Woman's Hour - Nikki Haley, Pornography series, Author Liz Jensen

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Nikki Haley has officially dropped out of the race to become Republican candidate for US President. So what does this mean for the upcoming elections, for women voters and also for women in politics? Emma Barnett speaks to political strategist at the Harvard Belfer Center, Shannon Felton Spence and director of the US and Americas at Chatham House, Leslie Vinjamuri.The author Liz Jensen’s son Raphael was a wildlife biologist, an environmental activist, and a prominent member of Extinction Rebellion. In 2020, at the age of 25, he unexpectedly collapsed and died due to an unknown heart condition. Liz speaks to Emma about her new memoir, Your Wild and Previous Life, about her process of grief, hope and rebellion. On Friday 22nd March, Anita will take Woman's Hour to Doncaster and join forces with BBC Radio Sheffield for a special panel edition of Woman's Hour - Who wants to be a female entrepreneur? Ahead of that, Emma talks to BBC Radio Sheffield presenter Paulette Edwards who is spending a day at Opportunities Doncaster Live, where school girls have gone to find out about local business opportunities and how to develop their entrepreneurial minds. Continuing our series opening up the conversation around pornography and its impact on sex and relationships, our reporter Ena Miller talks to a woman we are calling Sophie. She believes porn has shaped her sex life and the desires of her sexual partners in a negative way, and explains why she thinks this is the case.Who do we want to be to our children when we’re dead and gone? And how do we want them to remember us? These questions are posed by the play The Hills of California currently on stage in London. Set in Blackpool in 1976, the Webb Sisters are returning to their mother’s run-down guest house, as she lies dying. Olivier award-winning actor Laura Donnelly, who plays the mother Veronica, joins Emma.Presenter: Emma Barnett Reporter: Ena Miller Producer: Lottie Garton

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

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Emma Barnett and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Good morning and welcome to the programme. She was the last woman standing. Why did Nikki Haley, the Republican presidential hopeful, fail to cut through against Donald Trump? Well, maybe there's the answer, but what does Trump's victory at this stage mean for American women? We shall explore. The actor Laura Donnelly is here to talk matriarchs, power struggles and siblings as the star of Jez Butterworth's new West End epic. And we will have

the latest in our series on pornography. But I'm also going to be talking to a writer about something she says she always felt would happen. Have you ever had that? Have you had something like that in your life where you felt it would happen? And perhaps it did. I was thinking about this this morning and I felt I knew from the age of 10 or 11, very young, that I just wouldn't be able to naturally have children. This was even before I started having very difficult and painful periods. And 20 long years before I was eventually diagnosed with endometriosis and adenomyosis, I just knew I wrote it down in my diary, I wouldn't be able to have children naturally,

I just had this sense of foreboding. It was very striking, especially as a young girl. And I take no pleasure in saying it was true. I am now the mother of two children, but only post seven rounds of IVF. And for my guest today, the writer Liz Jensen, she always believed that one of her children would die. She had a strong sense of it, even went to a therapist about it, trying as best she could to lay this thought to rest. But 20 years or so on, when the phone rang and it was her ex-husband, she knew one of her boys had gone and she's now written about it. Have you had anything like that in your life? It could be very different. It may not have happened. It may still be with you, this sense of something. But if you have and you feel like you can share, you don't have to give

your real name, and I shared mine in the bid to make you feel perhaps more comfortable about sharing you can text the program you can text me here the number is 84844 text will be charged at your standard message rate something you thought would always be the case a strong sense of something on social media what at bbc women's are perhaps the opposite happened this is not about being able to predict it's just why we have and what we have sometimes a sense of. You can email me through the Woman's Hour website or go for WhatsApp or with a voice note on 03700 100 444. Just watch those data charges. Same numbers for anything you hear on the programme.

Please do take the opportunity to make your voice heard. But someone who had made their voice heard again and again and again, the last woman standing between the American electorate and a rerun of Biden versus Trump in the upcoming race for the White House, Nikki Haley. Today, we're going to look at the fact that she dropped out yesterday of the Republican presidential race, what that means, and why she couldn't cut through. The former South Carolina governor who became, don't forget, Trump's U.N. ambassador, was also the first prominent woman of color to seek the Republican nomination for president. She told her supporters yesterday that she would still use her platform for good.

I said I wanted Americans to have their voices heard. I have done that. I have no regrets. And although I will no longer be a candidate, I will not stop using my voice for the things I believe in. No regrets. Let's unpack this with the director of the US and Americas at Chatham House, Leslie Vingimimori, politics and communications strategist at the Harvard Belford Center, Shannon Felton Spence. Shannon, if I could come to you first. Good morning. Welcome to the program. How has this news been received in America, you know, for some highly expected? Yeah, I think that that's right. She had vowed to stay through Super Tuesday and people were even questioning why she was going to do that. So I don't think that there's anybody that woke

up yesterday and was surprised by her decision, especially because it was sort of at that point, mathematically impossible for her to get the delegates that she needed. So I'm sure that there are, you know, a share of disappointed voters who wanted to see her sort of run out the clock on him and make a real play for the nomination. But this was largely expected. And what do you think is the reason she couldn't cut through? I think that there is a couple things. I mean, the number one thing that we just cannot, we just can't discount is that he has sucked all of the air out of the Republican Party. And this is his party now, he being Trump, obviously. And, you know, all of the Republicans

that are currently in office got in line right behind him. And it's very hard to break through in a party primary when that is the case. And then the second thing I would say is she took a really long time to find her messaging against him. And I'm not even sure today if she has found her messaging against him. Is she for Trump or that she used to be for Trump? Is she vehemently against Trump? You know, there's just no there. There was a there was a real gray area in sort of how she wanted to address the Trump in the room, if you will. And she never really found the right thing that cut through with voters. Leslie, welcome back. I remember we were talking about this a few weeks ago.

What's your take now? You know, I think the Nikki Haley story is a very interesting one. I think it has room to run, not in this current moment, but that, you know, for me, the interesting story about Nikki Haley is how many Republicans continued to vote for her in a party that is, as you know, as Shannon has said, completely dominated by Donald Trump and has been for quite some time. She managed to push through, become the second candidate. She stayed in far longer than I think many people would have. And I think she, you know, has been a real irritant to Donald Trump.

She's pulled away wealthy voters, more moderate, wealthy Republican voters, more moderate voters, many suburban women, independents, you know, New Hampshire went ahead and voted in a Republican primary. If you look at the state of Virginia, Donald Trump was polling at around being, you know, having a 60% delta with Nikki Haley. On the day, it was only around 30 percentage point gap. So she's, you know, she's demonstrating that we have a man at the top of the party who's used bullying tactics. People are afraid, even within his own party, of speaking out against him. And she was tremendously bold, right? She continued to provide a voice for those who are disgruntled, who aren't pleased. Not effectively enough to secure that nomination and to, you know, run for the White House. But this is, as we know, a deeply flawed candidate,

91 indictments, many things could happen. And at some point, Donald Trump will cease to be the leader of the Republican Party. And she is beginning to carve out a path for that alternative. I agree completely with the view that Shannon expressed that she didn't get the messaging right. And even now we're waiting to see, will she endorse him or will she continue to provide a voice for that alternative? And that's a very tricky calculation.

And I think that, you know, many people are she will be looking to see if anybody else is going to follow her. So, you know, a leader needs followers. Very difficult road to pave in the Republican Party, but good for her in trying to do that. That decision, Shannon, on whether to endorse could be key to what her future lies and where her future lies and how she could be an alternative voice, because there are clear divisions in between what she was saying and Trump.

Not everything known, as you say, with the messaging for some being unclear, but definitely a division when it comes to foreign policy and not having the US not back, for instance, fulsomely Ukraine and what's going on in the Middle East. Yeah, there's virtually no difference between Haley and Trump on domestic policy, but in foreign policy, there's massive difference. And that is something that is really top of mind on voters right now. It doesn't tend to drive people to the polls like you would think. But again, the normal laws of politics don't really apply when Donald Trump is in a race. So we don't really know. There's so many unknowns with him. Leslie is absolutely right, though, that Nikki Haley has the share

of the vote that he's going to need to win against President Biden, right? Independent voters. A party primary is party voters. There's not a person in America who doesn't know exactly how they feel about Donald Trump. They are either for him or they are against him. They've had a long time to decide, and it is truly binary like that. And so if people wanted to vote for Trump in the Republican primary, they have, right? So her voters are really up for grabs. Whether he is going to take that opportunity to put her on the ticket, which I do not think he will as his vice president, or sort of move himself a little bit more to the middle to pick up that 30 to 40% share that she was getting across states. I also don't think he's going to do that. And so I think that this Nikki Haley, maybe is not the story anymore, but she will remain sort

of a figure in the race in that she's going to sort of drive that election turnout and where those voters go. Where does this just Shannon to stay with you for a moment? Where does this put people's perhaps minds about the upcoming election? You know, when something is a rerun, there's a different feeling about it. There's also scores that feel need to be settled potentially as well. And also, you know, there's another message that perhaps to the women of America, that there's still not the ability to be ready for the first female president of America. That's such an interesting point that you bring up. And I was thinking about this on my commute yesterday as I was waiting for Nikki to take the stage and exit the race. There are still little girls in America that are drawing pictures

in elementary school saying, I'm going to be the first woman president of the United States. And it's just so disappointing. It's a very disappointing feeling for, you know, a middle-aged woman and women across the spectrum to sort of think that we're still raising girls and women that think that it's 40 years away. Yeah, there's a striking point to dwell on. Leslie, to come back to you and then keeping with women, what about how lives could look, should look, may look under Trump again as a woman in America?

Well, you know, there's plenty of room to be concerned. And we've already seen some of that in the Dobbs decision, the reversal of Roe versus Wade and how that's played out across a number of states. And that, of course, is linked to Donald Trump's appointment of justices in the Supreme Court. Senate were, if we saw majority Republican rule in those two bodies, and the return of Donald Trump, it's entirely possible that we would see a national ban on abortion. We've seen the decisions about embryos and the effect on IVF in one southern state in the United States. So this was a ruling in Alabama, correct me if I'm wrong, around that embryos are seen as human life. Correct, which has very significant implications for those frozen embryos that many people that are using IVF treatment in order to have children and have been doing for a very long time. And, you know, these sorts of decisions, even though they're at state level, they're very

much affected by who's in the White House, who's got the dominant voice in Congress. And it not only affects the political governance, the formal governance, it affects the tenor of debate across the entire country. It gives voice, it gives power. We all know that when the person that we feel represents us is at the top of an institution, it gives us a sense of empowerment and it brings voices to the fore. And I think that's something that's very hard to measure. But we saw it when Donald Trump was president, that many of the messages he sent out felt like they were gendered, that they were sexist or racist. And they gave voice to all sorts of people. And they also suppressed a lot of voices. And I think on the question of women and girls,

that's really important. I would say, though, you know, if you look to the other side of the house, we've had Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright as secretaries of state. We have Gina Raimondo, secretary of commerce. We have phenomenal women leaders at very high levels of government.

We have Christine Whitman. We have women. I know, but, you know, there'll be those who perhaps don't follow American politics that keenly, but they might be thinking, what's happened to Kamala Harris? You know, they might be thinking that, well, where are the great hopes actually at this level to make this not a rerun between Biden and Trump, two older men? You know, they perhaps wonder why that just hasn't come out in greater to greater level. I mean, I get absolutely Kamala Harris. You know, she was I like to say she's a very strong leader. She's a tremendous woman. She was given a bad hand in the early days of the Biden administration by being asked to solve a very difficult problem on the southern border. And quite frankly, she played it badly. She's she's since done better, but has never managed to get traction. But I do think you can't, when you look at the United States,

there are still tremendous opportunities for women and girls. If you look at girls sports, women's sports are tremendous, you know, Title IX opened up the gateway to even public spending in girls sports. Across the whole of society. There are many, many reasons for optimism. We have to be very careful, I think, about taking, you know, that one seat in the White House, which, quite frankly, there are many categories of people that don't have access to that seat. We should be wondering why we don't have another African American president, an IndianAmerican president, a Latino. There are multiple categories.

It's a very hard office to get through to for so many reasons. So I'm still, you know, as on the whole, quite optimistic about the women, the role of women in U.S. society. But I do think that Donald Trump, were he to be reelected again, would have a very significant dampening effect across the whole of society on how women feel about their own independence and their own agency. And yet women will vote for him. We know that. And yeah, you know, we can see that in certainly in the data from last time. We don't know how it's going to be this time. Just a final word from you, if I can, Shannon, just about perhaps that feeling at the moment. It's so nice to hear Leslie be so optimistic. She's absolutely right on many fronts. But I have to say on when I'm talking to American media, that's definitely not the tone and tenor

that but she's she is right. It has gotten so much better. And there is certainly room for women leadership. And it should not be lost that women, general elections, presidential elections very often come down to being decided by those suburban women who are often independents. And so they have tremendous power when it comes to making these decisions. Indeed. We'll go with some optimism. I don't always get it either here in the British media. So it's nice to see some smiles on some faces and also to get your analysis this morning before that moment passed. And we didn't think about, you know, what Nikki Haley was trying to do, perhaps, and also what that moment means as we look ahead to that race for the White House. Of course, an election going to be happening on this side of the pond as well. We still don't know when.

But thank you very much to Shannon Felton-Spence, politics and communication strategist at the Harvard Belfer Center, and Leslie Vingimori, Director of the US and Americas at Chatham House. Now, I asked you a question based on my next guest and a sense that she had of something very strong and very upsetting that was going to happen, potentially happen in her life, and whether you had ever had such a sense. Let me just come to some of your messages because you've been generous enough to send them in before I come to my next guest. I too, I had a very vivid dream of a husband to be in my 20s. He was in a field with his feet grounded in the mulch. My initial response as a London girl was, oh no, I'm stuck in the mud. Three decades later, I met my husband online. He was then an

IT person living in Wiltshire, who's now a park keeper in London. He loves nothing more than being in nature and I love nothing more than him. I had a very strong sense when I was young, I would not become a mother, that I would be gifted though one great love affair in my life and that love would be able to receive all the love that I had and that being a mother might have given me. I'm now 44. Three years ago, I met that person who, as I imagined, would be my person to walk through life together. It's the greatest love I've experienced. A couple of kisses on that. Another one here. When I was three months pregnant, I moved back to the UK from leaving my Peruvian partner of three years for a few months before he was due to join me. As we said goodbye at the airport, I looked back at his head and I had a very clear thought, I was never going to see him again. Ridiculous as it seemed at the time. It came to be exactly what happened. I've raised my beautiful girl entirely alone. And another one here, when my

friend and colleague was going to the US for a couple of weeks, I had a dull sense of unease. And a week later, he was killed in a car accident. It was a terrible loss. Many more messages about these deep senses of something. Let me tell you about my next guest, the author Liz Jensen, whose son Raphael was a wildlife biologist, an environmental activist and a prominent member of the Extinction Rebellion group. In February 2020, at the age of 25, while out for a run in South Africa, he unexpectedly collapsed and died due to a heart condition he didn't know he had. Set against the backdrop of climate and ecological catastrophe, Liz's memoir, Your Wild and Precious Life, is a story of grief, hope and rebellion.

Liz, good morning. Good morning. Thank you for being here. And I want to come to this strong sense that you had, which is part of what we're asking our listeners about. But first of all, I wanted to say how sorry I was for your loss, for your family's loss, and get a sense of your son. Well, thank you. He was an extraordinary child who grew into an extraordinary young man. He was quite unusual, even as a baby. You know, he didn't really behave like other babies. He was very contemplative. He would get a bit lost in space quite often.

He was eccentric, I would say, as a child. He very much knew his own mind. He was fascinated by wildlife from when he was tiny. And it was no surprise to me when he went on to study zoology. Because I think, you know, that sense you have when you're a child, the boundaries are different. You don't have the same sense of who you are, maybe because you don't look in the mirror and you're out outside and you're watching other animals and there's a sense that you too are an animal. He had that very strongly and I know I had it as a child.

I didn't have that sense that I belonged to a particular species I think and I think we really lose that as we grow older. I certainly lost it, but he never lost that sense of being part of something much bigger and huge and organic and beautiful. Talk to me about this sense that you had of that you might lose a child. What was that? How did that come to you? It came to me when I was pregnant, I think, with my first son, or maybe shortly after he was born. I didn't know how, if I was going to have just him, or whether there would be another child. But by the time I was pregnant with my second son, Raphael, it was unbearable, because I couldn't tell anyone. It's not the kind of thing you can say to anyone.

I think I'm going to lose one of my children. And also, I had that superstitious feeling that if I said it aloud, it would come to pass. So it was lonely. It was a shameful secret, awful secret. It just weighed on me so heavily. So in the end, I, you know, in another era, I would have gone to a, you know, a wise village elder or a shaman or something. But I went to see a therapist because this was the modern world. And the therapist, I'm actually very grateful to him because when I told him this, he said he didn't just talk about magical thinking. He said, yes, it is magical thinking, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take it seriously. And so we worked on it together and I sort of investigated it. And

I went on a little pilgrimage, a very private little pilgrimage. And when I came back, it had lifted. And so I was able to put it aside. That doesn't mean I forgot it because it was always at the back of my mind but it was at the back of my mind as something that I once believed, I once thought and it would occasionally rear its head and I would just stamp it down because what else could I do with it?

And then I got the phone call. And did you have a sense of anything before you picked up the phone? No, but when I picked up the phone it was my ex-husband and he could barely speak, he was crying and my first thought was, which child? Which boy? It must have been, I don't know how you would even describe that moment especially because you tried to lay to rest that fear

Well I'm glad I laid it to rest because what could I have done about it? It turned out that the thing he died from was the thing that was probably you know if you'd asked me if your son's going to die what's it going to be of? I'd have said snake bite maybe you know he worked in some very dangerous places, you know, he was handling venomous snakes, he was working in environments and in places that were highly risky. And I always knew that. And I could have spent my time worrying. And at some point, I thought this is not going to do my mental health any good. And I don't want to be that kind of mother. I don't want to be a mother who is constantly worrying about her child

and conveying that worry to him and making him feel guilty. He loved his life. He absolutely loved his life. He filled his life. He did so many things in it. And I'm really, really glad he did. And I'm really, really glad I didn't stop him. There's a message here, very striking, which says, I too had a strong sense that my son would die young. Sadly, he did die in his sleep soon after turning 20. I stepped out of myself from that day onwards and have lived the six years after his death as if I'm watching my life from a distance. Sadly the sense that I would lose him

one day didn't prepare me in any way. Yes I met a young woman just the other night at an event I did and she said to me she had a very strong sense her father would die. Now her father was relatively young and there was nothing wrong with him but she she told people, you know, it hit her so hard that she told people. And then he did die. He died very suddenly, very unexpectedly. And she asked me, did it help to have had that premonition? And I'd never thought about that before. And actually, I think in my case, it probably did help because, you know, I think you find all sorts of resilience inside yourself that you didn't know you had.

But I think just that being an option had always been there. So I think in some way it had prepared me and I'm glad of that. You talk about the moment that you heard of your son's death as your Kairos moment. What does that mean? Well, the ancient Greeks had two words for time. There was Kronos, which is the time we know, chronological time, which you measure in, you know, seconds and days and weeks and months and millennia. It's calendar time. It's clock time. But there's another kind of time called kairos, which is the kind of time,

it's a moment that just cuts through. If you see chronological time as linear and on a vertical line, think of kairos as a horizontal line. Think of kairos as the vertical line that just breaks everything up and changes paradigms. And that's the moment, that was my kairos is the vertical line that just breaks everything up and changes paradigms. And that's the moment, that was my Kairos moment when my son died.

It changed everything. You're keen, I know, with your writing and what you're doing now and talking about your book, to try to also say to those who outlive their children that there is still life for you. How have you found that? Well, I found it in many ways, actually. And I think the first step of it was surrendering to my grief, not trying to push it away, not trying to stop it, not trying to stop the pain, just giving into it. And for the first nine months that involved, among other things, crying every day. It just came to me around about five o'clock in the afternoon. My body needed to cry. And I think there are physiological reasons why crying can

help because you do feel better afterwards, the way you feel different after a storm has passed. So I just didn't deny it in any way. The other thing was I met other women and other parents who'd lost children longer ago than I had, and they were a huge source of comfort to me. Because, you know, I asked one of them quite early on, do have a good life she'd lost her son 15 years before she said yes I have a very good life I have a fulfilled life and that word fulfilled really stayed with me and I also felt right from the start I owed it to Raphael to live well I owed it to him since he'd been denied that future he might have had. I owed it to him and I still do owe it to him. And I feel him very much with me in spirit. Just to live the

best life I can. He always, and it can feel overwhelming sometimes because, you know, what can we do in the face of this gigantic climate and ecological emergency? But he always said to me something which I think is very wise, which is do what you can where you are with what you've got. And to that, I would add to anyone who's grieving, you know, when you can and as much as you can and how you can. You also, I know, and you just started to allude to it there, feel like you're able to communicate with him or have signs certainly that there is that connection, which is a very private thing, but really helps, I suppose, if somebody can talk about it and share it,

because there will be those listening who have lost people, many people, you know, who've been in this situation, but still have ways that they feel connected. will be those listening who have lost people many people you know who've been in this situation but still have ways that they they feel connected I assure you there will be so many people and I I think yeah you say it's very private but I've decided I don't want to keep it private because no no and I I applaud you for that but what I meant was people just are so in it with it with themselves sometimes that they feel perhaps they can't share. But sharing it, which is the joy of live radio,

I always think is you never know who's listening. And the wonderful thing is that when you do start to share, you hear so many stories of other people who get signs from their loved ones and who carry on speaking to them and feel that they're answering back. I mean... What was it for you? How does that manifest?

Well, it manifests in the fact that Raphael and I were very close. We had a very sort of clean, loving, wonderful relationship. And so I always know what he's likely to say. So you could say it's just my imagination and maybe partly it is. But very often it's a feeling of, oh, he wants me to do this. And that's really beautiful. And it does keep me, you know, allow me to enjoy my life as well, because I feel I'm not alone. He's not totally gone. He's still around. I think when we die, you know, our energy, our life energy doesn't disappear. Energy doesn't disappear, it just changes, it just transforms into something else.

So I've come to believe there are other dimensions, and there is another dimension in which the people who have died actually aren't really dead, which is why death isn't really the end. Having very powerful messages coming in. There's one here that says, my son died aged six, three years ago from a brain tumour. When he was a newborn, I looked at him and said out loud without thinking, how long will I get to keep you for?

I'm crying listening to this conversation. Yes, you step outside of life. You live in the most surreal place, somewhere between worlds, between life and death, never to return. One day I'll be with James again. That thought is beautiful.

It is beautiful. It is absolutely beautiful. Incredibly beautiful. And I think that there are so many people who feel like that, who feel, yes, I will see them again. And, you know, believe me, I was someone who before my son's death didn't believe any of that.

Absolutely not. I, you know, had a very sort of, I was very interested in science. I still am. But, you know, I had this feeling that, well, if science hasn't proved it, it can't be true. And now I think, well, science hasn't proved it yet because this is something that's quite difficult to measure but that doesn't mean it's not true Liz thank you for talking to us thank you very much the books called your wild and precious life you're hearing about your son Raphael Liz

Jensen there thank you for coming to talk this morning and thank you for your messages there's a lot of them coming in I will come to them as I can as you can Thank you for coming to talk this morning. And thank you for your messages. There's a lot of them coming in. I will come to them as I can, as you can hear. But please do feel you can share. And anyone in particular who's suffered loss, we will put some support links on the Women's Hour website, as we always do. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered.

There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. Now, let me ask you a completely different question. Where's the worst place in the UK for women to try to, you know, run their own business, be in control of their own destiny when it comes to that sort of thing,

where would you say? It's Doncaster. The city came bottom of a league table that looked at opportunities for women entrepreneurs last year, according to analysis of Office for National Statistics data by the website money.co.uk. Can this be true?

What do the women who run businesses in Doncaster think? What's being done to support those self-starters and also the girls of the future? That's quite crucial. To find out more on Friday, the 22nd of March, a couple of Fridays time, Anita will take Women's Hour to South Yorkshire, where the programme will join forces

with the mighty BBC Radio Sheffield, which covers Doncaster, the Doncaster area, for a special edition of Woman's Hour. Who wants to be a female entrepreneur? To tell us more about that programme, let's talk to someone we know well here on the programme, but also they know well in Sheffield, BBC Radio Sheffield presenter Paulette Edwards. Paulette, hello. Hello, good morning. How are you, Emma? Well, I'm all the better for talking to you, especially because you're going to get us pumped up, hello. Hello, good morning. How are you, Emma? Well, I'm all the better for

talking to you, especially because you're going to get us pumped up, I'm sure, about the next generation. It's National Careers Week. You're at something called Opportunities Doncaster Live. That's an event that matches learners with business where school children perhaps can find out more about careers of the future. Maybe they'll be inspired to set something up themselves. Who have you been talking to this morning? Well, so far, so here you're at Doncaster Racecourse. I'm not putting a bet on. I'm here at this lovely event. So we've got young people, girls in particular from South Yorkshire. We're expecting 4,000 young people today. So that's an impressive amount of young

women, not just wanting to skive off school, but wanting to get themselves connected up with careers and to think about the future. 34 schools itching to be a part of this. So I'm looking forward to meeting more young women, but I've actually come across already a woman called Gemma Peoples, and she's the CEO of Harrison College. So they are a specialist business enterprise and employability post-16 education provision for students with autism and special educational needs. And her baby Eva was with us. So Eva was having a little bit of a scream in the background as well. So we were talking about the challenges that she's faced, the fact that as a young woman born and bred in Doncaster, she'd not had any support for setting up her own business.

She's exactly the kind of role model that we need to be talking about on this particular occasion. So I am going to be, as you've said, with Anita at Cast Theatre in Doncaster. I'm really looking forward to it. We're going to have a panel of local businesswomen, some experts as well, to put Doncaster right at the centre of all of this, to see if all these theories make any sense when we talk to real people. And the hope is that we are going to encourage not just young women, which, as you said, is very important, but people who are constantly, may have an idea or want to set up a business and need a little bit of support. We're going to bring it all together and we're going to put our

entrepreneurial big pants on on the 22nd of March. And we're looking forward to it. I love that, entrepreneurial big pants on the 22nd of March and we're looking forward to it. I love that, entrepreneurial big pants. Okay, can we get that? Can we get some knickers made for this? I think we can buy some actually. I've got some in my drawers if you think they'll work. Different drawers, different drawers.

Well, there you go. A lot to be said for that. And just Paulette, quick one. Have you got any sense of any of the blockers or the reasons why uh this isn't hasn't been going so well for some in the past any sense of what the barriers have been if i can talk about my own experience which i know is a while ago the careers advice wasn't great and i think a lot of it could be to do with confidence and the way we look forward to things and who we perceive to be business people.

So one of the things I might ask the young women to do is to consider female entrepreneurs and tell us who they think is doing well in the world of business. So I think often maybe the role models aren't as obvious as possible. Maybe the confidence isn't there. And maybe the way we perceive businesses is not, you know, the risk taking that's connected to that and the information that we think we need to gather and the skills we think we need to learn. Maybe they are not as obvious and graspable as they possibly should be. So we're going to tease all of that out while we're here. Looking forward to it. Important work. I'll leave you to it, Paula. Thank you so much, Paula Edwards, who will be joining Anita, Anita Rani for that special Women's Hour programme live from Doncaster.

If you are sitting on an idea for a startup, but you are not sure what to do first, or maybe you've already taken the plunge, but you want to grow your company, we would love to hear from you. Send us any questions or experiences you want to share, and maybe you'll be able to hear them discussed on that live programme coming up which we're looking forward to in Doncaster 84844 that's the number that you need or email us through the Woman's Hour website. Now two of the latest in our series a very frank series about pornography and its impact on real sex and relationships. We've been talking to women so far we're also going to be talking to men I did ask you to get in touch and if you wanted to, as one of our many male listeners, do get in touch with the same details I've just given. But next week, the writer and academic Dr Fiona Vera Gray will pull together some of the issues raised by the stories we've heard so far. in another very honest conversation. Sophie believes pornography has shaped her sex life and the desires and expectations of her sexual partners. She's very clear about her attitude to porn and as you'll hear, it's been shaped by her own experiences.

I hate porn and I think it's OK for women to hate porn and I want other women to know that it's OK not to be OK with porn just because it's an everyday part of people's lives. I think it's impacted me in my personal life and I think we need to talk about it more. When you say you hate porn did you hate it because of how it impacted you or has there ever been a time that you thought it was okay? I've never thought porn was okay. It's difficult for women to say I'm not okay with porn. People assume that I'm somehow frigid or prudish or anti-sex. People disagree with me. They disagree with me quite vocally. When it comes to intimacy, what is it that you expect? What do you imagine?

Healthy sexual intimacy looks like two reciprocal, mutual, consenting adults having an experience that's based on empathy and connection. There shouldn't be a power imbalance or a kind of using of the other person's body. There has to be a genuine interest in what the other person is feeling and experiencing. And I think that's something that is lacking in a lot of sexual interactions as a result of porn. What was your reality? Yeah my reality has often not involved respect for boundaries and interest in what those boundaries are let alone an interest in sexual desires or wants or needs. Sadly, in my experience, all too common for men to disregard even a very, very clear no. And this is also nice guys, normal guys, guys you might think of even as feminist. What were those things that were happening to you? Sexy violence, like wanting to strangle me or wanting to do anal sex or wanting to kind of pin me down. And that is from porn. That's not something that is inherently physically pleasurable.

That doesn't increase my sexual pleasure. It doesn't increase his sexual pleasure. But it may. That is a sexualisation of violence. That's making violence against me sexy. There have been occasions where men have specifically asked me to not make eye contact with them during sex or where they've requested that I make pornified sex noises, it was about me replicating a kind of porn experience where I was basically just delivering a service for them.

But then there are people who enjoy porn. They enjoy watching it. They enjoy it being part of their relationships. Could you see how it could actually benefit a couple no and how does anybody who's using porn know whether the women in it are even adults where they've been under pressure of some kind whether they, maybe they've just changed their minds. With some sexual partners I've had, there's been a trend that their sexual pleasure and their orgasm is somehow my responsibility and I have to provide that. And if that's not provided, then I've done something

wrong and terrible. One guy actually got his erection and kind of shoved it towards me and was like, what am I going to do about this? As if it was my job to deal with it, which felt very threatening. So in that moment, what are you thinking? In that moment, I felt completely unsafe. I felt I was at his mercy I'm assuming you're getting on before these moments happen and then what it changed the scenario from a nice relaxed state where you've made out that you've entered a state of undress you're getting a bit vulnerable with each other. And then suddenly there's this huge power imbalance where he said to me, this is what I want. What you want doesn't matter.

And maybe I'm going to take what I want. And that was, I mean, he didn't. I asked him to leave and he did respect that and he did leave. But there's a moment where suddenly everything shifts I think porn definitely has something to do with it and how could it not it's something that they've all been consuming since their you know even pre-puberty days and one of my previous sexual partners talked about the effect that porn had had on him and he said that when he encountered women out and about like cashiers at his work friends he couldn't stop imagining them

in sexual scenarios he said that just he couldn't stop that video playing and how did this discussion come about he came clean to me that he had a porn addiction. We were talking about that and the effect that it had on him. The way it made me feel was, you know, first I appreciated his honesty, but I also felt deeply uncomfortable because if that's how he sees all women, that's how he sees me. I'd lost some of my humanity in his eyes and I think he agreed with that and he wanted to move on from that and find a way to relate healthily to women

but he couldn't porn had done damage on his brain somehow so I just found this it's just on my phone right and it was just a website that's there to educate parents on the terms that people are using. And one of them I read was the death grip. Have you heard of that? No. The death grip is where the man will hold his penis so tightly while he's masturbating.

So he gets so used to the sensation of his own grip that then, basically, if he's having sex with a woman, that's never tight enough. I've definitely seen that happen with some of my former sexual partners. They've had real problems with basically enjoying normal sex. The only way that they could orgasm was through masturbating. And sometimes that's what they would just have to do. How do we learn how to have sex? Well, I think the boys were definitely learning how to have sex directly from porn. And I think the girls were learning it indirectly from, at least for me, I was learning it indirectly from the way that porn had seeped into the rest of culture in media, in adverts, in even jokes that were made about things like doggy style.

And, you know, how does a 14 yearyear-old girl know what doggy style is? Like, why is that part of popular culture? Why were 13-year-old and 14-year-old girls that I knew having anal sex? Where had we learned that from? That's because of porn influencing culture more widely. Like, these things had become normalised to me. I think when I first started having relationships with men, I was trying to be the cool girl

who was doing all the things that the girls were doing and was being adventurous and could please her man, just like we'd read about in Cosmopolitan or other magazines that had these ridiculous lists of ways to drive your man wild as if that was our purpose in life and as if that made us like a better performing woman and I remember there was also competition between girls of who'd given head first who'd done anal and you know who was having sex how much sex was everybody having but it was still all centered on on the men somehow what's the impact on you Sophie even on lead up to this interview you know you have been quite emotional about this whole process which is absolutely fine so to me it's obvious there has been an impact on you

I think porn has made me feel fundamentally unsafe in sexual interactions a lot of my previous partners have ignored my no, have violated my boundaries as a result of their porn consumption. That's made me feel like every time I enter a new relationship, we've got to have a conversation about porn. Yeah, instead of having fun getting to know someone, I have to have all these heavy conversations. When you meet someone and they behave one way, then you get intimate and they behave in a way that you're not happy with. How do you reconcile that they're one and the same person? I was seeing a friend of a friend. He was a nice guy. And at his house, we were making out and he would kind of pinned the back of my neck and I said what are you doing that hurts you should have asked me and he said

oh I didn't want to ruin the mood I thought hang on what why so you'd rather risk making me feel unsafe and uncomfortable than ruining the mood he said oh but women women like that he'd obviously learned somewhere from porn that that's what I wanted or from other women doing what he wanted well yeah or maybe maybe these other women hadn't hadn't felt safe enough to articulate that boundary in the way that I was confident to. You talk about boundaries a lot. What are those boundaries? The line beyond which you don't want something to happen. I've told you what I wanted, which was for you not to put my hand on your dick. And you've just done what you wanted because what you want is all that matters. It's emotional to think about because my current partner also has to deal with the trauma that I've experienced.

That's something that has stayed with me and if I'm in a situation which reminds me of any of those previous situations it's very very difficult I have to give myself time to learn how to feel safe again a woman there that we're calling Sophie, the reporter was Enna Miller. And if you want to be part of that conversation and anyone listening, just do get in touch. But also I should say, if anything in that conversation has affected you, there are support links on our website.

There's a message here. I so agree with this woman. Porn exacerbates the bad behaviour of men towards women all over the world. So many misogynists everywhere and men who control everything. So many women everywhere whose lives are treated as worthless and degraded. It's nothing to do with beauty or being enjoyable. It's faceless.

And lets men and those women involved live without a meaningful approach to any relationship. Vanessa, thank you for that message. But from the man who brought theatre audiences Jerusalem and Ferryman, now we have Jez Butterworth's The Hills of California on in the West End of London. A stunning epic, I was able to see it the other evening, directed by Sam Mendes, which tells the story of women in Blackpool. The play, set in 1976, follows the four Webb sisters who are returning to their mother's house as she lies dying upstairs. Olivia Award winning actor Laura Donnelly plays Veronica Webb, the mother of the four sisters, but also one of the sisters again in later life. Laura, good morning.

Good morning. I was blown away by it. It's quite the performance. And I also didn't realise it was you when you came back on in a different role. So well done. Thank you. That was the goal. Yeah, honestly, I was like, why is she not coming for a curtain call? Oh, there she is. But she's someone else. on in a different role so well done thank you that was the goal uh yeah it was honestly i was

like why is she not coming for a curtain call oh there she is but she's someone else um just just tell us a little bit more about what you think this is uh this is trying to show people i think that uh i think that the with the point of story essentially being to let everyone know that they are not alone. I think that this deals with some very universal themes, one being family and another being death. And a friend of mine described it recently, which I thought was it really struck me that it is about how do you want to die, but also how do you want to live? And so it really is that universal in its scope, I think. And I think that that's something that Jez does does really, really well. Your performance as Veronica, which is your main role, a single mother, a guest house owner, striving to turn her four teenage daughters

into Blackpool's own Andrews sisters. I mean, it's quite a drive she's got. Yeah, it is. And I think that, you know, there are people who watch it and associate the kind of the show business aspect of it with the likes of the story of Gypsy and Mama Rose. But for me, Veronica's drive for her children is not one of trying to live vicariously through them.

I don't think that she is, you know, had aspirations for show business for herself, and that didn't work out. I think what it is is she has experienced a life that she feels somewhat trapped by. She's a woman of, I think, great passions and, as you say, great drive, and she's very intelligent. She's very capable. And I think she recognizes that in another world

and another time, perhaps she would have had something more magical. And that's what she really wants for her daughters. I think that she sees that for women, in Veronica's time, obviously being the 50s, but as we go on to see the sisters in the 70s, who are going to be adult women, they're going to be wives and mothers, and that's really going to be it. And she wants so much more for them from that. She wants them to be adult women. They're going to be wives and mothers and that's really going to be it. And she wants so much more for them from that.

She wants them to live magical lives. There's great humour. Of course, it's Northern women and Blackpool's a place close to my heart, certainly. And I was very much laughing at times and just wonderful put downs and wonderful lines and honesty between them. But there are these very painful moments as well.

And it's not a play that sells motherhood to you, is it? No, it definitely doesn't. I think that it shows a lot of the hardest reality of motherhood. And I think that from my character's point of view, it's something that she, in in fact other than in very particular moments in the play I think that it's something she does incredibly well and makes it look quite easy but of course in those days being a single mother and running a guest house at the same time will have been the most monumental of tasks and and again, in the 70s, when we see those women who are, you know,

they are mothers, they're not reluctant mothers. They just, they speak about the realities of it and they're very candid about it. And at the same time they have, you know, there's great love there. And one of the characters at the end of the play, in a hugely emotional moment, she asks for her husband and her son, the son that she's kind of slagged off earlier in the play, you know. And so I think that it does present a kind of the reality of the struggle of it, particularly in those two particular eras. I should say that you're also romantic partners with Jez Butterworth. Not if I could put it like that.

That sounds like very quaint. We're actually married. You're now married. Yes. I wasn't sure. So it must be an interesting, and you have two children together. I don't know if they come and watch this.

It's pretty adult. I don't know how old. It's pretty adult. I brought them along to the tech week to see the younger girls do their song and dance routine. I thought out of all of it, that would be the bitter thing. I could see. That's very sweet and musical and lovely to see. But it must be quite an interesting dynamic for you to have that personal and the creative side of it.

Are you his muse? I mean, is this how it works? I mean, is that, yes, I guess if that's the word we're using. I don't know. I've never asked anybody that. Yeah, I mean, I think... I don't know if I am. I guess he has these ideas for plays and because he begins talking with me about them very early in the process, then I kind of become a part of the development of that.

But it's very much his process and I really try not to get in the way or have too big an effect on it because I hate the idea that the... Like, the world does not need a Laura Donnelly play. I hate the idea that I would have some... Like, bend it out of shape somehow with what it is I would like to do or not like to do.

No, you've ended up with two roles in this. You must be absolutely knackered. Oh, yeah. And yeah, it's a fair task, but one that I am very, very happy to take on. And, you know, I always am when it comes to him saying, well, I think there's a role in this for you. But we do, there is a joint aspect to it and then there's also um very much a separation you know he he has his i have mine um i don't appreciate getting notes acting notes i was gonna say am i allowed to ask how's feedback people including myself are not very good at it no he's he's generally he's brilliant we've learned you know how to look after each other in that sense over the years,

what we welcome in each other and what we should probably stay away from. And it works really, really well. It works really smoothly and we both really enjoy it. So that's why we do it. We just have a lot of fun with it. He doesn't do short plays either, so. He really doesn't, not anymore.

He hasn't done, I'm going to have to convince him. I'm going to have to talk to him about, you know, another 85 minute play. That would be great, I'm going to have to convince him. I'm going to have to talk to him about, you know, another 85 minute play. That would be great. Give me time to have dinner afterwards. Well, Laura, it was, it's something that will live long in the memory. If people are able to get to see it, I should say, The Hills of California will be on at the Harold Pinter Theatre

until Saturday, the 15th of June, where we have not one, but two roles being played by our guest today. Laura Donnelly, lovely to talk to you. And you. Thank you so much for giving us a bit of a flavour of that. But also, you know, some of the themes raised, I'm sure you'll be able to relate to and talk to. And thank you so much for your messages today. We've had incredibly powerful ones.

There's another one here, just that sense of something you thought or felt from perhaps an early stage and maybe has come true or hasn't. There's just one here that says, I had a very similar experience. I was talking about my own sense of not being able to have children naturally, where I would say to my mother aged 10, I know I'm not going to be able to have children. I can just tell. And then I got diagnosed with PCOS aged 22. Thank you for feeling like you could share that. No name on that message. You don't always have to put names on, but it's always a pleasure to hear your take and your experiences that's all for today's woman's hour thank you so much for your time join us again for the next one hello i'm david yelland and i'm simon lewis we're the hosts of radio fours when it hits the fan the podcast

which looks at how big names and big companies manage their PR. But what about your own personal PR? How do you better manage your own reputation at work? We're here to help. With a series of special bonus episodes, we'll bring a little wisdom and share some tips to hopefully make you better at that job. Quick Wins is a series of short and snappy episodes with lots of advice aimed at improving your working life. If that sounds useful, then please listen and subscribe on BBC Sounds. Just search for When It Hits The Fan. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered.

There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.