Let's Talk About Sex, Baby ... And Seventeenth Century Theatre

Yes! My totally grabby scandalous title brought you in! Read on, friends as I share my tipsily written, soberly edited thoughts on a seventeenth century spy, tinder and feminism. 

I recently watched the dress run of The Rover, probably the sexiest show currently on at the RSC. (If you don’t think that’s much of a statement, go check out Lucifer in a white catsuit, red lipstick and stilettos in Doctor Faustus at the Barbican, then come back to me. Elizabethan theatre is RAUNCHY.) 

It was very enjoyable. Aphra Behn, who wrote it, was one of the UK’s first professional female playwrights, when she wasn’t being a spy. She’s kind of like a seventeenth century John le Carre, except she wrote about far more universal and exciting things than international espionage: sex and travel, mostly. The play’s about three wealthy sisters who escape their brother’s restrictive watch to experience some fun and romance before facing the highly unromantic futures that have been laid out for them, which involve being shipped off to convents or into unwanted marriages. They disguise themselves as gypsies and join carnival season for one night of freedom, where they become entangled with three English travellers, who find the carnival equally new, exciting and foreign. 

The Rover © RSC

The whole play stinks of patriarchy, like most things from 1677 do. Amid the party atmosphere of the carnival, there are seriously solemn moments: one of the sisters has to not just forgive but pretty much laugh off two men who attempted to rape her (on separate occasions! in one day! And one of them goes on to marry her sister!), and the sisters all have to do exactly what their brother and father tell them. 

While that’s all important though, what I really want to convey here is how SEXY the show is. There’s sexy men, and sexy women, and sexy men having sex with sexy women, and sexy women having sex with sexy men, and sexy women having sex with unsexy men and skirts fly off and hands wander and everyone is just so excited to SEE EACHOTHER. It’s lovely! 

The Rover © RSC

As I sat and watched the scandal unfold, it felt terribly unfair to me that nearly 350 years later, such electric, excitable sexual adventure still feels like such a distant and fantastical notion. There’s something desperately numbing about watching people dance and kiss and argue and get so intensely entangled in each other, in a story that only takes place over 24 hours or so, and then go home and turn to the 21st century’s equivalent matchmaking tool - not carnival, but tinder. Masks and music and dance have given way to swiping through photos and forcing conversation with boring strangers on an app. 

HOW CAN THIS HAVE HAPPENED? We’ve had lots of progress since 1677. Microwaves and shorts for women, to name but two examples. It is very much a good thing that I am not forced to marry anyone I don’t want to. This play makes it abundantly obvious that women in the seventeenth century found it just as unsavoury a prospect as we do today. It is good that women can now report rape as a crime, and men are punished - occasionally. AREN’T WE LUCKY. But all these marks of progress come with serious caveats. I may not have to marry anyone I don’t want to, but that’s not the case for many women and girls in the world. We might be able to report rape as a crime, but women still have to laugh off rape ‘jokes’ in many situations.  

Rather than joining a carnival and dancing round in masks, meeting people, taking in smells and sights and sounds and feeling physical attraction, we join Tinder or Grindr or Happn, and virtually bat off weirdos and consign ourselves to random onslaughts of dickpics. Technology has somehow allowed us to do away with physical connection, but keep the abuse and objectification. How can we have let this happen as a society? We’ve kept the sexual oppression, and LOST THE ACTUAL SEX?!?! 

© Vice

I don’t think I’m being over dramatic here. A study released last month showed that millenials (specifically young people aged 20-24), have less actual, in person, kissy touchy sex than previous generations. And I can believe it. I mean, how do you even connect with people these days? We don’t go outside! Even if we did, what would we do? Technology has splintered the media so much that there’s very little that EVERYONE connects over any more.There’s nowhere that EVERYONE IS. They’re not at carnivals, or speakeasies, or punk gigs or raves. They’re on the internet. (And while you CAN have sex over the internet, I’m going to stick my neck out here and say it’s not as fun.) And yet these extra miles and messages and apps between us all haven’t kept us any safer. Young women have a 30% chance of being sexually assaulted on university campuses. We’ve kept the dark, oppressive demons of centuries past and cast off the fun side. 

Watching this 1677 play in 2016, the poignant, relatable aspects are the violence, sinister control and revenge many of the men seek to affect on the women, while the lively sexual banter feels ludicrous and dated. IT SHOULD BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND. The crazily overt sexism should feel distant and antiquated, and the SEX, the CONNECTION and the CARNIVAL, should feel universal.

The Rover © RSC

Something better change

I feel sorry for the people who voted leave.

Not the ones cheering with union jack flags outside Westminster this morning, who are by now probably downing the final, tobacco-scented, backwashy dregs of their 14^th celebratory pint of ale. Not the floppy haired, fop-voiced, dark suited, faux-somber ones either. Not even the ones who are now trying to defend their half-hearted support for the remain campaign, and cling to their leadership of the Labour Party. I don’t feel sorry for those leave voters at all. But the 17.4 million others? The ones who did it to take back some semblance of power – not reinforce power they already had, at whatever cost? I feel very sorry for them. And I think those people are feeling a little sorry for remain voters now too. Cause there's only a few people celebrating. 

Jeremy Corbyn was not inspired by remain

The people who voted leave did not vote against freedom of movement, or more confusing trade deals, or a weakened economy. Based on the downright misleading messaging from the leave campaign, they voted for immigration to be curbed, reduced pressures and extra funding for the NHS, and less bureaucracy. Many in our country are feeling very desperate, and who can blame them for seeking hope – I mean, ‘Leave’ is a much more action-packed, exciting prospect than ‘remain’. Noone has ever shouted rousing chants of ‘Remain!’ from a picket line. It’s not a gift of a message. Action often feels better than inaction. It was obvious that people were sick of being told what was best for them by disconnected elites. The sad thing is, they will now probably have to sit and watch as Boris Johnson foppishly guide a slew of slugglish laws through parliament in order to implement this change, privatise more of the NHS, and continuously shout down any debate on immigration by refusing to admit that we can still do nothing about it.

I feel as though this is an emperor’s new clothes moment. Politicians can no longer blame the European Union for all the issues disenchanting the people of Britain with politics. They can try for a couple more years, but I hope the electorate don’t let them get away with it.

I am disappointed with the referendum result. Intrigued by the statistic that our economy was at its weakest since 1985, I asked some of the people in my office today what it was like in 1985. "Worse than this". was the broad conclusion. It was in the wake of the miners’ strikes, severe dismantling of the unions, and people were angry. Now that it’s here, I hope Brexit does help people regain power and combats the shocking inequality in this country. But I fear it won’t. What I really hope is that when it doesn’t, the people who demanded their voice be heard today keep speaking up, and direct it at the people who really deserve their scrutiny. Prime Minister Johnson, or Gove, or Corbyn, or Leadsom, should not be in for an easy ride. 

Resolutions

Welcome to 2016 everybody!

That’s how this post opened when I wrote it, back in January. Now that midsummer is approaching, it’s a bit of a weak opening. Doesn’t scream up-to-date and must-read. But, given that the post written below is about New Year’s resolutions, it is kind of fitting. Allow that ridiculous opening sentence of mine to place you, like any good author should, in a vivid, suitable context for what’s to follow. I present to you here my thinking from the tenth of January 2016:

I started the new year off not with a bang, but with violent fit of coughing and the feeling of vague mystification as I sat under a duvet with a lemsip, watching Brian Adams sing a rock version of Auld Lang Syne to the crowds of people gathered for the fireworks in London. (He was indoors, but they all could hear?!) But I hope you all had a good time.

Since then, my life has followed a strict regime of duvet-time, Netflix-binging and teddy hugging, overseen by a devilish triumvirate of stubborn cold symptoms, PMS and back to work blues. All of which has really dulled my enthusiasm for new years and new beginnings and all that.

My approach to resolutions has been swinging erratically from enthusiastic list-making, dreaming of all I can do in these next 12 months to make me a successful human, and the dull, angry conviction that resolutions are the faux empowering tool of a harsh capitalist system, fooling us all into becoming more subservient citizens after spending 2 useless weeks valuing friendships, family and food over economic productivity and diets.

Buddy the elf doesn't need resolutions or diets.

When the Head of Department invited us all to share our resolutions at the team meeting this week, I shared nothing but a weird, anguished animal-noise, before monotonously telling my wide-eyed colleagues that “my new year’s resolution is … ugh … to, er, make one …” Which was pants. But I was put on the spot, and something about the meeting room and the spreadsheets and the jam-packed agenda told me that “I HAVE NO RESOLUTION BECAUSE I’M NOT CONFORMING TO YOUR EXPLOITATIVE CAPITALIST IDEOLOGY” would not have been an acceptable response.

Cosy and warming as angry defiance can be, I also don’t think it’s a feeling I’ll look back on and cherish. It’s only useful if you do something about it. Otherwise you’re just a moody girl freaking everyone out by making inhuman noises in business meetings. And while I’m happy to be that girl, I would also like to be proud of myself in 2016. So, in short, the blog’s coming back.

2015 was a really good year for me, but because I was so busy, this blog got neglected, something I said I wouldn’t do. Now that I’m lucky enough to be working normal 8 hour days, am no longer commuting into London, and am just beginning to miss the brain-stretching reading and research of uni, there’s no excuse not to go back to it.

I haven’t got official plans, or themes, or timetables, but it’s always been a bit of a miscellany. Humans hold many contradictions, so some random, unpredictable content, splatted straight out from my brain will, I’m hoping, still be entertaining, and of value. I’ve started a new notebook for the new year, and it’s already filling up.  So, see you back here soon!

Ha! Soon! That must have been the Lemsip talking. Six months later, and I am feeling a little flat about my lack of consistency with this resolution. One might say I have completely failed, but the way I see it, I still have six months left to come good on it. So, I say again, see you back here soon! What is it they say about people who do exactly the same thing and expect a different result? 

I never discovered David Bowie

I’m not going to write a eulogy to David Bowie, because frankly, who am I to write it. I was born twenty-three years after Space Oddity came out, a decade after Let’s Dance, and I didn’t even manage to get tickets for the epic exhibition at the V&A.

Still from the V & A's David Bowie Is exhibition, 2013

I don’t know what it’s like to ‘discover’ Bowie. I’ve loved many people’s excitable memories of it being shared today. It sounds like an exceedingly special experience. As someone who wasn’t there anywhere near the beginning, Bowie’s vast catalogue of eye-opening music, magical style and multiple exotic personas has, in my life, always just been there. A fact, like gravity. His genius was unquestionable and self-evident, always.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know all the words to Ziggy Stardust, imitating his pronunciation of ‘spiders’ and ‘mi-i-i-ind’ along with my air guitar, delighting in the drama and glamour.

I’ve never not wanted to swim like the dolphins can swim.

I’ve always know that a hot tramp is the most desirable, decadent thing anyone could ever be.

Ziggy played guitar ...

The worlds he created in his music aren’t just marvellous through the eyes of a child. They’ve continued to enchant and romance me as I’ve grown up, and hearing of his death today was oddly unnerving. Like losing a safety blanket. Thankfully, just his music was a simple fact of life for me 20 years after its release, so it will be for years to come. I don’t believe the magic will ever fade. Let's put on our red shoes and dance the blues...

The beautiful music of David Bowie. Rest in peace.