CONTENT WARNING: This edition of my newsletter discusses rape and sexual assault. These are not easy topics. I am writing as a woman who has been threatened by men, sexually assaulted, spat at from passing cars and urinated upon. This gives me the absolute right to say whatever the hell I need to say about the subject.
“A lot of work that I'm interested in making is about staging stories of sexual assault… and consent… and sex, by and for those with lived experiences of assault,” says Raina Graifer, the 23-year-old creator of MANIC, a one-woman show which is about all these things.
“When I was younger, I was assaulted myself and then later at university, I was raped.
“And it was a really impactful experience for clear reasons on my understanding of a healthy sex life.
“It made me re-evaluate the consent in all of my past relationships. And I've come to terms with some not ideal situations I had landed myself in.”
Those ‘not ideal’ situations include losing her virginity at 17 on the grubby floor of a fast-food restaurant loo, to a young man she’d just met on a dating app. She hooked up with him in person because his fondness for jazz seemed cool and interesting, and she had high romantic hopes for the relationship by contemporary standards. (That is, she thought they’d look good together on her Instagram page).
But after that single encounter, she never saw him again.
This, at least, is how she tells it in a 50-minute performance lecture, complete with powerpoint slides and text quotations from feminist thinker Catharine MacKinnon. And I believe her, because Manic pulsates with raw and chaotic truthfulness. Whilst the show at times seems artless —it’s like a great slab of confessional sorrow tumbling out on stage — her artistry is serious, in that she aspires to getting at the truth about herself, the world and her own place in it.
To this end, although a comely person, she spends much of her solo show in a hideous tasselled bra and big, period-proof knickerbockers over which she has layered a G-string. It does her very ordinary and typical female body shape no favours and that’s the point. There will be no people-pleasing, no ‘male gaze’ here. She is, as she is. Her own person and not a sexual fantasy. It’s brave.
It is this boldness of spirit which brought her across the Atlantic from the Washington DC hinterlands to study Theatre And Philosophy at Bath Spa University in the UK.
“I thought it'd be interesting to do university internationally,” she tells me. “I like the idea of being able to travel excessively. It's really expensive to travel in the States. So being able to take a plane somewhere and do like a European trip was really cool.”
Manic, which began life as a puppet show, is her first full creation. She has been performing it now in the UK for about 18 months, including winning Best Solo Show 2022 by creative youth project Fuse International.
On the stage Raina Greifer successfully manufactures the air of a young woman still desperately trying to work things out. Sex has disappointed her. There has been no love and no romance. And certainly no orgasm. The handful of men she has had very bad sex with didn’t seem to like her very much, and the things they did to her have left her feeling violated.
But she consented.
Or did she? The underlying theme of this show is that the conditions of contemporary society have robbed her of the ability, as a young American woman in the age of ‘sex positivity’ and social media, to truly consent.
For Greifer, steeped in 21st-century intersectional feminism, the underlying cause is clear:
“To seek an equal sexuality without political transformation is to seek equality under conditions of inequality.' (Sexuality, Catharine MacKinnon)
In other words, sex is trauma. Young women embark on their fumbling, early experiences of intimacy under the conditions of patriarchy, and in search of male validation. Therefore, as she paraphrases MacKinnon in the show:
“Maybe trauma occurred during sex is not an accidental singular incident but the culmination of a much longer much more purposeful pattern."
She’s got a point. I wish a book like MacKinnon’s Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979) had been on the syllabus when I was studying for my own philosophy degree. Because we’re not talking here about some trite human resources handbook. Instead, it’s a warning blast about what will unfold over the course of MacKinnon’s career: A body of work dealing with women's rights, sexual abuse and exploitation written by an expert in international law, constitutional law, political and legal theory, and jurisprudence.
MacKinnon is up there with Andrea Dworkin as one of the earliest and most decisive feminist voices against the pornography that now saturates digital and online spaces. (A fact that you tend to forget if you’ve switched your porn filters on.)
I learned my own feminism at an evening course run by the Ruskin Trade Union College in Oxford in 1983. (This was just 13 years after radical feminism landed on UK shores in the form of a Women’s Liberation conference held in that very same building.) I made time for this class whilst attending a nearby women’s college at the University - Somerville — that has always been famous for its radical, questioning, spirit. Somerville girls often ‘did it’ in an age when nice girls mostly didn’t. Or said they didn’t. And the notorious cheapness, narrowness, ricketiness and discomfort of the college beds (I actually dismantled one of mine, and slept on a mattress on the floor) gave Somervillians the jokey reputation for being able to have sex on a washing line.
I was also in at the ground floor as the post-modernist ideas of French philosophers Derrida and Foucault began filtering onto campus. (Though being Oxford, of course, it did not have a literal campus. It was too old and too posh for that.)
And for decades the theoretical assumption, widespread on the radical feminist left, that the differences between men and women were mostly down to ‘society’ went unchallenged in my head. My earliest sexual experiments were conducted warily, suspicious of men in general, under conditions of unacknowledged trauma and low self-worth. But at the same time, there was this shadowy other Liz, the centre of her own Big Romance, wanting the very things that her radical feminist education had taught her consciously to reject.
It was not a good recipe for picking wisely. Or, indeed, for picking at all. To this day, I remain unmarried.
And I have regrets. A memory: As a good-looking 20-something, I remember standing, very obviously alone, on some steps near the Doge’s Palace in Venice, entranced by all the colourful activity in the Square. I was approached by a handsome young man wearing the smart dress uniform of an ancient Italian militia. He politely invited me to join him and his friends for the evening — and I refused. Insulted, he stalked off. Perhaps I turned down the most magical experience of my life. Or perhaps I averted something darker. I’ll never know.
Greifer, one time, took the more adventurous route. And woke up the next morning to the understanding that she’d very likely been the victim of a rape. The anguished unfolding of this experience — and the memory black hole that dominates it — forms the heart of her show.
Did that first bad experience, on the floor of a toilet, set her up for the subsequent horror? Or was it a still earlier assault that happened when she was fifteen? Greifer’s thesis is that adolescent girls are robbed of their sense of self-worth. In the grip of self-contempt they seek male approval which undermines their boundaries and leads to bad choices.
And if that was true even in my day, how much worse is it now? The beast has jaws. On the one hand, there’s Instagram. (For the record, teenage girls’ mental health collapsed in 2012, when they got smartphones.) And on the other, a school-teacher friend assures me that teenage boys’ alleged obsession with the macho posturings of Andrew Tate is very real.
So how do we bring about male sexual respect for women — for their dreams, for their vulnerability — without bringing back ‘good girls’, ‘bad girls’, and Magdalene Laundries?
When we chatted, Greifer described herself as a ‘femme-identifying’ person and ‘pan-sexual’. She would probably take issue with me describing her as naive girl who grew to be a thoughtful woman.
But biology is real. And — microaggression alert!!! boop! boop! boop! microaggression alert!!! emergency! evacuate the building immediately and stand clear of the contaminated area! — what I can see, and possibly she can’t yet, is that she’s a sexually conventional, white, middle-class, woman with romantic daydreams who at some level must know she’s been sold a crock. But she won’t say that because, according to today’s mores, that would expose her to the career-ending accusation that she’s a bigot. Which she clearly isn’t.
I was recently bullied online by a young, male social justice warrior who probably didn’t realise my true age, for not being ‘sex positive’ enough. So misogyny and rape culture haven’t exactly gone away. They have simply assumed a progressive, even ‘feminist’ guise.
I’d go further. There’s growing evidence (The Paradox Of Liberation) that the sexual revolution has been good for some men and disastrous for females. Writers such as Mary Harrington and Louise Perry are beginning to make headway on free-thinking platforms (Unherd, Triggernometry, etc) by arguing that the sexual revolution has failed, and I’d love the Labour Party under Starmer to be taking this subject seriously too. Especially as they’re likely to be our political overlords very soon.
But it’s the same old story. Women’s issues are worthy but will have to wait until… And there’s always some other, more urgent, socialist problem that needs to be addressed first. Some other reality, some other injustice, that takes precidence. I recently listened to a podcast in which I heard an old friend, a TV producer close to the Labour establishment, describe the Rotherham-style grooming gangs issue, a nationwide scandal that has still not been addressed, as a ‘racist dogwhistle’. I don’t think he’s a bad person. I think, living his glamourous media life between London, Los Angeles and his luxurious second home on the Continent (literally, some kind of converted castle), the routine abuse and lack of respect experienced by ordinary young women, as they attempt nothing more nefarious than finding a boyfriend or having a good night out, are beyond his scope to imagine.
Greifer is a talented and committed performer of growing experience. And she is far too canny to take her show into these politically troubling places. She sticks to her own experiences, and to promoting her own, somewhat aggressive, brand of sex positivity for those women who find there’s nothing much to be positive about in their sexual lives. But she is not yet entirely seasoned in her craft. On the night I saw Manic (at Theatre Deli’s commodious new space in Arley Street, Sheffield) her performance felt a little rushed. The heightened poetic language spilt out of her so fast it did not give me the time and space I needed to fully absorb its impact.
Despite this, at one point mid-show the audience — which consisted of 16 (mostly older) women and three men — broke out into genuine, heartfelt, spontaneous applause. Personally, I wanted to hug her. I wanted to say: “Don’t worry, love. You will get your taste of honey. It just takes decades to put things right if you get off to a bad start.”
So how do we manage this? How do we protect our daughters, our nieces, our friends’ funny and intelligent girl-children, from getting off to a bad start? It will take decades, and legislation, and international treaties, and police forces that don’t protect their own rapists, to put right our abusive, pornsick online culture. Billionaire tech moguls, whose unaccountable power now reaches into every corner of our lives, will have to be given a realistic fear of jail before the abuse ends. (And, trust me, it’s the abuse I care about, not banning naughty pictures.)
Meanwhile, healthy, young women, with the hot blood of procreation pounding through their brains and bodies, are on a strict fertility deadline to find a protective mate. They won’t wait. Why should they? But to suggest that young women can be horny too — and Greifer is explicit on the subject of her own desire — seems, in our toxic culture, to be just a hair’s breadth from saying they are ‘asking for it’. I’ll leave that to Freud, Judith Butler and the Minor Attracted Persons, thank you very much.
No. The interventions will have to be personal. Parental. It won’t be easy and it won’t turn you into Mr or Mrs Popular with your teenage children.
The right talk of lost ‘cultural guardrails’. But we are in Shakespeare’s Sister territory here. How on earth, when rape has been effectively decriminalised, do we protect brave, bold, horny, young women like Greifer from sexual exploitation without limiting her freedom and filling her with fear?
I don’t know. But I do know we shouldn’t be leaving it to a 23-year-old theatre-maker from Silver Spring, Maryland, to figure things out all by herself.
If you’d like to book Manic, you can reach out via her social media. But — warning — she doesn’t make it easy for people to contact her. So you can also contact me and I will pass your details on.
What’s On Sep 23-29
After that, I think we all need cheering up. Silver Screen actress Dorothy Mackaill was born in Hull in 1903. She arrived in Hollywood via Paris and then the Zeigfield Follies in New York, and starred in a number of racy pre-Code films. She managed the transition to talkies with good grace but then… got too old. But never mind, shake it off, babes, the veteran of three brief marriages, she was used to leading her life on her own terms and spent her later years in Hawaii, a place she seems to have liked better than Sculcoates.
Nepobaby Elizabeth Godber’s musical tells her life-affirming story in The Remarkable Tale of Dorothy Mackaill, a John Godber production at the East Riding Theatre in Beverley Sep 27-Oct 14, £15 & £20.
Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way To Spend An Evening is another show rich in plucky-girl vibes. The feisty South Londoner was a 1930s musical comedy star. Living as a married woman in America when the Second World War broke out, she moved heaven and earth to get back to Blighty, sharing the dangerous journey with Ernest Hemingway. In 1944 she was one of the earliest performers into Normandy, following just after the first wave of British troops to land and performing to them in shattered towns and buildings. Lucy Stevens’s script uses Gertrude Lawrence’s own words from her autobiography A Star Danced.
The cabaret-style show includes songs by Rodgers & Hammerstein, Ivor Novello and Kurt Weill, and is directed by acclaimed cabaret artist Sarah Louise Young. Tonight (Friday) at the Ropewalk, Barton Upon Humber, if you’re quick (£13 & £15), Helmsley Arts Centre, Sep 23, Otley Courthouse, Sep 24.
I once saw comedian Ruby Wax in the York branch of Waterstones. She was being very — Ruby Wax. I hope she likes the city because she’s here again, performing her solo show I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was at the Grand Opera House, Sep 28, £16.32 & £32.41, as part of her nationwide tour about mental health.
Some of my favourite people are neurodiverse. This includes a young boy of my acquaintence (well, he was young then, he’s a bright teenager now) who was diagnosed with ADHD. At first, I didn’t believe it. I’d seen him concentrate so his teachers must be wrong. It was only later that I understood people with ADHD can concentrate — to the point of over-focussing — but only if they’re interested in something. Neurodivergent artiste Dora Colquhoun’s solo show ADHD: The Musical: Can I Have Your Attention Please explores some myths and preconceptions on the subject. Theatre Royal, Wakefield, Sep 25, £15-£22.
A crime-thriller writer of my acquaintence, who had a startlingly good knowledge of London’s criminal underworld in the 1950s and 1960s (he visited old people’s homes in Kent to interview retired hoodlums) once told me that it was no coincidence that Detective Chief Superintendent “Nipper” Read relied on the talents of WPCs (women police constables) when investigating those notorious East End gangsters the Kray Twins. It was the testimony of brave women that got them behind bars in the end.
So, to round off this ‘girl power’ edition of Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter, I will put in a good word for Mikron Theatre’s summer touring show A Force To Be Reckoned With, which explores the history of pioneering female coppers. Written by reliable Ladies Day playwright Amanda Whittington, it has all the Mikron trademarks of slapstick humour, portable sets and great tunes sung by a multi-tasking cast. Mikron pack up for the season soon, but there’s just time to catch this upbeat show indoors across the North at Hesketh Bank Community Centre, Preston, Sep 24 (2pm, £13 & £15), Leyland Historical Society, Civic Centre, Leyland, Oct 2, Gilberdyke War Memorial Hall near Hull, Oct 4, Sedbergh People's Hall, Oct 8, Snainton Village Hall, Scarborough, Oct 11, Viaduct Theatre, Halifax, 12 Oct (two performances), Georgian Theatre Royal, Oct 13, and Skipton Town Hall, Oct 14.
That’s it for this week, folks. Next week I will be returning with — an advertisement. So we’ll see how that works. In the meantime, don’t forget if you like my newsletter and want to see it continue to thrive you can support me by:
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Liz x