Woman's Hour - Toxic Masculinity, Women & running, Judith Gough UK Ambassador to Sweden

Episode Date: October 5, 2019

Drag queen, Courtney Act - real name Shane Jenek, Jordan Stephens from the hip hop duo Rizzle Kicks, and the Chief Executive of the ‘Men and Boys Coalition’, Dan Bell discuss what the term Toxic Masculinity means to them and how it makes them feel. Why are more women choosing running over other sports when it comes to staying fit? Dame Kelly Holmes talks about the influence of athletes like Dina Asher-Smith, Rachel Baker tells us how running helped her lose weight and Jens Jakob Andersen has researched data with the International Association of Athletics Federations.The international bestselling novelist Johana Gustawsson’s latest book ‘Blood Song’ draws on her own experiences of IVF and her struggle to conceive. Johana and her husband Mattias tell us about finding out about his infertility and their need for a sperm donor.Judith Gough the now UK Ambassador to Sweden tells us about her job and her four year position in the Ukraine.Chrisann Jerrett and Dami Makinde discuss their charity We Belong. They set it up to help young people who came to the UK as children, start the process for legal status.We hear about the impact of so called ‘Superfans’ on female music journalists. Wanna Thompson tells us how a tweet she sent about Nicki Minaj went viral and Hannah Ewens a journalist from Vice discusses what motivates ‘superfans’.The author Jojo Moyes talks about new novel ‘The Giver of Stars’ based on the true story of the Horseback Librarians of Kentucky.Presenter: Jane Garvey Producer: Rabeka Nurmahomed Editor: Lucinda Montefiore

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, good afternoon and welcome to the weekend edition of Woman's Hour, our highlights of the week. And this week we'll discuss the impact of the expression toxic masculinity on men and we look at women and the appeal of running. Why are many more of us now choosing it as our sport of choice? I was walking around the park with my little boys one day and my little one suddenly learnt to ride his bike and I had to run after him. And I was like, oh, I can do this. And I weighed 20 stone at that time. So I then went home, downloaded the Couch to 5K app and started running.

There were many Sunday mornings where if you were in that park, you probably would have seen 20 stone me running around crying at some points. Really impressive story that and you can hear it on this edition of the programme. Also, two young women who came to this country at the age of just eight. Tell us why their legal status stopped them from going to university. Jojo Moyes discusses her new novel based on the true story of the horseback librarians of Kentucky. And Judith Goff, our woman in Stockholm, on what it's like to be an ambassador. The idea that you stand around with a pink gin in your hand and eating certain chocolates that we shan't name, I think is not accurate. A lot of these receptions and dinners, you can sort out some serious stuff at them and you can bring people together that might

not otherwise talk. The life of a British ambassador explored on Weekend Woman's Hour. Now, be honest, do you use the term toxic masculinity? If you do, what do you mean by it? And have you ever given any thought to what the use of the term does to men? Well, that's something we've been discussing this week. The term, by the way, was first invented in, we think, the 70s or the 80s. No one's quite sure. These days, it's all too often bandied around as a catch-all term for entitled, aggressive, emotionally repressed male behaviour. So, to the men who don't much like hearing it,

I've been talking to the drag queen, Courtney Act, real name Shane Jenick, Jordan Stevens from Rizzle Kicks and the chief executive of the Men and Boys Coalition, Dan Bell. I do think the term has got a lot of issues. I mean, it is inherently an othering term. It's a shaming term. It has connotations of disgust and uncleanliness. And I think that if the intention is to be genuinely

kind of having an open and productive conversation, I think a term which is so loaded is is at best not useful. Jordan, I worry a little, though, that I think that our society generally is quite toxically masculine in that it's not gendered. I think that women can also utilise their energy and often do to try and ascend in particularly masculine worlds. But I feel as though there's something that I'm not quite getting at with one term, when we've existed in a space where women have been shamed verbally and through law and through many different ways, and it seems as though there's a kind of issue with one term

to describe men in a way that could be seen as shamed. But what about our responsibility to create like an equilibrium verbally for other terms to describe everyone else in society? I guess it's not that two wrongs make a right by any means. But I think there's certainly a double standard about, you know, we look at femininity is almost in itself often seen as a dirty word. It's demonised. And I think that masculinity is seen as a great word. I'm not sure that I entirely agree with that. I wonder, Dan, whether you think masculinity cannot be celebrated now.

Is that the position you think we might have moved to? I think it's very tricky to celebrate masculinity, for sure. And I think one of the areas that I have most anxiety about is the impact on young men and boys who are growing up in a conversation which seems to be... The broad message seems to be pretty negative about masculinity. And if you bore a young man who, in all likelihood, won't be fully versed in the nuances of gender politics,

they'll be receiving a pretty negative message about what it means to be male. I'm struggling, I think, to understand how you feel they're burdened. If you're being told that, you know, your identity is something that is bad and wrong, which seems to be broadly the message. It's interesting, because I feel like that has been the messaging for women for hundreds of years, and the tables are finally turned somewhat. And I don't think that we've got the messaging right yet. But I think we're working at getting to that place and I think in this transition period where we're trying to sort of come to equality there's there's a struggle with the fragility of a man's identity where being criticized becomes a complete sort of attack on his identity and he's unable to sort of

listen to what's being said and say okay OK, rather than react, how can I listen, understand and also see, you know, the ways in which women have been shamed about their identities for hundreds of years. I just want to bring Jordan back in because you, I think, would it be fair to describe your attitude to women as being rather different now to how it might have been 10 years ago? I mean, yeah, 100%. I've been brought up by a pretty independent strong mum my dad wasn't around so much but he's been in my life and looking back

at the way in which I spoke and thought about women would have definitely been conditioned in a way like my learning was very much a kind of objectification thing, kind of seeing sex as, you know, the kind of apex of something or I don't know, just being, I'd say, led down with a girl who was very up on that and the irony was that at that point I was very good at pointing the finger at other people but in my own personal space I was really struggling to to open myself up so you were calling other people out yeah but you hadn't actually changed all that much yourself I was I was really I was a very very difficult boyfriend and i think that i was i wasn't informed or educated or even given a space to understand how i'm trying to give myself some service here but emotionally violent some of my behaviors would have been in terms of i had and have quite deep intimacy issues that i'm not saying are as a direct result of toxic masculinity but i

definitely think that the way in which I view myself as a boy and man had pushed out certain behaviors or accepted certain behaviors there was no one checking me on that stuff in my immediate friendship circle or and I felt as though I was handed down as well like a very complicated relationship with love I'd never seen kind of my mum and dad together and stuff like that and yeah I found it really difficult to deal with and I think that me coming to terms with what I needed to be able to be more open and loving in my immediate circle it spun me into this world of talking about gender and energies because I would need to be more in touch and intimate with myself and emotional with myself. And that wasn't the message that I was being given by society.

I kind of was completely in my head, thought I could think my way out of anything. Do you remember the first time that somebody spoke to you and treated you in a way that you thought was rather different to a young girl of the same age? Oh, when I was younger. I mean, talk about you were really little. Young girls and young boys are treated very differently. Definitely. And part of that is societal and it's the home. I think, yeah, if I think for mothers,

I mean, I've done some reading on this stuff. I find it really interesting. I think for mothers and fathers, it's difficult to not fall into the coded behaviours that I had the other day with one of my closest friends as a child. He's about two. And I could almost feel the kind of like wanting to be a little rougher with him or

something because he was just because he's a boy and it I caught myself I didn't really do anything I didn't but it was there it was just I think it's common knowledge that we do without meaning to you know and a lot of the language I spoke to my dad was football it was like which I love I think football is an incredible sport and language but a lot of the communication wasn't in words desperately needed to have words and feelings and it was just sometimes like oh did you know did you watch the footy or whatever yeah it's one way of communicating um shane what about you where did you grow up i grew up in brisbane australia in the 80s and now if we're talking hyper masculine yeah australia is a place that comes into mind yeah and you know what's really interesting is um i've lived in the us for eight years i've lived here now sort of for the last 18 months and

i actually think that the uk has got i won't say a healthy but out of the three the healthiest relationship with masculinity and femininity and i i feel from my observations a lot of that has to do with portrayal of men in the media and in in the UK, you have so many different types of men who are valuable. You've got your Dandy, you've got your Russell Brand, you've got your Harry Styles, you've got intellects like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry. That's something I've always, I mean, when I used to live in the States and something I sort of trotted out on occasion there

was how significant it, I thought, that Sherlock Holmes was a sort of a masculine archetype in the uk this is not a tough brute of a man he's got an incredible intellect yeah drug addict though well that is that is that yeah yeah but i'm just saying as a masculine archetype i think that would be less you'd be hard pushed to find one quite like in america yeah and in australia and and growing up I remember this idea that I was valuable because of my masculinity and I wasn't masculine and I remember trying to be more masculine. What I see in toxic masculinity sometimes or a lot of the time in its expression is that it's redefining what the correct way of being a man is and one

of the things that I think is quite interesting about that is often it's framed in actually ironically very traditional terms so the kind of the instance that jumps out at me is the whole masculinity so fragile hashtag what that's actually saying is if you're a real man you'd be able to be weak so it's actually imposing another form of shaming on men for not adhering to another being prepared to be vulnerable, so if a real man would be vulnerable, which is still saying what a real man should and shouldn't be. I mean, that's all quite nuanced and sort of granular. I think Jordan said earlier, women have lived with this forever. I just wrote a little essay called...

I don't know if I said it, but it was called I'm a Pussy, and it's basically talking about... There's, I think, quite a deep misogyny in the way we just communicate with each other. There's a lot of accepting, accepted terms. The word pussy bugs me so much because that's men and women shaming each other for being not strong and using a female genitalia to describe that, despite the fact that female genitalia is responsible for life.

Yeah. The more I think about it, I hear these conversations, but like this is such a common term and it just imagine having to hear that every single time someone was described as faltering or failing to have that thrown around and and that's a shaming term men use between men all the time interesting stuff from jordan stevens dan bell and shane jenik who you might also know as courtney act of course now i am a bit of a couch potato. The most athletic thing I do in an average day is to try desperately to get to my 10,000 steps.

But no one can have failed to have been inspired this week by some brilliant performances from top British athletes like Katerina Johnson-Thompson and Dina Asher-Smith at the World Athletics Championships in Doha. What we do know is that running is getting so much more popular these days amongst women. It's partly to do with the success of park run. It's now 15 years old park run and this is the idea that you just turn up at your local park and you run or walk five kilometres with an organised group. Rachel Baker takes part regularly in park run. Jens Jakob Andersen has been looking at how women's participation in running has increased since the 80s. And Dame Kelly Holmes won two gold medals for Britain at the Athens Olympics in 2004. She's also a big supporter of Park Run

and is said to have been an inspiration for Dina Asher-Smith. I am so honoured, to be honest, but proud that my achievements have inspired another generation because when I did it, I did it for my own self, my goals, my ambition and drive and determination. But the journey it took to be there hopefully is inspiring things because things don't always go right, but if you keep going, perseverance, and you believe in yourself, you can achieve. And I think Dina's got that attitude and

behavior where she knows what it takes to be world class she's very articulate she looks lovely so she's got all of that asset to her but relevant to that is the fact that she is incredible and talent in both the one and two hundred meters and we have to remember as you said in your opening this would be the first time ever that a woman in Great Britain would have won a global medal. In fact, 100 was the first time ever in a short sprint that a woman in Great Britain has ever won a global medal. If she wins a title, that's history. Let's bring in Jens Jacob Andersen. Jens, what was your research intended to reveal about particularly women taking up running? So initially, we didn't have like one intent, because when you analyze running or any other topic on a global scale, it can sometimes be a bit challenging to know what specifically you're looking for. Most of your findings will come as you research and dig into the numbers. So we looked at, we did the biggest analysis of race results in history and

did the first global mapping of running participation. And we found that in 2018, for the first time, there were more women running than men. But you don't know why. It's just the data is there, no reasoning why. We cannot say for sure what the reason is. We have our hypothesis. And one hypothesis is, of course, the entire movement that we've seen over the, I don't know,

past 50 years of gender equality and where women previously didn't participate to the same extent in sports as they do today, which is amazing. And I think that we've just crossed the 50 percent participation for female runners is amazing. But I think the reason can be because of the motives of running, where if you look back 20 years the people who ran were competitors they were people who did it for the sport of of running the competitions if it was a 5k it was a competition marathon was competition whereas today the motives for running can be many there can be plenty there could be not only achievement the achievement element but also health it can be social elements there are many elements to running today other than just competition now you are Kelly a big supporter

of park run yeah which I know is something Rachel is also involved in why why did you get involved in park run I love the park run movement I, you said it's 15 years. It was something Paul wanted to kind of start up just for himself. And what I love about it, and probably one of the reasons why women are taken up, that it is for everybody. It does not matter what your background is, what your weight is, your race, your colour, your height. It doesn't matter because what happens is you go to a park run, there's a social element. It's stopped isolation for older people that might go and volunteer. So there's a big volunteer movement there.

You have people that have come back from surgery, people that have been ill, people that want to lose weight. And then you also have young runners who aspire to be good and you have those that want to go and get a PB. I love turning up. I go to random park runs around the country, around the world in fact, where I just love that movement that's involved. A PB, that's a personal best.

A personal best, yes, sorry, a personal best, yes. So Rachel, what was it that actually prompted you to start? So in 2015, in February, I had pneumonia and throughout that year I then got tonsillitis seven times and I also got psoriasis and then I had pneumonia. And throughout that year, I then got tonsillitis seven times. And I also got psoriasis. And then I had pneumonia again in the November. Turned 40 in the November. And the week before my 40th, my doctor says, you're not going to be here by the time you're 50 if you don't do something.

That was quite a shock. So January 2016, I weighed in at 23 stone and went to a slimming club and started to lose weight. And then I was walking around the park with my little boys one day and my little one suddenly learnt to ride his bike and I had to run after him. And I was like, oh, I can do this. And I weighed 20 stone at that time. So I then went home, downloaded the Couch to 5K app and started running. It was really hard. How hard? Very hard. started running it was really hard how hard very hard I did it by myself uh local park and there were many Sunday mornings where if you're in that park you probably would have seen 20 stone me

running around crying at some points but I kept at it and the more weight I was losing the more people were saying I was healthy the more I was going back to my doctors and getting really good heart rates and um blood pressure readings and low cholesterol rates I just carried on I lost nine stone now I know you're now a run leader and you teach other women how to do it what are the basics a beginner needs to know that they can do it they've got to come knowing that they are able to do this and pair trainers and some sports clothes and that's it I think and somewhere to run and Kelly as our star runner here this morning if anybody does want to take it up what would you say is the way to start yeah i think the couch to 5k

programs that are out there are amazing because they really are getting people started i think what also just to add into why people do it is the mental health benefits so many people do it because it makes them feel good and they may have struggled in the past so you have a social interaction you have the feel-good factor of gettingter, which is obviously a lot of people's barriers. But you also have that moment where people need to get out there and feel good about themselves. So I've seen a lot of people who have extreme mental health problems who are taking up activity, coming together in a social group like Rachel would have started. And they change dramatically and it makes them feel good, both physically and mentally. So it's really good to see. And I really hope that more people take part for those reasons and also givehusiastic way there. Now, here's an email from Pam who says, I started running two years ago when I was 61.

I was inspired to start running after watching my local park run. And I used that NHS app, Couch to 5K, to get started. I now run 5K three times a week. And Pam says, I have never felt better. Pam, that is brilliant. She says, I didn't have a weight loss goal, but I have lost that extra fat around the middle that post-menopausal women tend to get.

Better than that, I can run for the bus and keep up with my two granddaughters. This feels like a real achievement, especially as I have never been particularly sporty or done regular exercise. Getting older can feel like a process of losing things and doing something new post 60 feels absolutely great. Pam that is just the kind of email we like thank you very much for that. Alison on Twitter says my six-year-old grandson

Orson has completed his 50th park run on his birthday in June. Yeah I mean I suspect Orson doesn't even know he's doing it at the age of six. He probably doesn't feel it at all. But nevertheless, congratulations to him. It does say he sounds like a potential world athletic champion. Who knows? Now, Johanna Gustafsson is an international bestselling author. She's just published a new thriller called Blood Song. And it's a good read this. It takes you from the terror of Franco's rule in 1938 in Spain to fertility clinics in modern day Spain and in Sweden as well. Now Johanna drew on her own experiences of IVF and her struggle to conceive. Her husband Matthias agreed to be open about his infertility and their need for a sperm donor

and the fact that their three sons are all the result of IVF. We thought that I was the one having the problem because, you know, that's what we think. We think that most of the time it's a woman. And actually I was not. It was Matthias who could not have any children and who was sterile. So that was a huge shock.

And the way we learned it as well by a private clinic here in London was very violent and the words used were very violent over the phone and we didn't quite understand when they told us so Mathias was like sorry I don't understand what do you mean because the word they use where there is no sperm in your sperm over the phone and then we said sorry but what do you mean well there are no swimmers in Well, there are no swimmers in your pool. There are no swimmers in your pool. Imagine that.

I can't actually. And it's not, it cannot have been, well, it clearly wasn't easy for anybody to hear. Why is it, I wonder then, Mathias, I don't think I've ever spoken to a man in this position before, actually, knowingly. Why is it so difficult? If it is the man in this situation some people

feel as a reflection of the masculinity or you know what sort of man they are and so forth it's all about the conception i think that you know it's it's it's something that i think in society i think we we need to come to terms with that more because this is a problem that is becoming more and more common for women and for men. Did you talk to your friends about it? Did your friends acknowledge what was happening? Yes. I sat down and we said, OK, well, either we keep it to ourselves or we share it. And we just felt we had to talk to our friends about it.

So we felt sort of, OK, well, we speak to our closest friends and then, of course, we have some friends overseas that you may not see regularly. So it's not the sort of conversation you just start talking about on the phone. It feels like it's something that you need to be face-to-face, perhaps. You came to a decision that you would have fertility treatment.

That isn't easy either, is it? Going through the treatment isn't easy. Fertility treatments are very time consuming. They make you sick. And if you have, for example, for the twins, I had 27 injections a week. 27? Yes, that I had to perform myself. And I was, my publisher is here, Karen Sullivan, or Renda Books, and she, I had to tell her, Karen, I'm sorry, but at seven exactly, before we're going to talk about my book, I have to go to the toilet to do two injections. Because this is at the time, you know, and I was touring doing that, basically. So it's very heavy on the body. Not really on the mind for me, because once I made that decision, it was just, I had to do it. But, Matt, it's not easy for you to see Johanna going through all this.

Yeah, very different. I mean, it's the same sort of concept as when a woman gives birth. As a man, you can just really be supportive and be there and in this case it's even worse because you you obviously you see the amount of uh you know the very very intensive treatment that you have to go through and everything all you can do is really offer support and encouragement it's very important in the fertility treatment that you you keep a very very relaxed mind and you you you feel good and so you're trying to sort of focus on those things. Choosing the sperm donor. Yeah.

Is that something you, did you do it together? Yes. Yes. How? We did everything together. Yes. We really did. It was very important.

It's something that I really talk in detail in Blood Song, this industry, because it's really an industry. Oh, yes. And you go online and it's a catalog. Okay. So you feel that you're choosing jam when you're choosing your children DNA, basically, which is a vocabulary we don't like to use DNA, because it's hard to think that half of the DNA is unknown in a way. And you basically what we did is that those clinics, which are online, so the sperm clinic, you choose basically the different categories, so blue eyes and tall...

It's that specific, isn't it? Very specific, because what you want is you want someone who would look as closely as you can of your husband or your partner or your girlfriend, whoever, you know? Mathieu, what was that like for you to sit there and do this? Yeah, I mean, it's very surreal and it's, you know, it's very sort of commoditized. So you try to, you know, we always took the approach,

okay, let's try to just to get through this process and do it, not place too much importance to it. You know, you're trying to look at the stats and okay, well, this is a good fit and then you sort of select it, you click and you move on sort of and you're aware of the choices you make but then you don't

place too much importance to it. In this country, the law is such that well, you explained, Johanna, what happens in the future or could happen. What can happen, but that's why we chose actually to do it here, is that the donors in this country have to be known. It's forbidden for them to be unknown, which means that when your children are adults,

they can go to look for their janitor. They can meet that person. And I'm just going to insist on something here, which is very important for all people being like us and even adopting parents is that we, they're not fathering those. They're not fathers. The father is Matthias here. Well, the father is the person who's there at three in the morning. Exactly. Like we were last night. It's like I knew. We're part of a wonderful association which is called DC Network. The two founders are parents like us who could not conceive. And they explained that to us.

They said, you know, when your child will want maybe to meet the donor, you will have had 18 years of closeness and love and experiences. So you will meet less. It will be easier for you. But that is a law here. And it's not in France. And it's changing now. I was talking to a lawyer just yesterday about that.

Are they changing it? Yeah, they're about to change. It's a 1994 law and it's about to change now. Johanna Gustafsson and her husband, Matthias, who were guests on Friday's edition of the programme. Still to come on the weekend edition of Woman's Hour, should music critics these days be very afraid of superfans? That was an interesting conversation we had during the course of the week.

Now, just over 30% of Britain's ambassadors or heads of mission are female. It doesn't sound a lot, I suppose, but it is a threefold increase in the last decade. That is impressive. Three of the four British ambassadors who've hosted Prince Harry on his African tour are women. Judith Goff is our woman in Stockholm, and she has just completed a four-year stint in Ukraine. She did leave Kiev in August before the controversy surrounding impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Here is Judith explaining to me the job of an ambassador. My role is to represent the United Kingdom in any given country.

In some ways I tend to think of that as being the eyes and ears of my country in terms of understanding the environment in which I find myself and in which I get to represent the United Kingdom and translating that for London so that I can inform policy making and the policy decisions can then be taken. Also to be the mouth of the UK and to promote the UK and what the UK stands for and help people to understand in that country. Your new posting, which is to Stockholm in Sweden, and you're busy learning the language. How is that going? This is, I would say, probably the seventh or

eighth language I have learned. That doesn't mean to say I can speak them all fluently. They're all in various states of disrepair. I find the older I get, the more of a challenge it is to learn a new language. But for me in particular, it's important to be able to speak Swedish in Stockholm. So I'm on my seventh or eighth lesson and hope that in a couple of months, I'll get to the point where I can use it for my role as I start it here. So something like, pass me that plate of pickled herring, would that currently defeat you? Or could you give us an idea of how you'd say that? I haven't yet learned pickled, well, I do know what pickled herring is, but I'm not sure I could

put the full sentence together. We've just been talking this morning about animals and their personalities. I'm not sure I'm going to use that in my job. But you have to start somewhere. I think my conversations are going to be much more around what's going on politically in the UK and relations between our two countries. But you never know. So we've established that your new role is Stockholm. And where have you just been?

Somewhere very, very different. So my last posting was in Ukraine, where I've just spent the past four years in a very different environment to what I now find in Sweden. Just to remind everybody of the quite delicate, actually, situation in Ukraine. Ukraine in 2014 went through what we called at the time the Ukraine crisis, where following a summit in Vilnius and the president not signing an agreement with the EU, protests started in the capital. These were rather mishandled by President Yanukovych at the time.

And as a result, over 100 people were killed in Kiev. He fled the country, went to Russia. And Russia swiftly followed with the annexation of Crimea and the fermenting of a conflict in eastern Ukraine. And so what we had during my posting was a country that was desperately trying to reform and build a prosperous state with strong institutions, but all the time whilst fighting a conflict. Which is still going on? Still going on today. Sadly, more than 13,000 people killed when I've traveled to the conflict zones myself and seen it firsthand. It is incredibly shocking to see what is happening and particularly as it's the 21st century in Europe. And it happens to be a country where, Ukraine I'm talking about,

where homophobia is an ongoing issue and you are a gay woman. Did that concern you when you got that posting? I don't think any of my postings until this point have been in countries where it is easy to be gay. I think this is the first time that I have had the luxury to relax in a way that perhaps I haven't been able to before. The fact is that when you are the ambassador, that role and that status does provide you with a degree of protection, if you like. But obviously, it's something you weigh up very, very carefully, not merely because I'm going to be working there and I want to be able to do my job without let or hindrance, but because I'm taking my family with

me and I don't want them to suffer. But what I have typically found in the postings that I have chosen is that the reaction to me personally and to my family has been on the whole positive, a few incidents every now and again, but not hugely challenging and perhaps in the way that people perceive. Obviously, it's very, very different for those who are, for example, Ukrainian and outside of that bubble who have to deal with homophobia and difficulty on a daily basis. But just by being you and being there with your partner and your children, that was a statement in itself, wasn't it, actually? I think so. And I had a number of people say to me, you're the first gay person I've ever met. And I well I can assure you I'm not. You're wrong there. It's just that I am the first gay person that you are aware of having met and often that has been followed up with a

comment well you're quite normal really at which point you think well that's that's kind of a compliment but I think it's about in countries where there are no visible role models, in countries where there is not a discussion of the issues, just by being there and being yourself quite quietly, that in itself can help people to understand what the issues are and to come to understand that it is not a threat or a risk in a way perhaps that they thought it might have been. And the entertaining side of it, it's a long day yours, isn't it actually? And I assume sometimes the clock turns to about six o'clock and all you want to do is go home. But in fact, you have to attend a meeting of the Anglo-Swedish Elk Protection Agency or whatever it might be. Is it tough, the entertaining and hospitality and just being pleasant side of things?

It can be very tiring. It is very much part of the job. Certainly in Kiev we could have two or three functions a night. The idea that you stand around with a pink gin in your hand and eating certain chocolates that we shan't name or you won't want me to name, I think is not accurate. A lot of these receptions and dinners, you can sort out some serious stuff at them and you can bring people together that might not otherwise talk. Can you think of an example where you as a female ambassador made a difference,

either to an individual or to a set of circumstances? I find particularly going to conflict zones, being able to engage as a woman can be very helpful. It's less threatening sometimes, I think, for people. And particularly when you're dealing, as we were, in eastern Ukraine with victims of gender-based violence. Unfortunately, in a post-conflict situation, we know that it is often women that suffer. And we had a very large project for UNFPA,

where we have helped about 60,000 women access help or support or shelter. Can you just explain that as a woman, that 60,000 women? Yes, I think it's about 58,000 Ukrainian women who through a project that we fund in eastern Ukraine have been able to access, support, advice, shelter and health care. And this is particularly for women who have escaped the conflict but are suffering from gender-based violence or consequences of conflict. And I think sometimes as a woman, you're able to see those opportunities and to support and champion those opportunities. But also when I have visited women's refuges as a woman, you're able to see those opportunities and to support and champion those opportunities. But also when I have visited women's refuges as a woman, I think sometimes you have better access and a better ability to engage and understand the problems. That's not

to say that our male colleagues can't, of course. But when you're dealing in these situations, I think it's really important, particularly when you have a conflict. Conflict resolution does need women to participate as well. And that historically has not always been the case. So to any young woman listening who thinks, you know what, this woman sounds fantastic. I want to be her. What do they need? The key qualities for me are you need to be curious. You need to be curious about the world and curious about life and never want to stop learning.

At the age of 46, I've come to a new country and I'm now spending a lot of time learning about it. So I think that's really important. I think it's helpful to have an interest in foreign policy and world events. I think you need to have personal resilience. Sometimes what we're dealing with is very, very difficult when you're dealing with conflict, particularly difficult consular cases, crises, terrorist attacks, body bags. Some of the work can be very, very tough. So I think it does require personal resilience and just a sense of adventure. Judith Goff, selling, I have to say she sold it to me, the role of ambassador to Sweden. I think though it's unlikely, however hard I try, I'm not going to become the British ambassador to Sweden or indeed anywhere else. Now, a new charity launched this week aiming to help young people

who came to this country as migrant children and are undocumented. So many challenges actually here. For example, how do you find your way through the system, particularly if you need finance to help you get through higher education? The founders and joint chief executives of We Belong are Dami Makinde and Chrisanne Jarrett. We Belong came about because we recognised that actually the young people feel a sense of affinity to the UK having been brought here from a very young age and so the name encapsulates the permanence that they feel to the UK

that this is their home. But why are they not documented officially citizens? Well, the immigration system in this country has been broken for a very long time. It's very complex and costly. And the young people that we work with are having to go through a very long process before they even get to settlement. You know, with a no legal aid and the cost just being hiking every year, it's made really difficult to not only regularise but also maintain status in the UK. What happened in your case? So I was born in Jamaica and I came here at the age of eight. I'm like Paddington Bear, came with all my ID around my neck and I've lived here ever since in Hackney. And at the age of 18, when I wanted to go to

university, I recognised that because of my immigration status being unsettled, I was being treated differently in the fact that I was charged international fees as opposed to home fees. Demi, what happened to you? Yeah, so like Krasan, I was born in Nigeria. Like Krasan, I came into the UK at the age of eight years old also. I'm currently 26 at the moment. And I lived in Milton Keynes first before then settling in London at the age of 13. And we tried to regularise my status from the age of 15 so actually quite early on within my teenage years but was not successful until I was 21. What happened to you at 18? At the age of 18 is when I really started to ask questions because as you know going to university you need documentation and being brought to the UK at eight you just don't ask am I British and that's when the real

the question becomes relevant. And so we have young people finishing secondary school in sixth form and recognising they're on their own and then this new path to settlement that they didn't think about before. Demi, I know you've spoken to a lot of other young people. What sort of stories have they been telling you? A lot of people feel isolated. A lot of people feel ashamed. If we're talking about the young people who are in this particular situation, just feeling isolated and

ashamed and feeling they can't speak up and can't tell, you know, their story to anybody because being a migrant in the UK comes with a connotation that they don't want to attach to them. And so, you know, the one thing that we try to do at We Belong is creating a leadership programme that allows them to be able to be equipped. And we create a platform for them to be able to speak up and have their voices heard and become future leaders and spearhead and set the agenda in what's going on. What about their parents? What is the legal status of the parents of these children

who are not officially legal? So it's a mix. As Zami mentioned, for example, in my situation, my mom did all she could to maintain our status. And in fact, she put in an application for permanent residence in 2007. And the Home Office got back to us in 2012 and said they lost all our paperwork. And so you have a situation where parents can be extremely proactive, do everything they can, but like the Windrush situation with the constant changes in immigration rules and the complexities around it you can easily get lost in the system. So how did you restart all that because I do happen to know that you did go to LSE and presumably got the funding

how did you resolve it? So we and you studied law which is very useful in this which is very relevant in this situation I found myself in, I was quite lucky. I got a scholarship to study at LSE, but the situation for many young people was still kind of the same. And that's how we kind of came about activating changemakers and being a voice in our communities to really say, this is an injustice, the situation in the home office is very broken and we need to be beacons of change

and influence change makers to recognize that this is not fit for purpose how did you manage to persuade lse to give you a scholarship i mean is that what you're trying to do across the country until this question is resolved well we persuaded them simply because we told i told my story and i think that there's a power in telling stories and going back to the immigration system in general I think it needs to be evidence-based and it needs to be based on the experiences of people that are going through the system and so by telling the stories of sharing our narrative that's how we're able to influence change. In regards to universities we've had very successful campaigns and getting scholarships up and down the country but really it's a central

change that needs to happen through government. And what kind of response are you getting from that area? Presumably you've been trying to talk to the Home Office about this. No we have been trying to talk to the Home Office about you know the situation we've built a relationship with a lot of MPs a lot of the young people who are in this situation have also written to their MPs and you you know, asking them to speak out in Parliament regarding the injustice that they face. And so we've had quite positive interactions with MPs who are looking to help us, who are looking to speak out and a lot have as well. So it's been quite positive. Of course, we do need more MPs to continue to speak out on the issue until the situation is resolved and the law is completely changed so that young migrants can be treated equally and fairly in a society that they call home. Now obviously we asked the Home Office to give us a comment on this and here's what they said. Fees are set at a level that helps provide the resources necessary to operate our border immigration and citizenship system to reduce the

burden on UK taxpayers. We have committed to reviewing fees for children registering as British citizens. It is not mandatory to apply for citizenship in order to live, study and work in the UK as Leave to Remain confers these benefits. Well, our comment to that is that we don't necessarily agree that it is not essential to apply for citizenship. Citizenship for us and the young people that we work with implies permanence. There's not going to be any question now about their status and where they belong. Whereas limited leave to remain, these young people have to renew it over a 10 year period at a different cost.

If you fall off of that process, you're never anywhere closer to becoming settled in a country and being recognised as a true citizen. So limited leave to remain is simply not enough. And in terms of the fees, I mean, you know, these are young people going into adulthood with an immense financial burden. Of course, there is a cost to maintaining the borders, but we are also taxpayers too. Dami, I know you were offered a place at university at Royal Holloway, I think it was five years ago. Why did you not take it up? I simply couldn't take it up because they considered me as an international student.

So despite having lawful status at that time, they told me that I had to wait until I had indefinitely to remain settled status in order to be able to go to university. So I wasn't able to take it up. And that's when I came across, you know, Just For Kids Law and, you know, with Chris-Anne and started to do the Letters Lend campaign. So that was the reason why I couldn't take up my place at Royal Holloway at the time. But the law, Chris-Anne, as I understood it, on access to university funding, was challenged in 2015 at the Supreme Court. What happened as a result of that? So we campaigned for equal access and we shared our case studies with the justices of the Supreme Court and they actually esteemed that the student finance rules must be changed. Around 2,000

young migrants every year are now able to access student finance but in doing this campaign we recognise that though a symptom in the expression of a hostile environment is the barriers to higher education for young migrants, the root causes the immigration status and also the immigration process in general. So that's why We Belong kind of came through. Chris Sanjarrett and Dami Makinde. Superfans can be, to put it mildly, keen on their idols. In fact, utterly devoted would be a better way of putting it. And you anger them at your peril. As American music journalist Juana Thompson found out when she tweeted about

rapper Nicki Minaj's new album. Juana said, You know how dope it would be if Nicki put out mature content. She's touching 40 soon. A new direction is needed. That tweet went viral. Juana had thousands of angry responses

from superfans of Nicki Nicki and even a direct message from Nicki Minaj's Twitter account, although Nicki denies sending it, I should say. I talked to Wana and to Hannah Ewins, vice journalist and author of a book called Fangirls. Wana told us about the response she had to her tweet. Well, they were angry about my tweet saying that she needs more mature music. They went on to, you know, say really derogatory things about me. I had so many notifications coming in that my phone would not load properly. So when I was scrolling my TL, I seen that Nicki Minaj indirectly responded to me listing a bunch of songs that she deemed mature. When I was able to regain

access to my account and it wasn't frozen anymore, I seen that she actually personally DM'd me and I thought it was fake. And lo and behold, it actually was her page. And I've got the text of that DM in front of me now. I mean, I'll read a bit of it. When your ugly ass was 24, you were pushing 30. I'm 34. I'm I'm touching 40 lol and what does that have to do with my music and then it goes on um I mean we're all sensitive about our age I guess you had said that she was getting more mature do you think she's got a point there well the criticism more so was I was saying as a long time nikki minaj fan that i felt like the progression has stalled and at time i wasn't thinking of it as an ageism thing and i really

do believe that a lot of artists when they get older you know they make music that relates to where they are in life and i just felt like her music was not growing progressively at all so I didn't think that my critique was anything of an attack on her but she obviously took it differently than I did yeah well to put it mildly she certainly did one um Hannah yes she did is is this is it normal for I mean for the artists themselves to contact a music journalist well I think we've seen that a few times recently. You had Ariana did this. So did Lana Del Rey as well. They DM'd or directly contacted a music journalist who'd been critical of them. With Lana Del Rey, she actually tweeted Ann Powers, who is a very well-respected music journalist. And so did that publicly. And and again it was actually a very similar case of

Anne Powers doing a very very long well-considered piece of criticism in which she says that she's a fan as well as a critic and I think it was taken as a piece of deconstructive sort of criticism rather than something that's very constructive. And what this does to the fan base is that it galvanises them and then gives them permission to pile in as well. And as in Juana's case, they really do. We've got something now which we would call Stan culture. But this isn't just a super fan. This comes from the title, by the way, of an Eminem song. Yeah yeah about a fan who got too obsessed with Eminem and then it all went very violent so yeah Stan is someone who really wants the artist to win really cares about them getting to number one and will spend a lot of time and energy trying to

boost that profile and prove that their artist is better than someone else's artist what's obviously very difficult for you wanna is this is how you make your living. You are a music journalist. What you do for a living is you talk about performers and musicians. Of course. And I believe after this whole direction or the incident with Nicki Minaj, it kind of affects my work

because every time I do review an album or review a song there's always some criticism from fans saying you know you're just a hater you can't provide unbiased sound criticism and it's like I can I that's what I've been doing but I do believe this is like a cloud over me where I feel like I have to try 10 times as hard to kind of you know get my point across so people don't think I'm just being, you know, like they said, a hater. What about the fact that it would appear, and you can take me up on this, that female fans are more fanatical, more devoted, and that female artists are more likely to be at the centre of this than male artists? What would you say about that, Juana? I do feel like it gets more attention when it's from a female because it's expected.

It's expected that women are supposed to be emotional. And so I really do feel like female artists, in a way, do get an unfair shake. Because I do see equally male stans on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. And they express their displeasure just as much. Would you agree with that, Hannah? Most stans are young girls, women or queer people. I think that's fair to say. So when we're talking about stan culture, we are talking about these groups who are slightly more marginalised, whereas now... Young female fans always get... They are ridiculed in a way that football fans,

who often are more likely to be male, just don't get. 100%. Yeah, 100%. What do you think will happen in the future, Wano? Does this actually threaten, seriously, does it threaten credible music journalism? Yes, it's a stain where it's like, you know, this musical artist has put this

person on blast. And you know, there's a lot of harassment and targeted harassment that comes with that. But I also do believe that if it wasn't basically good criticism, they wouldn't have responded because I really do believe that I struck a nerve within Nicki Minaj, because there had to be some truth to it. If there wasn't any truth to it, I believe she would have continued to scroll and go on with her day. Has it dented your confidence at all? To this day, I'm still getting harassed. That has not stopped whatsoever. So are we talking daily basis?

Yes. Really? Oh, for sure. Daily. I had to use an extension on a web browser to find a blockchain. So I could block thousands of accounts because the harassment was getting so bad. A lot of them still show up. But yeah, it's been like a year and some and I still get targeted harassment. That's the American music journalist Wanda Thompson. And you also got the view of Hannah Ewins, a journalist with Vice.

Jojo Moyes is a hugely successful writer. She has come up with 15 books, the latest of which is called The Giver of Stars. And it's based on a really interesting little slice of history, the horseback librarians of Kentucky. It was Eleanor Roosevelt who sparked the idea for books to be delivered to remote families. And it was mainly the women who did the hard work on horseback. So how did Jojo find out about this? It was in a magazine, the Smithsonian magazine. And like many writers, I scan the whole of the internet in the morning before starting work. And I found this publication with these extraordinary photographs of young women

atop mules and horses with their bags ready to head off into this incredibly rugged landscape. And the images were so powerful, I couldn't believe that nobody had really written much about them before. Now, you did the research in Kentucky. You're not the sort of writer who doesn't want to go to the actual places you're writing about. No, I find that if you go to a place, it often completely skews the story that you write, because you speak to people, you get a sense of the smells, the sights.

I also felt that given that it was about Appalachia, which I think a lot of people who live there feel hard done by when it comes to how they're written about. They feel that they're often described as hillbillies, as ignorant. I felt it was really important to get a proper measure of the place itself. So what did you learn about the people and the rhythm of their speech, which you can almost hear as you're reading the book? Yeah, it's very particular. And I don't think I could have written the book if I hadn't spent so much time talking to them. Luckily, they're big talkers.

Basically, a lot of people who live in Appalachia are descended directly from the Celts, from Scots and Irish people, but also there, because it's such a closed community, the rhythms of the speech are descended still from Elizabethan England. So it's a very ornate way of speaking, much more ornate than we in England. There's a very strong oral tradition of storytelling. It's in their DNA. So you can't sit down for five minutes, you will be there 50 minutes later and have heard half a dozen stories about everything. What evidence is there that the real librarians were women who tended to be rebellious? Because we're talking about the early 20th century. Well, I did a lot of research on an academic site called JSTOR, which gives you the most kind of niche subjects you can imagine. And I did a lot of reading about women at that time. And a lot of what you read about Appalachia and Kentucky in

particular in the 1930s is of women who are downtrodden and, you know, people who are just desperately trying to keep their families together. But when you dig deeper, you find that there have always been these rebellious women. I mean, whether they're criminal or whether they are just women who refuse to be bowed by the patriarchy of the time. And it just felt to me the more I read that it was a peculiarly modern story, which is women trying to push out into a man's world and being sat on. There is an awful lot of male violence, drunkenness. How much is that rooted in historical fact?

Very much so. I read a lot of first person and self-published accounts of life at that time. It's quite a popular genre. And it would not have been fun for most women to grow up in 1930s East Kentucky. I mean, you were kept pregnant and barefoot a lot of the time. Your whole life would have been spent post-depression trying to feed your family. And it was a very violent society, not just for women, for men against men and families against families.

It was a kind of lawless area, but it also had its own rules. I don't want to kind of describe it as completely lawless because, like all these communities, it has its own way of being. Now, there is, as you say, a strong theme of fighting the patriarchy but there's also fighting corporate interests which because mining is what is done there and there's corporate interests destroying the landscape. How much are there modern parallels in that? Oh it's still I mean the whole thing about this story was that it felt to me like it had so much resonance for the modern day, both in the fact that Roosevelt set up this WPA program because he felt that he and Eleanor Roosevelt felt that because people's focus had been spent on staying alive, that they were falling prey to snake oil salesmen, religious fundamentalism and people who disputed the existence of facts. Now, that has a few parallels in the modern day, I would say.

So for me, that was a really modern story. But if you go into Kentucky's history, it is impossible to ignore the rape of the land by loggers and miners. And it's as naked now as it was back then. As far as the librarians are concerned, there's one little blue book that they distribute rather secretly. What is it? It's the Mary Stokes book, Married Love, which was the subject of a court case in the States where various states banned it because they considered it indecent. And a federal judge overturned that ban. But I mean, I don't have evidence that that particular book was used. But given that the spread of materials that were distributed by these women, I didn't think it was unlikely. But I thought it was the perfect example of women trying to facilitate and help other

women by giving them advice about sex and biology. And what horror that was caused, you know, by doing that among the religious community and among men in general, even though actually a lot of men were brought a lot of happiness by the distribution of that book. You've been a great champion of libraries and the importance of reading. How much did that inspire the plot of this novel, as well as just finding out about these women? I don't think I did it in a conscious way. But funny enough, someone pointed out to me that nearly all my books have a library in them at some point. And I was a child who grew up in Hackney. My parents weren't particularly wealthy. And so for me, the weekly visit to the library was

hugely important in my formative years. And I believe very strongly for both children and adults that if you don't have reading, you have nothing. You don't have the very first step on the ladder to success or, I don't know, mental health in later life. It gives you so many things. She's so right, isn't she? That's the best-selling novelist Jojo Moyes. Next week on the programme, we're featuring abortion in America. We've got a couple of reports, one from an abortion clinic in Missouri and another from a prayer rally organised by anti-abortion protesters in Alabama. And on Monday, you'll be able to hear, too, from the former editor of Teen Vogue, Elaine Welteroth.

Have a very good weekend. Hope you can join us Monday morning, just after 10. 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.