Woman's Hour - Women obsessed with women, Returning to work, Jack Monroe

Episode Date: June 17, 2019

What's the fascination with films books and television programmes like Killing Eve where the story centres on women obsessed with other women? Author Joanna Briscoe and journalist Sirin Kale discuss.We hear why a UK wide coalition of women’s organisations, represented by the Centre for Women’s Justice, has begun legal action against the Crown Prosecution Service claiming that rape cases are being dropped because of a change in policy and practice. Beth and Gina tell us what happened to them and Rachel Krys the co-founder of End Violence Against Women tells us what the coalition is hoping to achieve.Food writer Jack Monroe Cooks the Perfect....Cannellini Beurre Blanc.Emma Land and Tontschy Gerig tell us how the struggled to find work after a long period off.The Booker Prize winner for fiction Arundhati Roy tells us about her new book of political essays focusing on environmental degradation, government elites and the impact on the poorest and most marginalised people in India.Ell Potter and Mary Higgins tell us about their theatre show Hotter.Presented by Jane Garvey Produced by Rabeka Nurmahomed Edited by Jane Thurlow

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

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, good afternoon and welcome to the weekend edition of the programme. This week, Jack Munro cooks cannellini beurre blanc. You can hear the Booker Prize winning novelist, Arundhati Roy, on why she continues to write non-fiction on really controversial subjects and what it's like if you're desperate to get back into the workplace but you're stuck at home. The lowest point for me was going for a

walk in the morning at the time that everybody was going to work and seeing hundreds of people walk past me from obviously doing a vast array of jobs and thinking what is it that they've got that I haven't. That the voice of one woman who, when she was in her 50s, applied for over 500 jobs. She didn't give up and she's now back in the workplace. You can hear from her a little later. We've also got, and thank goodness for that, the definitive guide to exercising your pelvic floor. You can hear from the creators of a new theatre show called Hotter. And women obsessed with other women, as in Killing Eve.

Is there more to this obsession that meets the eye? I think it's really important to recognise that when two women are playing off each other in this very sparky, kind of almost nuclear fission type way, there's always some sort of erotic charge there, in my opinion, of very sort of fundamental level. That's later in this edition of the programme. First, a number of women's groups have launched a legal action against the Crown Prosecution Service, saying it's failing to prosecute cases of rape. They say that just one in every 25 cases gets to court and argue that the previous approach

to continuing with the prosecution, known as merit-based, has been dropped by the CPS. The End Violence Against Women Coalition looked at cases of 21 women who'd made reports to the police. The alleged crimes were thoroughly investigated. The police then passed the details on to the CPS, but then nothing else happened. Rachel Criss is one of the founders of End Violence Against Women. Gina and Beth both had their cases dropped.

Here's Beth talking about what had happened to her. What led me to bring this case about was in 2016 I had been raped and somebody had tried to kill me. Five months previous to that I'd also been date raped and it brought back a lot of intrusive memories but the important thing about the March rape was that I vowed on that day to gather the courage together to actually talk about these experiences. Because I knew that if I didn't, I was headed towards even more chaos. So through that process, I started talking to my GP. I started getting some support. And that led me to talk about my childhood. And and that led me to talk about my childhoods and so that led me to talk about my father and I felt that when I was strong enough I'd go to the

police I told my mum briefly not in much detail I said you know I know we've we've talked about this for years we never talked properly about it we'd laughed about it we'd coped with it we didn't know that our experiences were abnormal until we'd had enough of normal life. And we ended up going forward. Over two years, the police gathered over 50 witness statements from teachers, counsellors, social services, etc., etc., friends, family members, even a brother of my father.

And that led them to bring about 44 charges of things ranging from actual bodily harm, rape, sexual assault, all kinds of child cruelty, etc, etc. Gina, what was the case that you wanted to bring to court? So similarly, I didn't actually want to bring anything to court, which I think is important to say. I was reporting a rape that happened in 2016 to me. And within reporting that, I mentioned, again, similarly, that I perhaps wasn't didn't respond immediately because I was quite used to that style of treatment so the police pressed me on what I meant by that and I said well actually eight years ago which is nearly 12 years ago now I was with an abusive ex-partner who would beat and rape me on a near daily basis. And through my fears and kind of my recovery from that,

I think I've learned to be quite strong is probably the word I want to use, but actually just, yeah, not really facing facts very well when it comes to sexual abuse. And so that's kind of what I said in the in my statement giving and the police then encouraged me to report what had happened eight years earlier and try to convict the suspect my ex-abusive partner and they convinced me that we would have good grounds and that we would have enough evidence. Again, I supplied them with a list of 21 witnesses. I actually believe that only four of those were ever even interviewed.

I had medical evidence in the form of doctor's notes, counselling notes, where I had complained about the abusive partner at the time of and for the following five years afterwards suffering injuries and I mean having a list of prescriptions that would again provide evidence to this. I later found out that those medical notes weren't for some reason used in my evidence. What was the reason for the case being dropped? They didn't they haven't given me one, in all honesty. How did they deliver the news to you then? You were expecting you would go to court.

Oh, yeah, and three years' worth of collecting evidence later, they sent me a one-page, I would say copy-and-paste style letter, which basically said that they didn't feel they had enough evidence for a jury to be confident in their conviction. Beth what about you how did you find out that your case wouldn't go forward? So after the trial date had been set and similarly it was years in the making I got a call from the police officer in charge in April and he said I can't believe I have to deliver this news to you but I was called in for a meeting with the CPS last week and they told me they're dropping the charges I said to them what

the heck are you doing this guy's definitely done it look at our evidence and they he felt that they weren't listening and that a decision had been made by powers above I'd been then offered in a letter similarly copy and paste a right to review I looked into what a right to review means and I saw that a right to review is the CPS. People who'd made that decision review their own decision so it's really kind of bogus. What's been the emotional cost to you of the whole process? Well I strongly believe that this process has re-traumatised me and it's brought back memories, flashbacks in the form of both nightmares and just very vivid flashbacks on a daily basis that are interfering with my working life and my ability to cope.

It's brought back depression, anxiety and everything linked to an abusive relationship. To then have that almost now facing a second trauma uh which is to be told that all of this is is meaningless and is is not believed yet again and i really struggle to see how the bigger picture of what this is going to affect in in other girls that are going to go through this process and how anybody is supposed to have any faith in the system whatsoever and even want to attempt to report to the police. Why are you prepared after all you've been through to go through judicial review if it happens? I don't see that I have an option really. My ex-partner is still out there and potentially still abusing. But also,

I don't live a day without the flashbacks. It's not that I can forget about this. And also, I've spent the last three years gathering evidence. It's almost now that I feel like I'm in a position where I have to push back against the CPS because one of the reasons that they dropped my case, and this is a quote from the CPS you stated that you had been raped every day sometimes more than once a day you stated that you would cry and say that it hurt you also reported bleeding and said that you went to the doctors the suspect denied that he had raped you and that he could not recall you going to the doctors it's disgusting but you had evidence from the doctor if that doesn't make everybody listening very angry and wouldn't make

anybody feel like they have to say something i don't know what would beth what about you why are you prepared to go through with the judicial review as i say again if it happened I think because I know how lonely it is to be facing these things you know I've been in abusive relationships because before I knew what normal was or what love was I thought this was the version I know that what how awful that process is and I feel a responsibility to leave things a little bit better than I found them so I do believe in the power of us coming together as well this is such an isolating process and it's incredible to have the Centre for Women's Justice and the End Violence Against Women Coalition representing

this pattern on behalf of us because when we go to them as individuals and say we just fobbed off with you know I had the CPS lawyer crying when I went for my right to review, when I said, what are you going to do? You basically said to him, go on, keep going with it. Well, thank you both. We're joined by Rachel Chris, who's one of the founders of End Violence Against Women. Now, the Crown Prosecution Service has repeatedly denied that its approach has changed.

Here's what they said to us. Decisions whether or not to prosecute are based on whether our legal tests are met, no other reason, and we always seek to prosecute where there is sufficient evidence to do so. What evidence do you have that it has changed? Well, we have substantial evidence that there has been a change in approach. The CPS, more than 10 years ago, did make a concerted effort to look at these, what are often very difficult cases to get to court. They're often cases where there's been rape within relationships,

there's grooming cases, and these have always been difficult. And they worked very hard to develop an approach to decision-making around charging that would mean they could look very carefully at the evidence and ignore what we know are really dangerous prejudices and rape myths that are held really by a lot of people and in particular by juries and they knew that they were second guessing jury decision making and that was preventing them bringing charges on cases and we've had some really impressive progress. I think you'll agree

that the convictions of the Rotherham grooming gangs, for example, are an example of where if you take the merits-based approach, you look really closely at the evidence and at the abuser rather than just how a jury might perceive the victim in the case, then you can bring these cases. We are aware that there has been a training programme throughout the CPS in 2017 that was really going against bringing this merits-based approach. Prosecutors were being coached to drop that and just look at the code test and really make a decision, is there more than a 50% chance of conviction? We think that they were using what they perceived to be the prejudices of juries to

make those decisions and we've got really strong evidence from the stats from about 2014 we saw an increase both in the number of people reporting rape to the police and in the number of rapes going through to court that increase really turned around in 2017 where we started to see a drop-off. So now, instead of a one-in-five chance of a report of rape ending up being heard in a court, it's now a one-in-25% chance. How sure are you it's the CPS that you should be focusing on? So many women are coming forward. The police have had severe cuts. Is it the CPS or the police you need to be looking at?

I think there's certainly challenges across the whole criminal justice system. But what we know is that these training courses have happened in the CPS. And we're hearing from sources within the system that the merits-based approach has been dropped. If you look at the CPS website, you'll find no mention of the merits-based approach when a couple of years ago, it was really all over the guidance that prosecutors who were specialising in rape were given. There was a lot of training given within the CPS up to 2017 to teach them how to take what is the kind of human rights approach to bringing rape cases. All of that got dropped and that is a substantive change. We think the change within the CPS has created a sort of feedback loop because the police officers who are getting these reports and building these cases

now know that the threshold has increased and that it's going to be much harder for their case to result in a charging decision. So they're bringing fewer cases through to the CPS now because they know that they're very unlikely to get through. Rachel, Chris, Gina and Beth and here are just a couple of emails on this subject. From Sarah, I was 52 when I was drugged and raped by a stranger in November of 2017. I am totally dumbfounded by the ineptitude of the police in my case, but on hearing that the CPS has changed their processes, it does make perfect sense to me now.

In my case, the police didn't even bother to interview main witnesses, nor did they get the footage from two CCTV cameras. I naively thought I was in safe hands when I reported to the police, but I couldn't have been further from the truth. The whole experience took the light out of my soul. You shine less as a human and you have to bury the pain very deep within you. It never goes away because justice was denied and your worth as a woman in what I consider to be a serious crime is questionable. An anonymous listener says, I'm listening to your

piece on the poor women who've had their cases dropped by the CPS and I'm crying my eyes out as I've gone through something very similar. An abusive, coercive, controlling ex-partner brutally raped me and I had doctors and counselling evidence and another of his partner's corroboration evidence and it too was dropped. I now have to be around my abuser as we share a child, and he is very vengeful. I am so angry, says that listener. Not much I can say to that, really,

except, of course, if you want to contribute your experience to the programme, then please do so via the website. Now, Jack Munro was a guest on the programme this week. She's the food writer and anti-poverty campaigner. Her latest book is Tin Can Cook, and it's filled with recipes made from tinned ingredients. No surprise there. She says her mission is to help people eat delicious food,

whatever their budget. So she cooked cannellini beurre blanc. My main driver behind writing this book was that for quite some time, a few years ago, I was a food bank user. And food banks are something that are on the increase year on year in this country. And more and more people are forced to rely on them. Otherwise, they're at risk of going hungry. And I wanted to create a book of really simple recipes that I would have found useful at that time. It's not just a book for food bank users, though.

It's got quite attraction in the camping community or among people with disabilities who may find it difficult to chop fruit and vegetables or to use a lot of energy to cook. So it's sort of a multifunctionfunctional simple cookbook you are making um i didn't do it justice when i said something with cannellini beans it's got a much much posher title what is it um it's a cannellini bean beurre blanc and that sounds quite fancy um but i put it in sort of i put it in this book sort of as a bit of a hurdle of my own to get over. I was raised working class by an Irish mum and a Cypriot dad,

so we had very plain, basic food in my childhood. And then as an adult and as a food writer, I would come across recipes for beurre blanc, and I'd think, it's not food for someone like me. I don't even know what it means, actually. It's like a butter and wine reduction, basically. It's like a classic French recipe. Let's get started then,

because I think you're going to make this for my mid-morning snack. Which I'm hugely looking forward to. The ingredients are very simple. Tin of cannellini beans. You've got some pasta as well. Any shape? Yeah, any shape of pasta. Although there's a fantastic book called The Geometry of Pasta by a guy called Jacob Kennedy and a designer, Kaz Hildeildebrand who talks about that there is a perfect

shape of pasta for every kind of pasta dish so I looked through his book to find what the perfect shape of pasta would be for a cannellini bean beurre blanc and he recommended for anything with big beans conchigli because it's the shell shaped pasta and it literally cups a little bean in every single mouthful so the pasta sort of forms around the bean like a snug little cocoon you get a little bit of sauce in there and it's absolutely perfect so this is my very basic budget cookbook but it's got ideas about itself stick the pasta in the pan and let's get going with this okay i'm going to sit the beans in at the same time because then they go really nice and soft and creamy so stick them both in the pan of water and the other ingredients are the kind of things that well you tell me um

does the does the average person perhaps on a low income have other ingredients that you're about to use in their in their cupboard i mean what what would you say about that well the good thing about this recipe is you can pretty much use what you've got. So I've got white wine vinegar, but you could use any kind of vinegar. I've got butter, but you could use oil. So there are so many variables to cook this dish that it is as long as you've got basically some acid, some booze, some fat and some flavour, you can make it. Tell us a bit about your current, your state of mind,

if you don't mind me asking, because you've been very, very public about alcohol, about acknowledging that you had a problem with it and about packing it in. How is all that going? It's going absolutely fine. I mean, I managed to get here with an entire small bottle of white wine and not swig it on the tube. Well, that was actually sort of honestly why I asked you, because it's pretty hard to avoid alcohol in your line of work isn't it yes it is well it is and it isn't i mean i used to cook with alcohol and my recipes quite a lot simply because i had it laying about and now it's something that i have to deliberately go out and

get and i had a difficult conversation with the um managers of all my local corner shops a few months back and i just said look do not serve me booze i'm an alcoholic i'm trying to like recover i'm putting myself through a 12-step program don't serve me whatsoever which means that now i have to walk for about a mile to buy a tiny 200 mil bus and a wine to go and do warzaks i go in and lee the guy at the corner shop is like no he told me not to serve you and i'm like i'm going on the bbc he's like this is legit i told me not to serve you. And I'm like, I'm going on the BBC. This is legit. I need this. It's for this recipe. And he's like, no, come on.

That's a really interesting insight into the measures you felt you had to take to tell the people who in the past would have sold you alcohol that they just shouldn't. I'm not complacent about it, but I seem to have come out the other side of it. There's a fantastic smell. I have to say it is largely that of cooking alcohol wafting across the studio now, I've got to be honest. Tell me a little bit about... I was thinking about my own food bank donations,

and, you know, the terrible truth is, Jack, sometimes I'm conscious that when I give, I give food to the food bank that I wouldn't buy for my own household. Ah. Well, what... Yeah, you tell me. What am I doing here here you are breaking my cardinal rule of food bank giving go on my personal feeling on it is that you should donate the same quality of produce that you would have yourself if you're not in a position to do that then giving anything is better than giving nothing and if you can give sanitary products toilet roll and sun cream this of year, because sun cream is extortionately expensive.

And I know that food banks are grateful for donations and things like that as well. That's a good point. And I know that your book has been made available, hasn't it, via the Trussell Trust. Is that correct? Yeah, I did a crowdfunder because I wanted to get one copy of Tin Can Cook into every food bank in britain so that they could photocopy it and it's been neatly designed so that it photocopies like as an a4 page i said you can photocopy it you know it's not copyright laws just photocopy it hand the

recipes out to food bank users and the general public went one better and have crowdfunded enough for 10 000 copies which is a couple of hundred to every food bank in the uk and people have been just handing them out to their clients and the feedback i've had from food bank users and from the volunteers who run them has been astounding and really overwhelming because this really is what i wanted this book to do is to go into the hands of the people who would need it the most well i think it's doing well good i'm glad to hear it and just very briefly because i honestly didn't think about this until i looked at the book stewing steak if you've got a tin of stewing steak you say you can effectively get rid of the what can be a somewhat gloopy sauce and then do something with the meat

yeah it's just slow cooked meat um it depends on what you're doing with it if you want to make like a ragu so you just add the stewing steak with. If you want to make, like, a ragu, so you just add the stewing steak with some of the gravy to a can of tomatoes, a slosh of red wine, a bit of garlic or onion, and you've got basically the equivalent of any slow-cooked nonnas bolognese out there, but knocked up in 15 minutes flat.

I'm quite methodical in how I approach my recipes, so I bought loads of different cans of stewed steak and rinsed the gravy off and then weighed what was left to see which was the best value brand of stewed steak though which can was mostly steak and which can was mostly gravy it's something that I would have previously associated with my mum's dinners we'd have stewed steak and mash and a pile of boiled greens and as a child I was I didn't want to touch it but as an adult I'm like that's some good quality stuff right there Jack Munro who's now rethinking her adolescence as so many of us do as we mature. If you'd like to download the Cook the Perfect podcast you can do so via

BBC Sounds. Loads of good cooking bits of advice and recipes there and of course if you'd like to do the cannellini beurre blanc then you can see that recipe on the Women's Hour website now. Are you currently at home but thinking about getting back into the workplace or maybe you're already trying and you're finding it tough because you might be in your 40s and 50s and you're finding it hard going? Hope you can take heart from what you're about to hear. Tonshi Gerig is 61 and she's now back in the workplace as a senior manager in people services at EY. But before that, she was at home for many years and she had applied for over 500 jobs before she got this one. Emma Land is 48 and is a temporary play worker, but she's a qualified teacher. She's applied for more than 100 jobs. In an ideal world, I asked her, what would she like to do?

I'm not going to commit to anything specific. I know I'm qualified as an English teacher and I love teaching English, I love writing, I love the power of words, but I want to feel successful, I want to earn enough money to pay the bills and I just want to feel valued, which is what I think everybody wants.

Can we just go back a little bit, Tanshi, in terms of your own story? Why did you leave the workplace in the first place? I left for multiple reasons. I had a big job that was very stressful. I was working extremely long hours and I got to the point where I really needed a break. I wanted to take a little time out, which turned out to be three years, It wasn't quite what I anticipated. And also my daughter got older, so she didn't have the same financial support. So that was why. And I took that time off, expecting to get back into work three, four months later.

And it just didn't happen. Why didn't it happen? I have no idea. I'm an HR professional, as you said. So in terms of writing CVs, I'm extremely good at that. I started off by doing all the things that they tell you, like I tailored my CV to every single application. It was a full time job looking for work. I think I probably got feedback from one job in 70 or 80. And then it was the standard letter, you know, other candidates more closely fit your requirements. And I'm thinking,

I've just ticked 12 boxes out of 10 of the ones that you were looking for. Okay, you were, I think, at quite a low point, weren't you in that period of time when you were out of the workplace? At its worst, what was it like? Oh, I got suicidal at its worst, because you have all those financial pressures, you know, you worry about feeding your kids, keeping your house. I nearly lost mine. There's all of that lot. But I think what's even more corrosive is what it does to your relationships and your sense of self-identity. I think the lowest point for me was going for a walk in the morning at the time that everybody was going to work

and seeing hundreds of people walk past me from obviously doing a vast array of jobs and thinking, what is it that they've got that I haven't? That was awful. Emma, you, I know, have a gift for words. You are a great writer. And I've got a paragraph here that I was reading yesterday and it really stuck with me. You take us through a day in your life, effectively,

after you've seen the kids at the front door and they've gone off to school. And you write here, Eat something, drink some water, trying to be healthy, put some washing on, darks today, not enough whites or pastels for a full load, look in the freezer, pick something for tea that may or may not be eaten, the tap drips, the clock ticks, look through emails, look through job sites, look out the window. It's debilitating, isn't it, that sort of day?

And we've all had those days. Absolutely, but it's more than demoralising. I think you do feel like you don't exist. Is it better to do something rather than nothing, even if you are vastly overqualified for the job you're currently doing? I've found that it is. I think everyone would advise you to get out and do something, as long as you're with people and you're trying to do something productive even if on paper it's something you

are as you say overqualified for. During those 13 months when I was unemployed I made a point of getting out of the house and going to sit in the cafe and even if the only person I ever spoke to was the person on the till I still got out there and I still wanted to be part of society, even if I felt on the margins of that. And it's a little bit like being in a prison, actually. I know that sounds quite melodramatic. Well, you recognise that, Tonshi, do you, that feeling? Certainly I recognise that feeling of isolation,

not so much the prison bit, but that thing about going out to the cafe just as some desperate attempt to maintain some form of social contact because I think the other thing that's very hard about that situation is it's so isolating it's not like there's a people advertised hey I'm unemployed let's all go to some kind of unemployed you know and spend money we don't have and spend money we don't have exactly exactly and I think that's and you know that you see the figures you know there are a large amount of people are unemployed but it doesn't help because you're not really connecting with them. You are now back you know a high paid important job in a big big organisation so Tanshi

how did you do it? I was very very lucky and it was a partly a question of luck I met somebody who told me about the women's returners programme and I got into EY on their reconnect programme without that I think there's a strong possibility I wouldn't have been here. You are not earning less than you used to, are you? Or are you? I am slightly, yes, but not massively. No, not massively.

So I'm very lucky in that respect. And the technology, had it changed? Well, it was interesting, because that was one of my concerns about it. And it has changed, because I did hear lots of messages about, oh, your skills are going to be out of date, and all that kind of stuff. And it was changed because I did hear lots of messages about, oh, your skills are going to be out of date and all that kind of stuff.

And it was not true. The fact that you are 48, Emma, it's not it's not old by any stretch of the imagination. Is it something that people mention to you when you approach them for work? They don't mention it, but I think most of what is communicated is unspoken. And either they give you a certain look or they might refer to the fact that maybe they might say, oh, your skills might not be up to date. But I think really what they're saying is you're 48, you're too old, which is ridiculous. I think many TV talent shows would have you believe that age is just a number and you can achieve your dreams and all of this. And of course, in the real world, that's not actually true.

And age is a number. And I think you are judged by that number. And it's not fair. Emma Land and Tanshi Gerig, a big reaction from you to this discussion. Here's an email from an anonymous listener who says, I'm a 53 year old woman. My youngest son is going off to university in September and I'm dreading it. Here's an email from an anonymous listener who says, I've been out of the workplace for so long that I feel the only answer is to be self-employed, but I feel isolated. I don't see anyone from one day to the next except my son, who has his own life, and my partner who works full-time and sometimes works away. My confidence is at a real low. I don't have many friends and I've gone from a full-time mum of four to nothing.

And once my son goes off in September, I feel I really will be redundant. I've read articles that say, now's the time to do what you want to do, but I don't know what that is. Thank you. Yes, I suspect many people will have a load of sympathy for you and a real empathy with you too, because that sounds like you're at a bit of a crossroads. Well, I hope something comes to you and things get a little better. Chris says, I retired in September of 2018 after working as a midwife for over 30 years. I became a full-time carer for my mum who lives with me. But I was becoming isolated and depressed and felt like I was losing my identity.

I now work part-time for a law firm and I love it. I am so grateful to a friend who sent me the information about this job and encouraged me to apply. That is, as I say, a subject that really got you going. So we'll definitely go back to that in the very near future. It isn't easy to get back to work and i think we need some cast iron advice on exactly how you go about it on tuesday we had the definitive guide to the pelvic floor exercise so i think if you sit on a hard surface well i'm doing that now yeah leaning slightly forward hands on thighs and then try and lift your anus and your vaginal muscles away from the chair squeeze lift and hold certainly after five seconds try and relax i think 10 seconds is pushing it with a lot of people particularly if you have got a slight weakness of the muscle you know 10 seconds of holding is a long time. Continence nurse specialist Jane Sampson now if you want to get to the bottom of the pelvic floor then listen again to Tuesday's

program on BBC sounds and go on Twitter and Instagram where you can find top pelvic tips from physiotherapist and stand-up comedian Elaine Miller. Now TV traditionalists will be on the couch on Saturday night with their crackers and their cheese glued to episode two of Killing Eve. Binge watchers will already have finished the whole thing, of course. Whatever stage you're at, you'll know that this is all about the incredibly intense and frankly erotic relationship between an elegant psychopath, Villanelle, played by Jodie Comer, and the MI6 agent on her trail, Eve. The two women are obsessed with each other and there is an erotic charge

between them. I think about you all the time. I think about what you're wearing and what you're doing and who you're doing it with. I think about what friends you have. I think about what you eat before you work or what shampoo you use or what happened in your family. I think about your eyes and your mouth and what you feel when you kill someone. I think about what you have for breakfast. I just want to know everything. I think about you too. Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh in Killing Eve. Now, this is actually relatively familiar territory when you think about it. Mrs Danvers and Rebecca, the favourite, for example, everything that was going on in that film.

And Notes on a Scandal, the book and the film, featuring an older teacher who was preoccupied with a beautiful young colleague. Why do we enjoy watching women in these sorts of relationships and circumstances? Jenny talked to the novelist Joanna Briscoe and to Shirin Kale, a freelance journalist. What did Shirin think of the relationship between Villanelle and Eve? I'm very convinced by it and I think that the reason the audiences have reacted so superbly to Killing Eve

season one and season two perhaps not to the same extent is because it's just so incredibly satisfying to watch the dynamic between Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh on screen they have such incredible chemistry uh Emerald Fennell the writer of season two has said that it's very clear for her that it is definitely a sexual obsession and I think to see that incredible sparky dynamic between those two women on screen is something that we so often don't see that presenters in film or on tv and that's why audiences are just drinking it up. Joanna what do you make of it? I absolutely loved season one where I thought it was fascinating this cat and mouse game, and it was subtle

and you had a growing awareness that it was a real fixation. I'm finding this season a bit on the nose. Well, we're a bit early into it, aren't we? I've seen the whole thing. Oh, you binge-watched it. So it is addictive, I have to say. Having said that, I've watched the whole thing. I've binge-watched, but...

And it's amazing, the acting is incredible. I find it a little bit... Eve, you're obsessed with her. It's a little bit stated sometimes. But it's a fascinating subject, one I deeply love. Now, The Favourite, Shirin, had three women in obsessive relationships. What did you think of the way they were portrayed in that film?

What I loved about The Favourite, and I adored it as a film, was that yes, it's about female obsession, but it's also about sexual intrigue, and it's about power. I think so often when we think about representing women on film, it's often well-intentioned, but we frame them in very positive lights. It's about female solidarity and friendship. And there's this feminist kind of discourse which says that women should support other women. And don't get me wrong, I absolutely believe that they should. But women are just as capable of being horrible and cruel and mean and nasty and backstabbing and treacherous as men. And to see The Favourite and to see that power struggle between those three women play out in such a magnificent way on film and to see these women be conniving and treacherous and devious,

I adored it because it was a side of the female lust for power that is so often not represented. How true is that, that suddenly we're, you know, after sisterhood and everybody helping each other, how important is it that we have these kind of relationships where maybe women are not quite so perfect anymore? I think it is important. I think to some extent that's always been represented, but somewhat in a more dodgy way in the past, you know, women catfight, whereas actually I think now we can accept

that, of course, female relationships aren't always perfect and it's not all about solidarity. And I think the particular subject that we're discussing actually often is to do with an imbalance of power. And I think, you know, the woman who becomes obsessed with another one is often lacking something in herself and is finding another woman absolutely fascinating because, as occurs in many novels,

that the object of the gaze is more daring and the one watching and being obsessed is on the sidelines and really absorbing the energy from someone else. And I think this is all a totally fascinating subject. What other literary examples would you put in this category? I mentioned Rebecca. Yes, which is an arch-obsession novel. What literary examples would you put in this category? I mentioned Rebecca and Poor Mrs Danvers. Yes, which is an arch-obsession novel.

Well, from very early, The Bostonians by Henry James has one woman obsessed with another in the guise of politics. They're all the French novels, Colette and Violette Le Duc and Evelyn Maillard, where they're usually set in school and it's usually someone younger who becomes obsessed. Sarah Waters does it wonderfully in Affinity, The Paying Guests. There's many, many. The Woman Upstairs by Claire Massoud is another example of it.

I think it's about identity and one's own identity and it's not necessarily about the object in the way that the gazer thinks it is. Joanna, I mean, these obsessive relationships have been, to some extent, at the heart of your work. Sleep With Me features a woman who inspires obsession in others and then is obsessed with one of the other characters. Why was it such an appealing theme for you?

I think in youth I had been obsessed. I'll come out with that. Not in a kind of stalker way, but in a very... And often it is about youth, this theme. There are a lot of young protagonists, actually Sally Rooney to some extent, who experience this. So I'd had that. And then it was just something that I thought,

there's a kind of outsider element coming in which I'm fascinated by and I realise I've done it again in my next novel in a very different way but it is an obsession with someone what we're talking about someone who has something you don't and I think that can also tip into a relationship that turns toxic like actually the film All About Eve, very obsessive, and then it becomes competitive. So that's an element of it as well. And I think it's just something...

I love looking at a female through the female gaze. Often in the past, authors have hidden behind the male gaze, like Willa Cather, they've had to, whereas we don't have to. But to what extent are these obsessions almost always erotic? I think, yes, it is very much about sexual and erotic energy between two people. I would also say, though, that in popular culture, the word obsessed has slightly lost its meaning. You know, if you speak to a generation of teen girls, they'll say they're obsessed with Rihanna. I don't think that that's the same level of erotic fixation that we're talking about here.

And I think perhaps that word is slightly degraded from that original meaning. But yes, I think it's really important to recognise that when two women are playing off each other in this very sparky kind of almost nuclear fission type way, there's always some sort of erotic charge there, in my opinion, of very sort of fundamental level. It has become very popular now and i don't wonder are we a bit disappointed that sisterhood might be going out of popularity and dangerous obsession is in i don't think that they're necessarily mutually exclusive i i think feminism is evolving and growing in very interesting ways,

as well as there's always a backlash. And I think we can incorporate this into it. So I don't think it's necessarily a contradiction. And I'm excited by seeing this. Also, it means there can be two female leads on screen, which never really used to happen. The novelist Joanna Briscoe and the freelance writer Shirin Kale talking to Jenny. Now the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 for The God of Small Things but she's also known for her non-fiction and it's very powerful stuff as well. She's just published My Seditious Heart, a collection of political essays written over the last 20 years.

She's been criticised for her forthright views on a whole range of subjects, including land acquisition in India, environmental degradation, government elites, and the impact of all this on the poorest and most marginalised people of her country. I put it to her that her life would have been so much easier if she'd just stuck to fiction. Well, in truth, you know, I got into a lot of trouble with the God of Small Things as well, you know, court cases, all of that. So in actual fact, it's a bit of a myth that the novels would have led me to have a quieter life because there isn't that separation in terms of the way I look at the world. Whatever I do, life would not be quiet. And because you happen to be female, are you always going to have more criticism than a male writer? It's a double-edged thing, you know. so sometimes you get a lot of attention perhaps because you're female, but then you get a lot of flack as well.

And when I started writing the political essays, at the beginning I had all these men who were telling somebody who had just written a book that sold so many copies. And won any number of prizes. How to write, how to think, what tone to take, what subjects to write about, what subjects not to write about. It was almost corny, you know. What did you do about that? I just laughed. But, you know, it took a while for it to wear away. But, I mean, forgetting me, you know, in India today, any woman who stands up and

criticizes the Hindu right, it's just, you know, rape threats, death threats. It's unbelievable the kind of misogyny that they face. In this country, when we hear about the Indian elections, and we did hear about them, the headline is always, it's the biggest exercise in democracy in the world. Hundreds of millions of people will vote. And we marvel at that. And if I'm honest, I'm not sure we really look very much more at it

in any greater detail. What should people in this country know about what happened in the Indian election? Well, you know, I mean, I've been writing about it for some years now. And the fact is that, first of all, the problem is that democracy has been reduced to elections. Every institution of democracy has gradually been compromised. And now the institution of elections itself has become completely controlled by big money,

more data. They had booth by booth targeting of, you know, castes and populations. They had millions of WhatsApp groups through which to transmit this kind of propaganda where they could combine 21st century technology

with a medieval understanding of a feudal society. And so it was incredible that it leapt over the fact that there are so many Indians who are either illiterate or semi-literate because you had these videos going out on WhatsApp. And it was very hard to counter that kind of propaganda with this one person as the cover story, you know. You mean Modi? Modi. So this selling a brand of toxic Hindu nationalism

and an election in which the millions of Muslims were demonized. And as you know, India has more Muslims than almost any other country, including any Muslim country in the world. Wow. Well, you put it like that. That is astonishing. Is there any place for women in Modi's government? Does he have prominent female colleagues? Yes, there are women who have been elected. Amongst them, notoriously, a woman called Sadhvi Pragya, who was accused in a bomb attack in which six people were killed in a place called Malegaon. She's under trial for terrorism.

She goes around with a cow and claims that its urine has cured her breast cancer. And if you stroke its hide backwards, it will reduce your blood pressure. And I don't know if she's going to take it with her into Parliament. But she might. She might. And she is a prominent female politician. She's a member of Parliament now. You've written a great deal about sexual violence and it is clear that it is still a problem everywhere.

It certainly isn't confined to India. Has it got worse? Well, that's actually hard to say because you don't know whether it's got worse or whether more and more women are now coming out and reporting it. It's hard to say. But in India, because of caste and because of the numbers of geographical areas that are under military and police occupation. There has been one form of sexual assault that has been culturally acceptable, you know, which is that the upper caste men have felt that they can walk in and rape a Dalit woman. Why? Because they are upper caste and they are entitled. So in villages, this has been a traditional thing. And therefore, it is not culturally as outrageous to people as, for example, when the famous protest happened about the girl when the more and more women are in the workplace.

So tradition and modernity has its own recipe for assault. And then you have the fact that one of the greatest issues in India is the displacement of masses, of whole populations. By development. By development. By development. And, you know, this is what I keep saying, that feminism has now been sort of taken over by the language of the NGOs, and they decide what is feminist and what is not. But if you see a vast population

displaced from its hereditary land, from its ancestral properties by development. And sometimes the cash compensation just falls into the hands of men. Women are cast on the waters, you know. So it's a form of regression, an attack on women that just goes under the radar. Let's say you write a third novel. You're going to write a third novel set in the India of 2050. What do you think it will be like? Well, we are once again looking at the mass of the human population not required to participate in economic activity.

So in a way they will be seen as surplus people and we know how dangerous that is. And all the tools that we've used to try and understand the era that we live in will not work. I think we are heading into a time that we have not known before, that we will not be able to use

our usual tools of left and right. We'll have to come up with a new algorithm. Aaron Dattie-Roy and that collection of essays is called My Seditious Heart. Hotter is a new theatre show. It's currently at the Soho Theatre in London, but then you'll have a chance to see it at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh over the summer months. Elle Potter and Mary Higgins are at the centre of all this. They met at university and worked together on what started out as a student show. Here's Mary describing it to me.

It's a show about bodies and hotness, and Elle and I interviewed women and trans people aged 11 to 97. How many did you speak to? It was about 40 in the end 50 yeah each time we do the show we sort of try and add more interviewees to make it kind of greater spread of the type of people we're interviewing these people are volunteers yes yeah we don't force them into anything okay um and the show it's only it's an hour long and it it's a kind of well it's about sexuality it's about experiences of sex it's about how you learn to experience sex and it's an hour long and it it's a kind of well it's about sexuality it's about experiences of sex it's about how you learn to experience sex and it's about body image and it's also and this is the

bit i found if i'm honest slightly uncomfortable it's about your relationship or your former relationship so tell everyone a little bit first of all about how you came to do the show together we didn't really know each other we were at uni but we didn't really know each other and i does that mean you devoid of each other or you've been wary or what we had mutual friends but honestly i was slightly intimidated by mary because she's so cool like if anyone saw her now they would understand she is cool yeah she's very cool and um we were in sort of theater productions separate ones and sort of always missed each other and i was sort of aware of her. And then one day she came up to me in a pub

and said she wanted to make a two-woman show with me, like literally out of the blue. And I said yes. And from then we sort of started hanging out more and more, rehearsing, finding out about each other. When you're doing a show about bodies and hotness, you have to think quite a lot about your own relationship with your own body and your own sexuality and we were both sort of discovering I suppose who we were who we are are you prepared to say anything about that Mary go on yeah I mean

I also think I asked Elle retrospectively because I fancy her that you can't really admit that to yourself at the time because it's meant to be a professional opening line do you want to make a show with me yeah it did work and it paid off yeah okay um and we just got really intimate and we were also talking yeah we knew we're going to make a show about bodies and then you come to the bit where you realise you've only got two between you and you should probably ask some other people and that's how the interviews came in. So queerness is sort of central to Hotter. It's sort of like the blood of Hotter but we didn't used to mention,

we've been doing the show for about two years but we didn't used to mention that we were together. Oh, you didn't mention it at the start? No, because we'd just broken up before we did the first Edinburgh run. So crucially that was a very, very difficult time when we were doing a show together, really intimately about bodies. And the elephant in the room was that we had been together

but couldn't really speak about it. Because it's really difficult immediately after a break-up to sort of even contemplate spending time with the person you'd just broken up with, let alone doing a run, a month's run in edinburgh festival yeah so we couldn't really talk about it in that now okay we've established that you talk to lots of other people it isn't just you and you actually very effectively lip sync your way through the contributions of lots of people who range in in age and all sorts of other ranges as well amongst the people you talk to let's hear some of your interviewees talking in this instance

about their first experiences of masturbation. On sofa, late at night, well, it was probably around 11, and it was to a programme called Sex Etc. My parents were asleep or out. And I remember at the beginning, I used to quite forcefully go left to right. My friend Juliet taught me how to do it, largely over the telephone.

I think I almost definitely looked up some kind of wiki how about how to do it. I thought I was dying. I was like thank god I have my phone here I can call the police. I'm very lazy. I just do what I know I like and then it's over and then I go to sleep. I don't know if I came the first time but that I remember specifically lying on the sofa watching sex et cetera going with one finger. About masturbation. No I don't think I've ever talked to anyone about masturbation. And slightly infuriatingly, she doesn't reveal any more.

That was the voice of a 97-year-old. How did you find that 97-year-old? Anne is the grandmother of my sister's ex-boyfriend. Keep up at the back, yeah. She was living in the same city and so we went and met her. Well, I was on my own actually and we spoke for an hour. We have about five or six questions

on wanking, but the first one is, you know, have you ever talked about it before? And she said no. So I didn't ask the others. I'm not entirely surprised that she hadn't talked about it before, really. And I suppose in a way that is an illustration of just where we are. We're in a very different place to when I was growing up

and things are changing around you two as well, obviously. You do talk too about the menopause. I've got a bit of a beef here because God knows I'm menopausal, but I've never had a hot flush. And that was the only symptom that you talked about. I want you to talk about aching joints, please. Really? You've never had a hot flush?

A lot of women having the menopause don't have hot flushes. Well, we should interview you. Well I'm afraid I'll have to speak to my agent. I don't come cheap these days. It is interesting to get those insights from from other women and from men we should say as well. You're doing another show aren't you which involves a different sort of contributor. Tell me about that one. yeah so our next show is called fitter and basically when we made hotter we didn't even think about the fact that we would only interview women and trans people and we thought why have we done that why have we made that decision as women why do we only want to ask those questions to other women or female identifying people and it sort of forced us to to face up to our own relationship with masculinity

like our own softness and hardness in our attitude towards it um so we thought why not make a kind of greasy teenage brother like too hotter like the male equivalent of the show but you will be there representing those voices yeah which is it brings up a kind of conundrum which is can you take on experiences of people you're not the same as on stage or is that the perfect place to sort of become someone else so um but in some ways it's no different from hotter as in it's interesting that we have that extra hesitation because we're talking about male and masculine presenting people but with hotter you know we are lip-syncing to 97 year old or voices of women of color it's just about sort of degrees of separation and just being

really careful when you're making verbatim theater that you are platforming the voices in a respectful way mary higgins and l potter you can catch up with them at the edinburgh fringe festival and then they'll be back in London in September. Now, on Monday, Women's Hour starts a new series on teenage mental health, and you'll hear the experiences and the voices of teenagers, of their parents, their teachers, and mental health professionals. To give you an idea of what lies ahead, here is the voice of one woman whose daughter is really suffering.

She was starting to self-harm. She was having suicidal thoughts. You know, I knew there was something far more than just normal anxiety because she just seemed totally flat, not enjoying life at all. And you are, you're put on a waiting list and left to get on with the rest of your life. You know, it's, it really is like that. It's very, very lonely. And I know that there are lots of other people out there going through it, but that doesn't help me.

Some very powerful testimony. And there'll be more of that on Monday morning, two minutes past 10. Have a very good weekend. 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.