Woman's Hour - Baby Bonding, ASMR, Afghanistan, Eimear McBride, BMX Freestyle

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

Some mums may take a while to bond with their baby after they're born. This can be for a variety of reasons and is in fact very common among new mothers. Journalist and writer Natasha Lunn decided to write about her experience of not falling in love with her daughter immediately. She joins Andrea along with Dr Karen Bateson, Head of Clinical Strategy and Development from the Parent Infant Foundation, to discuss the reasons why bonding may take a while for some women.ASMR - or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response - is a relaxing, often sedative sensation that begins on the scalp and moves down the body. It's grown massively in the last few years, particularly during lockdown. What is the appeal behind it, and why do female voices perform particularly well? We hear from Dr Giulia Poerio and ASMR artist Sharon Shares.In Afghanistan, news reports say that the Taliban are going door-to-door in places, taking girls as young as 12 and marrying them off to militants. With thousands of Afghans fleeing to the capital, Kabul, to escape the Taliban advance, Andrea speaks to Lynne O'Donnell, a war correspondent and columnist for Foreign Policy magazine.Eimear McBride burst onto the literary stage with her first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, which won both the Women’s prize for fiction and the Goldsmith’s prize. Two more celebrated novels followed and she has now written her first non fiction book, Something out of Place: Women & Disgust. Charlotte Worthington won gold for Team GB in the BMX Freestyle event at the Olympics – the first time BMX has ever been represented at the games. Fresh from returning from Tokyo, Charlotte joins Andrea live from UK National Cycling Centre in Manchester.Presented by Andrea Catherwood Produced by Frankie Tobi

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Andrea Catherwood and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Good morning. I want to hear from you this morning about your experiences of bonding with your newborn baby. There is an expectation that mothers will feel instant and overwhelming love and attachment. You might be surprised how often that's not the way it works. And are you a convert to this? It might sound a bit weird to you, but it's called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,

better known as ASMR. It is a growing trend in relaxation. The videos are an internet sensation. Does it work for you? Does it leave you cold? And if it's passed you by entirely, we're going to be filling you in later on the programme. Do let me know.

You can text Women's Hour on 84844 and text will be charged at your standard message rate. Do check with your network provider for exact costs. On social media, it's at BBC Women's Hour or you can email us through our website. Now, there are terrifying reports coming out of Afghanistan about women and girls as young as 12 being kidnapped by advancing Taliban soldiers

and forced into sex slavery. I'm going to be talking to a correspondent who's in Kabul. And today, multi-award winning novelist Ima McBride will be talking to me about her latest book. It's nonfiction. In fact, it's a very hard hitting exploration of the way women and our bodies are viewed and portrayed. And I'm delighted to say that I'm going to be talking to BMX Freestyle Olympic gold medal winner Charlotte Worthington. She's going to be joining us live from her triumphant return to the UK National Cycling Stadium in Manchester. Now, what we're going to be looking at now is baby bonding, because there is an expectation

when you see your baby for the first time that you're going to feel this love and immediate connection like no other. And for many mums, that is true. But for some parents, and perhaps more than you might think, it does take a while to bond with their baby after they're born. In fact, research from the National Childbirth Trust showed that around a third of mothers in the UK experience difficulties in bonding with their baby for a variety of reasons. Well, we spoke to some of our listeners about this.

Mums Libby, Victoria and Alice told us about their experiences. My baby was born just over six weeks ago. I think I had in my head the whole pregnancy, this kind of instant surge of love that I would feel for him. It's what I'd read in books, it's what I'd seen in films and I thought it would feel for him. It's what I'd read in books, it's what I'd seen in films, and I thought it would just be instantaneous. Unfortunately, I had a difficult birth, quite a traumatic birth, and it was quite a while until I was able to hold him.

So I never really had that moment that I'd expected of, you know, he comes out and goes straight on me and I get this big surge of love. I had Matilda, she was my second child, and I had her with a planned cesarean section. She was a rainbow baby so she was conceived after quite a long time of trying and then we had a miscarriage. So I do wonder if that's what affected bonding with her, whether I was just worried that something wasn't going to be right with her or that it just seemed too good to be true to have her. I found birth very empowering and exciting,

but I didn't ever find it emotionally overwhelming. I think it's easy to lose sight of the fact that everyone's different, everyone experiences different things, and just because one parent experiences something doesn't make it universal, and that's kind of OK. I was really fond and of these really cute little babies I'd had but I found the the concept of truly loving this little baby who just ate and slept all day a little bit alien I had a couple of moments that really changed me I

think one was watching a film when very sadly in the film a mother loses her child and at the end of the film I just was in floods of tears just staring down at my baby in his basket just thinking you know it just would be the worst thing for anything bad to happen to him and I think that made me realize yes I do love him okay I might not be on cloud nine all the time because I'm sleep deprived and have been through a traumatic experience with the birth. But that doesn't mean I don't love him. It's just a different kind of love. It's a kind of deep, protective sort of love rather than a sort of sunshine and rainbows love.

I was just carrying her to bed one evening and she was six weeks old and she just looked up at me and smiled. And I just felt that rush of all-consuming love which with my first and my third child was instant but with her it just seemed to take a lot longer to come but once it came it was brilliant and she's seven years old now and we haven't looked back but there was a marked difference with her. I think it's a little bit sad because the more I talk to mums the more I realise it's actually really common not to feel that elusive rush of love. Not only is it not spoken about but mums can also be told it's indicative of a wider concern around maternal well-being whereas in reality or my reality at least those first few months after my children have been born

have been some of the most content times of my life. So I think it kind of needs to be normalized, both from a professional kind of midwifery side, but also a societal side, that it's an equally valid and normal way to respond to the birth of a child. Well, that was Libby, Victoria and Alice there. Now, Natasha Lunn is a journalist and writer on love and relationships. She decided to write about her daughter's birth

and how she didn't feel that fairytale love straight away. Instead, her write about her daughter's birth and how she didn't feel that fairy tale love straight away. Instead, her bond with her daughter, Joni, took time to grow. And she joins me now to discuss this, as does Dr. Karen Bateson, Head of Clinical Strategy and Development at the Parent-Infant Foundation. And she worked as a consultant, clinical child psychologist at the NHS for 20 years. Natasha, if I may start with you, just tell me your experiences around how you felt about your daughter when she was born. Well, I think similarly to a lot of the women, that clip was amazing,

I think, just in terms of hearing those stories, because I hadn't heard many of those stories. And so I did have that vision of being handed my baby um having that kind of blissful moment of love then probably having a little sleep while my husband watched her so I could kind of wake feeling rested and then hold her of course um you know whilst I was holding her there was somebody stitching me up and throwing bloody rags and counting them and saying she's lost too much blood we don't have time to get her to surgery it was very much um you know still ongoing birth um and also my husband was having to leave soon after because of the covid restrictions so I was really that from the offset really just worrying when is he going to leave how am I going to be on my own I'm not going

to be able to get any sleep to look after just I guess all these sort of fears and worries were what I was consumed by rather than even having any space or time to look at her and have that kind of picture perfect moment and so often in love I think we have these idealized milestones in our head and for me I just learned from that point onwards it was just very much what I would describe as a falling in love rather than a love at first sight which now having experienced it makes total sense because the idea that you're being stitched up and sewn up and not sleeping and you're meant to have this sort of beautiful love story now seems completely unrealistic to me but obviously I know some women do feel that way.

And so for me, over the coming weeks, it was just, you know, I was very concerned about keeping her alive, staying up all night, checking she was breathing. And that was a deep connection. And I was concerned for her welfare. But it wasn't that I look at her and feel this overwhelming rush of love. And that just took a lot longer to develop. I think it's really interesting. And I'm really pleased that so many of our listeners actually contributed to this, because I think it is really important to hear these women's voices. I wonder if there still is a degree of guilt, though, Natasha, in surrounding actually admitting this, saying it out loud because of

course we are given this very idealized view of how we're supposed to feel when this little bundle of joy is put into our arms as you say often at a time where we're feeling at our very most vulnerable and it's funny because I had interviewed so many different women because I've been writing a book called conversations on love hearing different experiences of parenthood and thought that I felt none of that. You know, I was like, I know it's different. But when I saw the tweet pop up this morning, I suddenly was like, oh, I'm going on to speak about this. You know, there still is that little bit of needing extra courage to do it.

But I think what has changed for me is because I've spent so long thinking about love, I now understand that it's not this feeling that is given to us or gifted to us. It really is something that we contribute to and something that we choose. And actually, love is how you choose to interact with your baby every day. It's not that kind of giddy feeling that you get from the moment you see them. It's looking after them, caring for them, learning to kind of connect with them over time. And so now I guess I've redefined what the word love means. And so it never really could be something that you can just that can happen in a second, I don't think. Karen, I'd like to bring you in here. I wonder if women are sort of subjected to a false narrative

around bonding, and they don't realise that actually these feelings, the kind of slower burn, if you like, about your relationship that builds with your child is very normal. Yes, I think that's definitely the case. I think for decades, we've kind of seen images and heard stories in the media that have given us this expectation that there'll be a swell of love and music will play and Cupid's arrow will strike at the moment of delivery. Actually, bonding starts during pregnancy, if not before. It's a relationship, as Natasha said, that builds over time. So every time you imagine the baby or talk to your bump, you're strengthening that bond. And the connection that you build with your child actually continues to build throughout your lifetime. It's most intense

during pregnancy in your child's first few years. But that swell of love is actually predominantly driven by a biological experience of oxytocin. So we know that oxytocin can be suppressed by anything that puts the body under physical or emotional stress. I wanted to talk to you about that because I think I wonder if there are areas where it becomes more difficult for babies to bond or to mothers to bond with their babies for example you know I had twins who were very premature when they were born they went straight into intensive care and that for me of course was a very different experience from my first child who went straight into my arms I wonder if there are common triggers

like that where it becomes harder to bond there There's certainly much more common to experience some form of psychological stress or some kind of physical stress that interferes perhaps or just delays that experience of falling in love. So things like perhaps difficulties in fertility, the previous loss of a baby, and any kind of trauma or adversity or loss in the deep-rooted, quite difficult feelings that can temporarily kind of pop up during those early days of your baby's life and of your relationship with your baby. And in some ways, that's quite a clever design by Mother Nature to stop you getting too overwhelmed with everything. You know, the birth, you're trying to take a lot in, you're processing lots of things. And so it's actually quite clever that the brain manages one thing at a time. So there's definitely risk factors. Natasha, I wonder if when you didn't

feel that mythical rush of love, you were worried about postnatal depression, because that is something that I think possibly in the past people connected with not being able to bond with your baby. Yes, I definitely. Well, I think my husband was concerned about that and obviously looking out for signs anyway, when he kind of said to me early, don't you love her more than you love her more than anything in the world? And I was like, no, not yet. I think he was looking out for that. So I do remember sitting there and Googling symptoms, but I had also spoken to very kind, honest women who had had similar experiences. And a lot of women had said to me sort of on day three,

I don't know whether there's like a specific hormone change, but a lot of women had said that was the day that they kind of thought, what have I done know this is really really hard so I I did know that you know those women hadn't gone on to experience it so it could be but it could not be um and I also felt like it was changing all the time so it wasn't like I was feeling absolutely nothing I could feel something growing and as I said a sort of falling in love um and I just you know I knew that all relationships ebb and flow and that I was sort of not expecting it to be I was never going to feel anything ever so I think I was lucky in that respect yeah I

wonder just Karen to bring you in here on the idea about um about postnatal depression is there a connection between not bonding? Should women who don't bond be concerned about that? Or is that a myth? I think for most women, the absence of love, that kind of gap where you're waiting for something to grow, isn't normally something that would need professional intervention. I think we need to draw a distinction between that temporary absence of adoration compared to the presence of something more deep rooted, maybe a sense of disappointment or disconnection from your baby, maybe resentment towards your baby or the presence of feelings of depression or anxiety. And that, of course, may be driven by some guilt that you're feeling because you're not experiencing this instant rush of love.

But I think if parents are experiencing the presence of something more difficult, that's when it's worth having a chat with your health visiting team or getting some reassurance and guidance from your GP. So, yeah, when it when it becomes more prolonged or deep rooted, that's definitely time to speak to a health professional. I just want to bring in one tweet here because it's quite an amazing one, actually. It's from Susan and she says, in the 1970s, after a difficult delivery, babies were taken away to the nursery. I breastfed, which was fine at first until day two, and the baby brought to me looked different. It was actually the wrong baby and the love gushed in when the nurse brought back the right baby. So clearly there was a feeling there that that mum knew her baby when

she saw her again. Karen, I wonder what advice you would give for women going through this and particularly for their partners or friends or parents supporting them. What can they actually do if they're in that period in the first weeks after childbirth where they're not feeling those things? I think it's important to remember that building any relationship takes time. So it's a process of discovery. So spending time getting to know your baby, trying to learn how your baby communicates, spending time reading their cues and communications. Babies are communicating with parents before birth, so it's never too early to start interacting. So lots of cuddles, singing, reading, lots of chatting. And you can do some really practical

things like wearing a sling, making sure you have skin-to-skin contact. Even using a face-to-face primal push chair can be helpful. And I think it's important we don't forget that bonds build with dads and other parents too. You know, they often get overlooked, but their relationship with the baby is just as important. So I think just not overwhelming yourself, being kind to yourself and the ordinary things are good enough. So spend time. There's nothing more interesting to a baby than you. So spend time getting to know one another. Well, that's lovely advice, Dr. Karen Bateson and Natasha Lunn. Thank you both very much indeed.

Now, have you heard of ASMR? It stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, and it can be described as a particular feeling that you get, a kind of a relaxing, often sedative sensation that begins on the scalp, perhaps as a tingle, and then moves down the body. It can be induced by a variety of signs, often including people talking softly. And there are over 13 million ASMR videos on YouTube. Their popularity has grown massively in the last few years, particularly during lockdown. So what is the appeal behind this internet sensation? And do female voices perform particularly well? Well, Dr. Julia Poirio is a researcher of ASMR, and she's a lecturer at the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex. And Sharon Shares is an ASMR artist from California. Now, it's not a very easy thing to describe.

I don't know how well I did there. So possibly the best thing to do is just to hear a short clip of Sharon from her YouTube channel. In the heart of this city is a giant antique clock tower. Not only does it contain bells that chime, it also reenacts stories from the 16th century at certain times of the day. A castle built in the 19th century. The beauty of it is that it looks like

a fairy tale castle. Sharon, okay, to start with, can you explain to us what was going on there in that clip that we just heard? Yeah, sure. So basically, that was me telling a story through one of my, I have like these kind of meditation travel videos where I create some sort of visualization for people to go in and kind of immerse themselves in their travels with me. So my two parts to it are, one, I'm kind of telling this story that kind of puts you in a different state of mind. But then the second thing is speaking in a soft speaking and I'm holding props and tapping on things. So that way you can ideally get that ASMR effect, feeling those tingles, feeling that kind of state of just relaxation. Julia, tell us what the point is of ASMR and can you describe the feelings that it creates for us? Sure, yeah. I mean, ASMR is really

visuals and sounds that help create relaxation. A lot of people use it to help with stress, anxiety, helping them sleep is like the really big thing. And the feeling, I think it's kind of difficult to explain, but I like to give an example of when I was a kid and I would be braiding hair with other friends. And when someone would be braiding my hair, I would get this like tingly feeling like where it's just like it feels nice, like it just feels very innocent and nice and good. And I didn't know at the time what that was. And then much later on, you're like, oh, that's ASMR. And probably a lot of people have experienced it and not even realized it. Julia, just talk to us a little bit about the science of all of this. I mean, is it a real thing, I guess? Yeah, that's, I mean, that's such a good question. And I think it's,

it's one of those things that people, if they, if they can't experience ASMR, they often wonder whether, you know, people who say they can are just making it all up. And I think it's important to kind of, to say that there are lots of kind of experiences, psychological experiences that not everybody experiences. So just because you don't have firsthand experience of something doesn't mean it's not true. So common examples might be something like sleep paralysis or hallucinations. And we know from research now that people who report experiencing ASMR do actually show physiological changes when they are getting that tingling sensation. So they show reductions in heart rate. And that's consistent with what Sharon was saying about this being very relaxing sensation and one that people tap into to go to

sleep. It's also worth pointing out that I think a lot of people think about ASMR in terms of the ASMR videos on YouTube but ASMR as a sensation as a feeling existed before YouTube the videos just allow people to access this feeling on demand in the same way that you might listen to music to get music induced chills and those kind of goosebumps of your head standing up on end a really important thing to also mention which Sharon touched on was this idea that touch is also a really strong trigger. So a lot of people think about ASMR as being triggered by whispering and sounds. But actually, we found in our research that one of the most common triggers is a social touch. So this kind of soft, slow stroking. And you can't get that on videos. Interesting. But I wonder, Sharon, if therefore you think that this kind of explosion in interest of the videos is perhaps partly due to lockdown and maybe partly due to people spending more time on their own and therefore, you know, having to look electronically, look on a screen for maybe the kind of interaction that they would have had surrounded by friends

and family? Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is maybe related to the lockdown. But I think even before the lockdown, ASMR just started to just be seen and be more popular because I got into it before the lockdown personally. And there is just I I just didn't realise there was this whole community out there that's been out there for years, actually. It's actually also, you know, a very lucrative community. There was an ASMR rich list earlier this year,

and the top artists are estimated to make up to £6 million a year. What is it about women's voices? Because women seem to do particularly well as million pounds a year. What is it about women's voices? Because women seem to do particularly well as ASMR artists, Sharon. Yeah, you know, I think that everyone has different triggers. So some people like women voices, some people like men's voices. I personally like both.

For women being more popular, you know, I think women naturally can have a sort of like gentle tone um with them but I also still think like both men and women can have just as relaxing videos now Sharon sometimes um ASMR is misrepresented as something sexual maybe it is because there's quite a lot of women's voices and and the whispering um what do you think of that does it annoy you you know I it does it does annoy a little bit but I think it also is an opportunity to teach those people when they first hear about it and think about it sexual to really tell them what it's about because I know when I first heard about it I also wasn't sure like, what's the intentions of this and everything. But as I did more research, I really saw like, oh, wow, this is really more about, you know,

helping, kind of being a tool or a resource to help with sleep and anxiety and all these great benefits. Julia, you talked about the idea that touch also creates these triggers. In terms of the signs out there, there seem to be so many of them, you know, from kind of crunching in snow to tapping a table. What are the parameters of ASMR? Is it just anything that gives you a tingling feeling? Is that how it works, Julia? Well, so we've looked at the kind of different triggers

and there seem to be a kind of a core set of triggers including sounds but also things like visual stimuli so watching somebody fold a towel very carefully would be something that would be triggering for people who are asmr sensitive in terms of whether there's something intrinsic to the sounds that's something that we're doing research on at the moment but it's also worth pointing out that some people can have really aversive reactions to things that would be considered typically asmr inducing so a really common example is eating sounds so um there's also this youtube trend called mukbang which is um people eating really large quantities of food um and this can trigger something called mesophonia which literally means hatred of sound so it can trigger these really

kind of angry aversive reactions and actually what's interesting is that we've got some research now that is suggesting that misophonia and asmr might actually be underlined by the same thing so actually people with asmr are more likely to experience misophonia um and we think that's because they are more sensitive to sound. So they they're more able to pick up subtle differences in the external world and interpret those into emotional responses. And do you have figures for how many people experience ASMR? Such a great question. And I wish I knew. It's something that we're working on at the moment. We don't have a population estimate currently.

We did do a public engagement event at the Welcome Collection a few years ago, and we polled people there asking them whether they experienced ASMR. About half the people we polled said that they did. I suspect that's an overestimate, but I think it's less common than something like synesthesia, but not as common as something like music-induced chills, which I think most people will have experienced. And indeed, it does seem to have seeped into adverts and music videos. Do you see it becoming more prevalent? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it seems since, you know, the term ASMR was coined in 2010. And if you just look at the interest in that over time, it's just exploded. And I think it's really taken on new meaning.

So as a psychologist, I'm really interested in ASMR as a complex emotional state. But it also has just become part of popular culture now, I think. You know, there's ASMR adverts, infiltrated music, rap videos, you know, all sorts of different things. There's even, you know, ASMR exhibitions. So I think it has taken on new meaning. And I think it will continue to increase over time as well. Sharon, if somebody has listened to this and thought, I'd really quite like to get into this, where would they start? Yeah, I mean, honestly, you could just type in ASMR on YouTube and you'll have a ton of options now. There's more ASMR content out there

now than ever before. Okay, well, just before you go, I'm going to give you some of the tweets that we've been getting in because we've had quite a lot of response to this. One says, my 13-year-old daughter puts on these YouTube videos of ASMR with crunching or other satisfying noises and she's absolutely fascinated by it. It's the strangest, weirdest thing. We all just laugh about it.

I sort of understand it, but I find it quite bizarre. I think probably she's speaking for quite a lot of people. Emma says, I've just heard the article on ASMR. To me, this is awful. It's akin to scraping fingernails down the blackboard. And Kate says, I've experienced ASMR since

childhood, but I'm triggered by things in my environment, often music or particular voices, even reading can trigger and I can trigger myself just thinking about it. And I find a couple of the videos are intensely irritating, to be honest. So it does show that obviously out there, there is a huge range of responses to this, doesn't it, Julia? Yeah, I think, you know, everybody has, if they experience ASMR, they have their own specific tastes in the same way that you might have specific musical tastes.

There do seem to be some common things, but certainly reactions can really vary and people do have really strong asmr experiences so the best example of this was somebody told me that she would be on the tube in london going to work commuting to work and she would be watching people put on their makeup and she'd be so relaxed that she'd be almost be glued to the seat and she would miss her tube stop. So I think there is definitely variety in the kind of intensity of ASMR experience. And one of the people that tweeted in mentioned being able to self-trigger ASMR. This is something that a few people have mentioned. It seems to be a lot rarer and we don't yet understand that, but that seems to be something that we need to research more. People can also self-trigger goosebumps as well without any external

stimulation. Fascinating. Well, Sharon Shares and Julia Poirier, thank you both very much indeed. Now, in Afghanistan, news reports overnight tell us that the Taliban are going door to door in places, kidnapping girls as young as 12, marrying them off to militants and forcing them into sex slavery. The Taliban's extreme conservative ideology sees women as commodities, as the spoils of war. Thousands of Afghans are fleeing to the capital, Kabul, to escape the Taliban advance. And more than a thousand civilians have been killed in Afghanistan in the past month, according to the UN. The Taliban says they've now taken control of 11 of the country's 34 provincial capitals. There's growing concern that they could eventually

threaten Kabul. Now, the resurgence comes in the wake of US forces and other foreign troops withdrawing from the country after 20 years. They originally went into Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the September 11 attacks on New York in 2001. The last two decades have seen progress for women's rights and schooling for girls across the country, but that now looks under threat. Well, Lynn O'Donnell is a war correspondent and a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine,

and she's in Kabul right now. Lynn, I know the Taliban aren't in Kabul yet, but can you give us a sense of what that city looks like at the moment? The word that I've been using in conversation and other people have been using too is apocalyptic. I was away last week in Herat in the West, and when I came back, Kabul was just a different city. As you said, thousands, probably tens of thousands of people are streaming into the city to get away from fighting in other parts of the country.

This means that a city that was already pretty stretched for resources is now terribly overcrowded. People are camping in public parks because there's nowhere else for them to stay. The Taliban have taken border crossings, which has been inhibiting the import of food and fuel. So prices were already going up anyway. Now we're looking at, economists tell me, inflation in the capital of 10 to 20 percent. It can only get worse. We're probably looking at, if the scenes that I saw the other day are anything to go by the potential for extreme civil unrest. I saw elderly men and young boys fighting over the park in central Kabul the other day. It's a really dire situation.

Lynn, last month you wrote about how the Taliban are treating women and girls in Bamiyan province, an area they've taken control of. Can you tell us more about that? Yes, I went to Bamiyan province in the central highlands because a number of the districts in the province had been taken by the Taliban and then pushed out. Bamiyan is a predominantly Hazara Shia province and the people there feel very much under threat from the Taliban. There have been massacres under Taliban rule in the 90s. I went into a district called Saigan and I was told by the residents there and by women who had come back

that they had been told by the Taliban that women of marriageable age and young girls were going to be rounded up and married off to Taliban fighters. When this became known, families got their girls and their women out as fast as they possibly could. And when I was there, there weren't very many who'd come back. But I spoke to some women who had fled just from the rumour that that was going to happen. Even it wasn't a rumour, it was announced from the mosques once the Taliban had come in. Now, we're talking around about the mid to late July. When I wrote that story for Foreign Policy, I got an awful lot of pushback. People told me that it wasn't true, that I was making it up, that I'd been duped. But it's now become a very

widely known fact that when the Taliban go into districts and take them over, this is exactly what they do. They force women to stay home, not to work. They close girls' schools. Women aren't allowed out of their homes unless with a male relative. They have to wear full hijab. Boys schools are also converted to just rote Quran learning. It's a really, really dire situation. Lynne, I was a foreign correspondent working in Afghanistan 20 years ago when the Allied forces originally

came in to oust the Taliban. This all sounds to me achingly familiar. In fact, it seems very much like what the country looked like in 2001. I mean, is it really possible that all the slow progress that's been made over two decades could be reversed? I don't think it's just possible, Andrea. I think it's happening in places where the Taliban have taken over. And I first came to Afghanistan in 2001, and so I saw what life was like before the fall of the Taliban.

And I think, yes, we're going back to that if the Taliban take over, certainly in the places that they've taken over. That seems to be what they want. But it's a little bit worse than that, I think. We're hearing stories from Kandahar, for instance, of the Taliban going door to door, looking for people who work for the government, have worked for the international military.

There are summary executions. People are being disappeared. Bodies are turning up in open ground. And the battlefield mutilations and atrocities that we're hearing about also, and I've seen video of, also make me think that this is a vengeful, there is a vengeful element to what's going on now. And it will probably be worse. Lynne, President Biden has said that it's time for the Afghan army to fight the Taliban and to protect the people. Are they able to stop sex slavery from happening?

Well, the way to stop it is to advance and to push them out of the districts that they've taken over. No Taliban, no atrocities. That's the equation. What we've seen is an utter rout of Afghan forces. The international community, led by the Americans, has spent almost $100 billion developing the Afghan military and they are melting away in the face of four or five of the cities that have fallen in the last week have fallen without a shot being fired. The question's got to be asked what's going on. What they're not doing, and I've found this all over the country where I've been in the last few months, is they're not fighting for the government of Ashraf Ghani,

and they will say that. We fight for ourselves. Now, they're not getting paid, they're not getting food, they're not getting resupplied. Why stand and fight if you don't even get food? Lynne, a quarter of the MPs in the Afghan parliament today are women. There has been progress. Is there anything that they can do?

Or, I mean, it does sound like quite an apocalyptic painting that you are pictured rather that you're painting here. Is there anything they can do? Well, the number of women in the parliament is mandated by law. So they have to be there. There's actually a 30% mandate. I think what people have to do if they want the world to know and to take notice is raise their voices. I don't know really at this stage how much louder they can shout, but all you can do is tell people what the situation is. Well, Lynne, thank you very much for doing that for us today. Lynne O'Donnell in Kabul. Thank you. Now, we've had a lot of tweets in, as you might expect, on bonding. I particularly like this one. It comes from Pammy

and she says that in farming, I think Pammy is a farmer, in farming, if a ewe isn't bonding with her lamb, we walk past with a dog, she says in brackets, threat. The ewe immediately becomes protective and bonds. So sheep have this problem too, she says. And Jenny says, I felt like a terrible mum when I didn't experience that rush of love when my baby was born. I'd had a traumatic birth and early delivery and very little sleep for months as my baby had reflux. I was so jealous of everyone who fell in love with their babies right away. And I felt like I must not deserve to be a mother.

Over time, my love for him grew and grew and now it's at its fiercest, it's the hugest love I've ever known. It knocks me off my feet and I'm so relieved to hear Natasha's words on this. Now, Eimear McBride burst onto the literary scene with her novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. It won both the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Goldsmith's Prize. Two more celebrated novels followed. And now she's written a very different book. It's her first non-fiction book.

And it's called Something Out of Place, Women and Disgust. Well, Eimear, welcome to Women's Hour. Hello. Hi. I wanted to ask you first about this title of the book, Something Out of Place, Women and Disgust. First of all, is it women who are out of place? And talk to me a little bit about what you mean by disgust. Well, the title really comes from the anthropologist Mary Douglas, who talks about the idea of taboo. And what is taboo is often something that is seen to be out of place.

So, for instance, if we have a slice of cake on a plate, that's seen as perfectly acceptable and delicious. But if the slice of cake is lying on the toilet floor, that's something disgusting. Cake is cake wherever it sits. But because it's perceived to be out of place, it's now an object of disgust. And that seemed to resonate with me with the idea of the way that disgust is used as a controlling mechanism for women

and has always been, and it seems to me to be increasingly so, because it's something that works beyond sort of the intellect and even beyond emotion. If you can create an atmosphere of disgust around something, people are so repelled they don't want to engage with it at all. Ema, give me some examples as to what you mean and what way that women are treated as if they're disgusting. Well, I think the way women's bodies are treated obviously is a way to silence them. So there's a conversation about women's bodily functions, which is, for instance, generally winds up with someone going, oh, yuck, periods, or oh, horrible menopause, or all of these just general functions of life, childbirth, all of those things are seen to be, you know, a way to shame women, to keep them out of public discourse, to keep the importance of women's bodies outside of the public discourse. You write in the book about the distinction between meat and flesh in terms of the way

that women are viewed. Can you just elucidate a little bit on that for us? Well, again, this is an idea that came from great novelist Angela Carter. And I suppose it's a useful tool for gauging how women are being treated. It's a gauge for objectification that, you know, human beings are perceived to be made of flesh

and yet women so often are not accorded that dignity and their bodies are treated only as means, as objects for, you know, performing various tasks to make men happy, various social functions. And so I suppose the idea, it also, you know, ties into the idea of pornography where you see that, you know, women are objectified completely outside of any kind of humanity and their bodies are simply seen as meat.

And so I think meat and flesh is, you know, if you're in doubt about whether a conversation is one that's about sexuality and exploring ideas behind sexuality or women's bodies. And people often claim that those things leak into porn. I think the idea that, you know, is the woman's body in question being treated as meat or as flesh in this conversation? Eimear, there are loads of stories in your book that are shocking. But one that, you know, really stood out for me was the Debbie Harry story when a journalist, Lester Bangs, writes about her in 1979. This is at the height of her fame. I remember her so well in those days. But they say, he says, she may be up there all high and mighty on TV, but everyone knows that underneath all that fashion plating, she's just a piece of meat like the rest of them. Now, this was published about one of the most famous singers in the world at the

time. And yet you say that no outrage really followed that. I wonder, in this post-MeToo era, are things better than that? Surely they are. I'd like to think so. I don't know if they are. I think, you know, the idea of the post-feminist world in which women are no longer supposed to be outraged by acts of misogyny and denigration of their bodies and their functions and their intellectual lives and all the other aspects of their lives. You know, I think it's it's hard to say. I think perhaps it has gone underground. And there are lots of ways that people are incredibly misogynistic now, while sounding like the good guy, while pretending that they're really on women's side. And I think we're swimming in dangerous waters at the moment. So the real nub of the book, perhaps, is how we can look at the sexual female body without objectification. I think this is very tricky, and it is tricky because women are brought up in a society that teaches them that their only value is in their objectification and that they must themselves create their own self-objectification.

And I think it's one of the huge problems and time-wasting problems that women deal with this constant looking at oneself from the outside so not only having your thoughts and making your point but then constantly second guessing yourself wondering how that went down was that all right and it it it wastes our time and it takes up valuable energy but that this is the way we've been socialized indeed i wonder what you know you you do in the book you obviously want uh to move the conversation on and i wonder about what your thoughts are on ways of navigating that i mean it does seem in a sense like an impossible situation and one that we've been conditioned to accept i think you know, and I have no answers. I think that the way forward is at least to be aware, for instance, of the idea of disgust,

of noticing it in places where perhaps it is hidden, where perhaps we have taken those kind of responses for granted and not challenged them. I think also perhaps allowing ourselves to live with complexity, to not exist within binary notions of decision-making even, that sometimes things need to be harder and stranger and more difficult than we might want, and that sometimes not all women want the same thing, and we have to understand that and find ways to accommodate each other than we might want. And that sometimes not all women want the same thing.

And we have to understand that and find ways to accommodate each other while not necessarily, you know, feeling that we have to give in. Ema, give me some examples of what you mean by that. The idea that we have to stop dealing in binaries. Well, I think, you know, I talk, for instance, in the book about lap dancing, which, you know, personally makes me cringe the

thought of it but has also become this kind of industry whereby women are supposed to find sexual empowerment through performing um you know these highly kind of sexual uh acts and this is somehow empowering them and making them physically stronger and I suppose it's it's these kind of areas or you know there's a part in the book where I say, you know, I feel like women should be able to wear whatever they want. And I really die inside them. And I see women wear a porn star T-shirt. So I think this is the idea of double stagnation of the place where there are things that some women find empowering that other women find appalling. And how do we navigate the space between without becoming, you know,

setting ourselves up as judge and jury on each other? Yeah, you do point out in the book quite rightly, I suppose, that the last thing that we want to do is fall into the trap of taking on that patriarchal policing of the choices that other women make about their own bodies. Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, that it also works

in the patriarchy's favour to divide and conquer in that way. Well, if you care about this, why don't you care about that? If you say this about this subject, why don't you say it about that subject? And I think, you know, we have to allow that the world is a big place and we have to use the measure of are we meat here or are we flesh? You also talk about what happens if you choose to be the wrong kind of meat, as you put it,

someone who doesn't actually care about male approval, who is prepared not to conform to the standard view of what's considered feminine or beautiful. I suppose things like positive body movement or lesbians who don't give a toss what people think about them. Is that a solution? It is a personal solution. And I think that is the best that we can have, the judgment being made and will sadly never stop the judgment being made and may in fact with refusing to buy into those things can actually you know inflame misogynists to greater heights um but it is learning to step outside of that enough of uh of being kind of unforgiving in in unwillingness to take corrective treatment. You know, this is a factual book. You've dipped your toe into facts rather than novels and imagination.

And you've come up with, you know, it's well researched. There are loads of examples in there. I wonder what you think when you look at how we raise our children. You know, you're a mum, aren't you? I wonder, you know, should we be telling them about this at quite an early age? How do we make disgust obsolete? I think, you know, with young children, reinforcement is obviously, I think, the way forward. It's best not to terrify them. And especially young girls who I think the way forward it's best not to to terrify them and especially young girls who I think are increasingly put through the mill with you know with not being permitted you know this

kind of intense feminization that seems to have gone on in the last few years and all the sort of pretend you know mindfulness movement which is all about making yourself look like a very beautiful woman or else this is a sign that you don't care about yourself um and and i suppose it's about rearing girls to see those things for what they are to not be fooled by them to not be pressured by them um and that's you know that's not just one thing that one woman can do on her own with her daughter that's you, that's a community and it's a movement. And, you know, surely this is what feminism is, right? Tell me how it felt to write a factual book. I mean, what was your motivation for doing it? I mean, it feels to me reading it like a lot of this, a lot of the thoughts that you've

had have been building up over quite a long period of time. I mean, it covers quite a journey, possibly your whole life. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't something that I had planned to do. And I think when Welcome Collection approached me and asked me if I wanted to write something for them, I suddenly thought, oh, well, OK, the idea of disgust, the notion of this kind of quiet pressure that is exerted over women. Maybe it's time to explore that and see if this is more than just something that I personally have experienced, that I have been thinking about all on my own. But to go from fiction into non-fiction is a big change and especially, you know, I'm obviously an experimental novelist so having to write grammatical sentences and be well behaved with form was, you know, its own challenge.

Well, it's a fascinating read. And Ima McBride, thank you very much indeed for joining us to talk about it. Now, Charlotte Worthington won gold for Team GB in the freestyle BMX event at the Olympics, the very first time that the BMX event had ever been represented at the Games. Not only that, she also became the first woman to ever successfully land a 360 backflip in a competition. That's described as the holy grail of BMX tricks. Well, fresh from returning from Tokyo,

Charlotte joins me now live from the UK National Cycling Centre in Manchester. Charlotte, first of all, welcome home and congratulations. It's great to have you on Women's Hour. Good morning. Thank you very much. You're from Manchester already. You're very close to it. What kind of reception did you get at the cycling centre when you got back this morning? Yeah I'm from Manchester I grew up in Chorlton which is the south side of the city and yeah we just got here and it was fantastic we had loads of kids that were doing mountain biking all came down to cheer us on we got a special gift as well. Now this was as I said the first time that BMX was represented at the Olympics so how did you actually get into it? How did you start doing that? Well, I was always into extreme sports. I used to ride scooters throughout most of my teenage years.

And it was when I got a bit older and I was a little bit bigger and could handle a bike a little bit better. I was about 19 when I decided to switch to BMX. It was the same kind of adrenaline rush thrill. I picked it up pretty quick because I kind of already had the balance skills and I'm 25 now so I've been doing it five or six years. When you went to Tokyo did you have an expectation that you could win a gold medal? We always knew it was a possibility.

We knew if this run got pulled off and things fell into place and we thought it was highly likely that other people wouldn't be able to step it up. But we definitely went into the games thinking it's a possibility, but it's kind of not the goal. I set that as the goal and it was the goal this whole time.

But when we actually got there, I think the goal changed to, let's just do our best to pull off that run. And the result will come. Now, of course, you know, you've become famous really for this 360 backflip. I'm not going to try to explain it because, you know, you really have to see it. It's extraordinary. I wonder how on earth you learn to do that? Because I mean, if it doesn't come off, presumably it's really nasty. I mean, you're up in the air spinning around. I mean, if you didn't make it, you would hurt yourself, I guess. Yeah, I mean, when you're on a BMX 20 feet in the air,

there's not a lot of room for error or time for mistakes or hesitation because, yeah, it can come off quite nasty. And the first time I attempted it in contest in the first run, I did come off the bike, but I got away very lucky, just with some whiplash. But tell me, because this is, I find this an extraordinary kind of just insight into the mind of an Olympian and a gold medal winning Olympian. You were there under all that pressure and it didn't work out for you the first time, this incredible jump that no woman had ever done before in a competition. And yet in the last round, you chose to do it again. I mean, I just, I can't imagine

the kind of pressure you were under. What made you choose that? Because you could have gone a different route, couldn't you? You could have had a safer routine and probably got a bronze medal. I could have changed my mind, but we literally didn't have a backup plan so that that thought didn't really enter my head at the time after the first run I felt like a rush of adrenaline for even trying to do the trick so that definitely helps me along the way but I've worked really hard with a lot of the team behind me at British Cycling and friends and family's advice on being in those high pressure situations and I've practiced them and I've come out the other end not as well as I did in the Olympics before and I've come dead last but you have to practice and take the risks and learn how

to what to focus on in that situation because there is thoughts that creep in and you do start to think is this the right time is this the right trick is it the right plan um and you know if I got kind of whisked away with those thoughts in the half hour between the runs then I probably wouldn't have pulled it off the next trick I probably would have hesitated um so I think all I was actively focusing on was that I can do it and well regardless of the result I was going to at least try and do it. I didn't have a backup plan. And you did it.

Maybe not having a backup plan is a great thing. The gap will fade off, definitely. You must have been so focused on this, on your training in the run-up to the Games. What happens now for you? Well, now I'm definitely taking a little break. I might look at getting my shoulder fixed up i've had some issues with my shoulder and and it even i even dislocated it and took an injury

six weeks out of flying to the games um so it's been a bit of a whirlwind it's been very intense in the weeks leading up um there's a lot that's been going on so I'm going to be glad to take a little break throw the diet out the window for a while Good idea I know that because it's been so successful BMX at the Games there's supposed to be a lot more funding coming in I think about a million pounds what's that going to mean for the grassroots of the sport?

It's absolutely incredible news that I think British Cycling and UK Sport announced a million pounds to go towards BMX freestyle. And that's massively going to go towards the grassroots of creating a contest structure. It allows kids the opportunities to go out there and practice that. Is it a good sport for girls? Definitely. Definitely. I think it's very intimidating for young girls to go to a skate park and see that it is male dominated. Maybe 80 percent of the sport is male.

But I think it's such a great community within BMX and the skate park that once you get in there and make a couple of friends, you know, everyone's there to support you and help you learn tricks. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much indeed for joining us. It has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and very good luck. Are we going to see you in the next Olympics? I definitely hope so. I think you will.

And you might see some, we might see some more girls as well. Hopefully somebody is getting inspired by watching you and what you were doing in Tokyo. Charlotte Worthington, thank you very much indeed. We've had a great response today, as you might imagine, to our bonding question. We've had a lot of talk about people saying

that it made people feel sad and guilty. But actually, every tweet that we've got has ended up by saying that it worked out very well in the end. I'm sure that's not the same for everybody, but it does seem to be the same for a lot of people. That's all we've got time for today. Thank you very much indeed for listening. Goodbye. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. Sneakers? Trainers. Whatever you want to call them, they are amongst the most iconic cultural

objects of our time. But their evolution is a story rarely told until now. From BBC Radio 4, this is Sneakernomics. Across this podcast, we're going to be telling the crazy origin stories of the most well-known sports companies and their relentless quest to be the world's number one brand. Sneakernomics tells the story of fierce competition and rivalry, one that tore families and friendships apart and even divided towns. We'll follow in the footsteps of mavericks, hustlers and dreamers, and hear their tales of boom and bust, fame and infamy, hope and heartbreak. Above all, this is the story of the people behind the shoes.

From BBC Radio 4, this is Sneakernomics. Subscribe at BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake.

No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.