Can men write about female pleasure?
Looks at why pop culture romances such as Titanic and 10 Things I Hate About You are both irresistible and problematic.
Sex. It surrounds us. We watch it, read it, think about it, worry about it, fantacise about it and define ourselves and others with it.
But who’s sex is it, and who’s really enjoying it? Those questions are being explored by two Wellington theatre productions that open this weekend: Body Double, created by Eleanor Bishop and Julia Croft, with Karin McCracken, and Venus in Fur, directed by Andrew Foster. Both offer differing points of view as they dive into the hazy and frustrating universe of sex and representation.
Body Double, playing at Bats Theatre, uses sources from literature, film and science to investigate the ways in which heterosexual men often end up being central to a woman’s experience of sex. So, instead of the outcome being about a man’s pleasure, the women have reinserted their own desired outcomes. Because, as Bishop, Croft and McCracken have discovered – it has rarely never been about what the female character desires independently.
‘‘We have to practise desire as women because we’re not taught it as kids,’’ McCracken says.
Croft adds: ‘‘Thinking back to sex education from school and from your parents, it was from everything fear-based: ‘Don’t get pregnant, don’t get an STI, don’t get raped.’
‘‘No-one, as far as I’m aware at any point when I was a young person, said to me, ‘You know what? Sex can also be great, and you can have a really nice time and it can feel awesome.’ The conversation for young women is really around the bad things that can happen.’’
Croft gives the example of popular 1999 high school rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You.
Heath Ledger’s character Patrick falls for Kat, but she declines his offer of a date. Patrick doesn’t take no for an answer, and he continues to ask. He even hires a brass band to force her to say yes.
‘‘The insane sounds romantic and beautiful,’’ Croft explains.
‘‘He keeps bullying her to go out with him, and that’s just messed up. And then he gets a marching band and you go: objectively that’s awful. But something emotionally in me goes, ‘He pursued her, he couldn’t live without her... God, that’s great.’’’
Titanic is another weakness for Croft. ‘‘They [Rose and Jack] are super problematic, but you love them anyway, and I know it’s ludicrous, but I want someone to get back on the boat.
‘‘Like, Rose is leaving the boat and then she gets back on it because it’s more important to spend two hours and die with him than it is to live a lifetime without him. And despite how much feminist history I read, that it still f...ing beautiful.
‘‘I want that. No-one wants to get on the boat, guys.’’
The three women are no strangers to taking their feminist minds and fiery passion to the stage. They all recently performed at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival with Bishop’s Jane Doe and Croft’s Power Ballard.
Exploring the way in which females were presented came about during Bishop’s research in the US while asking women about their stories of sexual assault and harassment for Jane Doe. She was also reading third wave feminism that pointed out the need for a conversation around pleasure.
‘‘If we say that men always want sex and men have a higher sex drive than women, and men are the initiators of sex and the aggressors in sexual encounters, those ideas are the bedrock of how we might get to a place of nonconsensual sexual experiences of women. So they need to bring those conversations together,’’ she says.
She wanted to create a space to talk about pleasure and fun.
‘‘And to talk about my own sex life, to be honest – quite selfishly, perhaps,’’ she says.
Meanwhile, Venus in Fur isa neat example of Body Double‘s point. A playwright wants to find a female lead for his contemporary adaption of Leocold Von SacherMasoch’s novel Venus in Fur – a story about a man who was abused as a child and wanted a woman to abuse him as an adult (he coined the term sado-machism).
After finally finding his lead actress for the role, things start to become awkward when she disagrees with how he has written her character.
‘‘One of the conversations and themes in the play is this whole idea of expectations surrounding sex and sexuality and, in light of the whole Harvey Weinstein revelations, it seems very timely,’’ Foster says.
‘‘I must add this play is not about a rapist, but it is about the conflict of male fantasy being played out on women and the way in which the media, in many ways, imposes a male view of gender and sexuality onto women.
‘‘Women are placed into this role, and that’s one of the strong things in this play, the way in which men manipulate the role that women play in society.’’
The story brings up the same discussion points as Body Double. When the lead actress accuses the director of being sexist, he then turns it around onto her, accusing her of not allowing the character to be as passionate as the way he has written her.
‘‘He says, ‘This isn’t anthropology, it’s not sociology, it’s a play.’
‘‘And thereby argues that in drama we should be engaged in arguments and see both sides of them because it’s not a moral forum, it’s actually a forum for articulating both sides of an argument,’’ Foster says.
‘‘It has been criticised that the play has been written by a man, and it brings up the question, who is the appropriate storyteller when addressing something like this?’’
❚ Body Double is being performed at Bats until November 25, Venus in Fur runs at Circa until December 9.