Woman's Hour - Iranian referee Shohreh Bayat at the Women's Chess World Championship and the controversy about her hijab

Episode Date: January 17, 2020

Shohreh Bayat, an Iranian chess referee, has caused controversy this week having been accused of not wearing a hijab at the current Women’s World Chess Championship. The wearing of the headscarf is mandatory in her country and despite disagreeing with the rule she claims she was complying. We hear from Shohreh. How worried is she about returning to Iran? And BBC correspondent, Sarah Rainsford explains her situation.On the bicentenary of Anne Brontë’s birth, screenwriter Sally Wainwright (To Walk Invisible) and Anne Brontë biographer, Adelle Hay (Author of Anne Brontë: Reimagined) discuss Anne’s most famous work 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall', and why it is now considered one of the first feminist novels. The latest statistics suggest young British people are having less sex than ever before. Could this be because it can be so hard to be open about what we like, and what we want, from sex? Do our gender expectations make it particularly hard for straight men to admit they like a submissive role in sex? What about when the sexual act itself comes with elements of stigma or taboo - like anal play? We discuss how straight men can talk about sexual desire with female partners and why this matters. Shakira ‘Scotty’ Scott is an erotic romance author and blogger. Habeeb Akande is a sexual well-being educator. Matthew is 30 and has been married for two years.Francesca Wade has written a group biography about five exceptional women – the modernist poet, H.D., the detective novelist, Dorothy L Sayers, the classicist Jane Harrison, the economic historian Eileen Power and the writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. They all lived at different times in the same London square. She discusses with Jenni the struggles these women faced to live, love and above all, work independently in the early 20th century.Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Kirsty StarkeyInterviewed Guest: Shohreh Bayat Photographer: Misha Friedman Interviewed Guest: Sarah Rainsford Interviewed Guest: Sally Wainwright Interviewed Guest: Adelle Hay Interviewed Guest: Shakira ‘Scotty’ Scott Interviewed Guest: Habeeb Akande Interviewed Guest: Francesca Wade

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for Friday the 17th of January. Good morning. Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anne Bronte, the youngest of the three sisters. We'll discuss her best-known work, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, now considered to be the first work of fiction that can truly be described as feminist. Young people are said to be having less active sex lives than those in previous generations. How easily can young men and young women talk to each other

about what they want and whether it's OK? And Square Haunting is a biography of five women, including Dorothy Alsares and Virginia Wolfe, who all lived in the same London square in the early part of the 20th century. The author is Francesca Wade. Now, earlier in the week, you may have read about an Iranian woman, Shureh Bayat, who is a senior referee at the Women's World Chess Championships. She was photographed and appeared not to be wearing a hijab, which has caused a scandal in Iran where it's mandatory for a woman to cover her head. Siobhan Tai spoke to her, she was in Russia, on a rather poor phone line, and she explained what had happened.

I was working during the tournament, and after round two, I went to hotel, looked at my mobile, and I found that all Iranian media are reporting me. Picture was there, and they were saying that I didn't wear headscarf during the tournament. Of course, I had my headscarf, but the picture that they were using was from a different angle, so it was causing some confusion. What kind of things were they saying? It was a complaint about hijab, and I did that deliberately to protest against hijab, so I was in big trouble. So this was a photograph taken away from Iran at an international chess competition but you were still required to wear your headscarf. As Iranian we have to wear headscarf. I was in Shanghai and yeah I had my hair job because I had to.

So I was just shocked and I had a message from the Federation saying that I have to write something about these things and normally they meant that I have to apologize and I didn't want to do that because I don't believe these things. I think that people must be free to choose what they want to wear. I'm looking at the photograph now and you've got very black hair. And it is quite hard from the photo that I'm looking at to see a scarf on your head. Was this part of the problem? Yes, exactly. This was the main problem. And I had my head

scarf. But if you look at the other photos, you will find out that I had my scarf on my head. And from your point of view, you acted in good faith. You were wearing a scarf. It's just that some people couldn't see it in the photo. Exactly, yeah. But I had my headscarf in the next round as well, in round three. But they just didn't care about this. And apparently it was not enough for them. They wanted me to write something to support it up. But I just couldn't do that.

So what happens now? What will happen when you return home to Iran? Right now, I don't know, because I have to just concentrate on the tournament. On that part, I had to make a decision because I have to choose a side, either supporting Kajab or protesting against it. I just decided to be myself. My belief is that I don't believe Hedgescuff, so I just decided not to wear it anymore. And are you worried about going home?

Yeah, because they already wrote many things about me in media, and it's mostly negative things. And some people in Iran are in jail because of protesting against hijab. So I'm very worried. So I'm going to take my time. And what about your family back home? My family, they are all in Iran. My husband and my parents, they are in Iran. And yeah, they are very worried about me. And what support do you have? So what will happen to Shoray? Sarah Rainsford is the BBC's Moscow correspondent who covered the story. Sarah, how likely is Shoray to return to Iran? I think it's pretty clear she's

not planning to go back, at least in the immediate future. That's what she told me when I spoke to her in Vladivostok. She said it was too risky. She said it was a very hard decision to stay away from Iran because, as you just heard there, her family are in Iran, her husband and her parents, of course. But she said that she's worried that the authorities may want to make an example of her because she is basically an accidental protester against the headscarf. As she said, she was wearing it, although extremely loosely, but she was portrayed as though she was taking a stand, which she hadn't intended to. Now, essentially, she said, look, it's too risky for me to go back. I could at the very least get my passport revoked. At the worst, she said she could end up in prison. So she won't go. She's

focusing for the moment on the world championship and she's going to decide what she does next. What, Sarah, might be the consequences for her family? focusing for the moment on the world championship, and she's going to decide what she does next after that. What, Sarah, might be the consequences for her family? Well, she said she didn't want to talk about that because she was too worried about what they might be. I don't know if she has a plan in place. She was very carefully kind of cagey on that. I mean, I think there are precedents, of course.

There are other Iranian chess, in their case, chess players. Of course, she's an arbiter, a very successful one. Chess players who have taken a stance on the headscarf and are now outside Iran. So, for example, just in December here in Moscow, a very good chess player, Mitra Hijazipur. She was playing in the Rapid and Blitz Championship here in Moscow. She deliberately didn't wear her headscarf and she was expelled from the Iranian Chess Federation. And she now lives in France. And there are others who've very senior players, excellent players who've announced their retirement from chess because of the hijab rule, which they disagree with. What has the International Chess Federation said?

Well, you know, that's interesting. Officially, they haven't made a statement because they say the Iranian government hasn't made an actual statement on this, although they have sent signals. As you heard from Shoray, she says that she can't get them to guarantee she'll be safe, and that's why she's not going back.

But I've been speaking to Nigel Short, who's the English chess grandmaster. He's the vice president of FIDE, the international body for chess. And he was extremely supportive of her, of Shohreh. He was very admiring. He used to coach her, in fact, because he coached the Iranian national team at one point. And he said that whilst FIDE is not a country, there is precedent for FIDE supporting people involved in chess

and allowing them to play or to operate under the FIDE flag. So he said to me, if she decides ultimately to leave Iran and she decides, as he put it, to switch to FIDESSTAN, then he said it's highly likely she'd be welcome and she could continue to work as an arbiter at the very highest level in chess under the FIDE flag. There was a similar story involving Iran's first female Olympic medal winner, Kimia Alizadeh. What's happened to her? Well, yeah, that's right. We believe she's in the Netherlands. All she's said publicly so far has been a statement on social media. But she, again, is extremely successful in women's sports. She's the only woman to win an Olympic medal for Iran in taekwondo, it was. And she has said that she's

had to leave the country because she described the authorities using her as a tool. And part of that was about the hijab. But it was also about politics. She basically said that she was forced to go wherever the authorities wanted to say what they wanted her to say and to wear what they wanted her to wear. And she said she was one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran. And in fact, Shoray and Bayat asked her about that. And she just said she understood completely. She said, we're under too much pressure as athletes. She said, we just want to be ourselves.

Sarah Rainsford, thank you very much indeed for joining us this morning. Now today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anne Bronte, the youngest of the three Bronte sisters of Haworth, all three of whom were novelists. Charlotte is best known for Jane Eyre, Emily for Wuthering Heights, and Anne for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She's often been somewhat overlooked, but the novel, published in 1848 under the pseudonym of Acton Bell, is now considered to be as fine a work as those of her sisters, and, arguably, the first piece of feminist fiction. The story is that of Helen Graham, who escapes from her alcoholic and abusive husband, taking her young son with her to live alone in Wildfell Hall.

Well, Sally Wainwright wrote the television drama about the Brontes to walk invisible. And Adele Hay is the author of Anne Bronte Reimagined. We spoke earlier this morning. What was it about Anne that inspired her to write a biography? For a long time, I'd kind of believed the myth that she was the most boring of the three and not quite as talented as her sisters. So when I actually came around to reading her books, I was completely blown away just by how ambitious she was with the themes that she tackled. I couldn't quite believe it. So since then, I've kind of grabbed hold of every single biography that I could get my hands on, read around her subject, read papers and things. I first went to the Parsonage when I was about 12

years old. So I've always read things like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. So I was very familiar with those. But then learning about Anne was kind of this whole new level to what I could understand about them. It was very inspiring to pick up this book by someone who was sold to me as not very interesting and find that it was incredible. Now, Sally, in your television drama, we saw Anne at the time of the publication of

Wildfell. Why was it important to you to emphasise her talent? I think because I'd become aware during my research for To Walk Invisible that she was described as the baby of the family and you know that may have been appropriate when she was a child, but as an adult, it seems sort of stuck. And it just seemed really inappropriate that it had stuck because by the time they were in the mid-twenties, she was far from the baby of the family. She's the one who went out and actually held down a job, unlike Charlotte and Emily, who seemed incapable of doing that for various different reasons. She's the one who really did engage with the world in a much more meaningful way than either Charlotte or Emily.

So the things she wrote were really hugely based on real life experience. They weren't derived from other novels. Adele, it was written at a time when wives had no legal rights over their children. Domestic abuse would, I doubt, ever have been spoken about. How shocked would the Victorian reader have been by what she wrote? They would have been very shocked. Married women at the time were considered to be the husband's property. Any children were the property of the husband. And the protagonist, Helen Graham, leaves her abusive husband and takes the child with her. So she's breaking the law.

She then goes on to earn her own living as an artist, which again is breaking the law because anything that belongs to her, any paint supplies, any of the art that she produces all belongs to her husband. And she's selling it without his knowledge and living off the earnings while also pretending to be a widow and kind of she's removed her child from what she thought was a very dangerous situation. Whereas at the time,

women were encouraged to just put up with things. So if your husband wasn't very nice to you, it was your fault. There's also the famous Helen's bedroom door scene where she locks her bedroom door against her husband, essentially kind of claiming bodily autonomy at a time when that would have been completely illegal. Sally, how courageous must Anne have been to write about a woman who becomes independent, makes her own living, and is also actually an advocate for girls' education.

She was very brave. I mean, the fact that they had to publish under male, not quite male, but certainly they were hiding their gender by choosing the bell names that they chose to write under. So they were certainly aware that what they were doing was transgressive by publishing as women. But I think when it emerged who they were, that they were three sisters,

and when Charlotte tried to, and indeed did stop the republication of Tenant after Anne's death, that does show how transgressive the novel was. And in terms of the subject matter she'd chosen to use, the really explicit scenes of domestic violence within it were so shocking at the time. But what made it more

shocking, of course, was the fact that it was a woman who'd written it. Daphne du Maurier, Sally, reckoned that Helen's husband was inspired by brother, Grandma Bronte. How likely is that? I think it's very likely in terms of the detail of the domestic scenes, the conversations that were had. Where else could she have seen that? You know, this was a world where you didn't have tellies, so you didn't get endless images of that kind of thing. She must have witnessed it, and where else could she have witnessed it

but at home? Because there was no suggestion that their father was in any way transgressive. No, and even if she, you know, you might see the odd bad scene on the street. This was really intense, intimate knowledge of someone very close. And why has Wildfield, do you reckon, not received the kind of attention that Jane Eyre has had or Wuthering Heights has had? Well, it's like Sally said. After Anna died, Charlotte referred to the novel as a complete mistake, and she said that twice. She said that to her publisher in a letter,

and she also wrote it in the biographical notice of a republication of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. And Charlotte's narrative has kind of stuck with us because we have a lot more letters and things written by Charlotte than we do from Anne so Charlotte's version of events is the one that we have kind of been presented over the years and then Elizabeth Gaskell then exaggerated that a little bit with her biography but also there was another publisher who got hold of Wildfell Hall and made quite a lot of edits to it.

It's referred to as a mutilated text or a mangled text. So we've had this kind of botched version of Wildfell Hall for a very long time and that would have been the one that critics were looking at that biographies up until about the 60s, 70s had access to. Why do you think Charlotte's so disapproved of him? We can't know her motives entirely, but there was, you know, it's been suggested that there was sibling rivalry. She was possibly jealous of Anne, who was the baby of the family. Charlotte didn't...

And arguably a better writer, dare we say. I prefer Wildfell Hall to Charlotte's novels. So she, there's the potential sibling rivalry there, which I don't think was malicious because, you know, if you've got siblings, there's always going to be that element of competition. And if the baby of the family suddenly writes something amazing and it's quite shocking and you didn't expect. And also she was dealing with grief at the time she'd just lost Emily and Anne very close together and she also kind of felt like she had to protect their reputation because I think as well as well Charlotte had just been projected into a huge celebrity she'd suddenly become very very famous and she was kind of protecting the brand I think her own brand obviously but again when they became she became famous and the world knew that they

were women that's that that was a bit of a game changer because it just made it so much more shocking and it was about protecting the the reputation really of the family but i think it's interesting as well to say that what's exciting about the fact that she wrote a novel like that is precisely because women just didn't write novels then, they weren't published often because they were women. And the fact that they had to choose men's names to do that is awful. But what's really exciting about the novel for me is that it's an authentic female voice, it's not trying to copy male voices. And I think that is what's exciting about Charlotte's work as well,

was that they weren't derivative in their voices. It was one of the first time women were authentically writing about female experience. Sally, she does examine the idea of universal salvation in the novel. How important was her faith to her? Because I know you found that difficult to translate into the 21st century. Yeah, I mean, I was going to do an adaptation of Tenant, and I hope I still will at some point, but at the moment it's on the back burner.

And one of the things I found difficult that would attract a modern audience is that it is very much about her Christian beliefs giving her strength and courage and the determination to be who she is and that was very important to her as far as I understand. I mean one of the things I found attractive about the character that made me want to do it in the first place is how difficult she is. I mean, she's a really difficult protagonist. She's difficult to like. She's difficult for the reader to like, in fact, as well as presenting problems for the people around her because she's in a very difficult situation.

And she responds to it being very true to herself. But it makes her a difficult person. What would Victorian society have made of her attitude to being the sole parent of a little boy? You can kind of see that attitude in the book. There's a scene where she goes to visit her new very nosy neighbours. And it's at that point of the book, it's very similar to a Jane Austen novel. So a lot of social satire. But Helen has gone to visit these nosy neighbours who are asking her all kinds of intrusive questions. And again, she's at this point in the novel, she's quite unlikable. She's been through a lot of trauma that the reader doesn't know about yet.

And she's reacting to these people with quite a lot of hostility. And she kind of snaps at one point. And she has this monologue about educational equality, which when I read for the first time, I was thinking, this is something that people, you know, still talk about today. So Helen is talking about how she feels like it's unfair

that young boys at the time should be exposed to vice and just kind of sent into the world on their own without any help from anybody because it builds character. Whereas girls should be kind of kept at home and they're not even allowed to learn by other people's examples because they're very sheltered they're just kind of prepared to be

good young wives and it's very much a speech about how the boys will be boys attitude is very damaging and all of the other characters in this scene are saying, oh, you're going to turn him into a milk sop. He's going to be tied to your apron strings forever. And that's, I think, Lieutenant of Wildfell Hall was the first usage of that phrase, tied to the apron strings. She already anticipated that people would not like her views on gender equality. So Sally, given that you obviously would love to dramatise this for television, I'd like to find a way. Understanding your problem with the religion,

what do you want to say to women in the 21st century in the way you would interpret it? I suppose it's about autonomy. It's about having the courage to be who you are and not to worry about being difficult. You know, if you have to be who you are and not to not to worry about being difficult you know if you have to be difficult if circumstances in our world force you to be difficult don't be frightened of being difficult i was talking to sally wainwright and adele hay now still to come in today's program francesca ward and her book square haunting it's a biography of five women

including dorothy elsares and virginia wolf who all lived in the same london square in the early book Square Haunting. It's a biography of five women, including Dorothy L Sayers and Virginia Wolfe, who all lived in the same London square in the early 20th century. And the serial, the final episode of Exile. And apparently today, January the 17th, is the day lots of us will ditch our resolutions and good intentions for 2020. If yours need a boost, you can go to the Women's Hour website and read the article Seven Steps to Creating Good Habits That Last. It features advice from the behaviour change specialist, Dr Heather McKee, and you can also listen to her habits phone-in featuring Heather. That, of course, is on BBC Sounds.

Now, one newspaper has dubbed today's young people generation sensible after a number of reports into social trends have found rates of teenage pregnancy have fallen, casual sex is not so common as it has been, and indeed generally sex is not so popular as it once appeared to be. So, what's going on? Might it be that the message that consensual sex is insisted upon has got through and young men and women have not yet learned to talk to each other about what they want from a sexual experience? May they be too afraid to try things out in case the other person finds their desires

unacceptable? Well, Scotty Scott blogs and writes erotic romance fiction. Matthew is 30, married, and joins us from Peterborough. And Habib Agande teaches about sexual well-being. And by the way, our conversation may well be rather frank. Habib, let's start with you. How difficult would you say it is for young men to engage in conversation about sexual pleasure i think it's extremely difficult i think there's a lot of pressure on men particularly young men um vocalizing their sexual desires and their needs and wants especially with a female partner and from my experience i think men are more comfortable to speak about sexual relations

with their with their their friends who are non-judgmental. But with women, or obviously their female partners, I think there's a reluctance for men to speak openly and honestly and being vulnerable to speak about their sexual desires because there's a lot of pressure on men in terms of performance in the bedroom. As well as there are certain social practices that maybe men want to engage in, but they're not too sure if their female partner, how they would view them in terms of their masculinity, whether certain practices are considered to be acceptable or not. So there is a lot of pressure on men. I think we hear a lot about, and rightly so, about the pressure in society that women are under.

But I think young men in particular, they're also under extremely a lot of pressure in terms of how they should perform in the bedroom and how they should vocalise their sexual desires. You used the word vulnerable there. How vulnerable are young men when it comes to talking about sex? Extremely vulnerable because I think a lot of men, again, I'm generalising here, are driven by ego

and sex is one of those acts which many people engage in but many people are comfortable to speak about openly and honestly. And you don't have many, especially there's a lack of male sex educators. To be a male sex educator in this day and age is like to be a unicorn. I think in society we're comfortable for women, which is good, to speak about sex and sexuality and their sexual pleasures. Whereas if a man, especially a straight man, were to speak about sex and sexual pleasures. Whereas if a man, especially a straight man, were to speak about sex and sexual pleasures,

the media or people might deem him to be some form of predator or someone that's trying to manipulate women. So there's a lack of open spaces for men to speak to other people, especially other men, if they can relate to and open up and speak about some of their insecurities. Scotty, what about young women? How easily do you think young women can express what pleases them and what doesn't?

I think that in this day and age now, it's getting a lot easier for young women to speak because, you know, we've had certain movements like Me Too and, you know, the whole sex positivity stuff and sexual wellness. So the spaces are being opened up a lot more to encourage them to do it but then at that same time you still have these um you know the connotations of slut shaming around you know talking about your desires and wants and it's like trying to tread a fine line between okay how open can i be and is this too far matthew um in a distant studio not here

in the studio with us but i know you've been married for two years how easy have you found it to talk about sex within a long-term permanent relationship it certainly takes trust on both parts. I certainly didn't feel comfortable talking to my... Well, she wasn't my wife at the time, but the partner. It certainly did take a lot of courage to speak about some of what would not be considered the norm, those sort of things that I did enjoy sex-wise. And how did you get round to being able to discuss it um partly it was uh trust really um we got to know each other quite well the the sexual

relationship was healthy um so I just approached the subjects one night from a, would you like to try this point of view, not a, I really want you to do this to me point of view. It has to be a consenting on both parts. How much would you say culture and religion play a part in the way people try to approach these questions? I think culture and religion plays an extremely important role in terms of how we view sexuality, masculinity, femininity and certain sexual acts because we know that there are certain acts which are considered to be forbidden or taboo in certain religious practice and religious traditions and cultural traditions as well and i think especially living in a multicultural society where people come from different cultures and religions i don't think people um pay attention to some of these the various views in terms of what is to be a man, what is it to be, to enjoy sexual pleasure with your female partner, and what sexual acts are considered to be like taboo or where there's some stigma attached. And if we were to look at certain acts which some men, so if for example,

if you've got a heterosexual couple where the man wants to engage in particular acts, but maybe the woman doesn't feel comfortable because of her cultural, religious or personal views, sometimes maybe the man might not be aware of her cultural traditions or religious traditions, so that's why communication is important in order to understand, at least there's some common ground. I don't think we would all agree in terms of having a unanimous understanding of what it is to have a blissful sexual experience, but I think it's important to have that dialogue between the couple. And the word consensual is really important.

Extremely, extremely. I mean, that goes without saying. And that's something which, I mean, from my personal background, originally from Nigeria, and my upbringing in terms of understanding and learning about sex and sexual pleasure and sex education, that was given in the sense that

it wasn't even discussed in terms of consent because as a man, you can't engage in any acts unless you've got consent, unless the woman is, whether it's obviously she vocalises that or she implies consent, but you can't engage in any acts without consent. So when I'm hearing the recent discussions

about the importance of teaching men about consent, for me growing up, that was normal. It was the normal. It was the normal, whereas nowadays, I think, because there's some grey areas and some men aren't able to differentiate between when a woman actually gives consent, I think it's important to have certain discussions and workshops and classes so men are educated

and women feel empowered where they can say they don't feel comfortable with certain acts. Scotty, I know you're now in your 30s. How different is your attitude to sex from when you were younger and the way you're treated now from when you were younger? I think it's completely different for example being in secondary school and you know speaking about oral sex it's like completely like a no-no like oh you know you're a loose woman. We know what you mean. We've got you yeah but now I think as you get older and you have more experiences and everyone sort of matures around you it's sort of like you don't care anymore like I think my sex life now compared to when I was younger is miles apart and it's so

much better because you release judgment as you get older, I think. But how do you get rid of that feeling of shame about some things that you might do that when you were at school, people would have thought you were really, really awful? Do you know what? Okay. The thing that made me let go of it was I used to work for, I was a TV content moderator for this dating channel. And I had to basically approve the content that was put onto the main channels. And when I kind of heard what people were calling in and saying, I'm like, what I like is completely normal. And there's not really any reason for me to feel weird about it because everyone's got their own things.

It's just we don't always like to talk about it because it's not polite. Do you get what I mean? And I think the best way to sort of move away from feelings of shame is to understand that you are human and you're here to experience life to its fullest. And, you know, you can't live to please other people.

You've got to do what makes you happy as long as you're not hurting anyone. Matthew, what impact do you think pornography has had on the way the roles of men and women are perceived? It's a very interesting question. Mainstream pornography, the sort of stuff you can get free quite easily on the on the internet i think still sticks to an alpha male position it is one man and one woman or multiple men and a single woman um stuff that shows a different light shows um the sort of stuff we're talking about that would not be considered the norm is out there,

but you have to go looking for it. There are some great independent pornography makers out there that are... producing the stuff we're talking about, and it is quite liberating, actually, to watch it. Javi, what impact do you think pornography has had? It's interesting because when I ask this question to men and women, I receive different responses.

So generally men will say it has a positive impact on their sex life whereas a number of women generally say it has a negative impact. And one of the reasons when I ask people to expound on that, a number of women say that because it affects the way men view women and in a sense that they're looking for the woman to replicate what they've seen in these pornographic films, whereas some men see porn as a form of education. Now, I think porn is obviously a form of entertainment.

It's performance it's not real it's not quote unquote real sex but for a lot of men they look at it because again when i mentioned earlier about a lot of men being ego driven when it comes to sex and sexuality they look at porn as something that okay i can learn different things that are up so briefly how would you advise young men to approach conversations about these things with a partner? 100%. I would say with a partner, but I would also say to speak to people you're comfortable, who maybe can relate to you. So with some men, they might want to speak to a non-judgmental peer or friend. They might want to attend a workshop.

I conduct a number of workshops for both men and women. We recently had a workshop last week for heterosexual men and women about kunyaza, which is an African tradition which facilitates female ejaculation and multiple orgasms in women during heterosexual encounters. And we had an open discussion with both men and women speaking about not only this practice, but also our understanding about sex and sexuality.

So I think attending those type of workshops is also important. Habib Akhandi, Scotty Scott and Matthew, thank you all very much indeed for being with us. And we would like to hear from you. How do you start conversations so that you let the other person know exactly what you want and that they think it's okay? You can text us or,

of course, you can email us and thanks all three of you. Now there's a square in the centre of London called Mecklenburg, which during the years between the two world wars became home to five women of note. They were the modernist poet H.D., the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, the classicist Jane Harrison, the historian Eileen Power and the writer Virginia Woolf. Francesca Wade has written a biography which includes all five of them and it's called Square Haunting. Francesca, why Square Haunting? Well, the title is a quote from Virginia Woolf. She wrote that her favourite things to do in London were street sauntering and square haunting which I thought was a really evocative

kind of way of describing the sort of imaginative possibilities of the city and Woolf also wrote a famous essay called Street Haunting which the title sort of alludes to which is about her wandering around going out on a search for a pen or a pencil to write with and walking around London and looking up into the kind of lighted windows and finding sort of inspiration for possible characters she might put in her novels. Now, she, of course, was the woman who wrote A Room of One's Own. What role does that play in your book? Well, Wolf is in a way the kind of guiding force of the book

and A Room of One's Own was a really important text both for me kind of personally and for the book. I mean, I started the book when I discovered that the poet H.D. and Wolf herself, who are two of my favourite writers, had lived in the very same square in Bloomsbury in two different world wars. And the more I researched that place, Mecklenburg Square, I realised how many other really fascinating women had made their homes there during that period.

And I started to wonder what had brought them there and what they were looking for when they moved there and sort of tried to reinvent their lives there. What had brought them there? I mean, they didn't all live there for a long time. Some lived for fairly short periods. But what was it about Mecklenburg Square that brought them all there? Well, I think Bloomsbury is a really interesting place

and it's quite different then to how it is now. I mean, Bloomsbury, when it was first developed by the Duke of Bedford and the foundling estate in the 19th century, was intended as a kind of upper middle class suburb. But by the time the building works were finished, and these elegant mansions were ready to live in any family rich enough to buy one wanted to live in West London, which was much more fashionable. And so these houses ended up getting divided up into flats or boarding houses. And that kind of coincided with a real time of change in women's lives. Universities were opening up and the professions and the suffrage campaign was developing. And I think a whole generation of women were kind of growing up and wanting a place where they could live,

particularly women who might want to experiment a bit and not just go straight into a family home. We're looking for somewhere they could perhaps live on their own. Get a room of their own. Exactly, both literally and sort of metaphorically, I think, find a place where they could pursue their ambitions. Now, Jane Harrison, I think, is possibly less well-known than some of the others. Who was she? Jane Harrison was a classicist.

She's a generation older than the other women in my book. She'd studied at Cambridge and then found it very difficult to find an academic job. She came to London. She sort of went around the country delivering these very theatrical lectures, but she was pretty much excluded from the scholarly establishment and was sometimes told quite explicitly she wasn't being given professorships because she was a woman but instead she um she became sort of early popped on she um

she lectured to school children to working men's clubs um and eventually was invited back to new college one of the first women's colleges in Cambridge, where eventually she had the kind of time and space to produce these amazing, groundbreaking works of archaeological history, exploring a kind of hidden history of mother goddess worship, which she could see lay behind the traditional depiction of ancient religion as a kind of patriarchal family of gods headed by Zeus. Now, H.D., the poet H.D., and Dorothy L. Sayers rented the same room, obviously not at the same time. What other similarities are there between them?

Well, I was always very excited when I found a kind of social connection between them. But this isn't a portrait of a group of friends. And I wanted to put together these lives that might otherwise not be put together to try and tell a broader story, I guess, about women's lives and see what could happen if you put together people who I suspected had come to the square at a time when they were all looking to answer quite similar questions of, you know, how to live as a woman writer and what sort of conditions, as Wolf asks in A Room of One's Own, does one need to live a kind of fulfilled life? Jane Harrison was an inspiration for Wolf in A Room of One's Own. At the very beginning, it starts with Wolf walking around a Cambridge college where she's locked out of the library and she suddenly sees a sort of ghostly vision of someone she just describes as J.H. And that is Jane Harrison. But hang on, H.D. and Sayers did share a lover who wrote horrible things about them. Yeah, it was one of the most strange moments of research when I realised that a man had written these extremely insulting, kind of angry novels about two of my subjects. And his connection with HD was a bit more tenuous.

But he was called John Cornos and he did have a relationship with Dorothy Sayers during the year she moved to Mecklenburg Square. She had just left university. She was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford University and she came to London knowing that she wanted to be a writer and that she was going to do anything she could to fulfil that ambition. But I think it was a difficult year for her personally. She was in a relationship with this man who really didn't think much of her writing. She was writing crime fiction and he was somewhat snobbish about it.

And she wrote quite sadly to her parents that John prefers his art with a capital A. And I think he really ground down her confidence in that year. And so she did get her revenge eventually by killing him off in a lightly autobiographical book. And becoming a hugely successful and much admired writer. And as I understand it, Lord Peter Whimsey was actually invented in the square. And reading your book, I thought, how much is Sayers giving Harriet Vane what she didn't have, a man she really admired?

I think very much so. I think all of the women in my book were asking these same questions about how to combine a kind of emotional and intellectual fulfilment. And Gordie Knight Sayers asks, how do women cursed with both hearts and brains, you know, find a way of living where both of those sides of them can be satisfied. And I think Sayers perhaps didn't quite find that in her own life. She did get married, but it doesn't sound like a particularly happy life and she really poured her energies into her work and into kind of resolving through fiction this very question through the character of Harriet Vane she writes a series of novels where Harriet is trying to work out whether and

how she can she can accept Lord Peter Wimsey, the glamorously monocled detective. Yeah, I always thought that Dorothy was in love with Lord Peter Wimsey. Did you feel the same? I think we all are. I was talking to Francesca Wade. Lots from you on the Anne Brontë discussion. Sarah said, great to hear about Anne. Yes, she's much the best of the three.

I didn't get around to reading her until about a year ago after decades of reading. Sarah said, great to hear about Anne. Yes, she's much the best of the three. I didn't get round to reading her until about a year ago after decades of reading. Just wish I hadn't delayed. My mother kept telling me I should have listened. Anne Kennedy said, don't be frightened of being difficult. A great takeaway from this morning's discussion of Anne Bronte. Francesca said Charlotte Bronte also destroyed Emily's second novel after Emily's death, sibling rivalry and brand protection again. And Mandy said, I've only just read Tenant, I know, and was blown away. Absolutely yes. On sexual pleasure, someone who tweets as Girl on the Net said, just listen to this segment and it's great to hear

more discussion about how to encourage men to be more open about sexual needs and desires. The narrative is so often around performance. It's important to highlight two-way communication and openness instead. And then Richard said, Struth, it doesn't sound as if sex today can be as much fun as it was back in the late 60s and early 70s. When I was a teenager, I feel sorry for kids today. And then on Francesca Wade, Anne Kennedy Smith said, Super hearing more about Newnham College's Jane Harrison in this. A groundbreaking classicist and sort of early popped on, whose books wrote women back into history.

And she had a huge influence on Virginia Woolf. Now do join me tomorrow for Weekend Woman's Hour when you can hear Maggie Oliver. She's the former detective and whistleblower who exposed Greater Manchester Police's poor handling of the sexual abuse of girls in Rochdale. We discussed the publication of the first part of the Independent Review into failures in the investigation of the sexual grooming of children and Maggie thinks girls are continuing to be abused today. And there'll be jazz music from the Alison Rayner Quintet. That's tomorrow afternoon at four o'clock.

Do join me if you can. Bye bye. Henry Akeley disappeared from his home on the edge of Rendlesham Forest somewhere around the end of June 2019. They come every night now. The police don't believe me. Please, I just need you to get in touch. What we uncovered is a mystery that has sent us deep into England's past. To an area steeped in witchcraft, the occult, secret government operations.

Now we have multiple sites of five lights with a similar shape. And something that might indeed be altogether otherworldly. This is The Whisperer in Darkness. Available now on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who 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.