emma Watson’s Vanity Fair shoot, in which her breasts were partly revealed. Emma was treated as though she had betrayed her feminist values and as a result many online condemned her for hypocrisy. What was striking about issue was the manner in which people online were ready to convict her in the court of public opinion under those feminist values that were in place to free women and promote gender equality.

This theme of contradiction of terms persists in our society, the rise of pro-feminist attitudes has led to the perceived downfall of issues of masculinity, disregarding the fact that feminism is focused on the equality of the sexes, rather than establishing a matriarchal society and subordinating men, however tempting that might be to some women.
The social contradictions that Women’s Hour revealed highlighted how much we, as women, continue to face in Western society. This is also true when we reach positions of influence or responsibility in our careers. Indira Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo stated that women can’t have it all because we are still expected to place our families as our first priority, rather than there to be an equal share of familial responsibility between a couple.

I too have found myself running to my mother, rather than my father, even though my family is not very traditional, it still strikes me that I view my mother as my first port of call. This implies the assumption I have made regarding how central my mother’s role has been to the family unit, in comparison to my father.

This association of a woman’s priority can be witnessed in the world of celebrities, when suspicions were raised about the truth behind Kim Kardashian’s robbery, those that defended and supported her did so in relation to her as a mother, rather than as a human being. We were asked to think about the effects it had on her children and her husband therefore dehumanising her by removing her as a person and replacing it with the nameless role of being a mother and wife. This association of her as primarily being a mother and wife, first, is reminiscent of the beliefs of John Knox in the 1500s, a man who also believed that female monarchs became monsters, because women are naturally subordinate to men of course.
Today we find ourselves still struggling with the remnants of centuries long subordination, that reached its cementation during the colonial period, a time when anxieties around the weaker sex in proximity with those of a different race reached their peak. However, despite the existence of these remnants, figures such as Emma Watson and Angelina Jolie have used their wealth and their influential voices to continuously raise the issue of women’s rights in countries in which women deal with more severe obstacles to their gender. Prejudices’ surrounding women and perceptions of our gender will persist for many years to come. With increased accessibility there seems to be a rise in public sexist abuse on the platforms provided by social media. Despite this, if we mock the obstacles that are enforced upon us we serve to trivialise their importance and we need to highlight what these aspects of our society really stand for, as I witnessed in the Women’s Hour play.