Woman's Hour - Porn review, Maternity inquiry, Dr Laurie Marker, Return of the bullet bra

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

One in three adult pornography users are exposed to violent or abusive content online, with the majority backing new legislation to prevent publication of harmful content. That's according to a survey out today from the British Board of Film Classification. It's also the first meeting today of the Independent Pornography Review Taskforce led by the Conservative peer Baroness Gabby Bertin. Four months on from the publication of her government commissioned review into the challenge of regulating online pornography, Baroness Bertin joins Clare McDonnell in the studio to discuss what's been happening. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said 'we must act now' as he announced a national investigation into maternity care in England. The inquiry, which will look at the ten worst-performing services in the country, as well as the entire maternity system, is designed to be a rapid review reporting by December this year. Families say they feel let down by a system that's supposed to care them and midwives have told us they dread going in to work because of pressures and lack of resources. So will this investigation bring about the lasting change that parents and professionals so badly want? Clare hears from BBC Investigative Journalist Divya Talwar and Clare Walton, chief executive of the Royal College of Midwives.Cheetahs are the fastest land animals in the world with speeds of around 70 miles per hour. Over the past 100 years, the cheetah population has drastically reduced by 90 per cent and it’s estimated that there are less than 7,000 animals still left. Clare speaks to Dr Laurie Marker, who has made it her mission to ensure their survival. She’s the executive director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund based in Namibia. The bullet bra has made a recent return to the catwalk and to the cover of British Vogue, where singer Dua Lipa can be seen sporting a blush satin Miu Miu creation in the July issue. But will the silhouette, once favoured by Marilyn Monroe and Madonna, cut through to the high street? And what does that mean for the comfortable t-shirt bras that have been going strong since lockdown? Julia Hobbs, British Vogue’s contributing senior fashion features editor has recently road-tested the bullet bra. She joins Clare to discuss the experience, along with Karolina Laskowska, a lingerie designer and the director of The Underpinnings Museum. Presenter: Clare McDonnell Producer: Andrea Kidd

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. Hello, this is Clare MacDonald and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Hello and welcome to Woman's Hour. I'm Clare MacDonald with you for the next few days. Now, yesterday, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced a rapid investigation into the worst performing maternity and neonatal services in England. But many families who lost babies in the most horrific circumstances say an investigation is inadequate and what's needed is a full

statutory inquiry. We will talk today to the Royal College of Midwives who say the system is at breaking point and that many of their staff now dread going in for a shift. We'll also hear from the woman who has made it her mission to save one of the most under-threat big cats on the planet, the cheetah. Dr Laurie Marker will join us live from Namibia. Cheetahs have declined by 90% over the past 100 years. She'll tell us how she's trying to reverse that trend. And the conical bra is back. We'll be joined by a journalist from Vogue who test drove

one around London. She did get some funny looks on the tube. So will the rest of us be wearing one in the near future or is it just for the fashionistas? You can text the programme. The number is 84844. Text will be charged at your standard message rate. On social media we are at BBC Women's Hour and you can email us through our website or you can send us a WhatsApp message or voice note using this number 03700 100 444. Data charges may apply depending on your provider so you may want to use Wi-Fi if you can. But we're going to start this morning with some interesting polling out today into the attitudes of pornography users and

these came through a survey conducted by the British Board of Film Classification or the BBFC who spoke to over the British Board of Film Classification, or the BBFC, who spoke to over 2,000 adults who had access to pornography online in the last three months. Now over half of those who responded expressed concern about the levels of violence or abuse depicted in this content. It also found that one in three adult pornography users have been exposed to violent or abusive content online. It comes on the same day as the first meeting of an independent pornography review task force led by the conservative peer Baroness Gabby Bertin. Baroness Bertin, you may remember, is the author of the government commissioned

review into the challenge of regulating online pornography. Four months on now from that review, she joined me in the Woman's Hour studio and I began by asking why she wanted to publish her review. I felt it was just so important because I think it's clear that there are so many people watching online pornography now. I mean, figures would suggest that 18 million people per week are watching pornography. So that is almost a third of the nation. It's huge. What the review found that there was a startling lack of scrutiny, there were no standards and because of the taboo around this subject, people, it's much easier not to talk about

pornography, certainly not very pleasant to talk about harmful pornography. People would rather sort of pretend it isn't happening, but it is in vast quantities. And so one of the key takeaways was that far more scrutiny needs to happen within the industry, but that also the industry is starting to have an effect on society and one of the very very shocking things that we discovered is that over 38% of women have been choked and expect to be choked during sex. I mean how how can that be right? And we have good news on that. The government I think deserves credit because they announced last week that they are actually going to criminalize

depictions of strangulation and suffocation. And that is absolutely right and not a moment too soon. But the other key thing that I found is that you do not have parity with the online world, the standards, the guidelines, the laws that govern online pornography and those incredibly proportionate, you know, perfectly reasonable rules that are in place for good reason in the offline world and that needs to change. Well get on to that. Just to go back to your review, you mentioned banning strangulation in online porn, the government has already moved on that, but you had 32 recommendations. How much progress is being made on the other 31?

Well, so look, I'm an optimist. I think the government, some of these things are complicated and the government is definitely engaging and I met with ministers just yesterday. How you effectively, well I have a strong view you have to uplift the Online Safety Act. We already have a piece of legislation that isn't perfect but it is in place, we work very hard to put the Online Safety Act in place. You can use that legislation to beef up these laws that could protect online standards of pornography. But of course it does take a bit of time, however, we did publish in February, you know, we've had decades of inaction. So I really do urge the

government to move much quicker than they're moving. But we must sort of bank progress where it's banked. And in a sense it gives me more motivation and power to keep going on this. Because whilst it would be ideal that all 32 recommendations were accepted immediately the reality is they have to work through some of these things so it's good that they have announced that strangulation will be criminalized in pornography but it's absolutely right that we keep the pressure on to push through for far more of those recommendations to come. Just give us an example of where your priorities would lie though, give us a couple of examples of the things you think that would be the top of my

intray. So essentially the next key thing is proper external scrutiny of the industry. It would be, it is unthinkable to have a high harm industry, let's take tobacco, gambling, alcohol, they all have scrutiny now, they're not perfect industries by, alcohol, they all have scrutiny. Now they're not perfect industries by any stretch but they are looked at and they're properly regulated. We now need a pornography industry that is properly proactively regulated and scrutinized and that is why I'm very very supportive of an organisation like the BBFC that has expertise in this area to step up and move into the online

world and to make sure that laws are enforced, working with Ofcom of course, but to ensure that any law change and laws that are already in place are enforced, but also to proactively scrutinise. This is not an industry that can mark its own homework. That's what's happening at the moment though isn't it and you mentioned the British Board of Film classification we'll get onto the survey they conducted in a second but do you find that still staggering that they will regulate offline content and categorize it and you know put age-appropriate kind of depictions on it and yet anybody can go online and access all manner of

things in this unregulated way. It's totally staggering. And whilst it's not an easy thing to solve, you can't put it into the sort of it's too difficult to deal with box. It's too, we're too squeamish to deal with it. We're too squeamish to talk about it on the media, which is why I'm so grateful for programs like Women's Hour to really keep going on about this issue. It's huge and it's affecting our lives. It's changing society, it's particularly changing how young people are having sex, how they view each other, how they view themselves. There is no doubt in my mind that the rise of misogyny and violence against women and girls is being driven by

this extreme content that can be viewed online. and also no doubt that it's affecting our sons as well. You know boys are victims as well as girls and so it just cannot be in that too difficult box and if a government is serious about prevention and serious about the targets they've set themselves which I fully support and want to see them succeed in that they cannot ignore this issue. It's interesting because users themselves, as illustrated in the survey today, have reservations, don't they, about what they see? This is the BBFC again, polling out today finds the majority of pornography users themselves agree that there needs to be a change. The survey also found that 80% of users support the new laws to prevent publication of violent

or abusive pornography online, which comes in line with existing offline regulation as discussed. So how surprised were you that people who access porn actually are saying we don't want to see this level of violence? Well, I actually wasn't that surprised because I have I kind of have faith in society. I don't think people are logging on to see this kind of content particularly. I think they would much rather as this poll shows, you know, I don't judge. This has never been my review, by the way, was not some moral crusade. It wasn't a judgy review.

I accept that pornography exists and that's why we've got sort of get it into the right place. And it doesn't surprise me at all. And I, my team and you know myself, we have to go online and see what is happening on there and some of the, I mean let's not sugarcoat what we're talking about here. We're talking about content with titles that talk about killing women. We're talking about content with titles that encourages fathers to have sex with young daughters. I mean this is really grim, completely

wrong stuff that will be totally illegal offline and it doesn't surprise me at all that you know you may want to watch pornography for a lot of reasons but I don't think the majority of people want to log on and see that kind of content. How did that leave you feeling watching that? Well it leaves me feeling that we are being you know this content is being sorry how does that leave you feeling watching that? Well it leaves me feeling that we are being, you know, this content is being, sorry, how does it leave me feeling watching that content? Well just knowing it's there and then you have to go and do your research and watch it. No, I mean it's driven me on, it has been a northern star for me really, a guiding light and I, to be perfectly honest,

would rather never talk about this issue again. I mean people genuinely avoid sitting next to me during lunch because they're terrified what's going to come out of my mouth about this because I feel impassioned. We cannot just sit by and be a generation of, in my case, legislators who allow this to carry on. It's just, it's not right and we owe it to our children to make these changes. I just want to pick you up on that point you said, I'm not squeamish and I accept that porn is out there. People listening to this will say, we are adults. Aren't you limiting people's ability to make that free choice about what they do choose to watch?

No, I mean quite the opposite. We never had these debates around the very proportionate, sensible rules that are in place for offline pornography. This is, by the way, you know, Mrs Smith in 22 Acacia Avenue will always be slightly shocked by online pornography. I'm not for a second suggesting that somehow we police people's sex lives. I'm a liberal conservative. Essentially, consenting adults should be able to do what they want. But this is not that. This is not freedom of speech. This is not sexual liberation. This is violent, degrading content that is, whether you're 15 or 55, you shouldn't be seeing.

You have the first meeting today of your independent task force. So give us an idea of who is on this task force. And I guess the the question is if you've just had a review why do we need this? Well we need this because you know the reality of reviews and I was in government you order a review and you're very pleased with it when it's published but do you have as a government you've got lots of competing priorities you do need outside voices and outside pressure to really force you to do some of these things and that is just the reality. So my view was we need to set up a task force, not just of the brilliant people who talk about this day in day out, by the way they are members

as well, we have Barnardo's, we have charities like Cease, you know the BBFC are members, but also we need people who are outside of the industry. So we have BT, a represented former, the former CEO of EE, MNC Sarchi are represented. This is a powerful group of business leaders, of tech leaders, of policing. We have senior police on there as well. We have a former HMI inspector of constabulary and fire service. It's a very powerful group of people who actually have a huge amount of influence and expertise, but also we know that the government is engaging, we know that the government is, I think, with a good amount of encouragement will try and

get into the right place and we have allies in the government you know I know that Jess Phillips wants to push on this and that is why I think it is important to keep going. Yes and we have a statement from the government saying as we've already mentioned the strangulation issue they've already dealt with that they also say we've banned the creation of sexually explicit deep fakes without consent since March and they say violence against women and girls is a national emergency which is why our government is

committing committed rather to halving it within a decade so they say they're very much on your side do you think they're moving quickly enough? No I don't think they are and I think that's why I'm still going at this because they need to have like I said there are competing priorities, but I know that they're, that, you know, my experience from government is sometimes you need those outside voices, that outside pressure to move you on quicker. What do you say then to women listening to this now who might be worried about pornography use? It could be the men in their lives, it could be their own pornography use. Because as you say, you know, you go down that route and all of a sudden, and it doesn't take very long, you see all kinds of things that you may not want to see, but you may get sucked

into that world or you may be worried about somebody else. What would you say to them? Well, I would say that this is something that I talked about quite a bit in the report. We need to raise much more awareness around problematic pornography use. We obviously, as we've discussed, need to raise the standards. We need to make it a much safer place. We also, by the way, need to make it much safer for the people working in the industry. You know, we're talking about standards around content and holding the industry to account on that but also do the women in this, in the content, do they have their consent? Can they withdraw their consent? Are they over 18?

You know, what kind of safety protocols are put in place and I want to reassure anyone listening to this that I'm not going to stop going on about this until action is taken. What was it that drove you to get involved in this in the first place? Because it seems like it's something that hugely matters to you. You see the effect it's having on generations coming up in society. What drives you to make this difference? Well I was a campaigner. When I first went into the Lord's, one of the things I really wanted to try and use that platform that I had huge privilege to have was to talk much more about violence against women and girls, particularly around domestic abuse.

And so a lot of us would be making many speeches, we'd be changing the law, we'd be, you know, Theresa May was the Prime Minister, that was her big thing. And I'm forever grateful for her to putting that onto the sort of political mainstream, the map, you know, around domestic abuse. But there we were making speeches and then you think to yourself, well, so here we are publicly saying this is wrong, we must stop this and then the subterranean world of online porn says anything goes, the violence and if you're not stopping that, which is going into beaming into people's bedrooms living rooms every single day we know the statistics then it's all a waste of time so that's what drives me.

And what would look like success for you? What would look like success? Well age verification which we must acknowledge is going to come in in July. A ten-year-old boy or a ten-year-old girl not encountering porn by accident, that would be success and we have to really try and help Ofcom and the regulators to succeed in that. Success for me would be a space where pornography exists, yes of course it will always exist, but that we are not witnessing violence, misogyny and standards that just would never be allowed offline and that for me would be success. Baroness Gabby Burton, thank you so much for talking to us on Woman's Hour.

Thank you. Baroness Gabby Burton there speaking to me earlier and that task force meets for the first time this morning. You're listening to Woman's Hour, another day, another investigation into maternity services. Yesterday Health Secretary Wes Streeting launched a national investigation into NHS maternity services in England, saying that maternity units are failing, hospitals are failing, trusts are failing and regulators are failing and that there has been too much passing the buck. Now the inquiry which will look at the ten worst performing services in the country as well as the entire maternity system

is designed to be a rapid review reporting by December this year but it's only looking into services in England. Families say they feel let down by a system that's supposed to care for them and midwives have told us they dread going into work because of the pressures and lack of resources. We're going to hear from midwives shortly. The big question is will this investigation bring about the lasting change that parents and the professionals so badly want? And I'd love to hear your experience this morning. What would have made the difference to your maternity care? Looking back on it you can text womanzao on 84844. Let us know what you went through and with hindsight what would have made a

difference to you. 84844. First, we're going to take a look at the review itself with BBC investigative reporter Divya Talwar who's been taking a deep dive into this over the last six months. Divya, good morning. Good morning. Okay, let's look at this rapid review that Westreeting has announced. What's the aim of it?

Well, in the last 15 years or so, there's been scandal after scandal after scandal when it comes to maternity. We had Morecombe Bay, we had East Kent, Shrewsbury Telford, and you'll know now that Nottingham, the trust there, is now facing one of the biggest maternity reviews in the history of the NHS. Some 2500 cases are being examined and so this is a big problem. And Westreeting has been really strong, he's used very emotive language, he's sorry, this needs to change. And so the aim of this investigation, rapid being the key term being used, is to deliver change quickly. So there's going to be two parts to this investigation. One is going to look at up to 10 of the worst performing NHS trusts. We understand that Leeds Teaching Hospitals is going to make

up one of those trusts. Over the last six months months I've been reporting on issues at Leeds, avoidable deaths of mums and babies. Back in January, we reported that 56 babies had potentially died, and that could have been prevented with better care. So huge issues here at individual trusts. But alongside that, there's also going to be this system-wide look at maternity and neonatal services across England. And that's also going to pull together all the recommendations and reviews from previous reviews so that there is a coherent, clear single set of recommendations that can be implemented across England. Ultimately, the aim here is to improve maternity safety so that no other

baby or mother faces avoidable harm. I know you've been speaking, as you said, to families who have been affected by this and they've been campaigning for years for a statutory national inquiry. So how happy are they with this rapid review? You've just outlined so much has gone wrong. How much ground can you cover in a meaningful way by the end of the year? Well behind the scenes West Streeting has been meeting some of the brief families to get their input. So he met them before Christmas and then again last week he had a number of meetings that included families from Nottingham,

that included families from Leeds and Sussex and essentially they feel like this is a step, a step forward but not nearly far enough to really get to the bottom of this and to solve the problems. Essentially what a lot of the family wants is a independent public inquiry and the difference there would be that it would have statutory powers, perhaps it's led by a judge and essentially it would compel people to come forward that would compel witnesses to come forward and they would have to tell the truth and essentially families say that is the only way we are going to get to the truth and we are going to get accountability.

And you can see their point can't you you, because Divya, we've had a lot of reviews and inquiries. There was the 2016 National Maternity Review, also known as Better Births, a report in 2021 by the Health and Social Care Committee on maternity safety, which highlighted blame culture, preventing lessons being learnt. We've had the Ockenden review, of course, into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust. So lots of reviews but still poor delivery on maternity services. That's right Claire, there's been review after review after review. There was also the East Kent review led by Bill Kirkup. So there is no shortage of reviews. We know some of the issues. The problem is that the recommendations from those various reviews haven't been implemented for some reason. Also, there have been deep dives into individual trusts, whereas there isn't a kind

of single coherent set of recommendations about what needs to be done. It's also broadly left to the individual trust to implement those recommendations and learnings. Clearly something is going wrong because the same recommendations keep coming after review after review, change is not happening. Well yeah. This hopefully is going to get to the bottom of that. Yeah, worrying those recommendations haven't been implemented and nobody seems to be asking why. One of the most shocking statistics that Wes Streeting shared yesterday during his announcement is that we are paying out more in clinical negligence for maternity failures than we are spending on maternity services. It

doesn't make good sense for the taxpayer or patients. So that's a shocking statistic, isn't it? Really, you pay out more for things when they go wrong than you put in to help them stay right. Talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, obstetrics payouts are huge. I was looking into just one trust alone, Leeds, over the last five years they've paid out 70 million to families following injury including

fatalities, stillbirth. That is a huge number following mistakes that ideally shouldn't have happened. So there is an issue here again which this investigation is likely going to look at what is going wrong. There's also an issue here again, which this investigation is likely going to look at, what is going wrong. There's also an issue here around the whole kind of legal challenge that parents have to endure, because often what I've been told is that the trusts are not very forthcoming with the mistakes that they have made.

Families are then having to endure a very lengthy legal process. And at the end of it, you know, few years down, only then does the trust admit liability for what's gone wrong. Again, that's costly because NHS resolution is having to pay for the long drawn out legal process. So the system is broken in many, many ways.

And I'm sure that the investigation, the terms of reference haven't been drawn out. We don't know who's going to chair it. We don't know the people that are going to be key here. What we do know is that West Reading has said that the families are going to co-produce this. So they're going to work with him to be involved in the investigation, to be involved in which trusts are going to be looked at. And we assume, I think it's fair to assume, that some of the issues that are going to be looked at is culture, staffing, ideology around natural birth

and the issues that that leads to, the use of lawyers and litigation. So it's going to be quite far-reaching. However, it is a rapid review. So how much is it actually going to unveil? Divya, thank you so much. BBC investigative reporter Divya Talwar. Let's talk now or hear from a very important voice in all of this argument, the midwife. I'm joined by Jill

Walton, chief executive of the Royal College of Midwives. Welcome, Jill. Good morning. Okay, your reaction then to what Wes Streeting announced yesterday, this rapid review, your thoughts? We're welcoming a rapid review. As Divya said there's been investigation after investigation, hundreds of recommendations that actually haven't been implemented on the whole. There's lots of players in this field and so we welcome it. Rapid, it has to be rapid.

We've been all waiting for a long time for maternity care to get safer and better and the stories that we hear all the time are devastating for women and families and also from the staff who are working under this constant pressure where they absolutely know every day they go to work to do their best and quite often are thwarted in doing that. They don't have enough staff, they don't have enough equipment, they don't have enough time to listen to women and when there is a poor outcome well that's a whole other world that actually is so frustrating for everybody. So we really welcome the review. We think it's rapid, that's good, the recommendations, I suspect we'll see all the things we already know. But this is a woman's service for women,

delivered mainly by women, and the attention to it keeps falling off the agenda. And we want it right on the top. This is the thing, isn't it? It probably will tell you what you already know. So the next question is how you fix it. And that's a resources issue, surely, or is it just that? Is it getting more midwives through the system to attract more midwives to this profession?

What do you think's going wrong? I think that's part of it, but I think it's complex, really. There's a number of things, for example, around culture, for example. All the maternity and neonatal team need to work together in a trusting environment, not competing against each other, putting women and families very firmly at the centre of care, listening to them, having time to listen to them, and making sure that, you know, that their views and their needs and wants of their experience

of pregnancy and birth can be fulfilled. And they're all different. No woman is the same. You know, we have women wanting births in the middle of fields and those wanting more medical intervention you could ever think of, and those that need medical intervention as well. So how do we create a system that really puts women firmly at the centre of care and all the professionals working around them? Now

Claire you will know this, the midwife is key in this. If we have enough midwives to provide every woman the right standard of care and time to listen to her, that is when midwives can be their advocates and make sure that all of that care is available for her. Sometimes the care itself though isn't good enough. This is what a lot of women say. This is what I mean listening to these tragic stories. As you say it's a service run for women by women and women not listening to other women and lots of people are getting in touch with women's out this morning. This text Claire, this isn't just about baby deaths

it's about respect for mothers. My daughter had a baby in Nottingham and she was told she could not leave her baby with anyone or take her baby to the bathroom so she could not have a shower having given birth. She was also given no support for breastfeeding. That's one. This one, I was referred many times for mental health support during my pregnancy, which never materialized. The reason was because I wanted a C-section to suggest that I must be mentally unwell

for having a preference for my delivery. My pregnancy had complications and the baby was very big, made me feel stressed and unsupported. Just a couple of the stories, I have many, many more. But what do you say to that? Because clearly sometimes the service women get just isn't good enough. Oh, absolutely.

And I think that's the frustration of, you know, midwives talk to us a lot and their frustration that they cannot provide the care they really want to, that they're trained to provide is just shocking. I mean, that story about don't leave your baby, that's because there's not enough staff to provide that support in a postnatal ward. I mean postnatal care is another angle where it has absolutely fallen off the scale in terms of not being able to do what it needs to do to support new parents. But midwives tell us that previously, say 15,

you said 15, 20 years ago care was probably going in the right direction. It just, it stopped. That development and the right care for women just slowed down, where appointments could be half an hour or even an hour for women in the community so that you had time to hear about what they wanted and what their worries were. Well now, you know, there's just not enough time. It's 10, 20 minutes at the most for appointments in the community. That is absolutely not enough.

Do you accept that some of your members may need to do better? And I'll just give you this example. What would have made the difference to me would have been a maternity team who cared, who listened to me instead of treating me like a child or a piece of meat, who didn't scorn my concerns and make me feel like I was being dramatic. I wasn't. My daughter was stuck behind my pubic bone and was presenting elbow first, arm tucked under her head. She was born not breathing due to dismissive, uncaring and rude midwife not listening.

We are both fine now. There are many stories like that. How do you weedle out the people who really aren't delivering the service that these women deserve? Yes and I think that's true and I think some of it is that midwives are literally just putting their heads down and doing as much as they can and some of that caring stuff goes out the window and that's shocking to hear and that can't happen. But those staff need caring for too. You know, the morale in maternity teams and neonatal teams is really low.

And when you're feeling not valued and unable to give safe care, it gets worse, not better. So I think it's about everybody in this space coming together collectively and saying what is it that we all want and we will all want the same thing and working together to make sure it absolutely happens this time and I think we have a collective responsibility so that's women, maternity teams, midwives, everybody, the public to hold West Street into account, to really change maternity services once and for all. So these stories are never on this programme again,

because it's really important that we all stick together in this. Well, we would love that to happen. Thank you so much for joining us. That is Jill Walton, Chief Executive of the Royal College of Midwives. And keep your texts coming in. We'll try and get through as many as we can.

The text number 84844. What is the one thing that would have made the difference when you were giving birth? What kind of service did you want? What kind of service did you get? 84844. You are listening to Woman's Hour. I'm Andini and I'm looking back on the life of a Hollywood icon whose legacy lives on through more than just her film roles. She was someone who was interested in invention all her life. She wasn't that interested in the film that she was supposed to be starring in. She was much more interested in the latest invention that she was working on.

Who developed an idea so revolutionary that it's still being used today. Frequency hopping. It was used for secure military communications. It's in GPS, it's in WiFi, it's in Bluetooth. From the BBC World Service, Untold Legends, Hedy Lamarr. Available now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Now here's a question. What would inspire a woman to leave her comfortable job in the

wine industry in California and move 10,000 miles away to the far reaches of Namibia? Well that's exactly what Dr. Laurie Malker did to pursue her passion, ensuring the survival of the cheetah. Over the past 100 years, the cheetah population has drastically reduced by 90 percent, and it's estimated that there are less than 7000 animals still left. So she's taken on a huge challenge. Dr Laurie Marker is the executive director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund based in Namibia and she joins me from there now. Welcome to Woman's Hour. Well thank you very much it's very nice to join you. Fabulous to have you on the program. Now let's go back to where your passion for this

began. You were brought up in California but this was very much a kind of you grew up in a family that had a love of animals, a love of wildlife. Tell us about your childhood. Well very much. Well I grew up basically on the back of a horse and had a lot of different farm animals coming from a farming family. I had dairy goats and I had rabbits. So I moved from California actually up to Oregon to pioneer the Oregon wine industry. And then from there, the Wildlife Safari, which is a wildlife park, had just opened in the early 1970s. And that's when I started there right at the beginning. And that's when I saw my first cheetah. And from there, I've spent a long time trying to find out more about how to save them with

all the problems that they're facing. What was that moment like then, when you saw your first cheetah in the wild? Just amazing. Just, you know, they are, I call them speed and elegance. There's nothing more beautiful than a cheetah. The way they run and the way they actually feed the veld. They're a pretty special species actually overall. And when did you discover this shocking statistic that the cheetah population down by, excuse me, 90 percent, when did you realize how much

peril they were in? Well that was in the early 1970s. And I was in Oregon and I was running their breeding program. Cheetahs don't breed well in captivity. And we were one of the few places in the world that actually had cheetahs in Oregon at the Wildlife Safari. And I was given the opportunity to learn all that I could. And I wrote to people around the world and they said, when you find out something about cheetahs, let us know. They have a short lifespan, they're not breeding well in captivity and we're losing them in the wild. And then in the middle 1970s I had an opportunity to do groundbreaking research in Namibia where I am now and I was my research was actually to find out

if a captive-born cheetah could learn how to hunt. So I ended up here in Namibia with the cheetah that had been born in Oregon. I did teach her how to hunt, but probably more importantly, I found that farmers were killing cheetahs like flies, eight to 900 a year. They had no concept about how the cheetah lived.

They knew nothing about the cheetah's endangerment. And I thought, well, I've got to let the world know that the cheetah needs help. And as I tried to share what I had learned, not only in Namibia, then traveled throughout many other areas of Africa, people were not all that interested. There were very few conservation organizations in the 70s and 80s, and my research continued in captivity. I then moved to the Smithsonian Institution,

and at that point in Washington, D.C., I decided, well, I'm just going to go and save the cheetah. So I'll set up a foundation, which is the Cheetah Conservation Fund, and packed my bag, sold my life's belongings. And at Namibia's independence in 1990, I moved to Namibia to save the cheetah. So it's been quite an interesting process, because it's not really a normal thing that people do. No, it certainly isn't, which is why we're talking to you. Just to go back to the farmers, there seems to be a lot of ignorance. Why were they killing the cheetahs? Was it to protect their livestock? What understanding did they have of the cheetahs?

Well, that was it. And what I wanted to find out was why they were killing so many cheetahs. Was it because they were killing that much of their livestock or was it a perceived threat? And so I actually went door to door talking with the farmers. When I moved here to Namibia, I had quite a reputation actually here that here I was a young American woman who had brought a cheetah over to, it's like coals to Newcastle. And when I started then my in-depth work and trying to talk with the livestock farming community, I learned all about their systems. And with that, asked what they needed from myself as a researcher to help them help me

save the cheetah for future generations. Now, it's interesting because most cheetahs are not found in protected areas. They're found outside of protected areas because of the conflict with other large predators, lions and hyenas. And so 80% of all cheetahs in the world remaining are found outside. So we had to then learn how the livestock farmers were managing their livestock.

And we've developed a program we call Future Farmers of Africa now by using what we've learned and helping the farmers actually manage their livestock much better and healthier. At the same time, have developed programs like the use of livestock guarding dogs where we breed in place a very big breed an Anatolian Shepherd also known as the Kangal dog, which is a Turkish

breed, which has been used for about 5000 years. And we actually place these dogs with the livestock when they're young, and they grow up to protect the livestock. And over the last 30 years, we put over 800 of these dogs out with the livestock and farmers. And we have found 80 to a hundred percent reduction of livestock loss by using the livestock guarding dogs and not just cheetahs, but other predators as well. So a lot of it was to try to find out what they needed to know. They knew nothing about how the cheetah

was living on their land. And so we developed a ecological program. We radio callers, satellite callars on the cheetahs, we use camera traps, and have been able to find the cheetahs have one of the largest ranges of any animal, actually, land mammal over 1500 square kilometers, or 800 square miles as a home range for these animals. And so then we started developing other programs, school other programs,

school education programs, we've got a genetics laboratory, continued our extensive research, but it's really about people that if we can share enough information and work with the farming communities, then we can actually help save the cheetah. And this goes not only for cheetahs,

but actually we as humans are fighting against all predators and predators play such an important role in the health of our ecosystems. Cheetahs for instance help feed the vell when they make a kill. Every other animal, small mammal, birds, even insects eat off of the cheetah's kill so they're helping maintain a healthy biodiversity as well. And I guess the other question is, if you, I mean, obviously it's imperative to preserve this species, but also if you do, people might want to come and look at this species. Eco-tourism brings in a lot of money, doesn't it, really? Is that taking off?

Very much so. And Namibia, I have to say, is one of the leaders in Africa in living with, in harmony with nature. We work very closely with Namibia and several other countries on the development of conservancies, which conservancies are where communities are engaged in managing their natural resources. And with this then, if you have more wildlife, obviously more visitors will come in. So in Namibia, we pride ourselves in our wildlife management and our community engagement, as well as our government support of wildlife. So Namibia is a country where we definitely welcome visitors to come see. We welcome people to come up to the Cheetah Conservation Fund. We have a 50,000-hectare reserve. We do have orphan Cheetahs, sadly, at our center, where many of them we are able to rehab back out into the wild. We also have another center

up in the Horn of Africa, which we've developed out of Somaliland. And there our problems have been for the Cheetah is the illegal wildlife pet trade, where the cheetahs are actually captured from the wild as tiny cubs and then sold illegally into the pet trade. And so we've been working on two sides trying to stop this by developing conservancies and educational programs like we've developed in Namibia, in Somaliland and in Ethiopia, at the same time working with the demand countries, which have been in the Middle East,

to try to help share with them that wildlife should stay in the wild and wild animals are not good pets. And we actually welcome visitors and interns and volunteers actually to work with us to assist us in the work that we are doing. Well listen you are a fantastic advert for this work. Just very briefly you're a woman who sold her life belongings and pursued her dream. There may be many many women listening to this who think I want to do that not necessarily move to Namibia and save the cheetah but what would you say to people about pursuing their lifelong passions? Well, I think we have these passions and it's important to figure out if we can and how

to go about it. And partnering with other organizations that might be similar with similar dreams is also important, but we just think that everybody should try to, you know, do something. At least get out of the square box and I welcome people to help me help save the cheetah. Go to our website cheetah.org and learn more about what we do and see maybe even the structures that we're doing to maybe get you encouraged to do something more actively too. Brilliant to have you on. Absolutely fantastic. So interesting. Thanks for joining us Dr Laurie Marker, Executive Director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund as you heard based in Namibia where she was talking to us live from Namibia. Thank you all for your texts as well

on maternity services. This, I'm a recently retired midwife for years and years. We have been telling management that we need more staff to be safe. No one listens. They only condemn and criticize. Most shifts I worked latterly were unsafe at most levels. The working additions were appalling. And this, from the get-go, I decided to have an independent midwife. It was the best decision I made, cost less money than a family holiday.

I decided this after a few meetings with my allocated midwife As she seemed unsupportive I got the feeling that if I went forward with the NHS My experience would have been an unhappy one. This was 29 years ago and it sounds as if things have not changed since that is from Lottie. Thanks for getting in touch Lottie. You still have time to text the program. BBC Women's Hour, the number you need 84844. Now, let's move on to talk about a bit of a trend from the 90s that seems to be making a bit of a comeback. The bullet bra, the iconic silhouette made famous by movie stars like Marilyn Monroe, revisited, of course, by the hit drama Mad Men and reinvented

by Madonna in those Jean Paul Gaultier corsets. It recently made a return to the catwalk on the cover of British Vogue as well, whose July issue features Dua Lipa sporting a blush satin muu muu creation. But will it make it to the high street? That's what you're asking yourself. I'm asking myself. And could we be persuaded to ditch our t-shirt bras in favor of the bullet bra 2.0? I'm joined in the studio by Julia Hobbs, British Vogue's contributing senior fashion features editor who recently road tested the bullet bra for the magazine. Julia, welcome. Hello, thank you for having me Claire. Brave woman. And you went out in public in it. And Karolina Leszkowska, lingerie designer and

director of the Underpinnings Museum, an online archive documenting women's underwear from the 18th century to the current day. Karolina, welcome. Thank you, it's lovely to be here. This is really, really fascinating. So we get a bit of up-to-date, you know, what's going on in the trends and the history of it as well. You, Julia, called this bra in your piece devastatingly perky. So describe it for us and tell us where you wore it and how you wore it. Well, I'm actually wearing a bullet bra right now for our listeners at home, I am. And you didn't notice.

No, I didn't notice. OK, so the Miu Miu bra appeared on the runway. It was shown at Paris Fashion Week back in February. And it's part of the Autumn Winter 25 collection. And this gives you a kind of insight as to the trends that are coming in. This bra was a thing of great beauty. And when we saw it on the runway, I thought, okay, I have to see this thing. I have to try it out in real life and see how it fares in reality.

So it ended up on my desk. And sure enough, it was pinched off my desk and sent to the photo shoot, which became the cover image of Dua Lipa on this month's issue of Vogue and really that image struck us all in how strong she looks and I really love that image of Dua Lipa where she has her gorgeous kind of sculpted physique and she looks very powerful and she talks in this month's issue about feeling very strong in her body. I wore this bra on the tube. I wore this bra to the office. I wore this bra on the tube, I wore this bra to the office, I wore this bra on the street, I got some pretty strange looks on the Bakerloo

line, I've got to be honest. How did you wear it? How did you style it? Well I styled it on top of a gingham shirt, which I actually, it's not how I wear it now, and as you can tell I've become a bit of a convert to the bullet bra, but we'll probably get to that later. I wore it on top of as you can tell, I've become a bit of a convert to the bullet bra, but we'll probably get to that later. I wore it on top of a gingham shirt and it definitely attracted some looks. I did that because I wanted to see the reaction.

This was scientific research, all in the name of fashion journalism. Men and women? Men and women, really strange looks. People I think would glare at it and then avert their eyes very swiftly. My colleagues, who I'm very close to luckily, kind of booped it like you would a Labrador's nose, the points.

But as, and I did feel daft, but then as the day wore on and I went to go out that evening after road testing in the office, I wore underneath a very simple white vest, which is probably something that a lot of your listeners have in their wardrobe. And at that moment, I felt like I was wearing it for myself. It felt very purposeful. I caught a glimpse of my silhouette and I loved that it was taking up space and felt quite angular and it was unusual. Yeah. I mean, I thought the whole purpose of this was to actually show it off, not cover it up I could see you've got it on now. But is that not you know, we think back to Madonna and I said you're a leaper

And Sabrina Carpenter and people like that who very much got the kind of laundry on the outside again Is that not the point of this kind of statement? I think you can wear it how you like and And exactly as you say, we have these phenomenal women in pop music, Charlie XCX, Lorde, Sabrina Carpenter, Addison Rae, who will perform in underwear or pieces that look like underwear. There's a real power to that. It's reclaiming sexuality.

It's owning sexuality. These are really formidable women who are using underwear to demonstrate strength, I think, not titillation. Caroline, let's bring you in. Do you think that's the point of something like this? It's very structured, it's a real statement. It's not the same as kind of maybe putting something on that it's a little bit more, I don't know, titillating for the male or female gaze. Well, I personally think that something like the bullet bra, it'sillating for the male or female gaze. Well I personally think that something like the bullet bra it's not really for the male, the revival I mean, it is not for the male gaze,

it is something that we're not used to seeing, we're not used to that silhouette anymore, that it is something that I think is a very very powerful thing that someone can wear for themselves and what I think is also really interesting we're talking about this trend coming back, we're seeing it on the runway. The bra is being worn as a piece of outerwear. It's being worn, designed to be seen. When we think back to the origins of the bullet bra, which was kind of the mid 20th century,

maybe a little bit earlier, the purpose of that was to support the fashionable outer clothing of the time. That's such a big difference, I think, in how this trend has come around. The focus is on the bra, not on supporting the outer clothes. Yeah and it's interesting isn't it because I think Lana Turner was the first film star to wear it, Marilyn Monroe of course famously. So that was to accentuate what you're saying Carolina, the female physique underneath the clothing and we've seen it

in Mad Men recently as well but that's not what's happening here. I don't think so. I think this is more so than ever in history I think one of the wonderful things about beautiful lingerie now is that people more and more are wearing it for themselves. It's for their own self expression, it's for their own you know celebration of self and you know at the end of the day these are just stunningly beautiful objects when you I was looking at photos of this Mew Mew Brar earlier and it's just so beautifully constructed it's a piece of couture. That's a great word because it's a fantastic front cover for Vogue and it really is eye-catching and

it just it's just a beautiful beautiful thing isn't it really is that how you see it Julia? Well the interesting thing is that when this was shown on the runway, it was very unexpected. As Carolina says, I think there's a new generation that's looking at this bra through a new lens. It means something different. There was a very interesting quote from Mrs. Prada backstage at the show where she talked about these objects of femininity. So the bra, the brooch, and she also did stoles. And she spoke about these as a kind of comment on fashion in times of war. And there was a very wartime look and feel to that show. I mean, there's a lot of kind of socio-political foldings that go into our underpinnings.

Let's bring, yeah, Carolina, let's talk about that because when we talk about Madonna, for example, in the Jean-Paul Gaultier, Conor Cobra corset, you are a fan of the corset, but many women listening to this would say, you know, that's, it's very restrictive and designed by men for women, an instrument to torture. I don't think we have time for this. Okay. Can you do it in a minute? Fundamentally, I fundamentally disagree. Okay, take it away. Okay, so if we look at corsets, if we look at the kind of the grand scale of history, the main thing women's underwear did was it provided

support, it supported outer garments, it gave a fashionable silhouette and it supported them through the day. So corsets at their kind of earliest iteration, it was their version of a bra. That's what fashion technology supported at the time. That's what textile technology supported at the time. And the corset never went away. It just evolved. And I think there's been a lot of kind of negative propaganda around the corset. Kind of, it's been easy to blame for a lot of problems, but it's a slightly ahistoric approach. And I find it really interesting that the corset gets this kind of view, whereas high heels don't, which I think are far more restrictive, very common to this day. And it's just a very, very interesting comparison to make. And what's

also very interesting is you see in the 19th century towards the end of it you saw a lot of people start to demonize the corset claim it caused lots of health problems you look at who these people were they were men who were trying to launch a different kind of corset and trying to market it like Dr Warner for example of the Warner Underwear Corporation that still exists today. We all need to come to your underpinnings website, don't we? Yeah, I guess so. Myself included. Julia, I just want to say, I mean, have we come full circle? Because we've all kind of been living in brands like Skims, they've been hugely successful.

The Uniqlo vests with built-in bras, selling out fast. You know, loungewear during COVID, post-COVID is kind of what ate up the market. So are women ready to go back to this very structured underwear? Is that comfortable? Yes, I love, I love, love, love wearing this bra. It's, I, I agree with you. I think we've come through this period of very soft clothing, you know, the athleisure trend that has dominated, I think, now a decade. Now there is definitely a sense that we want to dress

quite mindfully and quite purposefully. And there is something to be said about starting your day, thinking about your underwear, thinking about the basis and sort of almost bolstering yourself for the day ahead. I certainly really enjoyed it. And I think, you know, I'm a fashion editor, I'm always going to be looking for new silhouettes and new ideas and I think this is something that's very simple to execute and it's it's fun. Carolina, I guess your everyday starts with you thinking about underwear.

It's your job. But why should the rest of us do that? Why should we embrace the love of underwear? Because I think it's embracing a love for yourself. I think that beautiful underwear can be a celebration of yourself, of your sexuality, of femininity, any way you want. It's a form of self-expression. And because it's hidden beneath your clothes, it's for you. You are the only one who knows, unless you wish to share it with another person, which is entirely a personal choice. And yeah, I just think on a basic level, beautiful lingerie, you can really, really appreciate as a level of craft and design. And in some ways, it can be a piece of wearable sculpture. And the more women, you know, people that embrace that, I think is a

wonderful thing. Julia, will the conical bra be coming to a high street near us soon, do you think? Okay, confession. I don't think we're going to see the very extreme silhouette coming to a high street near you, but I think we will definitely see the trickle-down effect of a more pointed silhouette. I've had a little sneak peek of some of the collections coming through from London designers for autumn and they definitely lean into this look. Okay we'll brace ourselves for that incoming. Julia Hobbs and Karolina Leszkowska, thank you so much for joining us here on Woman's Hour. Just to say have you been impacted by what you've heard on this morning's program regarding maternity services? There is information and advice on the BBC Action Line website, so go there. But thank you so much for joining

me this morning. BBC Woman's Hour. We will be back tomorrow at 10. Talk to you then. That's all from today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. Hello, I'm Nick Robinson. You might be tired of switching on the news, hearing those pre-rehearsed sound bites, the lines to take from those who shape our lives. When politics is as fragmented, as unpredictable, as fraught as it is now, it can be hard to cut through the noise. That is precisely my aim on Political Thinking, my podcast from BBC Radio 4. I have extended conversations with those who shape our political thinking.

I try to get to the heart of what makes these people tick, what lies behind what you're seeing or hearing on the news. That's Political Thinking with me, Nick Robinson. You can listen on BBC Sounds. I'm Andini, and I'm looking back on the life of a Hollywood icon whose legacy lives on through more than just her film roles. She was someone who was interested in invention all her life.

She wasn't that interested in the film that she was supposed to be starring in. She was much more interested in the latest invention that she was working on. Who developed an idea so revolutionary that it's still being used today. Frequency hopping. It was used for secure military communications. It's in GPS, it's in Wi-Fi, it's in Bluetooth. From the BBC World Service, Untold Legends, Hedy Lamarr. Available now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.