Woman's Hour - Fatimah Asghar, teenagers and alcohol, nursing's gender pay gap

Episode Date: February 23, 2019

The poet and writer Fatimah Asghar is the voice behind the web series Brown Girls. She talks about her experience of being a young Pakistani American woman and tells us about her new poetry collection.Men hold one in five of the best paid jobs in nursing, why? Alison Leary Professor of Health Care at London South Bank University tells us about the latest study in the nursing gender pay gap.The writer Mariam Khan talks about her anthology ‘It’s Not About The Burqa’ with Salma El-Wardany who contributed a piece about sex.Is it a good idea to introduce children to alcohol in the family home? How can they be encouraged to have sensible drinking habits? Mandy Saligari, a former addict and author of Proactive Parenting, and Dorothy Newbury-Birch a Professor of Alcohol and Public Health Research at Teeside University discuss.Clara Schumann was a famous pianist in the 19th century. 2019 is her bicentenary. We hear about her life and success from Beverley Vong, curator of the Clara Schumann Festival at St John's Smith Square and Lucy Parham who created the I, Clara stage tour. Why is genital herpes still a source of embarrassment? Marian from the Herpes Virus Association and Slyvia and Jess talk about their experiences of herpes.The artist and author Laura Dodsworth tells us about her latest project which features images of 100 vulvas. Two of the women photographed for the book - Womanhood: The Bare Reality - Lily and Saschan join the conversation. Presented by Jane Garvey Produced by Rabeka Nurmahomed Edited by Jane Thurlow

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. Hi, good afternoon and welcome to the weekend edition of the programme. And today, what can we offer you? Well, we can certainly offer you a very frank conversation about a book cataloguing 100 vulvas. I'll do the gags here so you don't have to. Or, of course, it could be a vulva, couldn't it? The conversation in the book and the film is

about vulvas and vaginas and the fact is that even though we shouldn't a lot of people use the word vagina to mean the whole kit and caboodle which it is not i reckon if the film had been called 100 vulvas people would have thought it was a program about cars so much confusion so a frank conversation in this edition of the programme about vulvas. And we'll also talk to two women who've contributed to a book that features a hundred of them. Also a bit more myth busting. We'll discuss herpes and celebrate Clara Schumann, the 19th century pianist who coped with touring, a sick husband and eight children. You can hear, too, from the poet Fatima Ashgar, the voice behind the web series Brown Girls, and alcohol and your teenagers. Is there any harm in letting them have the odd

glass of wine at home with dinner? Really, when you think about it, why are we teaching our children how to use a drug? We wouldn't give them a cigarette after dinner at the dinner table. That's true. So why is it different with alcohol? That's all in this edition of Weekend Woman's Hour. First up, a new study by London's South Bank University into the gender pay gap in nursing reveals that even though nursing is of course still a largely female occupation. Men hold 20% of the best paid jobs. The profession, says the report, has a sticky floor rather than a glass ceiling. It's gender opportunity rather than a pay gap

that's the problem. Alison Leary is Professor of Healthcare at the university. It suffers from a sticky floor because it's primarily a female profession. So 89% of registered nurses in the UK are female. And alongside that is a sort of gendered occupation of people that would generally work part-time, that would take a break for childcare, or increasingly other caring responsibilities. So it's not that women are not capable of rising to higher occupational status in the profession.

It's just they're more likely to be held back by other factors. So what then are a bright young nurse's chances of promotion and a significant pay rise? If it's a nurse that's young, and actually the average age to enter nursing is actually in the late 20s now, although we're likely to see a decrease in that as the change of the bursaries have happened there is a good prospects of promotion however it isn't as good as a man's and that's the issue so 11 of the workforce in england are men then the nursing workforce are men but they hold one in five of the highest paid jobs and in areas like northern ireland they hold one in three of the highest paid jobs and in areas like Northern Ireland they hold one in three of the best paid jobs despite being less than seven percent of the workforce. So generally this applies

across the country? It applies across the UK we found similar pattern of advantage of men being promoted faster than women across all four countries. So how much of a gender pay gap is there for let's say men and women working at the same level would they be paid the same if they were doing the same job at the same level they would generally be paid the same and it's the gender pay gap is quite interesting because what it looks at is the average in an organization between a man and a woman doing kind of roughly the same job but what we find is that because NHS organisations particularly are so big and the pay range is so wide it can this can actually be hidden so this advantage of men being

paid higher salaries for nursing is actually hidden in the gender pay calculations quite often which is why we looked at distribution. Nursing is not seen as a knowledge intense occupation as a safety critical occupation see more of a service job um which is untrue and that means my eyes widened when you said that yeah yeah so caring for people giving injections goodness yeah and a lot of the a lot of the work of registered nurses is vigilance if you look at the work of a district nurse, for example, it's incredibly complex, it's case management, all kinds of things like that. And yet they'll be earning less than, say, a state's project manager in the NHS or an IT manager.

A ward sister will be, including a child nurse actually, because men are affected by this genderisation in the profession as much as women are to a degree, might manage a staff of 70 people, a budget of a quarter of a million pounds, a 24-hour responsibility for a ward, and yet still be paid around £32,000 a year.

So you could earn better in retail, quite frankly. Now, your results suggest opportunities for women now are worse than in 1992. Why? Yeah, so we went back and looked at other people's studies and this has been consistent. When it happens, we're not entirely sure. We would have expected with changes in legislation and also the promotion of different roles that there would have been some kind of catch up. There has been in some other professions,

but other professions have tended to migrate to be more gender neutral. So nursing has remained resolutely female in terms of the workforce. So across the UK, it's still a roughly 90% female profession. And all the things that come with that, I think, have held the profession back slightly. You've said more needs to be done by employers to create a more supportive working environment for women. What are the priorities there? What do you think they should be doing? There are priorities around the gendered workforce so more women are likely to work part-time so valuing part-time work could be seen as something that would be a real step forward. I get lots of emails from people

particularly nurses who have had issues with working part-time where they've had to accept a cut in pay for example a lower grade to work part-time which is really unacceptable in this day and age because they're doing essentially the same job. And in our work, we've seen that women, particularly in the mid-range salary bands, will accept a demotion to take better hours or better conditions. There was a study by the Health Foundation, I think it was released last week, that shows an increase in dissatisfaction with working conditions in health care. So improving working conditions would really help i

think not only recruit people but retain them and also give them the opportunity to progress there are 41 000 vacancies for nurses in england yeah how attractive is the profession for women given your findings i think it's about making it attractive for everybody actually there are reasons why men don't come into the profession so it's about making it attractive to everyone so that's improving working conditions nursing if you if you speak to organizations like the royal college of nursing will say that there's been effectively a pay cut in the last 10 years so valuing the work that nurses do helping people understand that is a safety critical critical occupation that's knowledge intense it's not a service industry per se i think would help particularly employers and policymakers understand the value of registered nurses

unfortunately the value of registered nurses is only seen when they're not there so if you look at a lot of the big issues that we've had in the past, for example, mid-staffs, you know, there was a direct link there to a lack of registered nurses. Views of Alison Leary, Professor of Healthcare at the Southbank University in London. Here's an email from a listener called Yasmin. I've been qualified as a nurse for four years. I worked for a year on the ward and then moved to intensive care. I became pregnant in my second year there and I had a meeting just before going on maternity to secure my place on the ICU course for when I returned. These courses are essential if you want to progress within the field. As my maternity leave came to an end,

I contacted the unit to organise my study days, only to be told I no longer had a place due to me being off for the year on maternity leave, because coming back part-time would be an issue. Staff who are less senior to me have taken my place, but they work full-time hours. Where is the fairness in that? There's just one experience from the nursing profession for you now just about everybody in britain this week has voiced an opinion on shemima bagham and it's probably not the best time or perhaps it is for a collection of 17 essays from muslim women on topics like love divorce feminism queer identity sex yes, the hijab, to be published. This collection is called It's Not About the Burqa,

and I talked on Friday to two women who've played a big part. The writer Mariam Khan put the anthology together. Salma El-Wadani is an activist and poet who contributed a piece called Agenda Denied, Islam, Sex, and the Struggle to Get Some. So first of all, I put it to Mariam that this was a significant week for the book to come out. I think it's a double-edged sword. So I can't say it's a good thing or a bad thing. It's a thing that's happened

and we're just having to live with it, really. Because you know that I am bound to ask you about Shamima Begum. She's been the subject of all sorts of debates, some of it pretty ill-informed, across the media for the whole of the last couple of weeks. What do you think? I think that I don't have all the facts. And I think that there's a lot of opinions out there. And I think that it's a complex situation that needs to be looked at through the proper structures that we have in place, you know, by people who it's their job to serve justice.

And I think that the narratives that aren't talked about are the ones in this book that are equally as important as that has been inflamed and so this book that talks about mental health and LGBT and bisexuality and stigma and shame and racism and so many other things and just Muslim women and their lived experiences, which are just as valid as that narrative that is constantly associated with women and we're not allowed to have another one. And I think it's high time that, yes,

we acknowledge that that's an important narrative to have, but we keep having the same discussion over and over again. And in fact, we're in danger of having it again now, so let's not. So let's move on. I'm really interested in what you have to say about white feminism, Mar we're selling currently as a society, as mainstream feminism, is, in my opinion, white feminism. And it sort of centres a white, straight, middle class, cis, able-bodied... Thank you for looking at me as you say that.

Am I not supposed to...? OK. It centres a narrative and essentially pushes that narrative on everyone, but not everyone is from that group of people and not everyone will have the same privilege as those people i mean i do understand well from my own experience what can i understand but i try to understand that that white feminism can be a somewhat exclusive movement and indeed well how would i know salma do you feel excluded from it yeah 100 i think what mariam says in her essay is really important in that we have to acknowledge the intersections that we all sit at.

Which means what? So it means, so I and myself and Mariam, we're both women of colour, we're both Muslims. We're not just women and we're fighting for gender on one front. We're fighting on lots of different fronts. We're fighting Islamophobia. We're fighting racism. We're fighting sexism. And it can't simply be put into a gender like a simple, oh, it's just feminism. And all of these things add to our complexities of who we are and what our identities are. And so often when people are talking about their feminism or their version of white feminism, they're not very good at including the other

elements of oppression. Often all they want to do is think about the woman aspect of you and I can't segregate the person of colour and the faith narrative from my identity. It's a one package and often when the mainstream looks at me it only is willing to accept that one part that it recognises because it can't accept other parts or facets of my identity. And I think you make that really excellent point in your essay, in that when feminisms tend to look at you,

they will immediately assume that you're oppressed or submissive because you decide to cover your head or cover your hair or wear modest clothing, as opposed to seeing it as an independent and empowered choice that you've made as a woman. Salma, your essay is entitled Gender Denied, Islam, Sex and the Struggle to Get Some. And I was, I mean, this is a great essay. In the third paragraph you say, and I'm going to quote this,

as an Egyptian Muslim girl losing my virginity outside wedlock to a white Yorkshire boy who was unsure whether God even existed was one of the sweetest moments of my life. Yes. Expand. So my essay was, I kind of started off talking about how I lost my virginity, and how I did it in a space where I shouldn't have and it was actually against the rules. And it was outside my culture outside my religion, but it was good. It was a beautiful experience.

I stand by it by this day, because I think when you're a young woman, you have conversations where it's awful, and it was terrible. And not many people have that as a good experience. But mine was genuinely this really beautiful encounter but then again immediately afterwards when I talked to friends or from within my community my other Muslim girlfriends it was straight away implied that you know something awful has been done did you pray do you feel guilty and my essay kind of talks about that contradiction and how we deal with that how has that contradiction carried on throughout your life or has it? Has it gone now? No, I don't think these things leave you in that way. I think it's very much part of your identity and your struggles as a woman who lives in England and who has that

experience, but also who is a Muslim and who is practicing and who buys into their faith and whilst also navigating your own cultural spaces. So I always used to say that being a young Muslim woman in England is a lot like being schizophrenic and having so many different personalities that you have to bring out at various stages you're one person when you go to eat prayer you're another person when you're fasting in Ramadan you're another one when you're out you know maybe at night with your friends yeah you're constantly juggling and I think my whole life has been trying to bring them all together into one person. I very much agree. I think the thing about you saying being different in different spaces,

I think that's something that we all experience within your community. And often, for me, not the same thing, but for me, the version of that would be within my community, I'm constantly bombarded with religion looking like culture. And when I'm outside of it with friends who see things differently and are frustrated by things differently, we look at religion separately. And we think, OK, culture is culture and religion is religion. So there's a different version of myself than with my friends, because I know that my religion isn't enforcing anything upon me. Whereas within my community, sometimes I can feel certain pressures because they think culture is a,

well, religion is culture, basically. What is the one thing you want somebody to take away from this collection of essays? Somebody perhaps has barely ever spoken to a Muslim woman. What should they go for? Which essay would you recommend that they read, apart from your own? All of them.

All of them, absolutely. Absolutely all of them, cover to cover. Yeah, and I think that the thing that I want anyone to take away from this entire book is to think, wow, those Muslim women are so different because at the moment I'm so sick and tired of the same single narrative that is constantly... And if anyone can go away and think,

wow, they're nothing like each other or I didn't know they had this many opinions, maybe I should have, you know, given them the benefit of the doubt. Mariam Khan and Salma El-Wadhani. And if you like the sound of them and you want to hear more, then get the Woman's Hour podcast from Friday when there's more material and a lengthier chat with Salma and Mariam.

That's the Woman's Hour podcast from Friday. Now, we also talked this week about how and whether you should actually introduce your teenage children to alcohol. Is there a right way to do it, if at all? Mandy Saligari is the author of Proactive Parenting. Dorothy Newbury-Birch is a professor of alcohol and public health research at the School for Social Sciences, Humanities and Law at Teesside University. She takes quite a firm line on alcohol in the home.

Mandy, the author, is herself an addict, a former addict in recovery. Dorothy takes a pretty firm line. I asked her what she thinks of the idea of introducing your children to alcohol in the home. I think the reality, and now that I know the evidence much more, is that this isn't a good idea. And really, when you think about it, why are we teaching our children how to use a drug? We wouldn't give them a cigarette after dinner at the dinner table.

And I think the problem with this and the reason it happens is because we're all just trying to do the best we can and there's mixed messages out there and not very clear messages about what we should be doing. Well give us a clear message. Well the clear message is the guidelines that were published in 2009 says alcohol-free childhood is the best thing that you can give your children but the reality is that we know some children are drinking. And in fact, the majority of children have had a drink by the age of 15. So the guidelines say under 15, we should not be drinking at all. And then from 15 to 17, if they are going to drink,

then they shouldn't drink more than two to three units once a week in a way that is safe for them. The problem with young people's drinking is that they're not interested in the long-term effects. They're not interested in all of the stuff we know, that it's related to all sorts of diseases, it's related to cancers. But we need to get the message across that they can get into fights, they can be arrested for getting into fights. I've seen young people who've drank too much in A&E

where the doctors and the parents haven't known if that young girl has been raped or not because she's been so drunk. Now, these are not young people who we would class as being dependent on alcohol. They may only drink very irregularly. But when they do drink, they drink a lot and their bodies aren't able to deal with that amount of alcohol. I appreciate what you're saying,

although there will be some listeners who say we've got to deal not with the world as it should be or could be, but with the world as it is. So, Mandy, we know alcohol is a legal drug enjoyed responsibly by millions of people in this country. How do you teach your teenagers to be a responsible drinker? OK, so I think that what we're trying to do is first as parents be able to be heard by our children so that whatever we do tell them sinks in.

And the way to do that is to act with self respect and model, you know, appropriate behaviour to our children. So I think the first place that our children learn about alcohol is by seeing us drink. So if you're the person who comes in after a stressful day and goes into the kitchen, kicks off your shoes, pops open a bottle of wine, swigs it back and says, oh, that's better. There's a message that's gone out there to your children, however old they are. And I think that that's a simple reality that we have to understand that we don't just suddenly introduce our children to alcohol at whatever age you may decide to do that, that there are messages before that that

have already laid an influence. But as a parent, do you not drink ever in front of your young children? Okay, you're asking someone who's in recovery from addiction, so I haven't drunk for decades. The reality, I work in schools, I work with teenagers, I work with loads and loads of kids, that they drink. And I think the most important thing for a teenager to understand is that drink has an impact, and for them to be able to clock that impact as it's

happening, which means that they can then become responsible for why they drink, what purpose. I mean, they're trying to ease the sort of social wheels, of course they are, and lose inhibition and bond and belong and take risks and all those things. But they must understand that there are consequences, that there is subsequent behaviour that happens as a direct result of the alcohol. And any teenager who says, I can drink and I don't get shattered and nothing terrible happens is in denial and that needs challenging. I don't suppose there's a word of that you disagree with, Dorothy. There isn't a word. say that if we're totally lax about drinking with our children or really harsh about drinking, then it can have a negative effect.

And actually, I totally agree that modelling our behaviour as adults and understanding what safe limits are, 30% of us as adults drink too much. So, you know, it's about getting the message across what is the safe limits for adults as well as for young people. Mandy? I think also that parents will often pick up the pieces of a child who's drunk. So they've gone out, they've got drunk, they're sick, they're staggering around. Personally, as parents, I would suggest you do not make it easy for your child if they are suffering after a massive hangover or a big drink up or something like that. Let the world also have a part in teaching your child the consequences of what they do.

Right, well, let's talk practically then. What is a unit of alcohol? Is it worth actually lining up a load of, I mean, use water, obviously, put them in glasses and say, this is what a unit is. Don't drink more than this. I don't think they'll listen. Because once your children get to 13, 14 years old, the parental voice is often less influential than the internet voice or the peer voice. So what you want to do, and some kids will be able to drink more than others, and we can measure it by units, because that's what we all have to do. But actually, as a parent, I want my child to know what their individual limit is if you can't cope with what your best friend copes with you need to know that you also need to know have you eaten before you go

out and drink because that will also moderate the impact of alcohol are you able to drink one stop drinking for a while notice how you drink it's getting people to be conscious and in their bodies when they are drinking so they log the effect as they go along instead of this dissociation where someone just gets hammered and doesn't even feel themselves getting drunk mandy saligari and dorothy newbury birch now over the last couple of weeks we've been running a really interesting series on family secrets and if you missed any of them they've all been pulled together and they're available for you to listen to on the website now,

bbc.co.uk slash womanshour. It's 200 years since the birth of Clara Veek. She became known as one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century. She also composed and is best known as Clara Schumann, long living in the shadow of her difficult fellow composer husband, Robert Schumann. One of her best-known pieces is the piano concerto in A minor. Here's part of the third movement. Thank you. So how will her centenary be marked?

Beverly Vong is curator of the Clara Schumann Festival. Lucy Parham is a pianist and Lucy will be touring a show of words and music called I, Clara. So how much of Clara Schumann's work has been celebrated since her death? When I recorded that concerto 25 years ago, nobody was really interested in programming the concerto programming her works you know it's always been difficult to get this message across and now suddenly with this 200th anniversary we're finally giving her the the attention that she so deserves so I feel really happy about that. Beverly why do you feel so passionate about her? I think her 200th anniversary is a really good opportunity to reflect on her life and her music

and how she inspired other composers who we are very familiar with. I think it's very interesting how you're picking up on the fact that we're experiencing a vogue almost in women composers and women musicians. I think it's quite interesting to note as well that at her time she didn't feel particularly confident in her own compositions. So I don't think she would have gone around encouraging everyone to play her own music. I think she was very intimidated by her husband's

genius and often felt that her own music would embarrass herself and embarrass him. It was very rare, Lucy, for a girl to have a career in music at all. How much is her success as a pianist due to her really rather bullying father? Her father was famously tyrannical. The thing I love most is he also had two sons, but he chose Clara as his sort of prodigy, protégé, I suppose, not one of the sons. I'm not a big fan of her father, but I think he does get a bit of a bad rap in that he did choose her. He devoted himself to making her career. And it's, I think, easy for us to forget that in her lifetime, she was far more famous than her husband. Even as a child, you know, she was the female

Mozart. You could go to Vienna and order a Clara Tutt. You know, she had a cake named after her and all this sort of thing. So as a child and as an adult, she was more famous than him. And I think what's happened is since her death, and of course, Robert's own ascension with his music, that balance has changed. But also, you know, she was the greatest concert pianist. And I think maybe this whole thing about the composition and should she have composed more? I think with eight children and she did over 1500 concerts in her life. We also have to celebrate her for the great concert pianist that she was. That's important.

She was, Beverly, incredibly popular as a performer before her marriage, as Lucy says. What do you reckon was so special about her talent that audiences flooded to see her? I think she was a very remarkable musician. I think that was very clear from the start. She didn't learn to speak until she was four years old, and they were actually quite worried that she was deaf until they realised that she was responding to music. She learnt to play by ear, which is very, very difficult, and not everyone can do that, definitely not naturally from a young age.

She was very creative. When she practised every day, she started with improvisatory preludes. That's something which she continued into her 70s and 80s. Throughout, I think, 1830 to 1838, she included a piece either by herself in each concert or a piece of improvisation. And I think something like that is quite unheard of nowadays. She is, Lucy, almost always described as Robert Schumann's wife. And there was this great romance that I put into inverted commas, always put before her talent as a pianist and composer.

Why was that? Because am I wrong in thinking she was as good a composer as he was? This is a very controversial subject. And I would say it's hard to put her on a par with his composition. Her compositions are fantastic and beautiful but if one takes the work such as Chrysleriana, the fantasy, the piano concerto, they are so extraordinary that maybe she would have created pieces of that genius level but I think her pieces are extraordinary they're beautiful and they are remarkable on all levels but I would be hard pushed as a concert pianist to say that her work could be put on a parallel with his work as really you know lasting major compositions but I think

it's also important to know that without her his pieces would never have seen the light of day because she went out took them to Russia and all through Europe and brought them here to London. Because of her, the Arabesque became very famous in London. So she was the vehicle for his success and without her, no one would have known about him. Beverly, why did her competition stop when she was 36? Was it purely because they had eight children? I think it's probably a combination of everything. I think around that time, maybe around 1840 onwards, it was no longer expected or very common anymore

for a performer to perform her own work, his or her own work in concert. That probably played a factor into it. I think she was juggling eight children with an international career and also she never felt very confident about her own compositions there wasn't much incentive and i think also to say that shuman was obviously in the as she refers to it the insane asylum at endernich so she has eight children as beverly says eight children a husband who's completely ill at the end of his life and she has to tour 10 months of every year in order to make the money

to support these eight children she's got no help from anyone else so composition probably there was no space i mean one needs space to compose there probably was no no you know mental space for her to do that either we're about to hear her romance how does the piece lucy fit into your show well in my show and obviously this is normally read by a wonderful actress like Juliette Stevenson or Harriet Walter, not by me. But I set this piece up in that she got married and then people said, why didn't you tour more? So she went to Copenhagen. She went alone. And Robert was really cross and said, you're never, ever doing that again.

Next time I'm coming with you. So they went to Russia through hundreds of miles of freezing weather and he was plagued by illness and physical and mental. Anyway, in the show, he found the socialising difficult. He was silent and reserved. He could not accept the attention that I received. This is the voice of Clara. He was not Robert Schumann, but Madame Schumann's husband. I remember the evening that an ill-informed patron turned to Robert and asked, does Mr. Schumann play too? He glowered at me and we barely spoke for days. So I think that's a lovely sort of, you know, there she was, very famous in Russia.

And he, nobody knew who he was. Let's hear Romance. piano plays softly The Clara Schumann Festival is taking place this weekend at St John's Smith Square in London and I, Clara, the show performed by Lucy continues touring this weekend. And you can see it at the Omnibus Theatre in London, but I'm sure it's going outside the capital and around the country. about herpes. After all, seven out of ten people over the age of 25 carry the herpes virus. Now, we know it can cause cold sores and in its genital form, sores, blisters and itching. I talked this week to three women with genital herpes. Marion, who's also the director of the Herpes Virus Association, is in her 60s now, but was diagnosed with herpes in her 30s. Jess is in her 20s and got diagnosed last year and a woman we're calling Sylvia is now in her 60s and was diagnosed a

decade or so ago. She told me how she found out she had the virus. I had a partner that most probably was infected some years back but because it can remain dormant for such a long time then I have no way of knowing if that was the source of my original infection but it seems likely and I went to local sexual health clinic you didn't go to your GP no I didn't go to my GP I was extremely embarrassed I see okay and I went to the sexual health clinic and they took blood tests and they confirmed that I had herpes type 1 and type 2. So type 1 is obviously the facial cold sores, which I've never had. I've never had an outbreak of cold sores on my face ever. They told me to expect a major outbreak, which would be flu-like symptoms and a larger number of lesions, which did happen a few weeks later. And I went back to them and was given acyclovir as a prophylactic dose, which I still take.

Now, the flu-like symptoms you described, was it so bad that you had to take to your bed? Not that bad. But it was debilitating? It was debilitating, yes. It's like a very heavy cold and you feel pretty miserable and really don't want to go out of the house. And Marion, Sylvia mentioned the two types. You'd better just define the two types of herpes.

There are two types of herpes simplex and traditionally they do say that type 1 is the cause of cold sores and type 2 is the cause of genital herpes. But nowadays they find that over half of new cases of genital herpes are caused by type 1 because of oral sex. So people with facial cold sores are putting them on their partner's genitals. Jess, can you tell us, I don't think it's unfair to describe you as our youngest contributor, so can you tell us when you first realised that you had herpes?

It was back in September last year, following a known exposure to a partner, which was probably about 10 weeks prior to that. So that's quite a long incubation time, typically, until the first outbreak. It was very much the same as Sylvia's, so there were obvious lesions, swollen lymph nodes was the most obvious for me, flu-like symptoms, and, yeah, it took a good two weeks for my sores to disappear, which, you know, were in the whole vulva area. Sylvia said she couldn't visit the GP about her symptoms.

What did you do? As the outbreak was happening, I knew straight away what it was because I'd been googling it a lot um since I've been exposed so the symptoms I got I knew what it was instantly so it was a case of I need to go to the sexual health clinic and get that diagnosis and see what help can get from there did you think uh for yourself there was any kind of stigma about this? Oh, absolutely. You did? Yeah, and the person I contracted it off of was very affected by the stigma, I'd say. I think they were very much afraid of just being vulnerable or being judged, but I knew about herpes beforehand.

I'm quite well educated on the subject anyway. So I think it's what you make of it, really. It's your personal perspective. What do you think about that, Marion? Why is there still people do sort of lob it into conversation in a mildly kind of accusatory way, don't they? Yes, well, they make jokes about it. I think one of the problems is the stigma means that when someone makes a joke about it, no one with genital herpes is brave enough to say let's not make jokes about catching an sti anyone could catch an sti in this room if people are over 25 7 out of 10 of them are carrying the virus most don't know so people making the

joke could well have it themselves but they just don't know they have it by pure fluke they aren't manifesting any symptoms and it really is fluke isn't it there's no other explanation genetic yeah really they've done the research it is a genetic tendency to have symptoms or genetic tendency not to have symptoms sylvia when you got your diagnosis did you feel any stigma yes i did at the time um i didn't really know very much about it and I was horrified. And I did some research and I contacted the Herpes Virus Association when Marion very kindly sent me lots of literature about it. And I read a lot around the subject and realised that this is a skin complaint.

And it's no more than a skin complaint. And, yes, like Marion, I do get extremely upset about people making jokes because it's not a joking matter, but neither is it, for the vast majority of us, very serious. And I'm glad you said that, Sylvia, because I know you are a carer now for a partner with a neurological condition. And what has he said to you about your herpes diagnosis? When we met up, I was very upfront and told him straight away

that I had this problem. And he said, if we can cope with my very major problem, then yours is a tiny problem in comparison, and I'm sure we can cope with that. Do you think you'd have got that reaction from everybody? Did you get other reactions? I had dated one or two people before that who ran a mile to be honest even though I explained at some length that I was highly unlikely to be able to pass this on when I had no external symptoms but unfortunately there is a great deal of ignorance about the disorder and I found it very hard to convince people that that was actually the case.

Well, Jess, your generation, is it your experience that they are better informed? I would say so, yeah. I don't know if that's got something to do with the age of the internet. Things are a lot more accessible, especially if we want to educate ourselves, you know, type in the symptoms, things come up. I've told quite a lot of people about this close family close friends and the majority of them have all said yeah i get cold sores so what as for general terpes i think it's becoming yeah more known no one talks about it but i think people are starting to you know understand better about how it is contracted what it is what does this mean for themselves and their sexual partners do you think

people are more open more informed and less judgmental than they used to be Marion oh definitely yes we're beginning to see that happen um there are many more articles on the internet talking about how ridiculous the stigma is why have a stigma about a cold sore when it's on the internet talking about how ridiculous the stigma is. Why have a stigma about a cold sore when it's on the genitals and not have a stigma when it's a cold sore on the face? It's daft. Are there any potential implications? I'm thinking of women of Jess's age. There's no impact on fertility, is there? Correct. Right. So we don't need to worry about that. What are the other myths associated with it? People do worry about giving birth, but as long as

you caught it before you became pregnant, there is no issue whatsoever. The new guidelines from the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology say, even if you have an outbreak at term, you can have a natural childbirth. People worry about passing it around their body. This again is something that might happen during a first outbreak. It doesn't happen once the first outbreak is over. Think about it. If it could happen, every kiddie with a cold sore would self-infect their fingers, their feet, their knees and anywhere they can reach.

And it doesn't happen. We don't see that happening, no. But if you do contract it in your third trimester, then there is a chance that you would have to have a caesarean. Definitely. If you've caught it just before giving birth, then there's no time for the baby to develop all the antibodies that would protect a normal baby.

And therefore, definitely, women who catch it just before giving birth will need to have a cesarean section. And when babies do catch it, they give babies a cyclovir drip and the baby recovers well. Marion, Jess and Sylvia, and if you still have questions or you're concerned about herpes, there are links now on the Woman's Hour website, bbc.co.uk slash womanshour. Fatima Ashgar is the writer of a series on the web called Brown Girls

and it's about young American women wrestling with their lives as modern young people against the expectations of their families when it comes to religion and how they should conduct themselves. She's also published her first collection of poetry inspired by the partition of Pakistan and India back in 1947. It's called If They Come For Us. This poem is called quite simply Partition. simply partition. I pluck my ancestors' eyes from their faces and fasten them to mine. Widowed tree, roads caravanned with cars, browned date palms trampled. The house packed in 20 minutes, suitcase crammed with toys and atta. The war no one calls war crisps my Olu's tongue.

He runs towards and away while the field, while the ghost trains, deliver bones, burnt, while I bury the stories of my dead at the tree's base to dig up when winter ends. Fatima, why is partition such a theme throughout the book? Partition was something that I have always been obsessed with ever since I first heard the story of my family and their interactions with partition. And to me, I think it's just history is so important. It's such a violence to divorce people from their history.

And growing up in America as a young South Asian person, there was just no mention ever of partition in any of our textbooks. Nobody ever spoke about it. Nobody ever talked about it. And it kind of felt like this thing that, you know, I knew in my family and this little secret that we had that no one else knew about. And it was this thing that I could not shake from me. So I just kept writing about it and writing about it and found when I was kind of morphing this book that it was a really big theme in my work. And so I just leaned a little bit more into it. And of course, subsequently, other things have happened that have had a deep impact on you. You were 11, growing up in America,

when 9-11 happened. What impact did that have on you? 9-11 had a huge impact on me. And I think it was the thing where I grew up in a really diverse area in America where there was a lot of people of color, a lot of different immigrants, and it was very mixed communities of people living together. And while it wasn't perfect, it was this thing in which we were all, sometimes we were all the other, you know, kind of felt like that. And there was so much, I think, of my childhood that was actually just about like exploration of what it meant, what America meant, because, you know, my aunts and uncles weren't from America. And there was a lot of joy in that. And then I remember when September 11th happened, I remember the exact,

I remember the exact day, like I remember everything. I remember when I found out, I remember when I went home, and they hadn't told us exactly what happened. And then I remember the exact day like I remember everything I remember when I found out I remember when I went home and they hadn't told us exactly what happened and then I remember watching the footage and just being like oh everything is about to change what I felt strongly was this real sense of othering after that I felt like when I was walking around there was just a way that people kind of were always IDing me as dangerous. It was a real transition that I noticed when that happened. And then as you got much older, there was the travel ban imposed by President Trump in 2017, which you've also written about. How did that influence your

experience of being a young Muslim woman? It was something that was so disheartening and disappointing. But having lived at that point with so much Islamophobia, it wasn't actually like super surprising to me. And it was, it was a thing in which I remember because I was so young when September 11th happened, I remembered how much that shook me. And being older, I was able to be like, this is wrong. Whereas when I was younger, I think I internalized that more because, you know, you don't really know what's happening and you believe the news and you believe what people tell you. So I didn't have the discernment to fully say, like, this is not who I am. Whereas when I was older, I was just way able to be like, well, this is a part of a legacy of history that

America has done, particularly thinking about Trump as president, the kind of legacy of what he's creating, a lot of these policies that are pretty vile, and it falls into a kind of historical pattern that I was able to kind of understand a little bit better. Now, you wrote Brown Girls, which is very different from the poetry, which is all rather serious.

And Brown Girls is often really quite funny about, you know, how difficult it is to be young brown women with aunties who don't want you to behave the way you want to behave. Why was it important to put that funny relationship on screen? You know, it was just really important for me to think about all of the nuances of what it means to be brown, right? So there's a lot of times in my poetry, there's a kind of pain or hauntingness that I think comes out because of the form for me. It's just it's it's a lot more internal sometimes. So it's reflective in that way.

Whereas the form of screenwriting, I wanted to show something that was a little bit lighter. And I wanted to show the love that really exists in these friendships and the love that kind of when they're making fun of each other, when they're, when one of them is like, this thing is racist, and the other one's like, no, it's not you are wrong, like, you know, so I wanted a lot more play. And really what I was thinking about was wanting to see my friends laugh. I wanted to create something where my friends could sit in a room and just enjoy and watch themselves on screen and have a good time. So that's really the impetus of where Brown Girls came from. And how likely is it, as it is rumored,

to get onto Netflix or Amazon Prime, a mainstream platform? You know, inshallah, we'll see. We have a really great script and TV outline for the series. But TV is so interesting. So we'll see. Fingers crossed. Now, both your parents died when you were very, very young. And there is a beautiful poem in this book about them.

Will you please read Lullaby? Yes. This poem is for my sister, Khadija. When the sadness comes, my sister tells me a story. A man buried in Pakistan. A woman buried in New York City. When we sleep, they wake. Opposite sides of the world,

the planet opens a tunnel where they meet. Dirt sky and warm stars. The lovers dance all night, their way back. My father's fingertips pressing against my mother's crooked smile. Her henna-dyed hair, light the underworld. The mole on his lips' left side, Winks the dark. Fatima Ashgar reading her poem Lullaby on Woman's Hour this week. Now this is going to be a frank conversation about female genitalia. The artist and photographer Laura Doddsworth appeared on the programme two years ago to discuss her book, Manhood, the Bare Reality, a very simple concept. She included photographs of 100 penises and interviews with the men involved. And now, unsurprisingly, she's back with Womanhood, the Bare Reality, which features images of 100 vulvas, along with

some interesting interviews with the participants. I talked to Laura on Monday and to two of the women who feature in the book, Lily and Sashan. Why did Sashan want to take part? I do a lot of work in my personal life around supporting women to understand their reproductive wellbeing. And when I was 19, I had a coil fitted

and that resulted in me getting pelvic inflammatory disease and then I had to have emergency surgery to have my right ovary and fallopian tube removed and then after that I was diagnosed with stage 2 and then stage 4 endometriosis, uterine fibroids, uterine polyps. I was told that I might not be able to have children by the time that I turned 27 so I think for, it's really important to make space to have an open conversation about the reality of what it's like to live in your body as a woman and what that feels like and what that looks like.

And a lot of the time we attach a lot of shame to our experiences as women. And I think it's time now to kind of remove that, to make space to have that conversation because otherwise we're just instilling that shame in another generation of young women who aren't going to get the help they need aren't going to get the support that they need and aren't going to see themselves as normal. Lily you're brought up in the Catholic Church. That's right I think my

experience of the Catholic Church was that my sexuality and my female body was totally repressed with quite serious consequences for me. So I think it's really important. It's what you were saying about being shamed and shaming women is a way of controlling women. And, you know, women are often told you can't, you mustn't, you shouldn't. And, you know, we're just trying to reclaim that. You talk in your own account in the book about masturbation, about your joy in your own body and the pleasure it gives you. It is actually startling even to hear myself saying those words. You don't actually hear that stuff or read it very often.

Well, certainly not from women. No. We accept that boys and men masturbate all the time and there are lots of words for that that are used in everyday life. But for women, it's really shocking to hear about a woman pleasuring herself with her body. And, yeah, it is quite a radical thing. It's radical to centre women, basically.

Yeah, and Laura, I know that you were determined to wrestle women's bodies back from the jaws of pornography. Effectively, that is what this is about, isn't it? I think that is a really important about isn't it i think that's that is a really important background to this project and all my work for the last five years if you google vulvas although you could use a myriad of words myriad of euphemisms you're going to find lots of pictures on the internet but they're all going to be from porn and picking up on what lily was saying the radical thing isn't isnvas, it's not photographs of them, it's women showing them

on their own terms, showing what they really look like and like both of these women are saying reclaiming the space to talk about whatever we want because the vulvas contextualised as solely sexual but it isn't. The stories we've got cover all kinds of really massive important themes

like life experiences, like miscarriage, childbirth, the menopause, periods. Yes, and also pleasure and sex, but told from women's point of view. It's quite a juicy book and quite a juicy film. But yeah, the film, Laura, it is called A Hundred Vaginas. Why is it called that? Yeah, this has been a little bit controversial because since the publicity for the book came out, there has been this big debate about vulvas versus vaginas but not versus i mean do you know what i actually had to google yesterday uh definition of vulva just to be absolutely despite being the proud possessor of vulva for 54 and a half years i still had to

and it's the external genitalia yes so why the confusion with Channel 4 and vaginas? Well, I have photographed 100 vulvas. No endoscopes were used in the making of this film or book. So I photograph vulvas. But the conversation in the book and the film is about vulvas and vaginas. And the fact is that even though we shouldn't, a lot of people use the word vagina to mean the whole kit and caboodle, which it is not.

But I reckon if the film had been called 100 Vulvas, people would have thought it was a programme about cars. The fact is that vagina is the word that's in common use. But doesn't that tell you... I use... Of course, this shows the whole... I mean, it shows the whole problem, you know, that there's a lot of shame, even about naming women's body parts. It's crazy.

I mean, one thing I found from interviewing 100 women is that women don't know what to call down there you know a lot of women will avoid using a word at all I think it's really important to use the right language it's true that the title of the film is a bit confusing like that because I haven't photographed vaginas but the fact is there's never been anything like this on television before it's a very groundbreaking film it's very bold and it's all about the female gaze so people have to give the the title a little bit of artistic license all right okay do you think i mean empowerment is something we rattle on about a lot on this program session i don't know whether it actually does it exist you tell me

have you felt more positive since taking part in all this. There's absolutely nothing sexual about this project except in the capacity that we have shared our own sexual experiences. And I think that that is really empowering that we're not looking at our bodies in a sexualised way, which is the way that we typically see our bodies portrayed in the media. We're looking at them just as the home that we live in. It's just a body and it's the experience that comes along with that and I think that that is really empowering and I think what

was quite nice is I was like reading it on the train and the guy behind me was like reading it over my shoulder when I was going home on the weekend I was a little bit apprehensive at first because I was like there's this book and it's got all of women's vulvas in it and I don't really know if I should be reading this in public but then I was just like I don't I actually don't I don't care it doesn't bother me and I don't think that we should feel ashamed to kind of see ourselves in this way what was it like to be photographed it was hilarious actually because if you're a woman whether you've had children or not you're kind of used to people poking around um to be fair there was no poking around though no there wasn't no but it was when Laura just said

what you put your you know put your ankles together and let your knees flop out it's like oh yeah okay I've done this before yeah and then so it happened very quickly and then Laura just said right thank you and I just thought what you mean you didn't faint Laura and you didn't keel over in shock and you know I thought she was going to have some kind of terrible reaction from seeing my vulva. But you were worried about what Laura would think. Yes. Because you might be a bit...

Weird. Yeah. I learned a lot about vulvas though in this. I mean, I thought there were normal vulvas like mine. And then there were porn vulvas. And actually I only had to photograph the first few women to realise how incredibly different we are. And normal looks like a lot of different things. You know, we all look similar, but we all look very different.

And as a straight woman who doesn't have a medical point of reference, don't have any other point of reference, I didn't know. I think this would have been really useful to see. I wish I'd read my book when I was 16. I think there's lots of ways it would have made me feel better about myself. Laura Dodsworth, Sashan and Lily. And confusingly, there was a Channel 4 programme about this book called 100 Vaginas. And you can find that on all four. It went out on the channel this week.

An email from Chloe. I have two young girls, age five and three. When the older one first pointed down below and asked me what it was called, without thinking, I came out with foo-foo. I was actually really surprised with myself for avoiding the proper word. We now do refer to it as a vulva. I just don't think it's right that boys and men have so many acceptable words for their body parts, but girls and women don't.

Vagina is more acceptable, but of course it's not anatomically correct. I hope my girls don't get shamed for using the correct word as they grow up. Well, thank you for that, Chloe. And I guess your email and Channel 4's decision to call a programme about vulvas, 100 vaginas, illustrates that we still have a little bit of road to travel here. We need to go on a journey, don't we? But we'll continue on that journey on Woman's Hour

throughout the next 100 years, I hope. And I also hope you can join me on Monday morning live for a program beginning at two minutes past 10, as ever. Hope you have a good time and enjoy the sunshine this weekend. 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'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.