Woman's Hour - Weekend Woman's Hour: Sally Wainwright, Kellie Bright, AI girlfriends, lessons from the Pelicot trial

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

100m sprinter Bebe Jackson, 19, won a bronze medal on her debut at the IPC World Para Athletics Championships in Delhi, India, last week. Bebe was born with congenital talipes equinovarus, widely known as club foot, and when she’s not competing for Britain, she works nights caring for children with complex disabilities. She tells Anita Rani how she does it.In Sally Wainwright’s new BBC drama Riot Women, a group of women in mid-life escape the pressures of caring for parents and kids - and the menopause - by forming a rock band. Rosalie Craig stars as the incredible singer that brings them together. Anita Rani talks to Sally and actor Rosalie about the power of female friendship.Nuala McGovern talks to the French philosopher Manon Garcia. Manon watched the court proceedings of the Pelicot case in France, in which Dominique Pelicot and 46 other men were found guilty of the rape of Dominique’s wife Gisèle. In her book Living with Men, she examines French and other societies in light of the case and questions what more needs to be done.When you think about music from 500 years ago, you might picture monks chanting, or the voices of choirboys, but what’s been largely forgotten over the course of history is that some of the most striking music during this time was being written and sung by nuns, hidden away in convents across Europe. Nuala speaks to Laurie Stras, Director of Musica Secreta, an all-female renaissance ensemble.Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence company xAI recently introduced two sexually explicit chatbots. He's a high-profile presence in a growing field where developers are banking on users interacting and forming intimate relationships with the AI chatbots. Nuala McGovern speaks to journalist Amelia Gentleman, who has just returned from an adult industry conference in Prague, where she saw a sharp rise in new websites offering an increasingly realistic selection of AI girlfriends, and Gina Neff, Professor of Responsible AI at the Queen Mary University of London, who tells us what this means for women.EastEnders actor Kellie Bright took part in a Woman’s Hour special last year which asked whether the SEND system is working for children with special educational needs and disabilities. Tonight Kellie presents a special one-hour BBC Panorama. Drawing on her own experience as the mother of an autistic son, she investigates how parents navigate the complex system to secure the right help at school. Kellie joins Nuala McGovern to talk about what she found.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Simon Richardson

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. A new season of Love Me is here. Real stories of real, complicated relationships. It's not even like a gender. I mean, it's wrapped up in gender, but it's just a really deep self-hate. I think I cried almost every day. I just stole myself on the floor. It's coming on really straight.

It's like he's trying to date you all of a sudden. Yeah. And I do look like. my mother. Love me. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Weekend Woman's Hour. Coming up, highlights from the week just gone. Sally Wainwright and why her new drama about midlife women forming a punk rock band is all inspired by personal experience. For me, writing around women has kind of been therapy. He's been writing about this part of your life in a way that was uplifting and engaging and

interesting and that wouldn't make people think, oh, that's about middle-aged women. I'm not going to watch that. It's not. It's about women who find something very creative and very engaging to do together and how it changes their lives. Plus, Musica Secreta, the all-female Renaissance ensemble serenaders in the Women's Hour studio. EastEnders actor Kelly Bright discusses her new panorama documentary where she meets parents who say they're exhausted by the fight to get the right education for their autistic children. We hear about what the new crop of AI girlfriends might mean for real-life women.

And French philosopher Manon Garcia reflects on watching the Pelico rape trial and the book she felt compelled to write about it. But we start with a really inspiring young woman who we met yesterday. 100-meter sprinter BB Jackson 19 won a bronze medal on her debut at the IPC World Parathletics Championships in Delhi, India recently. Bibi was born with congenital tilapes equinovirus, widely known as club foot. And when she's not competing for Britain, she works nights caring for children with complex disabilities, often training on very little sleep.

She told me how she felt when she won that medal. It was definitely crazy. I didn't actually believe that I won bronze to start with. Like, obviously you do all your training, all the hard work you put in over the year and to come away with a bronze medal, like especially at my first champs, like, yeah, crazy. Let's hear your story from the beginning then. So when did you first realise or decide that this is what you wanted to pursue? I've always loved sport, like any type of sport.

Like I've always been like very big into like football and netball, especially at start a secondary school. I first started athletics when I was 12 and I didn't like it to start with. So quit it and then when I was 15, I couldn't do football anymore. So I decided to then go through the athletics route again. What happened with football? I couldn't do it because my disability got too much. So I wasn't able to tackle anymore.

I wasn't able to run on the wings. And how was that? It's very hard for me because football is my favourite thing. I grew up with football. My dad grew up at football. My brother grew up with football. I mentioned in the opening that you also do this alongside holding down a job caring for children with serious medical needs.

Tell me about that job. What does that require? So it requires a lot of mental strength, physical strength. I have children maybe with SMA, which is spinal muscular atrophy, sometimes tracheostomy, sometimes breathe in tubes, sometimes feeding tubes. It's very, like, emotionally hitting, like sometimes. Obviously, the children might not get better.

Sometimes they will get better. And how much of your time does that take? Most of my week. It takes up, yeah. So I normally do about three to four night shifts a week. Okay, so give me a typical 24 hours in your life. Most of my children live about an hour away from me. So I'd start my day at 9pm, travel to them for about 10pm.

I'd normally work until about between 7 and 8.30, depending on, like, if they're going to school, like when they're waking up. And then, yeah, after that, then I'll come home. And I normally have training about 5pm, so I only get a couple of hours of sleep. And then go back on it again and then start again at 9pm. Are you not exhausted? Yeah. So what keeps you going?

I don't often have breaks, but obviously having breaks, obviously, like, calling my parents, they're my rocks. So like, obviously, calling them in between shifts. Or sometimes I sleep around my boyfriends. It just breaks up the day a bit. Training does help me a lot. It helps me kind of get my emotions out, get my frustration out, just by running really. Do you get any financial support for your training? So, yeah, I think that's a struggle in the power world anyway.

Parathlete struggle to get funding. It's very difficult and obviously that's why I have to work full time. Sure. And you're currently part of the UK Athletics Futures Programme, which the next level is the world class program which includes funding from the National Lottery to help. What will it take for you to get there? Well, it should take a medal from at World Championships. Which you have, handling. Yeah. But obviously, once you're kind of on the program, so like say if I'm on podium, and potential, you can't go back down. So obviously, it depends if they see potential on me

or they don't see potential on me, it all depends. You've just come back from the World Champion, Paro World Athletics Championships, you won a bronze, you work caring for children, you get very little sleep. What is this drive and determination, this focus? Where do you think you get this from? In the athletics world,

we're all got some sort of disability. And obviously, like I said, my children at home have got disabilities too. Some children, like, spent a year on a ventilator, in the athletics world and obviously some of these children have spent a year on a ventilator and you kind of got to turn around

and say to the children or children's parents like no matter like what position they're in now in 10 years they might be on the world stage you never know like yeah club foot is a relatively common condition affecting around one in every thousand babies born in the UK and you had Achilles tendon release surgery

at the age of two but received no further treatment until the carbon fibre splint you started using a couple of years ago so how does your condition affect you on a day-to-day? It affects me in, like, loads of different ways. Obviously, it depends what day it is.

But on, like, a really bad day, like, sometimes I can't even get out of bed. Like, sometimes I get a lot of pain around my ankle. I've got no cartilage in my foot. So, obviously, my bones are just rubbing against bones. So, obviously, like, on a bad day, like, especially after a long training week, sometimes I just, like, I'm in immense pain, like,

with osteoarthritis. How do you stay motivated, then, on your toughest days? I think having a support network around you just keeps you motivated. If I tell my mum and dad or my boyfriend, like, oh, I don't want to do this today, then they remind me of why I'm doing this, how much training I've put towards it and, like, I'm missing this one training session isn't going to help me. So then, like, yeah, I feel like having a big support network around you keeps you motivated. Told you she was inspiring, paraathletics bronze medalist, B.B. Jackson.

Next, AI Girlfriends. Earlier this week, the New York Times ran an article on Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence Company, XAI, which is introducing two sexually explicit chatbots into its service offer. Musk is a high-profile presence in a growing field where developers are banking on users forming intimate relationships with AI chatbots. The journalist Amelia Gentleman has just returned from an adult industry conference in Prague

where she saw a sharp prize in new websites offering an increasingly realistic selection of AI girlfriends. Gina Neff is a professor of responsible AI at Queenie. Mary University of London. Newler discussed with both of them what the implications this kind of technology might be for real-life women. Amelia began with the basics.

Just what is an AI girlfriend? An AI girlfriend is pretty much, as it sounds, it's a digital girlfriend that you can befriend on a website. So there are lots of new emerging pornographic websites where designers offer users images of women that they can talk to, that they can befriend. And after some time, the user will ask the AI girlfriend to remove her clothes and perhaps perform a sex act on

screen. It sounds very kind of friendly and innocent, but in the world of the adult industry, AI girlfriends are pretty explicit. There are gamification elements to the them as well, correct? Yeah. So a lot of the users of these AI girlfriends are people who've grown up playing video games. And the designers, the developers, have created different prototypes of females that you can opt to befriend on a website. So there are lots of new emerging pornographic websites where designers offer users images of women that they can talk to, that they can befriend. And after some time, the user will ask the AI girlfriend to remove her clothes and perhaps perform a sex act on screen.

There are gamification elements to them as well, correct? Yeah. There is a way of making some girlfriends more amenable immediately to taking their clothes off and other AI girlfriends a bit less submissive, I suppose. The website developers see that as part of the fun and as part of the game. But on the whole, the kinds of girlfriends that are on offer on these sites tend to be presented as fairly submissive.

There's a lot of food for thought and everything you've said already, Amelia, but we did see that the New York Times was reporting Gina that Elon Musk's AI company has introduced two sexually explicit chatbots as well. What do we know? These sex chatbots are going to go mainstream. Many of the big tech companies,

the current AI chatbot companies, have not allowed sexually explicit chatbots on their services, although users have figured out ways to get around those guardrails. Elon Musk has thrown those guardrails out and said that his company will go forward and make these offerings. Yeah, I did also see because we know he's often concerned with population decline. He's convinced that the use of these chatbots will actually lead people to more intimacy with real-life partners that remains to be seen. But what there is is a race to intimacy

within this online world, as it was described by one. What about that, Amelia? I'm wondering what was said. I read some of the comments, for example, that some users are divorced or widowed, that talking to an AI companion about sex can be a safer outlet than in-person interactions to explore desire. Did that come up at all of the conference, that kind of conversation around intimacy? I mean, what was really striking is that the owners of the businesses who are creating these websites are primarily men and they are falling over themselves to try and present what they're doing as ethical and helpful and particularly helpful to women. So it's really paradoxical because on the whole, within the adult industry,

there's an idea that is a safe place to work, that if you're sex positive, it can be very empowering for women. But once you switch into AI, suddenly the male developers acknowledge that there are a lot of risks in the industry. and that they try and present themselves as doing women a favour by creating AI versions of women to do the difficult work of stripping on camera. A few of them did say that it's a useful training area where teenage boys might practice their skills in flirting.

But they also said some fairly dark things as well, saying, you know, you can say things that you really want to say to women to an AI girlfriend, that you might, feel too inhibited to say in real life. So you could say quite freely abusive things to your AI girlfriend and there would obviously be no consequences. I did read some of the comments. One was Steve Jones who runs an AI porn site and he said, do you prefer your porn with a lot of abuse in human trafficking or would you rather talk to AI? In a way, quoting some of those aspects that you mentioned there, Amelia.

Gina, I mean, is there any protections in place? Because this is, I suppose, policing online activity in a way, but very intimate online activity. Well, first about protections in the UK, images of children and some of these sexually explicit AI bots come very close to depicting young girls, young women, very young women. images of children are illegal whether or not they are real people or AI people. And I think that gives us something to think about. As a feminist mom of boys, I have told my teenage sons, listen, don't get AI girlfriends.

Whatever you do, I want you going out and interacting real people instead of learning bad habits. In a paper that I have out with a co-author just this week, we talk about artificial sociality. the ways in which people are developing relationships with AI chatbots. Now, we didn't study sex bots specifically, but when people develop these relationships with their chat box and the platform changes something about the rules or regulations or just makes an update, people can go through a real sense of loss. We tracked how they responded.

They feel that they need to start over or start something new, leave the platform, or train up and adapt to chatbot. And what we're finding is that people really are exercising the sense of control. And again, as a feminist, teaching people that relationships are something you control and people are something you control would be something I'm really worried about. I do want to read one comment as well of a female user talking about her AI companion as I was researching this this morning.

Before meeting him, I had a very normal life, a routine job friends. This is Vivian, who was the user. She said, suddenly I was a happier person, more creative, more intuitive. This is Valentine that she met online, who is a digital AI boyfriend, I suppose. She said the relationship had caused her to start listening to more music, to wear makeup again. She'd return to writing poetry. Amelia, I'd be so curious for your thoughts on when you hear that. Well, I think I saw a much darker side of the business when I was in Prague.

There was an acknowledgement by the people running these companies, that the vast majority of people signing up for AI girlfriends are currently men. And when you get into the kind of the weeds of the sort of women that both the website developers think men want and the kinds of options for men to create their fantasy girlfriends, it's just incredibly depressing, I suppose, because it goes back to kinds of really unhelpful stereotypes about women that seem to be being embedded in these organizations. So on the whole, when you go onto a website, you can think about what color hair you want your AI girlfriend to have, what size of bust, what size of waste. The kind of the first questions are primarily about

appearance. And then you click through and you get into personality types. What are some of the options? Well, they say, you know, do you want your AI girlfriend to be, for example, and I'm quoting here, submissive, obedient, yielding and happy to follow, or with you rather she was innocent, optimistic, naive and someone who sees the world with wonder. And they offer you different kind of professions as well. And on the whole, they tend to be things like yoga teacher or florist. So it's just incredibly regressive. Do you think, Amelia, just before I let you go, that, and I'll be curious for your thoughts on this, Gina, as well. Will AI girlfriends put sex workers out of work? I spoke to a woman called Lily Phillips, who is a British only

fans, a star who we heard about quite a bit recently because she's, I suppose, does the same kind of stunt that Bonnie Blue does in terms of taking on very extreme challenges to sleep with. large quantities of men in short periods of time to boost her only fans following. And she said she was considering getting an AI twin of herself so that her fans could request to see her do different things all the time. And that would be a way of, I suppose, monetising herself more efficiently around the clock because, of course, if you're an AI girlfriend, taking your clothes off, you don't get tired, you don't need to have a day off, you don't get ill, you don't feel humiliated ever by what you're being asked to do.

So she saw it as something that would complement her work rather than make her redundant. Gina, just very quickly. And the questions we have to ask is, what does that mean for society and what does that mean for real women? What does that mean for women who are non-sex workers who are now having to interact in a world? where the cards are literally stacked against us. Professor Gina Neff and Amelia gentlemen there. Amelia's article is obedient, yielding, and happy to follow the troubling rise of AI girlfriends,

which you can find on the Guardian website. Next, a moment of calm. I'm going to transport you hundreds of years into the past with some sublime, sacred music. Laurie Straz is the co-director of Musica Secreta, an all-female Renaissance ensemble. Together, they discover and perform music written by and four women between the 15th and 17th centuries. Laurie came into the Woman's Hour studio on Tuesday, along with other members of Musica Secreta, to perform one of the pieces that they've unearthed.

She began by telling Nula where she found it. This book is the only book of composed music for nuns that we can actually locate in a convent from the 16th century. It's, I mean, unique. It's about 45-minute walk from the middle of Florence, about a mile up into the hills. It wasn't a rich convent. It was quite a modest place. And yet, it had this wonderful, beautiful, rich, colorful manuscript of music prepared for it in 1560. And were you able to decipher exactly what the music was from that?

Yes, mostly. I mean, I have reconstructed some of the music because the manuscript is kind of crumbling to bits. I can imagine. holes in it, where I've had to rewrite some of the music. It's an entire year's worth of music for these women, for their devotions, for their services, for their recreation. But isn't it interesting that we don't really think about nun singing, perhaps, in the same way that we should? Well, yes, because I think what's happened is that over the centuries, as nun singing has dwindled and convents themselves have dwindled, we tend to associate. sacred singing with male voices,

particularly with the cathedral choirs and the choirs of the colleges in Oxford and Cambridge in this country or Westminster, you know, it's a very male-dominated sound. So we forget that women's voices were actually much more common and anyone could wander into a church

and hear women singing. We're going to hear some in a moment. What are they going to sing for us? It's a piece called Da Pachem Dominé in Deibus Nostris. And I chose it because the book was written at a time when the convent had been through war and plague and famine. So this piece is asking for peace in our time.

And what do you think we should listen out for? Because it's all female. With the way the voice cross, choral music we tend to associate with like soprano, also tenor bass. And in music for nuns, all the voices are singing in more or less the same pitch. So the girls will be working very hard for you to hear the individual voices, but they all blend together. Let us sit back and listen.

who How didsteado deus no foster? How beautiful was that? ordinary music. I mean, I feel like I should give silence to it. Well done. Thanks very much. I just want to name music as the greatest singers there, Elsa Campbell, Hannah Eli, Christina Watt and Luthian Brackett. Why do you think we don't know more about this music? Well, history is written by the victors and I totally agree with Virginia Woolf. Anonymous was a woman. It's very easy for women to drop out of the historical record. It doesn't take centuries. It can take just a matter of years. What do we know as we rediscover about the lives

of these nuns in the convent? Who were they? They were the daughters of Florentine families relatively well off. They weren't the princes and princesses, but they were minor nobility. But they would be the second or the third or the fourth or the fifth or the sixth, the daughter in the family. And only one daughter could marry. So all of the cities, excess women, would be going into convents. And And once you entered a convent, you couldn't leave. You weren't in public life. Even your family couldn't see you. You could go into the parlorio and speak with your family through a grate.

You were not allowed to be seen. And their lives were hard. They sang more than they slept. And that was the choir nuns themselves. The servant nuns, these women would be living on very little food. And they would also be contributing to the city's economy as seamstresses, or copyists or spinners or whatever. They had eight services,

and then however many masses, they were paid to sing for the souls of the departed, and they sometimes sang as part of their recreation, and they were teaching, and they did a lot of singing from memory. Do we know when nuns and women more generally stop being associated with church music? There's always a pocket somewhere where the nuns are singing,

right, up into the 19th century, but I think it was kind of the mass dissolution of the convents across Europe that Napoleon did it wherever he conquered. England's convents have been gone for centuries by that time. So I think that's really when women's voices stopped being heard. I mean, do you think, do you have like some dream of something else that you want to find or are you on a hunt looking for more music? I'm always on the hunt. I'm sure there is more. It's just that it's not cataloged.

It's not considered important. and one of the things about the manuscript is that almost all of it is anonymous and it's very hard to place something that is anonymous into a stream of kind of like the great men narrative the way that history is often taught

so anonymous music kind of falls by the wayside that was Laurie Straz and Musica Secreta the singers were Elsa Campbell Hannah Ely Christina Watt and Luthian Brackett their album Riccordanza

A Record of Love is out now Still to come on the program, reflections on what the Giselle Pelico rape trial means for the relations between women and men. And Sally Wainwrights on her new punk rock drama, Riot Women. And remember, you can enjoy Woman's Hour any hour of the day. If you can't join us live at 10 a.m. during the week, all you need to do is subscribe to the daily podcast. It's free via BBC Sounds. Now, Eastender's actor Kelly Bright took part in a Woman's Hour special program last year, which asked whether the education system is working for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

Kelly now has a special one-hour panorama documentary. It's called Autism, School and Families on the Edge. She draws on her own experience as a mother of an autistic son and within the SEND system, and she investigates how parents navigate that complex system to secure the right help at school. She follows three families as they apply for an education health and care plan. that's an EHCP. It's a vital document that determines what support a child receives and also the school that they can attend.

When Kelly came into the studio, Nula began by asking her what it meant to take part in the Woman's Hour Send program. It meant an awful lot because I knew it would have really big reach. We had the Minister for Schools there at the time. And so she made it this really important, loud episode of Woman's Hour. It reinforced what I believed, which was, that I had to keep talking about it. So you feel it had that impact? Yeah, I do. And actually so many people, even now, I know it was a year ago,

but people talk to me about that episode all the time. And I'm very aware whenever I talk that I'm talking for lots of other parents in a similar situation. I can only really talk about my perspective on that, my own experience. But I think you have wider experience than that now, Kelly. I think it would be fair to say. I watched your panorama documentary. You spoke to parents, particularly following three families, but others as well, whose children had been out of school for long periods of time. And, you know, you've heard their concerns. How would you describe them to the listener? We followed three children who all actually have an autistic diagnosis. It's Etta, Buddy and Caris. That's right. And they are completely different

young people as they would be. But that, again, I think is very important to show that you may all share the same sort of diagnostic name, if you like, but your needs can be very different. Do you think anything's changed in the past year in terms of support for families? There are sort of heavy rumours, I suppose, that government want more children educated in mainstream school. And I think there is a very widespread anxiety and concern. about the loss of an EHCP, that that might disappear and parents will be left without a legally binding document. Yes, just to reiterate, it's education, health and care plan, EHCP,

that determines the provision that a child should legally receive. That's right. It's a legally binding document between the local authority and your school, essentially, and it sets out in writing what your child should be receiving. And while we were making the documentary, things were kind of being. drip-fed into the media about change coming. I actually got to talk to Georgia Gould as part of the documentary, who is the new schools minister. She didn't clarify exactly what SEND support is going to look like in the future. But she did talk about that there would still be some kind of legal basis for whatever support was provided, which I think is really important because I think for a lot of

people, that's where their anxieties lay. What we know from the government is that they have refused to rule out the removal of EHCP. And also getting the EHCP, it's a huge milestone, but it doesn't mean automatically your child is going to get all the services that are written on that EHCP that they are legally due. It was a lady from my local authority actually who said to me, you know, it's not a golden ticket. It won't be this that changes your child's life. It will be the people that are in your child's life that will make the biggest difference. And I have to say at the time, I thought, no, no, it's going to be this piece of paper. And actually, she was so right. Because your son's school has been very supportive, but not everything that was promised

in his EHCP is being delivered. But you've decided you're winning at the moment in the sense that he's happy. Yes. I mean, I think if you're a send parent, actually, I just think if you're a parent, you just take every day as it comes. And right now, my son is happy to go to school. He is happy to take part in his lessons. He doesn't get access to the support that is written in his EHCP. If something happened tomorrow, which actually meant that I felt it was of detriment to him or his mental health, I would 100% be kicking up a fuss about that and taking them to tribunal or whatever it is that parents have to then do. But I do think that if we are going to look at...

making mainstream schools offer more support without the need for EHCPs, as is has been suggested. We have to look at how education in mainstream schools is delivered. You will have seen the other day lots of headlines talking about a council, spending as much as £950 a day to get a single child to school, a child with special needs, and to get them transported to that particular educational establishment there was hand-wringing, some people debating it. What were you thinking? Well, what I was thinking was, I mean, somebody asked me yesterday, what would your ideal look like? What would your ideal solution sort of look like? And actually, for me, I would

probably design maybe three or four different education systems, like provisions, all at state level. No one has to pay. Every county would have plenty of these separate ways of being educated so you would never have to travel a ridiculous amount of time to try and get your child to the right school for them and there would never be a lack of space because children are all different and they all do learn in different ways and some children may need alternative education that involves being outside more that is more based in being in a freer way of learning we funnel children into this system where you're all going towards this one thing which is GCSEs in this country. And that one size fits all just doesn't work. Not every child is going to

pass that English GCSE and maths GCSE, which you have to do if you want to do anything further in this country in education. And actually, we could be looking at where those children's other strengths lie and be incorporating that into their education. I actually heard someone on the radio talking about this the other day because I know the government have just made an announcement about getting young people into work, right? And actually, this is all part of the same thing. Education feeds our young people into the workforce. And this is why it's so important.

If you have children that are going to come out of school, having failed everything, who feel like they're not worth anything, that they've always been at the bottom because they just can't do school the way it's set up, where does that push them to as an adult? What's there for them? So, I don't know.

Sometimes I wish I was Prime Minister. Kelly Bright there, her documentary Autism, School and Families on the Edge is available on iPlayer. Well, a Department for Education spokesperson told us we'll continue to listen to children, parents and experts at every stage as we develop our plan for the send system. They go on to say we're already taking action to make sure support is available as routine and at the earliest stage, including through improved training for teachers, $740 million to create more specialist school places, earlier intervention for speech. language needs and embedding send leads in our best start family hubs in every local

A new season of Love Me is here. Real stories of real complicated relationships. It's not even like a gender. I mean, it's wrapped up in gender, but it's just a really deep self-hate. I think I cried almost every day. I just stood myself on the floor.

He's coming on really straight. It's like he's trying to date. you all of the sudden. Yeah, and I do look like my mother. Love me. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Area. Now, a difficult conversation coming next, but one well worth a listen to. As we heard yesterday, France's mass rape victim, Giselle Pelico, has been back in court to face one of her attackers. The only man who is appealing against last year's trial verdict in which a total of 47 men were convicted of raping her as she lay, drugged by her husband, in their family

home. Two were found guilty of attempted rape and two guilty of sexual assault. Earlier in the week, Professor Manon Garcia, a French philosopher who watched the court proceedings, came in to talk to Nula about the impact it had on her. It led her to begin work on a book called Living with Men, Reflections on the Pelico trial, which was released this week. Early on in the book, she asks, we women live with men, and if so, at what cost? I think this question, of course, it's a bit a rhetorical question because there is no question that we have to live with men. There are our sons or friends or fathers,

so I'm not pleading for let's live apart from men in society. But I think it's very important to see that the kind of sexual violence that Giselle Pellicoe experienced may sound extraordinary out of anything that we know, et cetera. But actually, there is a continuum between the sexist structures of society and what happened to Giselle Bricot. Here, there was, on the one hand, this extraordinary component that is the number of men, but also this very ordinary component, which is she was raped and abused at the instigation of her husband. And so suddenly we entered their bedroom, this sort of everyday form of sexual violence that is terrifying. And this is what it is

for so many women to live with men. You explore Hannah Arend's concept of the banality of evil, which describes horrific acts like the Holocaust that they can be carried out, not by sadistic fanatics, but by ordinary people. And you talk about like the banality of maleness. Yes, because in France, in French, it was obvious to parallel between banality du mal, which is banality of evil, and banality of maleness, which is banality du mal. So it's homophonic. But what was striking in this case is that outside of Dominique Pedico himself, who's very probably suffering from very serious problems and is really a pervert, and the other 50 men are perfectly normal men, good husbands, good dads, good brothers. good sons. And they have nothing to say about what happened, except for one or two. They just said, yeah, well, I went and she was there and I did that to her. And they have, in a way, like Eichmann in Jerusalem, they have nothing to say about what happened. Because the trial did show that dozens of these men, they're unrepentant for their crime. How do you understand their lack of remorse?

I feel it perhaps intersects with what you're saying. I think a lot of them see it as what sex is. And this is where it is really terrifying, is that a lot of them, the defense of a lot of them is to say, well, I couldn't have sex with my wife at that time for X and Y reason. Therefore, I went to see Madame Pellico as to replace the sex

that I was not having at home. And so what it shows is, A, that they think, they have a right to sex, that they're entitled to sex even if women don't want it. But be that they think raping an old unconscious woman they don't know is a good substitute for what they do when they have a sexual relation with their wives. And this is something really terrifying. This is something that should make us think, okay, what do we think male sexuality is? Like, how is it that these men, at least, and many men think there's a fungibility between rape and making love with the person you're married to?

And you say some men, but not all men. No, so I don't think all men, but I do think. So the reason why I called my book Living with Men is, of course, a bit polemic, but it's because I was flabbergasted and appalled by the fact that, that all the women I know, all the women everywhere, followed this trial, thought something very important about their lives and about what it is to be a woman was happening through Giselle Pellicoe. And almost all the men treated it as an extraordinary case, as something, some of those, like, crime cases that who cares, you know?

But something that's not based in day-to-day life for the man that you spoke to. Yes. But it's always, you know, what feminists say, when they say, how is it that almost all the women we know have been victims of sexual violence? And all the men we know say they've never committed any sexual violence. There's an arithmetic problem there going on. And so I wanted to tell men, okay, look, you need to ask yourself why this case is so important for us. And what do you have in common with these guys? I'm not saying that you could have raped Giselle Brilico. I'm I'm saying there is something about masculinity that is at play in what it is for you to be a man

and in what it is for these men to go rape Gisel Pellico. You call male sexuality in your book a field of ruins. Yeah, I think it is. But I think I'm not saying men are guilty for it. I think society is guilty for it. The movies we've watched, the way boys have been raised, the way boys have been also victims of sexual violence. themselves. But this sexual violence, it always comes from men. So there's a sort of catastrophe of male violence that is passed on from generation to generation. You know, a lot of people

say, but these men, they had mothers, their mothers raised them. But now we know that the best predictor of the gender views of kids is what they saw their dad do at home. And so men, by not being there, they raise their kids to have bad views about gender. I mentioned this week, Giselle has been back in court. One of the men is appealing against last year's verdict. He says he never intended his words to rape Miss Pelico and that he learned only after his arrest

that she had been drugged. So intent is his defence. I'd be curious for your thoughts on that concept, really not specifically about this defendant really, but in the way that society, French society, may view it. Yes, but it's because what he means by intent is mens rea. The fact that for a crime to be committed, the person who commits the crime needs to know that they're doing something forbidden. But in French legal language, it's called intention, but it's not like you have the

intention in your head of doing something terrible. It's just the fact that you're mentally able enough and aware enough of what is going on in the world that you know that this is forbidden. And so this defense cannot work. We've seen the videos and they've shown them again today. Like he knows that if she wakes up, he's going to be in big trouble. And so that's enough to show that he has intention by kind of presence of mind or command of mind. But it is interesting that he is going ahead with it. Yeah, but he has no other option, right?

Like it never happens that you have videos and hours and hours of videos. of sexual acts being done on someone in a coma. I'm going to spare the listeners with a lot of details. But one thing that struck me with the videos is the sound. You hear her snore very loudly, very regularly the whole time. That means there is no chance that you can seriously think she's just closing her eyes. Like, it cannot be the case. No one could believe that being there.

You say towards the end of the book that men need to love women. How does that happen? One thing that struck me in this trial is that all these men that had raped Giselle Pellicoe, they had wives, they had sisters, they had mothers. And not once their wives, their mothers, their sisters had entered into their thinking about, okay, maybe if I do that, I'm going to go to prison, what is it going to do to her? It's not just about cheating on your wife. It's about I saw daughters that were destroyed in the courtroom by the fact that their dad is going to be in prison for 12 years. But they stood by them. Yes.

Their family stayed by them and supported them. Yes, because they love these men. But these men didn't have like the one gram of love for them necessary to think, okay, what is going to be the impact of my act? on the women in my life. And it was really crazy. All these women were there. They had helped these men pack to go to prison and so on and so forth. But you could see that they were not part of these men's mental landscape.

Didn't care about them enough. And of course, Dominique Pellico, what is terrifying about his discourse is that I do think that he really thinks he loves Giselle. And he really thinks this is a side part where he kind of failed to love her the right way. But he really loved her. But it's part of her love for her that he found her so great that he wanted to destroy her. And I think there is something like that in a lot of ways men love that if they really love, then they want to destroy the object of their love. It's a very old topos in literature and stuff

to destroy the beautiful woman, to destroy the women that we love. The brilliant Manon Garcia and her book, Living with Men, Reflections on the Pelico trial, is out this week. And I want to direct you towards the BBC's action line for support if you have been affected

by any of the issues discussed in that item. And finally, riot women. That's the name of Sally Wainwright's new drama starting on BBC One this Sunday. I think it's fair to say, say that Sally is one of our greatest television dramatists. You might know her as the creator of Happy Valley and the incredible character of Catherine Kaywood played by Sarah Lancashire or Last Tango in Halifax or Gentleman Jack to name a few. There are so many beloved figures that

Sally Wainwright has brought to our screens and she joined me on Thursday alongside actor Rosalie Craig whose role as Kitty in Riot Women turns a group of lost 50-something women into a rock band. Here's the character, Beth, played by Joanna Scanlan, telling bandmate Jess, played by Lorraine Ashbourne, that she's finally found a singer. I am definitely still in. Good, right. So we're going to meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I figured that I'd work for you because you said you'd never go out. I'm going to work on smoke on the water, because I can already do that on the drums. Waterloo and Leila, how about that? Perfect. That's brilliant. So as long as we can all agree, yeah. In other news, the other news is that I, I have found as a singer, a proper singer.

Oh my God, can she sing. Go, take everything, take everything, take everything. Take everything. Wow, that was Rosalie Craig as Kitty singing. The last time we'd spoken to Sally, it was at the end of 2022, and she told us that this next project would look more in depth at women of a certain age. began by asking her, what made her decide they should form a punk rock band? It's very personal to me this.

So it's a lot about what I was going through at what Tamsin very eloquently called the middle squeeze. About 10 years ago, I started to think about doing this. I'd wanted to write about a rock band since I was 13 when I saw Rock Follies on TV. I saw that show and thought, that's what I want to do. I want to write television. So ever since then, I've wanted to try it about another female rock band. I wanted to do my own tribute to Rock Follies.

and then about 10 years ago I'd written and directed a drama about the Brontes and that's around that time my mum started to develop dementia and I felt I was being pulled in so many different directions I still had two boys at home one just about to go off to university the one thinking about what he was going to do education-wise

so a lot of being needed there you know that adage about you know if something needs to do in ask a busy woman I was that woman who just was being expected lots of in a good way you're often at the height of your career that kind of thing and in the middle of that

the menopause started and I didn't kind of realise what it was to begin with because it's not all hot flushes it's forgetting people's names and forgetting what comes next and brain fog and low mood

starting to feel after being 40 where you sort of finally feel you know who you are this unexpected thing happens where you kind of start to get sort of low self-esteem that you don't expect at that

no one really knows what's happening it kind of creeps up on it yeah so I did I wanted to write about that Particularly the experience with my mum, having to deal with someone with dementia who lives five hours away in Bridlington, having to drive up and down,

trying to direct a film at the same time, looking after your home and that kind of thing. It just seemed well worth writing about. Everybody wants you, and in the middle of that, you're disappearing. So how did you cope with it? I was saying to Rosia earlier, I kind of forgot that I've forgotten how I coped with it. You just cope with it.

So for me, writing right with him has kind of been therapy. He's been writing about this part of your life in a way that was uplifting and engaging and interesting and that wouldn't make people think, oh, that's about middle-aged women, I'm not going to watch that. It's not, it's about women who find something very creative and very engaging to do together and how it changes their lives. I want to bring you in, Rosalie, because your character Kitty,

what an opening scene you get. Your life's a bit chaotic. Yeah. You're very messy. You burst onto the scenes, and by the way, the soundtrack is also excellent. Thank you. We see you in a supermarket. you are completely drunk, you're kind of out of control,

you're downing bottles of vodka, you're taking pills, all sorts is happening. But you are performing and being all the things that as women we're told to keep to ourselves because otherwise they will bring great shame. But your character, when we see her, couldn't care less, maybe it's something about me, but I just loved that attitude. I mean, I couldn't agree more, but Sally constructed somebody who doesn't have a filter.

And that's partly because of what she's been through in life and being sort of the victim of aggression. She faces the world like that with two fists, and especially, you know, she exorcises herself through the use of song, which was really brilliant to do. But, I mean, that was, that alone, that was incredible to film that, wasn't it? We did it over about, what, three days? Three separate Sundays.

Oh, three separate Sundays, yeah, at night shoots, weren't they? Yeah. Tell us about Kitty. Tell me about her character. I mean, Kitty's a one-off, but I think she is, you know, as I said, she's had a very turbulent past, and I think that she's the victim of a lot of microaggression from men, or she's objectified by them

and she often sort of falls into a very bad place quite easily by this objectifying that she becomes the victim of. But although the brilliant thing is that we found when constructing, how do you construct a kitty is the fact that she will not be, she will not be victimised, you know, she won't. She never feel sorry for herself.

Exactly, that's it, yeah. And maybe that's what I picked up on. She just didn't care. She was kind of, so when you say constructing Kitty, so did you work on Kitty together? Yeah, we did, when Rosalie was cast, I think you rang me up and said, and you were just on the phone for hours.

Yeah, we were, we were on the phone for hours, yeah. I couldn't believe it, that was just checking she'd give me the job. We don't get a lot of time to rehearse in telly, traditionally. If you've got a six-hour series, normally you get two days for the whole thing, for the entire cast. So you have to choose really carefully you work with. And I don't like that, and I always ask for a lot more time to rehearse. Do you get it?

Yes. Because it's Sally. Well, the drama republic, we're really, brilliant about it because they knew that's how I wanted to work and I knew it was like Rosie wanted to work. So we got together over a period of any number of days and we just went through the script in great detail and then we had two days with Joanna going through all Kitty and Beth's scenes because they're the kind of the backbone of the series. They're two very different women who find this extraordinary connection. You know they're a very unlikely

double act but they find great friendship and great creativity together. Anyway, so we did rehearse intensely over separate days, but many days, and then two days with Joe Armagh. And it was, it's a really useful, it was a really, I find it really exciting, the process of, you know, like working on the voice, you know, deciding what her voice is going to be, you know, because it's a slightly lower register to your natural voice. And thinking about Kitty's physicality, the fact that she's always aggressive,

she's always going to hit out before anybody can hit back at her. So she's got an extraordinary energy. We talked about, you know, whenever she enters, we talked about great entrance. She always brings her own climate in with her, you know. Wonderful. She's got this massive. She's a massive ball of initially destructive energy.

The interesting thing is in episode one, she has a fight with everybody she meets. Yes. She has a fight in the supermarket with Tams and Greg. Yes, who's a police officer. She has a fight with a jaguar, later on. Yeah. And then Beth finds her, Beth sees her.

And all Beth sees her in her is a talent. Joanna's talent. She doesn't see any of the chaos. Yeah. And it's such a nurturing thing for Kitty to have this woman who just sees the good in her and the talent. And Kitty's never had that. She's never had that. What's the word?

Affirmation, never. And being seen, and particularly by an older woman. Yeah. Maybe that's a, that felt for me like a very important thing. I just need to do a roll call of names, by the way, because you've mentioned a few. In Riot Women, you've got Tamsing Grieg, Joanna Scanlon, Tar Jatwell, Lorraine, Ashbourne, to name a few. I mean... Billy Bulmore.

Chandee Poupal. Please. on people coming. What was it like just being on set together and also playing these characters and what went through my mind is I wonder what conversations happening behind the scenes amongst you all?

That part is, I was just saying to say this morning it was intoxicating. We saw each other this week because we were at the premiere in Hebden Bridge and there's nothing like all of us being in a unit together and the conversations even just coming back to London on the train yesterday. They're not only life-affirming,

But you are able, I think, like what you were saying about Beth and Kitty, you're able to see yourself in a different light. If someone's looking at you in a different way, or the female gaze gives you hope, or I certainly felt incredibly lucky to be around, not just such incredible actresses, but also people. I mean, the ability for women to change one another by conversation is astonishing. And that's what we see in this, brilliantly. It's female solidarity through conversation, but also creativity. I just want to pick up on a few things that come up and in the first scene we see Joanna Scanlan's character who is a teacher and she talks about feeling invisible.

Tell us more. So Joanna's characters that are very low ebb when we first meet her and well it goes back to what we were saying earlier actually she rescues Kitty but Kitty rescues Beth as well. I mean she's at her lowest. She's just a lowest. She's somebody who's got a lot to give.

give. She's somebody who's got a lot of love to give and nobody's around for her to love anymore. And then Kitty walks into her life and Kitty needs all the support she can get emotionally and psychologically. But what Kitty gives Beth is, it's kind of someone to love, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And Kitty really responds to that. So they kind of rescue each other because they're both in very dark places of the show starts. But then what comes out of it, which is really beautiful, is Beth can play the piano and Kitty can sing. And they get drunk one night, and they start to talk about Beth's husband. And Beth, Beth refers to a few things that he said in arguments.

And they just spontaneously turn it into a song. And the next day, when Beth comes home from work, Kitty's actually turned it into a real song that they perform. And all the songs are to do with female experience. That song is called You Just Like Your Mother, because this is his favorite way of winning an argument is to put her down by saying, you just like your mother. And then in episode four, the song that they've written,

They're going to sing Waterloo for the talent contest And they end up singing what we've called the menopause song But it's actually called Seeing Red And they're not going to do it till the last second And then they go on and perform And it's, yeah And seeing Red, but you don't shy away from menopause and periods And all womanly body functions

I mean we see you in the first episode Sleeping on a sofa and we see you bleeding Absolutely, I mean so it's so important to see it Isn't it? Because we all go through it And whether or not we're having conversations about it or not The fact that Sally's brave enough to write that into a script and you to have that challenge as a character or an actress

is astonishing and it's important for it to be out there. Rosalie Craig and Sally Wayne Wright. And if you're gagging to binge watch the whole of Riot Women, the series will be available on BBC Eye Player from 6am tomorrow morning. I cannot wait to binge watch it. Tomorrow, episode three of our new series of conversations, The Woman's Hour Guide to Life, is all about juggling your finances and challenging your money.

mindset. We dig into the background behind your spending habits and explore how to align your money choices with the life you really want. Here's a clip of it featuring Claire Barrett, consumer editor at the Financial Times and chartered accountant Abigail Foster. All too often, how we felt about maths in school, not knowing the answer or putting your hand up to answer a question and getting it wrong, that can often make us feel like, I can't do maths, so therefore I can't do money. We sort of shut ourselves down. That's absolutely the worst. thing that we should be doing. We should be really pushing on that and trying to understand more about our financial situation. If people aren't clear on what their money mindset is, how can they

work it out? I think the easiest way to work out your money mindset is to look through your bank statements. Often you can see things like when do you spend the most. Is it late at night? Is it at the weekends? I have like friends that have really bad habits of like when they're bored on the train, they start buying things. So I would say your bank statements hold a lot of that and looking through them is something that's really uncomfortable for a lot of people, but it's because it's a very visual representation of you and who you are as a person. To hear the Woman's Hour Guide to Life, just go to BBC Sounds, search for Woman's Hour, and you'll find it there. It drops at 8am tomorrow, and if there are topics or issues you want to cover, then do get in touch.

That's it from me, and that's it for the programme this week, but don't forget to join Nula on Monday at 10am. A new season of Love Me is here. Real stories of real, complicated. relationships. It's not even like a gender. I mean, it's wrapped up in gender, but it's just a really deep self-hate. I think I cried almost every day.

I just stole myself on the floor. He's coming on really straight. It's like he's trying to date you all of the sudden. Yeah, and I do look like my mother. Love Me. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.