My talk from today’s Countess Markievicz Summer School on Social Media & Gender

In 2016,  I was asked to write a piece for TheJournal.ie about the Waking The Feminists movement. I wrote

“As I sit here to write about my response to it, I’m cautious. I am wondering is this even something I want to do? In short, I am dreading the comments. I’m scared of ‘the bottom half of the internet’.

I have been working in the theatre for the past six years. As a director and producer, I am often in a leadership role. It’s not usual, that a young woman would be calling the shots. It’s even more surprising that she would speak with my accent, and be my age.

I have experienced gender bias, conscious or unconscious. I have also experienced out and out misogyny. I have attended meetings with my male comrades in THEATREclub, where though I was speaking at the meeting, I was never looked in the eye by the man in the room, instead, he would direct all his responses to my male colleague. I have been treated with a paternalistic dismissal, told that I wouldn’t be able to handle a big cast, told that senior actors wouldn’t respect me as a director because of my gender. It sometimes feels like  I have had to bang down the door, when others have had it opened for them, but hey, them’s the breaks. It’s not just because I am a woman. I’ve also been explicitly told “If you want to know the truth; it’s because you’re a woman, it’s because you’re working class and it’s because you’re young” I think that quote speaks volumes.”

The comments on this article played out exactly as I had predicted.

Men commented in their droves, the assertion, that women’s play’s weren’t being produced because they weren’t good enough. I was told that I was looking for attention, that I wanted people to like me. It was assumed that I wasn’t a successful artist. I was told I was moaning. I was schooled with copied and pasted wikipedia articles about the ratio of male playwrights to female - which disproved my article because the reason that theres less plays produced by women is that there is just more male playwrights than women. That’s just the way things are. One commentator even said “It’s a great irish tradition”

A fellow artist commented that this was my lived experience, it wasn’t there to be argued with. It was my truth. But yet, they continued to defect, and not to believe what I was telling them.

According to these men, I wasn’t entitled to my truth. I was making things up because I just wasn’t good enough.

In March 2015 I was asked to write a piece for the Irish Times. It was called ‘A New Proclamation for Ireland’ I had the task of re-writing the proclamation in any way I wanted

So I wrote the following;

“IRISHWOMEN;

First of all, in the name of the dead generations, we’re sorry that still, through us, you need to strike for your freedom. That in your homeland, you’re still oppressed by gender. That having organised effectively for change; little change has happened.

. We had just started to work on a new show called ‘The Game’ which would explore misogyny through the lens of prostitution and sex work. I had recently heard a story from a woman who had entered prostitution in order to purchase her child’s communion dress.

For most of my career, I had been concerned with class and social justice issues. The Ireland Trilogy, my latest piece of work focussed on housing, addiction and ideas of nationhood. This was my focus as a working class artist, but now, through this piece, I was learning that my gender further marginalised me in ways I had never known. So I wrote

“We will have a republic where no woman is able to be bought by a man to buy a communion dress for a child. We are putting an end to the commercialisation of sexual abuse that is prostitution. “

People were angry with what I had written about prostitution. They were denying this as a reality. They were saying it doesn’t happen. That woman doesn’t exist. Economic Coercion doesn’t exist. It’s a choice, a choice to be empowered by it or a choice to survive.

It felt like now I had broken the rules. I hadn’t gotten the memo.  We’ve all decided that prostitution is unilaterally okay now. It’s now called sex work. It’s now empowering. There was no room for discourse. No room to discuss anything. And no room for dissent.

A proclamation is meant to provoke. I was asking people to imagine a world where a woman wouldn’t be so poor that she couldn’t afford a communion dress and would economically coerced into prostitution.

Day in, day out, I was waking up with more tweets and more interactions. It was terrifying. I was seeing a part of the world I never knew before. You’ll get away with naming class inequalities, but when it comes to gender, you can’t rock the boat. This is the oldest profession. Back off.

Our show The Game premiered in October 2015. It was made in collaboration with six women with lived experience of the sex trade. Three who believed in abolition, two who supported decriminalisation, and one who held no such position. The piece is their verbatim testimony. It’s their experience.

Since then,  I have been involved in a lot of online discussion around prostitution and sex work.

Women who have had a negative experience of the sex trade are routinely told on social media that what happened to them did not happen to them, and that they are wrong to share their story. They are denied their experience, they are vilified for their truth. Women who have a positive experience of the sex trade are celebrated and supported for their unique perspective.

This is a quote from our piece The Game “She sniffs glue at the side of the rode and tweets about her last client, he says tell me your real name, tell me you are clean, tell me its okay that i am buying you. Tell me that you chose this”

The quote demonstrates a nuance I was eager to get across;  women sniffing glue at the side of the road are not the women tweeting about their clients and how satisfied they are. I was thinking of the prostituted children in Brazil during the world cup, who were strung out on glue, and how far away these narratives of choice are from their realities.

It’s a privilege to be able to tell your story. And if one group of people don’t have that privilege, the narrative gets dangerously simple and simplifying the argument suits one very significant group of people, the people who benefit from the sex trade.

Very often, what’s being objected to, in my online interactions about The Game if you drill down into it, is that we are giving women who have had a negative experience of the sex trade a platform. This offends me. I find nothing more disturbing, than not believing someone’s truth, someone’s experience as their own.

People see these interactions and they private message me and tell me i’m right, but they are afraid to comment and say what they think because this kind of discourse is so toxic. Why subject yourself to that kind of abuse? I was in a constant state of conflict myself, to engage or not to engage…

One of the great things that came from this internet storm was I actually met one of the women we worked with on The Game through it. She was one of the people who private messaged me. It wouldn’t be safe for her to wade in online, for many survivors, social media is a tool used to abuse them further, deny their experience and shut them up. I am proud that through art and theatre, we at THEATREclub through The Game  were able to facilitate a space where six women could represent their own experience without being attacked.

The common thread here, seems to be, that when women speak their truth on social media - when they name difficult experiences, or talk about misogyny, patriarchy and sexual violence, they are simply not believed. Or not believed by the people with confidence to speak up. The ones who do believe read silently, and are afraid to comment.

And in a way, I empathise. Rachael Moran was one of our collaborators on the Game. She warned us, once you know, you can’t unknow. We didn’t fully understand what she meant until we finished the piece. One woman who left the theatre after the show told me she was afraid to walk to the Dart station.

Social media allows you to concoct your narrative of the world by what you choose to follow and what you choose to believe, and crucially, the narrative you choose to suppress. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world where sex work was empowering, where addiction and poverty had no influence on your choices, where your gender had no bearing on your career. Do these people live in that reality? And how do they do it? They hold back the dam of truth, as they go home from work, scrolling through comments on the journal.ie or on twitter, and saying over and over again - I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you.