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

The Fucking F-Word

Until this week, I had no idea who Ella Henderson was. My first knowledge of the X-Factor star's existence came from a disturbing recount of a phone interview with her by Emma Barnett, women’s editor of The Daily Telegraph.

Young pop stars being excessively controlled by their managers and PR is a story we are all well versed in, and horribly blasé about. It is but one of those in-your-face issues that makes X-Factor not just an hour long session in eye-scratching, but also sends its viewers on a double downward spiral of introspection and shame, in preparation for their Saturday night pillow-cry.* In all fairness, my usual alternative of spending 5 hours in the pub leads to pretty much the same conclusion.

According to the article, when Henderson was asked if she considered herself a feminist, the phone interview was interrupted by a PR official, preventing the 17 year old from answering:

'Suddenly a gruff man’s voice out of nowhere growled: “She’s not answering that.” Said aggressive man when asked who the hell he was simply replied: “Her PR”. I then pushed for Rude Bloke’s name and was told “Russell.”

'I then asked why she couldn’t answer this question, and he replied “She’s just not. It’s not to do with Safer Internet Day.”'

The article continued to interview many other industry professionals about the incident, in an attempt to make some sense of this confusing and disquieting situation. To me, it read like a spoof. A surreal, ridiculous tale, it resembled a left-field Lord Curzon commission, fallen straight out of 1912. It was an interview conducted from a dystopic, Orwellian representation of post-suffrage Britain: ‘Russell’ was a strange, resolute symbol; the last man left clutching to better time once had, now lost in a violent wave of votes for women, educational reform and evolving pop-culture. Because the discussion: ‘Is the f-word too dirty for pop?’ frankly, takes the piss. The consistent questioning of whether feminism is still too ‘dirty’ or ‘divisive’ for certain industries hit me like a horrible wake-up call to current general attitudes towards the word ‘feminism’. A true pointy pin in the side of my once floaty, optimistic progress-balloon.

One of Barnett’s interviewee’s explained that some acts will be ‘advised against it [identifying as feminist] out of a fear of pigeon-holing the pop star and putting fans off.’ This is the same warped logic found in mainstream music companies that dictates that the public control what music an artist makes. Now this mass, reactionary, Coldplay-adoring ‘public’ defines the personal views of those in the spotlight, too? If an artist is banned by their label from making their own opinions and music public, they should also be banned from using the word ‘role model’ and ‘individual’ while they are with that label.

I didn’t think we had equality, or that the fight was over. But the battle in my mind was very different to the one this article confronted me with. I was under the impression that any anti-feminist feeling in modern, sane humans was subconscious; a latent distrust that wasn’t really possible to articulate. Like the bizarre grudge that makes me switch channels every time Nick Robinson appears on the BBC. To me, 21^st century sexism was a thing that came from a cynicism and complacency started a long time ago, now inexplicably wedged firmly in the back of the minds of a few. An invisible, toxic cultural meme, where page 3 and spearmint rhino are ‘tradition’, like wearing hats at weddings, or the right to bear arms in America. It seeps secretly into everyday life in the form of ‘eesh, got your period?’, ‘slut’, ‘whore’ and ‘aw she thinks I’m being sexist!’ (That one did personally happen to me. It turned a nice evening of mattress surfing rather ugly. But that’s for another time).

But this, this was blatant. Questioning whether the society is ready to hear people publicly claim to be feminist? Seriously? Whether young girls need to hear their idols speak about gender? Whether they should be exposed to something alternative, that shows them they don’t need to dance like Rihanna, or wear cupcake bras, or get approval from boys to be normal? That being successful by picking up a pen, or a banner, or a pair of fucking roller skates is just as fathomable? QUESTIONING whether women should affiliate themselves with the movement that turned us into the voting, working, jeans-wearing, slut-walking sex we are today? I really thought we were past that. That’s not sneaky, subconscious sexism. And it’s just as dangerous, if not more so. It’s evidence that feminism is losing momentum. The debate’s been sidelined. We’re being pushed backwards.

That people can still have dubious opinions on the use of the word ‘feminism’, while claiming to be an advocate of equal rights, is just so stupid. No modern member of western democracy would openly claim to be anti-feminist without expecting to be thrust into some serious controversy. And yet you don’t even have to take to rural, reclusive England, or the recesses of the internet to be met with a barrage of people flippantly detaching themselves from the movement for equal rights, because (and again I’m quoting from real experience here) ‘I like shaving my legs’, ‘If I want to hold a door for a girl I will’, and, my personal favourite, ‘I don’t want to be stereotyped.’ (Yeah, feminism really created a problem of stereotyping women). You don’t have to go out of your way to hear this. You just have to use the f-word.

It feels so old hat, and so tired, to still be defining feminism for people; to still be fighting against a negative image that never truly existed. ‘I’m not a feminist but …’ is the most infuriating sentence starter in the English language. Wouldn’t it be just FANTASTIC if we could get to a point in society where saying ‘I don’t consider myself a feminist’ created the same outcry and discomfort as saying the opposite once did?

I didn't have a lot on my plate today

*See an interesting and disturbing interview Louis Walsh did for January’s Q [I can't find it online so I can't link you unfortunately, but if you happen across a copy.] Barnett also quoted Crystal Castles’ vocalist Alice Glass on role models in pop. ‘She thinks a lot of female popstars don’t sell a good image of themselves to children as women. She cites Katy Perry (who recently refused to say she was a feminist) as an example of a pop star claiming to be all liberated – and yet dresses up in cupcake bras - and accuses her and others of sexualising children with their provocative clothes and actions on stage.’ It is important to think of the image we are selling to young children in mainstream music. Pop’s wariness of feminism is a probably just another step in the wrong direction.