Woman's Hour - Eve Ensler, Dress codes at work, Women's sexual desires

Episode Date: June 1, 2019

The playwright and activist Eve Ensler talks about her book The Apology an imagined letter from her father apologising to her for sexual, physical and emotional abuse.Does what you wear to work matter? We discuss exactly who determines work dress codes with the brand and image consultant Isabel Spearman, Helen McCarthy – who lectures in early modern history at Cambridge University, Magdalene Abraha, the group editorial manager at a publishing company, Lindsey Bauer who’s is a teacher at Colyton Grammar school in Devon, Viv Groskop the comedian, writer and author of How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking, and Uma Creswell who runs her own business and is vice president of the City Women Network.As the final series of Mum airs on BBC2 – we examine the character Pauline and ask why so many British sit coms and novels centre around women who are obsessed with status. We hear from critic and journalist Alex Clark and from Julia Raeside the broadcaster and television critic.We discuss myths about sexual desire: why do so many women want more pleasure and how do they get it? Dr Wednesday Martin is the author of Untrue: why nearly everything we believe about women and lust and infidelity is untrue and how the new science can set us free. Fran Bushe is a playwright and comedian with a show called Ad Libido.Professor Kimberle Crenshaw talks about the term intersectionality: why she first used it in 1989 and its continued importance today.What’s it like coming out to your parents? We hear from Amelia Abraham the author of Queer Limitations, from Riyadh Khalaf who's written Yay! You’re Gay! Now What? and from Amelia's stepmum Tessa.Why has the white plimsoll become such a desirable piece of footwear? Hannah Rochelle the author of En Brogue and Dr Thomas Turner the author of The Sports Shoe – A History from Field to Fashion tell us more.Presented by Jenni Murray Produced by Rabeka Nurmahomed Edited by Jane Thurlow

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Good afternoon. The sitcom Mum is halfway through its third and final series. A snooty Pauline becomes increasingly annoying. Why is the female social climber so often the butt of the joke in literature and on television? What to wear at work. How much does the way you dress influence the impression you make?

And coming out to your parents by design or by accident? I quite naively brought my girlfriend from university home with me for the weekend and introduced her as my friend and sort of pretended she was my friend. And I think from memory there was just sort of a moment at the end of the weekend when the girlfriend wasn't around and my mum said, that's not your friend, is it? And she just knew and she was really, really nice about it.

How best to approach it if it might not be quite so easy? The myths about sexual desire that need to be demolished. Why do so many women want more pleasure and how do they get it? Professor Kimberley Crenshaw reminds us of the importance of the term she coined intersectionality and how it came to be okay to wear white sports shoes whatever the occasion. I'm wearing a pair today with a trouser suit, but I do wear them with everything. So in the summer I'll wear them with shorts, I'll wear them with a more sort of formal dress.

I've even heard from readers recently who've worn them on their wedding days. That seems to be quite a trend at the moment. Now, it was in 1996 that a play called The Vagina Monologues was first performed off-Broadway. It was funny, celebratory, irreverent and at times tragic. And all over the world, women and some men flocked to see it. A New York Times critic called it probably the most important piece of political theatre of the last decade. The playwright was Eve Ensler, who was inspired to found the V-Day movement, raising millions of dollars for

campaigns to end violence against women. Well, we now learn from Eve's latest book, The Apology, about the personal experience in her childhood that inspired her passionate interest in the subject. It's written in the voice of her abusive father, Arthur. Why did she decide to write The Apology? I think there are many factors that catalyzed me writing this book. One was I had a very abusive childhood, sexually abused for years from five to ten, and then really violent, violent childhood until I left home. And I think all my childhood I waited for an apology from my father. I dreamed it would come.

Then he died. And it's been 31 years since his death. But there's still this yearning that someday this, you know, apology is going to arrive from Havana in heaven. And I think the second factor is, you know, I've been working in organizing for over 20 years to end violence against women. And we've seen men be called out. We've told our stories. We've broken the silence. We've built shelters.

We've created hotlines. And then with the recent iteration of Me Too, so many more men. But I was in Congo at the end of the summer at our wonderful City of Joy, which is this incredible sanctuary and revolutionary center for women who've been abused and really tortured in the war. And I suddenly thought, I have never heard a man make a public, authentic, thorough apology for sexual violence. Maybe in 16,000 years of patriarchy, I started asking people, is there a written apology anywhere? Have we ever heard this apology? And it just started to think, like, we've done our part. You know, violence against women was never a woman's issue, really. I mean, it turns out we don't rape ourselves. This has always been a men's issue. So I thought to myself, well, maybe I could write myself the apology I've always longed to hear, and it would serve two functions. I could feel and experience my father saying the words I needed

to hear. And perhaps it could be some kind of blueprint for what an authentic apology would look like. You were five, as you said, when his sexual abuse began. What do you actually remember of that time? You were so little. Well, you know, it's taken me years to piece things back and doing lots and lots of work. I remember a lot of what's in the book. I remember, you know, my father adoring me, adoring me. It began with this kind of adoration

and this, you know, I was it. I was the, you know, the apple of his eye. I was the reason for his existence. And then these night visits began and this invasive touching and this invasive relationship with my body. And I remember the confusion. I remember the strange, both, you know, that horrible kind of guilty pleasure where you're, you know, on some level, this is wrong, but it's your father and the adored one, so the kind of mind disaster of that. And then I remember it continuing and everything getting really strange in the family as a result of it. And I think what I remember is how complicated it was to feel that that adoration was becoming corrupted somehow.

He became so violent. He really hurt you. He did. I think what he had to kind of do was destroy the evidence of what he had already destroyed. Because I think after, you know, I got infections and I had nightmares and my personality changed and I was a very depressed and kind of broken child. And I think I was evidence, right? Ongoing evidence of his invasion and his sexual abuse. And so from that point on, from the time I was 10, I remember that first incredible, shocking smash across my face where I went flying across a room. It was like going from the pinnacle of adoration to the depths of erasure. Why do you suppose he did not apologize to you?

Because I think my father was a pathological narcissist. I think he had that. He never, ever understood. He was always right. You see, men of my father's generation, and I think this is true today, we only have to look to the strong men running throwing me and beating my head against a wall, telling me I made him do it. Do you know, I was the reason he did those things to me. My father had an inability to see himself as wrong in any capacity. So why would he apologize? What difference has writing the apology made for you? It's made such a huge difference. You know, look, for years and years, I'm 60.

I just turned 66 a couple of days ago. I have fought my way out of this bell jar, do you know? This book was terribly painful, revelatory, but above all, liberating. I feel at the very end of the book, my father says to me, old man be gone. It was like at the end of Peter Pan when Tinkerbell just goes, he's gone. And he's gone. I it literally it's been months. And I feel almost in a new paradigmic reality, like this frame that was my life, you know, being victim to her perpetrator has lifted. There's a suspicion that the vagina monologues, which I know began 23 years ago, which is a long time ago, kind of inspired the Me Too movement finally. Do you think the apology might persuade abusers to be prepared to confess and apologize for their Me Too experiences? Well, it's certainly my dream. It's certainly my dream.

And you know, what's very interesting since the book's come out is not only how many men have been wanting to interview me for their shows and podcasts and journalists, but how many men have been showing up. And now we're beginning, we have a website, theapologybook.net, where we're encouraging people to send in anonymous apologies and to write what is an apology and for survivors to write to themselves as their perpetrator. But men are beginning to write in. And I think we need a pathway.

We need a pathway now for men to begin to do thorough, deep reckonings. And not, I'm sorry I did that to you, but detailed accounting, because liberation is in the details. Detailed accounting, what they did, what their intentions were, looking back at their own histories to say, how did I become this man who could rape my girlfriend, who could harass my colleague at work? What in my childhood, what in the culture? And then to feel what your victim has felt. What happened in her life? What was the impact in her life? And then to make such an accounting, an apology that it's absolutely evidencing you're not capable of doing it again. email which said, I grew up with an alcoholic father who repeatedly physically abused our mother and we witnessed traumatic events from early childhood until we left home. When he finally died, I asked my brother who was dealing with his estate if he'd left anything behind. I wondered if he'd left a note apologising for the way he had destroyed our childhood. He hadn't left anything.

I think children are always wanting to get their parent back because they can't quite believe that a parent could possibly afflict such damage without a reason. Thankfully, I have two lovely daughters who I adore and now I have three adorable grandchildren, so I'm a survivor and haven't carried forward his legacy. And Joe said, there are lots of us out here quietly waiting for an apology from our fathers.

Eve Ensler is just an inspiration, and listening to her confirmed for me that we can live without it. We're going to have to, that's for sure. On Bank Holiday Monday, Tina Dehealy presented a programme about dressing for work. Some of us wear a formal tailored suit, others have to wear a uniform, some like a pretty frock or blouse and skirt, and some are lucky enough to be relaxed and casual in jeans and trainers. How much does what you wear matter in the workplace?

Can you dress for success? Well, Tina spoke to the brand and image consultant, Isabel Spearman, Helen McCarthy, who lectures in early modern history at Cambridge University, Magdalene Abraha, the group editorial manager at a publishing company, Lindsay Bower, who's a teacher at Colleton Grammar School in Devon, Viv Groskopp, the comedian, writer and author of How to Own the Room, Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking, and Uma Cresswell, who runs her own business and is vice president of the City Women Network. Who decides what the dress code at work should be? There is a sense of your

corporate brand versus your personal brand. So I think you can still bring your own personal brand to work. But if you're a major corporate or a major institution, you're trying to attract customers, you're trying to be in a certain sector or market. There's a lot of control from that sector around how we should dress and what we should be saying. Having said that, we're now talking about cognitive diversity, social diversity. And I think there's a sense now that if we're trying to win customers in different territories and different geographies,

we should have people who look and feel and dress like the customers we're trying to attract. So there's a combination of what the, I guess, the CEO and the executive committee want versus actually what the customers are saying to you. People like doing business with people that look and sound like themselves is about interestingly a poll from a few years ago found that over half of uk workers don't have to wear formal wear in the office so if that is the case is there any need for a formal dress code at work i think it depends on what you

feel confident in i've met lots of senior women who wear a great pink trouser suit with trainers. They're at the top of their professions. They feel comfortable in it. I think that echoes down. So the people that are working, the women that are working under them are then inspired by that. And I think it is changing.

I think, you know, dresses, I'm a massive dress wearer. And when I left fashion to go and work in a very male-orientated environment, corporate, and turned up in bright print dresses, I was stared at. Are you going to a cocktail party? No. This is what I feel good in.

And I think people are being encouraged to wear what they feel confident in, and that's the message that I get from a lot of people I meet. Lindsay? When I was a student doing my postgrad, I did a postgrad archaeology course, and to supplement that, I worked a couple of days a week for a high-end fashion designer, and she used to dress that I worked a couple of days a week for a high end fashion designer and she used to dress Princess Di and famous people of the time and we had to wear black and sort of all black top to toe and had to have our nails done and

everything. I found it really very imprisoning because you can't express yourself and I also felt that made me feel more serious and it aged me having to wear black all the time. Well I just think it's so interesting isn't it it exposes for me a lot of what we're discussing the contradictions of feminism and the limits of feminism and some of the messages that we get now especially through social media that it's okay to be whoever you are just be yourself and feminism is very much the same you know choice feminism whatever you choose if you're a woman is a good choice because you chose it and actually these things don't quite add up because we clash with reality and reality is people judge you you know we all judge people and in work you're judged if you have to meet a certain standard and then there's also the

individualism of everything in that I was just thinking about I'd quite like to go and work for this maybe maybe she'll be listening and I'll send my CV for this old lady who will say look I've got you a black dress to wear you this is how you have to have your nails done you turn up at this time you leave at that time and then when you go home you can wear what you want you know because in my life you know I'm a freelance writer and a comedian. I can just wear whatever hell that I want any time. But full on 100% freedom is also something of a prison. I speak to lots of senior women through doing these events for How to Own the Room, which is all about the expression of power and persuasion through communication and through your voice. But what we're talking about is how you communicate owning a room with the sound turned off.

And all of these women say, I find it really hard to express my femininity and be powerful. How do you feel about those contradictions, Magdalene? For me, the decision is very clear for me, I must say. I just, I cannot work well if I'm uncomfortable. I really don't like heels. I don't like flat shoes. And so I think I do express my femininity through how I dress although it probably doesn't look feminine to some people. Is that because of your workplace and the culture of your working environment? Well initially it wasn't so when I first entered the

working world it wasn't it was very clear there was a tacit work dress code at least not sort of said but you understood it was understood how women should dress. And what was that? Describe it for me. Smart, flat shoes, sometimes heels, skirts, dresses, none of which I particularly enjoy. In contrast, how do you dress? Tracksuits a lot of the time. Tracksuits a lot? Yeah, I do. I do like a good-eyed-ass tracksuit. Jeans, always trainers.

I'm just more comfortable like that. How did people respond to you when, like you say, after two weeks, you decided to switch it up and wear what you were comfortable in? Yes, definitely in meetings, often with males. There were some comments. I remember once somebody told me I looked like I was in pyjamas just before we began quite an important meeting. So that was quite disarming.

Others are sort of like, oh, you look awfully comfortable, but in a very sort of forceful way yeah exactly exactly um I choose to think of it as it makes me stand out more and so I'll be more memorable if I do perform well in said meeting or said work task so I sort of see it as a power tool for me has anyone ever pulled you up on it no nobody actually has you have to think about that yeah no because I guess people do things in very tacit ways. So I found the comment about me looking very comfortable rude, but it wasn't direct, you know. And so it's just sort of I just chose to perform very well in that meeting.

That was how I sort of decided to handle that. Just picking up on the femininity point that was made earlier and around being judged there's a lot of unconscious bias out there so I think it's sad that you should be able to wear what you want but people do judge you on that first impression and I think it's that constant balance of do I want to attend this function or this event or meet this person and what statement do I want to make versus actually can I be my true self and in an ideal world we should be able to do both but unfortunately there are these biases out there and it's just how we navigate through that and how we challenge that helen yes i think it's very interesting to reflect on the politics of fashion and i mean fashion is a

feminist issue and it would it you know there were many feminist battles raging over how important is it for for women to dress how they like i'm just looking around the table and thinking who's not wearing a bra? No offence, but I don't think any of us have burnt our bras in the end, have we? No, and you could argue that the time that we spend on thinking about our appearance and spending our money on buying clothes is time and money that could be spent fighting the patriarchy.

But on the other hand, if we're fighting the patriarchy, dress can also be our battle armour. And I think it's very interesting to think about how do women see dress as a way of asserting themselves, claiming power in the workplace. Isabel Spearman, Magdalene Abraha, Helen McCarthy, Viv Groskopp, Lindsay Bower and Uma Cresswell. Now, if you're a fan of Mum, the BBC sitcom which is in its third and final series on Wednesday nights, you'll be hoping Cathy and Michael manage to work out their relationship, despite the clear objections from the jealous son, Jason,

and the constant irritations of the ghastly brother's girlfriend, Pauline. This time, they're all at a mansion Pauline and Derek have rented for a week to celebrate Derek's birthday. On day one, Pauline took Cathy for a tour around the house, starting with the piano. Piano, obviously. Very nice. You can play the piano, can't you? It's pronounced piano. This is quite a good space if you want to read a broad sheet or check the putsy 100 index well that's good to know 65 inches 4k surround sound wi-fi sky plus and if you ask it nicely it'll make you a latte if you're nice to the telecast you'll'll make you... I've done it. Right.

Pauline epitomises a ghastly stock character that seems to pop up everywhere in sitcoms and even classic stories. She's the social-climbing, snobbish female on a par with Margot from The Good Life, Hyacinth Bouquet from Keeping Up Appearances and even Linda Snell from The Archers. And then there's Mrs Bennet, Becky Sharp and the mother of Bridget Jones. Why are such women so often the butt of the joke? Well, I spoke to the journalist and critic Alex Clark and to the broadcaster and television critic Julia Rayside. How would she describe Pauline? She's a dogged pursuer of social status. And that's very much in the domestic world.

The world of mum is, I mean, it's got a reputation for naturalism, but it's very heightened naturalism. So in that context, she's a very, I mean, you could almost say quite a one-dimensional character. She doesn't laugh at herself. She's unable to see how she looks to other people. And she just wants people to know how much money she's got. And she openly says, ask me how much I got in the divorce settlement.

She's a very unpleasant character. There's not really a nice side to her. So how is the audience supposed to react to her? I mean, I laugh at her, but she infuriates me as well. Oh, yeah. No, she is infuriating. There's a beautiful moment in, I think, the first episode of this new series where her partner comes out into the garden with a croissant in a bowl. And she just says the word very firmly, plate,

and it takes him a while to register. Then he goes inside realising he's using the wrong crockery. She's a monster. She is a monster. Alex, what do you make of her? Why do you think she's such a relentless social climber? Well, I think it's insecurity, as you often find with these characters, whether they crop up on TV or in literature. There's an insecurity, there's a desperation to be doing absolutely the right thing with a kind of under note of the fear that you're not going to be doing the right thing.

Because, I mean, I don't think I'm socially have enough status to say, but I don't suppose properly posh people do say piano, do they? I don't know. I'm extremely posh and no i say piano definitely and would you if your partner brought the wrong plate out of the kitchen look at him and say plate no i think that would be a recipe for going straight down to relate wouldn't it there's a sort of aura that persists around these characters of these very striving to be powerful women who are not in fact really that powerful and when we think of you know people like in literature becky sharp in vanity fair who's one of the kind of archetypal social climbers a lot of the time they're kind of doing the stuff that they have to do to get by because their range of options are so limited.

Julia, who would you say are the other familiar social climbers in British sitcom who could be compared with Pauline? Well, I think it's interesting because looking over the current crop there's a lot of brilliant comedy on at the moment. She doesn't crop up very often in contemporary comedy. She's definitely sort of a little bit of an anachronism now. I think in the history of sitcom, obviously there are dozens. You mentioned them at the start of the item, you know,

Hyacinth Bouquet and Sybil Fawlty and Dorian from Birds of a Feather. But I think Pauline, she's a throwback. She really is a throwback. Now women aren't portrayed quite like her anymore. And I think probably, you know, the writer, Stefan Goloszewski, it's probably something that chimes with him from the sitcoms he grew up watching, because I think he's about my age, you know, so early 40s. So it's clearly something from his memory, I think. Alex, to what extent would you say they appear in serious drama or in crime of which there is a great deal, say a Mike Lee film or Midsommar Murders. Well, Midsommar Murders is if you see a woman arriving in any kind of convertible car, if it is red, if a leg slides out of the car in a high heel, absolute wrong-un, definitely. climbing to boot, you know, is always just looking for the advantage, is usually trying to marry the lord of the manor or deprive him of some form of inheritance. And there is that kind of idea of

these sort of women trying to, you know, get their hands on something that isn't really theirs. Of course, there's a kind of flip side, which is a much more sort of, I suppose, pathetic kind of context. And it's the world of the sort of Beverly's, Abigail's party, Beverly and Abigail's party, you know, anxiously trying to display social status and a kind of glamour that her kind of surroundings aren't really providing her with sort of suitable enough companions to join her on this kind of fantasy journey. You know, you said that you thought the writer, Julia, had probably revived the stereotype because it was a familiar thing to him when he was watching sitcoms.

But she seems to me much, Pauline, seems to me much worse than any of those earlier ones. She is, but like I say... Why is that, 21st century? Because Mum is a very particular show, and it's really interesting. It borrows a lot from old sitcom, but I think the tone of it is so sort of particular.

It doesn't really... If you look at, say, a character like Margot in The Good Life, Margot is, you know, sort of often monstrous and behaves in a very snobby, very unpleasant way, but she also has moments where there's nuance. She laughs at herself. And now the characters will kind of jib her and she'll kind of soften. But Pauline doesn't.

She is absolutely impenetrable. It's the world that Stefan Golodzinski's created. He's created all these characters. She's on the other end of the seesaw comedically from Leslie Manville's character, Cathy. She is literally the opposite to her and keeps that seesaw balanced. Cathy is just too, too nice. She's far too nice.

She won't ever ask for anything for herself. And literally, Pauline's the opposite to that. And Alex, is there misogyny in all these characters? Well, I think there's certainly a kind of fear in especially the idea of women hunting for status, hunting for acquisitions, hunting for the absolute right thing, that they are kind of in some way insatiable. It goes to that sort of stereotype of

how do you please a woman? And I think there is a kind of edge of it. Now, this can be obviously deployed to greater or lesser seriousness and sort of malice, I suppose. But I guess it's there. I mean, it's certainly based on a stereotype, isn't it? I was talking to Alex Clark and Julia Rayside and Emily sent an email and she said, I'm not sure if I'm relieved or shocked to hear your panel say Pauline is a monster who can only have been drawn from old fashioned sitcoms. In every scene of this third series, my teenage son and I have looked at each other and shouted in chorus, It's Grandma! The piano, plate and pool scenes have all happened to us.

Even her clothes and walk are like Pauline's. By the way, my son's grandma told us she can't bear to watch Mum. Why? She said, I hate that, Cathy. She's so nice. Still to come on today's programme, Professor Kimberley Crenshaw reaffirms the importance of the term she invented, intersectionality. Coming out to your parents, how best to approach the subject and the rise and rise of the white plimsoll. How did a sports shoe become the fashion item of the moment? Now you may remember a couple of weeks ago we mentioned that we'd be discussing sex and finding out the latest research on what's really known about men's and women's attitudes to what they wanted from

their sex life. We've long lived with the stereotype that men think about it every seven seconds and are much more likely to be unfaithful than women who obviously barely think about it at all. Well, Fran Bush is a playwright and comedian whose show Ad Libido was first performed when she was 30. She's now 32. Dr. Wednesday Martin is the author of a number of books on the subject. The most recent is Untrue, why nearly everything we believe

about women and lust and infidelity is untrue and how the new science can set us free. Why has everything we've been taught about sex and science been untrue? Really since Darwin we have misunderstood and misrepresented not just males, but females of every species. Darwin believed that males were sort of ever ready and highly sexed and that females were coy and reticent and less sexed and less interested in sex. But that we're learning is untrue thanks to newer sex research and newer primatology and anthropology. We even have a new book out in the United States called Not Always in the Mood by a sex researcher named Sarah Hunter-Murray about how men are often the low desiring partners. So we've really profiled not just women, but men as well, when we have asserted that women have lower libidos. I always like to think about what is the efficacy?

What do we accomplish by asserting that men have higher libidos and women lower? And basically, when we believe that men naturally have higher libidos, we're believing that they have the power to shape not only relationships, but the world, and that women don't. Fran, how have such untruths influenced your experience of sex? So I always thought that I had a very low libido. I felt like I didn't always want it, found sex painful sometimes. But actually, I think what was actually happening was that the kind of sex that would work for me didn't match the sex I saw in the media, the sex that I was taught about at

school. I certainly didn't know that I had a clitoris or that women could orgasm or even enjoy sex from sex education that I had at school. So that was all things that I had to teach myself and learn. And I was putting so much pressure on having an orgasm from enjoying sex from penis and vagina sex, penetrative sex. And that just wasn't going to work for me. So I spent many, many years feeling completely sexually broken and I didn't have a libido. So how did you get around that? What's your experience of libido now? And who seems to have it stronger, men or women? I think now conversations are really starting about how women can enjoy sex and how we can experience pleasure.

I have discussions now with friends about which sex toys they use, which vibrators people are using. And those definitely aren't conversations I would have felt comfortable having in the past. I went to my doctors about it. I was told very much that I should just have a glass of wine to loosen myself up a bit, and that would make me want sex more. But I didn't really feel like there were any outlets for me. But there certainly is the curiosity there. My brain wants sex a lot, but my body doesn't always cooperate. And it's having those two things meet. There are so many examples if we look in literature. I mean, The Wife of Bath is the really famous one where women's desire has been written about. And yet, of course, women tend to get

punished for their desire. How are we going to get round the idea that we're all kind of eve really if we show any desire we will be punished i think that's the million dollar question as we say here in the united states and i'm so interested to hear about fran's experiences recently that she was basically told by her doctors to have a glass of wine to get into the mood. One of the greatest misperceptions in sex research and just in our day-to-day lives is that monogamy is easier for women. One of the things that's happening, and we have wonderful new data about it, numerous longitudinal studies are showing us that actually being in a long-term monogamous partnership

is harder on the female libido than it is on the male libido. We've been taught that precisely the opposite is the case and that we're naturally monogamous. So that when you see the intersection of this myth that the female libido is lower, which we've disproved now that we know how to measure the female libido correctly when we look at circular desire versus say linear desire what do you mean by that when you write that female desire is more circular than linear what does that actually mean that's a reference to the work of a sex researcher named dr rosemaryemary Basson, a Canadian researcher, who realized the reason that we keep saying that the male libido is higher than the female is because we're only measuring one metric of desire called spontaneous desire when you're sitting there and you think,

my, I'd like to have sex in the same way that you think, my, I'd like to have a hamburger. And that's not happening to Fran, for example, and to many other women. Rosemary Basson said, let's measure this thing called triggered or responsive desire. When something starts to happen and then you're interested in sex. And what Rosemary Basson found was when we measure triggered and responsive desire, the difference between the male and female libido, all that disappears. Let me just bring Fran in here because in your show, Add Libido, you say your aim is to fix sex. Yes.

Big question. How? Well, for me, certainly, it was learning what I liked and putting myself centrally in my own sexual experience. So much of the sex I was having was for my partner. So much of it was performative. I was making all the right noises. I would say I was faking orgasms pretty much every single time because it was so much more important that my partner had a good time

and that felt like enough for me. Their pleasure was more important. And worrying about if they were performing oral sex on me, have I taken too long to come is everything okay down there all of these other worries so for me it was putting myself central to the sexual experience and actually taking my partner out of the equation almost entirely working out what I liked on my own first. Why Wednesday is it so common for women to do what Fran did which is to immediately assume oh there must be something wrong with me. Why? When we prioritize male pleasure over female

pleasure really what we're doing in our culture is just showing our hand about who has power. We see that wherever women have very high rates of labor force and political participation, for example, they tend to have more sexual autonomy. So when people say we need to have a pleasure revolution about female-centered pleasure, I'm very much heartened by that. But I also think about how we can only have that when the material circumstances on the ground show that women deserve pleasure, when we have more female leadership and it isn't constantly embattled. When women are running the world, that's when we'll start caring about their pleasure in the bedroom as much as we care about male pleasure. In the meantime, activists and

artists like Fran are making a big difference by putting forward the idea, the simple, very important idea that female pleasure matters. I was talking to Dr. Wedensley Martin and Fran Bush. 30 years ago, Professor Kimberly Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality. Intersectionality is where race and sex discrimination overlap, along with class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, age and religion. She's been Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics for the past three years, as well as Professor of Law at Columbia University and UCLA. She's one of the founders of the African American Policy Forum and hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters.

Well, this week she was in London for a series of special events and explained how she defines intersectionality today. It's clearly the starting point of the way we think about race and gender and other forms of inequality. It's a word picture that's designed to draw our attention to the places where inequality actually overlaps with other forms of inequality. So we have ways of thinking about racism, we have ways of thinking about sexism, class inequality, heterosexism, homophobia, but often we think about these as mutually exclusive, as distinct. Intersectionality says that the way we experience these various forms of inequality often is in tandem. It's interactive. It's compounding.

It creates greater disabilities in the workforce and in social life than we typically think. Why is it so important for it to be recognized? intersectional lens, you don't understand things like why the pay gap that women of color face is so much greater than just a gender based pay gap. You won't understand why maternal mortality among black women in the UK, as well as in the United States is many times greater than the mortality rate for white women. So there's just a whole range of issues that you don't get if you don't have a concept that allows you to understand the full way that a woman might experience patriarchy, or a person of colour might experience racism. It is one of my biggest frustrations. And in fact, it's a reason why there are many,

well, I don't want to say many, some women's group I won't engage with, because they seem to overlook those aspects, especially to do with, I'm talking about things that are personal to me, race and class. And when you look at something like the pay gap, for example, we talk about the gender pay gap and differences. But when you look at that compounded with race and gender, I mean, it's shocking. Well, it is shocking. And I think it's also surprising that at this late date, we're still having an argument about whether we need to have an intersectional lens. I mean, this is not a new idea. The experiences around how race impact gender go back in both of our countries' generations. The whole question about suffrage, for example. We're celebrating the 100th year of women's suffrage in the United States,

but in reality, only white women got the right to vote at the time. We still have an argument about whether it's legitimate for us to say that the frame that we've been using to talk about feminism sometimes has marginalized a whole group of women, sometimes the majority of women. So that's kind of surprising. I would say also that the fact that some of these issues go across so many different professions is also surprising. So I found out being here for the last couple of years that in higher education, there's something like 23 Black women professors in the entire country out of 19,000 professors. I mean, it's less than 1%. So we're still having fights about whether we should actually talk about the problem, much less what we need

to do to intervene effectively to address these problems. How can we intervene effectively? I want to ask you two things that, but also some everyday examples of understanding the day-to-day lives of some of these women, because I think even here in this building, people would admit that they don't actually really understand what intersectionality means and how it manifests. Well, so there's so many different ways that it manifests. And it's frankly one of the reasons why the conversation that we're having tonight at Westminster is to talk about everyday intersectionality. It's not an idea that's just an academic idea. It's not just a big fancy word that people don't

understand. It's actually the way that daily life might be structured. So for example, I've talked to many women of color who have the typical experience of being profiled, just coming into buildings, shopping in stores, presenting themselves to even eat, like the may I help you, which is more of a, are you sure you're in the right place? Are you here to steal something? Yes, exactly. So that's something that's very much a part. I've read statistics here that show that black women are seven times more likely to have an interaction or actually encounter with police.

That's very similar to what happens in the United States. We talk about that. But then all the way up in the academic arena, I've had students and young professors tell me times that some of their professors have doubted that they actually authored the work that was turned in, the belief that they had outperformed the stereotypical assumption about what someone who's embodied as a woman who's a woman of color can do. I mean, we could go on and on and talking and talking about some of the experiences. I think equally important is why these experiences are so hard for some of our allies to incorporate. So why is it such a challenge for feminism to

realize that the racialization of women of color is a feminist issue? Why is it? Is it because these women don't have a voice and a relative to white privileged women don't have as much power? Yeah, I think it's because we have a way of thinking about discrimination that says the object of gender discrimination is women, full stop. And any other attempt to talk about, well, let's think about the different ways that different women experience discrimination sometimes is heard by other feminists as an attack on them, as undervaluing their own particular experience of being women, how they experience discrimination, or as, well, that's another issue. We're just here to talk about women.

We're not here to talk about race or having an immigrant background or religion. That's all somewhere else. And intersectionality actually came from recognizing that when the law did that, when a black woman says I'm discriminated against as a black woman, the law initially said, well, those are two different claims, and you can't put them together. That created a further discrimination. Professor Kimberly Crenshaw. Now, there are all kinds of conversations you will at some point have to have with your parents and they're not all easy. But for a lot of people coming out and explaining that you're gay is probably one of the most difficult. So what's the best way to approach it? Riyad Khalaf is the

author of Yay, You're Gay, Now What? Amelia Abraham is the author of Queer Intentions and her stepmother is Tessa. What was it like for Amelia to come out to Tessa ten years ago? I was in my first year of university and I'd met someone and it was a girl and this relationship showed me that I might be bisexual or gay. I wasn't really sure at the time. And I remember telling Tessa and being really, really nervous.

I think we can put a lot of pressure on ourselves and feel a lot of the shame ourselves. And she was very, very lovely and understanding about it. But I can't remember the exact... You probably remember better than me, because I would say... Tessa, what do you remember from that conversation? Well, I remember that I didn't see it coming at all, which makes me feel a bit dim in retrospect. Well, I boyfriends didn't I so it's not really a fault.

And about a week or so before the penny dropped and so when you rang me and she said can I come and see you I kind of had an idea what she might be coming to say. So when Amelia arrived and told me I felt I felt really honoured and I felt a responsibility to really get it right, to make sure that you absolutely knew and believed that I was totally fine with it. Yeah, I mean, I think it was a little bit easier for me. I mean, I'm very privileged and very lucky to be from quite a progressive family. And my mum was really accepting as well. And although my dad maybe found it a little bit difficult at first,

he came round to it quite quickly. But I was also really lucky to have someone in my family who wasn't my biological parent, who kind of felt like they could be my test run, as it were. A guinea pig. A test of a test run. Yeah, a guinea pig. How did your mum react? I quite naively brought my girlfriend from university home with me for the weekend and introduced her as my friend and I think from memory there was just sort of a moment at the end of the weekend when the girlfriend

wasn't around and my mum said that's not your friend is it and she just knew and she was really really nice about it she was really really good about it so as I say I was extremely lucky. Riyadh your mum found out that you were gay what happened? Yeah I was a silly silly boy so I was looking at some nice topless men on the internet okay when i was about 16 or 17 and stupidly had left those pages open on the family computer and she came across them and i think she instantly knew it wasn't my extremely heterosexual little brother and my outrageously heterosexual father it was definitely the flamboyant son Riyadh and she came to me in the kitchen and just said you know if there's anything you ever

want to say to me Riyadh you can just say it it's fine and I did you I knew straight away what she was talking about and I had so much shame about my identity that my head just went into my hands and I was sitting there for about an hour and a half thinking oh my god how am I going to get this out and she coaxed it and pushed it and and eventually I told her at the time uh that I was bisexual because I I honestly believed that I was and she was great she actually wanted me to be full-on gay straight away she thought what is this middle of the road thing she didn didn't realise that, you know, bisexuality is an absolutely, it's an identity that exists and that's great. I think she just wanted a black and white sort of answer.

And then we had nine months together as mother and son, as a super duo trying to sort of keep this secret together and away from my father, who is Iraqi. And we were quite afraid of his reaction because although he wasn't extremely, you know, practicing in terms of being, you know, a Muslim and he had a cultural hangover, if you will, that sort of made us believe that there might be a bit of homophobia there. So we, yeah, we kept it from him for those nine months. And in those nine months, I sort of grew further and further away from him

because of this sort of reaction that I predicted was to come. OK, what actually happened? What actually happened was that initially he had a big wave of shock. He said, we'll fix this. And what he meant was, we'll change you to be the right way. And then he went through a very, very difficult time. The night that I came out to him, he told us a couple of years later, he attempted, well, he considered taking his own life. And that was, of course,

a very difficult thing for us to hear and for me as a son to hear, because I knew that I was the catalyst that made him feel that that was the only solution. But now, you know, over time and through education and amazing, close bonding, love in our family, he's an activist. You know, he goes to pride marches in London and in Dublin. He has campaigned very publicly on TV and radio in Ireland for the same sex marriage vote, which was a success. Thank God. That's quite a transformation. Oh yeah. He invites my boyfriend along for dinner and treats him like a second son. And my thing is, in the book that I wrote, is I say to people that if my father can have such

a transformative journey and go from someone who would want to do something as drastic as taking their own life to then marching publicly with pride for this community then anyone can do it. Mina you've talked about your family being progressive and you had a part let's just say both of you overall and where we are now positive experiences of coming out what advice would you give to other people listening who perhaps haven't done that yet? With parents I'd say it sounds really simple but I suppose just think about what you say because if it's something that you wouldn't say to a straight child then maybe don't say it to a gay kid so if it's something a lot of parents say things like

oh but I want you to get married and have kids and it's like firstly it's 2019 you can do that if you're gay but also if you wouldn't say that to your child if they were straight, then just don't say it when they're gay or bisexual. And something I'd add to that is, look, it might feel like a sting or even a bereavement initially. The human that you've brought into the world might seem like a complete stranger all of a sudden when they say, I'm gay, like that. But remember, they're the same person. They're actually a better person because now they're open, free. They can be authentic.

They're going to blossom like a flower because they have this new friend identity. And, you know, if you have certain things that you want to say to them that are hurtful, take them elsewhere. Say them to a friend or a counsellor or an LGBT service that is there to help you. Just go online and find them

and then come back to the child and listen to them and hear them out as to how and why they came to this resolution. Riyad Khalaf, Amelia and Tessa Abraham. Wherever you go at the moment, you will see women and men wearing white sports shoes. Emma Thompson even wore them to the palace when she was made a dame. But what's the origin of the white plimsoll and why in the past year have they become such a hot fashion item? Hannah Rochelle is the author of the blog and book En Brogue and Dr Thomas Turner has written The Sport Shoe, A History from Field to fashion. First the terminology. What is a plimsoll? I think a plimsoll is a canvas shoe that has a rubber sole moulded on the bottom of it. And how does it differ from a pump? Well to me a pump is one of those shoes that you would have worn for gym at school for PE that had an elasticated kind of binding thing and a plimsoll has laces

that would be the way that I define it. And a trainer? And a trainer I would say a trainer is one that's a bit more technically advanced and is perhaps kind of something that's made perhaps in the 1970s or 1980s and you know more recently and has a lot more kind of technical function in it and what names would you use uh i would i would agree with thomas a plimsoll is a canvas shoe with a rubber sole um but i'd possibly stray into tennis shoe territory as well for that style of shoe so if it were white and laced up, you'd call it a tennis shoe? Yes, yes. Because to me, a plimsoll you pull on, you see.

You don't tie it up. Isn't it complicated? It is complicated. How did they first emerge, Thomas? This type of shoe, they date back to the late 19th century, and the types of plimsoles that we're talking about, or this canvas shoe with a rubber sole, these are introduced

in the early part of the 20th century when a lot of big rubber companies start producing footwear for people linked to the growth in popularity of sport and and the kind of ideas of fitness that's going around at that sort of time in the late Edwardian period. But at what point did they become a fashion item as well as a practical shoe for doing sport? They're a fashion shoe right from the very beginning. You can see perhaps in the 1920s in the US that men and women start wearing shoes which have their origins in sport for purposes outside of sport,

and they start wearing them in everyday situations or perhaps on holiday or in the summer, and the big manufacturers start pressing that. You see young women, particularly in the US in the 1920s and 30s, in schools and college campuses wearing Keds, a particular brand of sort of plimsoll canvas sneakers. And they're very sort of fashionable, very desirable. Oh, there goes another word, sneaker.

How did the white ones become so fashionable recently Hannah to the extent that it was okay for Emma Thompson to wear them at the palace? Well I think a white sneaker or a white plimsoll whether we're talking about the canvas or the leather ones are a really amazingly versatile shoe. They go with everything. You can wear them with tailoring. i think they look great with trouser suits on on women and men they look lovely with your sort of floaty floral summer dresses and obviously they look great with jeans and t-shirts so they work with all everybody's wardrobes but they also work on all ages from from young to old so they're a very democratic shoe

and what other notable names have dared to go somewhere really rather posh? Well in terms of people who've worn them in the past everybody from Audrey Hepburn to John Lennon was pictured wearing them wearing a suit with them. Jennifer Aniston was very keen on them in the 90s when she was in Friends and Marilyn Monroe was also pictured wearing them. So their appeal is really, really broad. So Thomas, what does the choice of a white shoe say about a person? When you look at it as a visual thing, it's almost like a full stop at the bottom of an outfit.

So it has that, you know, it's a very kind of stylish thing. I think white in particular, even going back in history, this is something which shows off your wealth and your ability to keep these shoes clean or perhaps can have new ones or have them washed regularly. So you have that. It's almost a form of conspicuous consumption. It's saying I can wear white. I'm not going to get it dirty. On the other hand, there is a sort of fashion for wearing dirty white shoes, which almost shows the experiences and the fun you've had in your pair of

battered old sneakers or your battered old plimsolls how would you wear yours Hannah now well I'm wearing a pair today with a trouser suit but I do wear them with everything so in the summer I'll wear them with shorts I'll wear them with a more sort of formal dress I've even heard from readers recently who've worn them on their wedding days. That seems to be quite a trend at the moment. So that just goes to show that they can be worn on any occasion. I was just trying to look under the table to see how clean or scruffy yours are.

These are quite clean, but I haven't worn them very much yet. But how do you keep them clean? You wash them regularly. Yeah, but how? There is some debate about whether you have to mix up a sort of soapy mixture and dab it on very carefully. Other people say put them in a pillow case and stick them in the washing machine. Yeah I just whack mine in the washing machine. Do you put them in a pillow case? Yes to protect just to protect the machine really to protect the drum

and I would also say to not do it too many times because it will start to erode the the glue that holds the shoe together and fade any designs that you have on them but yeah it works really well and don't dry on the radiator oh yeah don't dry on the radiator and definitely not in the tumble dryer right so you just let them die dry in a natural atmosphere in the room yeah slowly are they here to stay or will they go out of fashion i think they're here to stay absolutely and particularly as you see a lot of young women on instagram who are very very stylish wearing the very sort of basic old-fashioned in a way plimsolls and they love them because they're just they're so versatile and honest and minimalist so i don't

think there's anything not to love going forward. And comfortable. And comfortable. Yes. That does have something going for it, doesn't it? Absolutely. Yes. And you will always wear yours, obviously, Thomas.

I will always wear them. I've worn them all my life and I think I'll keep wearing them. Dr Thomas Turner and Hannah Rochelle. And Maura said in an email, growing up in Ireland in the 1950s, we called these gutties. We wore them for pee, and in summer we used them for casual wear, keeping our Clark's Playdeck sandals for more dressy occasions. We cleaned our gutties with a tube of whitening stuff,

which we mixed with water and applied with a little sponge, then put the gutties out in the sun to dry, stuffed with newspaper to keep their shape. And Gail said, I wore clean white simple trainers to Glyndebourne two years ago with an evening dress. It attracted initially some bemused stares, rapidly followed by envious looks, then compliments so sensible. I was 65 at the time.

And Bernard said, we called them bumpers when I grew up in the 50s. And I still call them bumpers now. Now, Jane will be back on Monday and she'll be talking to Juno Dawson about her new novel about young girls in the world of fashion and how vulnerable they are. So join Jane Monday morning, two minutes past 10, if you can. Enjoy the rest of the weekend. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven, 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 was 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.