Get Booked – Jo Shaw, Dangerous Women, Fifty Reflections On Women, Power And Identity 210322

You're listening to Get Booked for Women's and Men's Radio Station. I'm Hazel Butterfield and a huge book fan, so I love doing this show. Get Booked is all about talking to authors, chatting about anything and everything books related, and all the joy, enlightenment, and escape that good books can provide. Sit back and let us entertain you with a different guest each week, sharing who they are, what they do, and what in inspires them. Now, on today's show, we're going to be discussing the book Dangerous Women: 50 Reflections on Women, Power, and Identity, which was published by Unbound on the 3rd of March of this year. What does it mean for The Sun to call Shami Chakrabarti the most dangerous woman in Britain, or the Daily Mail to label Nicola Sturgeon the most dangerous wee woman in the world? What really does it mean to be a dangerous woman? Now, huh, given women agency, that makes them dangerous. Giving them knowledge and the ability to defend themselves makes them dangerous. Destabilizing what has been accepted and expected for too long is dangerous. Whatever next? Women who don't fall into line are dangerous. They affect the status quo. They incite jealousy and fear. Of the unknown. Should I be rethinking my traditional path? Ah, something else to think about. This challenges a concept of what is expected and the path that is expected and easily laid out for us, and it's very, very dangerous. Although, who is more dangerous, those forging a new alternative way or those who react with fearful outrage and persecution of what they are uncomfortable with? Or comfortable with. They don't want their comfortable life being threatened. If women can think for themselves, that threatens thousands of years of historical traditions. We know where we are with traditions. Negative stereotypes are used to label women to be derogatory and warn others not to follow suit. Do you want to be labeled this way? The ultimate didactic narrative of Adam and Eve and how she was punished for for just not doing as she was told. We are constantly overwhelmed with conscious and unconscious patriarchal rhetoric. It's been spun for years. We are conscious and unconscious victims of the patriarchy. Huh. Dangerous Women: Whatever Next, eh? Today, joining us in the studio, we have one of the editors, Jo Shaw. Thank you for joining us here on Get Booked. Hello Hazel. So as you can imagine, a highly sarcastic introduction. Women are dangerous. We keep on wanting to do what we want to do and break traditions that have completely suppressed us for thousands of years. That's very dangerous, isn't it? Yes, absolutely. You've really got the— you've really got into the spirit of it there, and you're really sort of picking out the bits that inspired us to do the project and to carry it through into back into being a book, which is you know, quite interesting because we were originally a digital project. Dangerouswomenproject.org if people want to go and find out more. Yeah. Now, I must say, I have stormed my way through this book, and it was one of those ones where you— there's such variety in there because some of them are subjective and some of them help us challenge what we have thought of women in history, where unconsciously we thought, "Oh wow, she was a bit of a troublemaker." No, she wasn't. She was just trying to forge a path for other people. And it's— there's a lot of— I think there's quite a lot of sarcastic rhetoric in the book as well, in terms of some of the contributors. And especially one of my favorite ones, which I'm going to read at the end of the show, was the provocatively dressed woman and just how dangerous she is. And it's in— there's so much unconscious bias around what we think of women when they choose to dress a particular way. And it's only in the, what, the last 10 years or so that it really has— the narrative has started to change around, you know, women aren't responsible for how they present themselves to stop them being at risk for sexual assault. It's men that need to change, and it's the narrative that really needs to be focused on. And I must say, I think every man and woman should be reading from this book just to get a broader understanding of just how much has gone wrong and how much we need to change. I think that's right. I think you've picked out the fact that it's the diversity of different voices in the context of the Dangerous Women Project and now the Dangerous Woman book, which is really a a distinctive factor of what we wanted to achieve. We wanted to say that there is no single way to understand what does it mean to be a dangerous woman. Each of those words can be subjected itself to quite detailed and varied analysis, and people might disagree, they might contest other people's meanings, but each of them, as you say, has a certain subjective power as well as, in many cases also really taking us back in terms of the quality of the analysis, the objective analysis, if you will, of the, the situation of women in different parts of the world or in different times in history. And it's— well, it does, it spans back to, well, Dot, doesn't it? The stories. Yes, yes, yes. And you kind of, you kind of forget that history has been rewritten and it's predominantly being written by men to suit a certain patriarchal cause or to suit religious texts. And, you know, the world is predominantly religious, and it does— most texts don't support a kind of female dominating role. Yeah, I think it's not necessarily about domination, it's about agency, isn't it? It's about, it's about acknowledging different subjectivities subjectivities and different senses of what, you know, constitutes reality for different people. So there isn't a single way of framing that, and as you say, for as long as there's been recorded history, women have been recorded out of that history. So that is something where a lot of work has been done by historians over time to try to both recover texts if you will, that have been forgotten about, but also to try to understand, um, you know, different patterns and whether previous other societies, um, have elements of matriarchy as opposed to patriarchy. And that, that's an important point as well. There are a lot of them different stories in the book that look at culture as well, and lots of different cultures to help us understand, um, and There's quite an important chapter in there about FGM as well, and it's just— I love reading about the different sides and just experiencing, you know, not all women— the book doesn't sit there going, "All women are right, we all should be allowed to do this, that, and whatever." It's about how women are depicted for doing the same things as men. I think it's very exciting that you come to the book with such a fresh eye, and you, you know, you're— I maybe know I know the material, including a lot of the other material that's on the website that people are welcome to go and have a look at. I know that material so well, and I take for granted that variety. But it's exciting when, you know, someone comes to it with a fresh eye and picks up the book with its hazard orange cover and says, "Look, let me dip in. I don't have to read this sequentially." I can start in the middle, I can read forward, I can read backwards, and I'll hear so many different voices and different bits of my brain and my emotions and my consciousness will be stimulated in different ways. Well, it does definitely take you on a journey, and as you say, it is a, you know, the book does stand out. I was actually at lunch last week and I'd gone half an hour earlier than when I was supposed to meet my friend so that I could sit and read a book in quiet for a little bit. And my friend brought her just under 1-year-old daughter with her, and I'm going to send you the picture because she saw this bright orange book, picked it up, and there's a picture of this rather cute little female baby sitting there reading Dangerous Woman in a very nice restaurant in London while meeting her friend. That's fabulous. I will send you the picture because it's absolutely fantastic. She's actually leafing through it. And I turn around to my friend and she's like, "Yes, that's what we want to do. She can have it after you." Absolutely. Well, another— I've got a similar story to that, which is that one of— well, she's a former PhD student of mine. She contributed a piece that's in the book about women and trade unions along with another colleague of hers. And, but she was also one of the supporters of the book on the Unbound website as well. So then you could like buy various, you know, various packages that gave you a, you know, special edition mug and so on. So she sent me a picture last week of her, I think 4-year-old or 3-year-old or 4-year-old daughter doing homeschooling because they've all got COVID at the moment, sitting there in front of a tablet or something and drinking her morning cup of juice or whatever out of this, this Dangerous Women mug and giving me an enormous grin on the, on the photograph. So yes, it clearly appeals to women of all ages. Yeah, good. And it shouldn't— it should appeal to men as well because I think— I think so, absolutely. One of our editors is a man as well. Yes, so that's Ben Fletcher Watson. Ben Fletcher Watson, that's right. Yeah, he works like me at the University of Edinburgh and he's actually in charge, or one of the people in charge, of the institute where we did the original project. And he came along actually towards the end of the project and interviewed for a job there. And I was then working at that institute and he said in his interview, oh well, you know, we'll take the Dangerous Women Project and turn it back into books. And he's— Ben is such a sort of completer finisher, if you will, that he's done precisely that. And we've been able to produce this book, and we produced another book about the art of being dangerous for Leuven University Press, which is just an absolutely gorgeous coffee table book, which so many people have remarked upon when they've seen it. Which explores aspects of creativity through the various posts that were on the Dangerous Women Project's website. Oh, I need to go and check that out because that sounds definitely like it's something that would be interesting. Well, if you have a look at our social media, you'll see that actually there's a reduction for International Women's Day both on the book that you've already got, but also the book that you haven't currently got, which is a great coffee table book as well as equally provocative in terms of its— the questions that it raises. That's the thing, isn't it? The power of a good book that raises questions. That's right. And a lot of people know that I'm always reading. All of my friends— I have a lot of male friends, and a lot of my male friends, they are feminists and they are well-versed and, you know, they do champion women. But sometimes we don't know what we don't know, and it's books like this that help us to kind of understand a little bit further what we didn't even think was an issue. Or just to see how things that have happened in the past, how it's formed, how things are in the future, and how much harder it is to rework certain narratives. And it's— I do write a lot on the patriarch and to be a dangerous woman. Because I, I consider myself a dangerous woman. I have been accused of being a dangerous woman many, many times. Excellent. Yeah, I know, bring it on. Um, because I was raised by a single mum who, you know, went to university once me and my brother were a little bit older, and she, she completely shook up the way that things happened. She did it completely on her own because She needed to. My own grandmother, who actually passed away a couple of months ago, and she was 95, she was rowing for London School of Economics back in the 1940s, and at university, and cycling 100 miles a day because she just, she just wanted to. She raised 4 children, and that to me was just normal, but can you imagine what that, how that was perceived as being quite contentious? And she, she— I'm sure, I'm sure it would. I'd just like to say that your 95-year-old grandmother quite possibly knew my 92 or 93-year-old aunt, who was also at the London School of Economics in the late 1940s. So the chances of them having known each other would have been rather high, I would have thought. Well, really randomly, because she died quite recently, I've got a picture right next to me now of her sitting with her LSE team members and then getting in the rowing boats. I might check and you can give me her name and I can see if she's listed on there. She was called Pauline Robbins before she got married. Pauline Shaw now, because she married my father's brother, who's passed away. But yeah, she was called Pauline Robbins. Oh wow, I love that. But there can't have been many women at the LSE in the late 1940s. Well, no, and I'm quite keen to actually have a look at the same time. How unprofessional is this? So because my grandma did things like that, she was a magistrate, she used to be a manager at the local psychiatric unit, you know, she really did do everything and I was raised thinking that that was quite normal so I carried on and when you carry on thinking it's normal I think you annoy people even more sometimes, don't you? I guess I can imagine that my aunt's family think exactly the same about her achievements. You're talking about what your grandmother did and my aunt's not only raised a family, but then when her youngest child, who's a very similar age to me, was born profoundly deaf, she retrained as a teacher for deaf children and made sure that her own daughter had the most amazing educational opportunities at a time in the early 1960s when And unfortunately our engagement with people with hearing difficulties was not always terribly enlightened. So yes, there's a certain parallelism there, isn't there? It's very interesting. But it's also an indication that, you know, you don't necessarily have to do anything astonishingly different. You just have to pursue a path and make your own mind up about what's best for you, for your family, for your community and so on. And that in itself is likely at different times to really make you stick out. And sometimes you don't even realize because it's just, you know, how you were brought up, how you were raised to behave. And sometimes if we don't be a little bit humble and go, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry that I'm actually taking up 50% of the space, and people can get a little bit annoyed, and it's a bit dangerous when you just expect it. Yeah, no, that's good. I did actually— I've just got the picture out now, and she was in the first boat of 1944, and unfortunately Pauline Robbins isn't in it. I have learned. No, no, no, I suspect your aunt, your grandmother, might have been just a year or two older than my aunt, and I never certainly heard that she was, um, she— that that was one of the things that she did. I don't think I don't think she went to university until after the end of the Second World War. Right, okay, I had to check. Could you imagine if she was on there? But yeah, there's 9 fantastic women there that are on that list, and I can't wait. I've got— it's my task today to frame it and put it in my garden room because I just think it's absolutely stunning. It shows the kind of line of women that I've come from. But can you imagine a working mother in the 1950s with 4 kids, and she actually had the audacity to have 3 jobs and go to university. Excellent, I entirely approve. Well, she was a very dangerous woman. Good. Very much so. Now I must ask you, and this is a bit like choosing your favorite child, so I appreciate it if you don't want to answer this question, but do you have a favorite of the 50 stories that are in this book? Do I have a favourite? I know I, well, probably not, but there's a couple that I would really pick out as having really sort of engaged me. I really, I know Papia Sengupta who wrote about her struggle to get a divorce. I know Papia a little bit, she's someone I've met through my work as an academic and She's at the University in New Delhi, and I was really struck by the way that she wrote about her challenges to be an independent woman and to get a divorce in 21st century India. And I think that really, really struck me as one of the things that You know, I learned a lot by reading that. I always love reading the historical ones. We did a launch of the book, an online launch of the book on Tuesday evening and— sorry, yes, Tuesday evening. And one of the readers there was Glynis Ridley who has done a work, she's written a book about Jeanne Baret, a pioneer botanist, and how she smuggled herself onto a French ship that circumnavigated the globe. She was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe as well as working as a botanist. Basically, she managed to get herself into this space despite being a woman and disguising herself and so on and so forth. So she did some really interesting work, and Glynnis Ridley summarises that story, which she's actually written a whole book about, in the Dangerous Women book. But those are just two of the many that I could literally just go through and talk you through how each of the stories really influences me or affects me emotionally. Just one further one that I would pick out, Lizzie Rose, who was one of the contributors, sadly died before the book came out, and she was very, very pleased, I gather from family and friends, to have been included in the book. And her Her book is about— sorry, her contribution is about the post-surgery selfie and about how people, how women exposing, as it were, their incompleteness or their damaged nature can be also a dangerous thing in lots of different ways. So those are just some of the ones that I would pick out. We dedicated our event last night the memory of Lizzie Rose, because it was very sad that she died between us deciding that we wanted to include her piece and us getting to the point of publication, which has been a relatively elongated process. I must say that was one of my favourite ones as well, and I'm sorry to hear of her passing. It's about owning what it is to be feminine, or not just accepting what other people think, want to see of you, and and appreciating yourself as beautiful and everything that you go through is beautiful. And, you know, you're not just worthwhile in society because your hair is glossy and you're thin and you wear the right clothes. That's just the most boring and problematic rhetoric that seems to be hopefully, hopefully, um, getting distinguished. But yeah, that is definitely one of my favorites. But also you pointed out the one about Papya Singhupta. I read that and it's actually based on what's happened to her, you know, in the last decade, but it could have been written about somebody who was experiencing something in the UK 150 years ago. How she's not allowed to get divorced until her husband actually approved it. And the only time he approved it was because he finally wanted to go off and marry somebody else. And it's just, I was just sitting there going, oh, It's a Monday, I don't drink on a Monday, but I'd really like to. It's one of those ones where you kind of— it was a bit of a rollercoaster ride because you're sometimes reading about something that happened in the 1400s and you just think, "Oh, horrific, but well done her for trying to, you know, break down boundaries," and then you read about something that happened, you know, potentially 6 months ago and just go, "Oh, I thought we'd made strides," and You know, there's a lot of work to be done, and it's good to just open our eyes as to appreciate that culturally and geographically, there's— we're all living very different lives. Did you read the book from beginning to end, or did you dip in and then just make sure by, I don't know, by crossing them off that you covered everything? No, I read it cover to cover. That's interesting, because I think there are many different ways in which you could read the book, so you don't have to read it from you know, starting with Nicholas Sturgeon's very short but snappy piece at the beginning that we were so happy that she wrote for us, through to the end. So it's interesting that you decided to read it from the beginning rather than in any other way. I would encourage readers to think about different ways of reading something like this. I think that what I'm really proud about the book is that, yeah, it features some academic research, some research by women who may not be academics, but who've, you know, writers, and they've done their research, as it were, on different women in history in different places. And so on. But it also features a lot of women who hadn't ever previously been published. They maybe had put stuff on the internet, as we can all self-publish in a way on the internet, but never actually been included in, you know, a book that's between two— between covers, have been designed and presented in a commercial context. And I think that one of the things that was exciting about project was that a lot of the women who were putting their writing online in the project were for the first time really exposing some of their ideas publicly. And then we went one stage further when we also were able to include many of these very diverse voices in, in this, this, um, this book, which, you know, reminds us of the enduring, the enduring power of the things between covers with paper and print and so on and so forth. So, you know, we experience all the time the power of the internet to communicate, but the book does have an enduring value. And it's been being able to include so many different diverse women, many, quite a few contributors from the Global South within those within those covers that's been something that I'm really, really proud of about what we've achieved. Yeah, completely. I think it was— the stories were so diverse, and the reason why I read it from COVID to cover is because I didn't want to miss one, because you don't know what the moral of the story or what the writer's actually trying to get across to you until you actually read it, and I didn't want to miss out on anything. What I did do, and what I do like about it, is because they're all essentially short stories, it means that you can pick up, stop, start, you know, it's one of those ones I kind of think could be quite good to kind of have at the side of the toilet just to pick up, you know. Yes. But what I did find I did is sometimes when I would read, because at the beginning of each section you say a little bit about the writer, the person, who they are, where you can find out more, and I did find myself going on Twitter or going to check out their blog and things like that depending on the story and what I wanted to hear more about. So there is that kind of thing that you kind of work through it and you kind of go off in the, in the World Wide Web rabbit hole as it is. So I did find that you kind of— Yes, you know, some of them are well-known voices, like, you know, Bidisha is obviously a very well-known voice, and Claire Askew has published quite a lot of poetry and also some detective fiction in the last 5 years or so. So some, some of them were already quite known, some of them have become better known since we first— since we put their posting originally on the project, which was between 2016 and 2017. And in that time, some of them have become, you know, recognizable voices in this cacophony of expression. And it's given people the opportunity as well who maybe are not as well known. That's right. Yeah, and I really like that. And it is very— this is the joy of good books, isn't it? Is helping people to come together and share their experiences and share their ideas, their subjectivity, and I think it is a fantastic book. It is one of those ones that I will be talking about for some time. Good. Yeah, exactly, that's what it's supposed to be, and I have been on the Dangerous Women podcast. I hope lots of people go out and buy the book as a consequence of your enthusiasm and giving me this opportunity to talk about it. Let me just— yeah, let me tell you about one of the bits on the project that also I found very, very, very moving. So, you know, we started the original project before International Women's Day in 2016. So we've been at this project for a long time and it wasn't sort of— well, it was suggested by somebody I was working with then, Peter Friesen, Eastone, and she really constructed a lot about the website and so on and so forth. And we introduced sort of, as it were, a set of norms about what we were going to do. So every post had a picture, which was hopefully a picture supplied by the author, you know, and it was something that they were then happy to put on online. And towards the end then of the project's It was originally, it was a sort of digital 365. Let's put a post online every day for a whole year. In fact, we did more than 365. We did something every day for 365 days, but we actually published almost 400 posts in the end. But some of those were also review posts in the sense that we were trying to sort of summarize where we felt that we traveled and so on. I'm sorry that if if it's coming across on your recording that the emergency services are on the street outside my office. I can hear them, yes. Yeah, yeah, but it's gone now. But one of the final posts that we did was that we asked, it's a compilation of people writing in. Some of them are contributors, some of them were just observers. We asked people to say what has it meant What did the Dangerous Women Project mean to you? And I'm just going to take the liberty of giving you some of those on an anonymous basis, but you can find that also on the website. People saying things like, the Dangerous Women Project stirred in me a voice previously silent, a gutsy voice that questioned ideologies surrounding femininity. It gave me confidence in the woman I am choosing to be.— and then someone else says, a year of provocations from and about Dangerous Women, encouraging me to speak up and out as a dangerous woman for myself and for other women. A year of initially watching and then joining a growing community of dangerous women who demonstrate the power of collaboration. A year of learning about dangerous women from throughout history and from around the world and coming to an understanding that that there were many ways to be dangerous. A year of celebrating dangerous women leading to a celebration with dangerous women to mark the next stage. So, and, and on and on. And that was one of the most powerful things, was that, you know, we simply put a simple online form, um, you know, as, as you get on a website, um, um, and you think, well, maybe you might get 10 people saying, oh, it's been 'and I've really learned it' and this, that and the other. But actually the visceral and emotional character of many of those responses and the deep, deep also deep understanding that that demonstrated that people were coming to as a result of, you know, each day pick— getting their posts sent to them by email or choosing to navigate to the website website or picking it up via social media, that they then responded, you know, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 of them responded in a very sort of powerful way. And this just literally generated one of our most unique products as a project from these voices. And I just hadn't expected that. You know, when you do like a survey or you ask people to respond to something, it's often very disappointing. You don't get much, you don't get much comeback. But this was hugely inspiring to hear from so many different women across the UK and internationally about the power of the project. So yeah, I keep going back to that. I could fill my day just by reading and rereading some of those posts, but particularly that one. How incredibly problematic that there are increasing numbers of dangerous women willing to share their stories and their perspectives. I don't think it's problematic, and I don't think you think it's problematic, but yes, yes, it was a very, very a very, very powerful thing. I don't know whether I'm allowed to swear on your radio program, but one of the responses was, you know, an opportunity for women to say "fuck you" to stupid patriarchy, etc., etc. Yeah, well, that is definitely— that's perfect. Yes, that was an anonymous response, or maybe we chose to make it anonymous. You shouldn't have done. You should have blown it up and had it as a banner. I've no idea. I honestly can't remember. There's a lot of red wine has flowed under the bridge since then. What I would like to talk about is the role that Unbound played, because I love Unbound as a publication, but it's a great way for people to help get a book published, isn't it, in terms of people can love the idea and help get it off the ground by contributing Can you tell us about your experience with Unbound to get this? Oh yeah, it's been great. I mean, we really have, we've really enjoyed working with them. The original project I couldn't claim was my idea. I picked it up and ran with it and shared that project with other people and it was very much a collaborative collaboration. And likewise, it was Ben who originally suggested that this type of book, which was a bit different for those of us who are academics, and I'm an academic and Ben's basically an academic as well, albeit doing a sort of mixed role, that it was a bit— that we should think outside the box and Unbound with their approach to encouraging crowdfunding of projects was a thinking outside the box moment and it worked incredibly well for us. It meant that the whole project has been a slow burn and we've kept the momentum going, you know, using their website to post extra updates. We've continued to draw attention to the project through social media. Media, and they've featured us at different times alongside other books when they've, when they've, you know, been themselves doing a publicity push. And they've also been incredibly effective as publishers, you know, the design side of it, the the, you know, the product that they've produced, which is a very nice thing to hold. It's, it's, it has a certain solidity to it, and it's nicely produced on good paper and so on and so forth. Um, it's just every aspect has been great. But we've also just enjoyed, um, we've enjoyed that way using the, the crowd, crowdfunding mechanism to keep the buzz around the project going, um, and to to, you know, to advertise it amongst our friends and family. I noticed that one of my nieces decided to be a contributor to the Unbound side of it, you know, by buying— you could choose, for example, and I think this is the one that I chose, to purchase a copy or one or two copies for yourself and then have a copy sent to, um, uh, a, um, a women's refuge in Scotland. In fact, we got so many contributors to that that we also included women's refuges in the north of England as well. So, yeah, so, so lots of these, uh, lots of these, um, um, offers, if you will, sold out and, um, and were a way of, of raising additional money, contributing to charity or giving support to, to an artist or whatever. These rewards proved to be very, very popular and were definitely a different way of thinking about how you build a community around the book. And so then when we've done the launch activity and it's, it's been so well received by radio programs and by, you know, newspapers and different people. And we've also then been able to extend those communities through, so we become, if you will, communities of communities. And it sort of builds its own momentum for something which is, which I've not experienced before. I've done publishing within academic publishing, and this is a slightly different experience. Couldn't speak too highly of Unbound. They've been a great partner. Honour in this journey. Well, I think it's kind of simpatico really, because it's a very inclusive community and kind of collaborative process in the way that you've gone about getting this book published on a project that is inclusive, community-based, and collaborative, so I think it was perfectly married together. Exactly, I'm sure that Unbound said, oh, this looks like a fit to what we want to do as a publisher, you know, an unusual publisher and an unusual project, and those sorts of things can tie together very nicely. Yeah, and I think it is fantastic that you've got it off the ground, and I must say, you know, congratulations again. Thank you. It's a question that I like to ask all of my guests here on Get Booked, and And this is definitely one of those interviews where I'm very excited to hear your answer on this one. I always like to ask about who my guests think— somebody in the public eye is currently just somebody who is making waves, who are a positive influence. There's so many rubbish influencers out there, and there are influencers out there who basically are just telling us we all need to be beautiful, or we need to do this, and we need to— you know, there's problematic people out there, but there's some fantastic fantastic people out there as well. Who do you think? That is a, that is a really difficult, um, question to, to, to ask. But, um, I think if, I think if you, I think if you asked me that question and we were talking about, you know, global news and so on and so forth, I would have to say I'm utterly, utterly struck Zelensky by the President of Ukraine and the extraordinary bravery that he's demonstrating in the face of the most, you know, that sort of pressure. But as well, I know that quite a lot of brave people in Russia are also standing up to Putin, the Pussy Riot women who were featured, I think, in the, in The Guardian, or one of them was featured yesterday. But, you know, I, I've seen on, on social media examples of, um, I don't know, in quotes, influencers in Russia, or, or talk show hosts and so on and so forth, who've stood out against the war and then instantly been sacked and basically need to, to leave Russia. So that's, um, that, that, that, that I think is just completely dominating the, completely and utterly dominating the, all the stories at the moment. So it's very hard to sort of look beyond that to find examples. Well, I mean, that kind of embodies being— Oh, sorry. Yeah, no, I was just saying that that does kind of embody being dangerous anyway, doesn't it? Because it's doing dangerous things for the good of other people, you know, it is dangerous to stand up to really powerful organizations that are doing something wrong, especially in Russia, because if you go against what you are supposed to be doing, it's not a case of you will be shamed and canceled on Instagram. You are at risk of losing your life, your family, being, you know, there is serious danger that you are putting yourself in, but If nobody does it, then they win. Oh yes, and I mean, one of the things that, you know, has been a great privilege of doing, working with Unbound and their publicists on this project, was that we were featured on Women's Hour at the beginning of last week, and that was an interesting experience. Experience, you know, speaking as a long-term listener to lots of different programs on Radio 4, you know, I felt like I peaked, you know, being on Women's Hour. But that was on Monday last week. And what was unsurprising was that they featured quite a lot of content on Ukraine. So they spoke to a Ukrainian MP who was talking about what the experience of basically being modestly trained to take up arms, but also what they were doing as MPs. They were staying there, they were trying to carry on meeting virtually or in person as much as they could to keep, as it were, the fabric of a democracy going. And then also speaking to a woman who's a Ukrainian scholar based in the UK who's been writing about Ukraine, obviously, but specifically had written a memoir about losing her brother who went in in one of the previous actions in eastern Ukraine, who was in the Ukrainian military and unfortunately lost his life. So those are some of the very, very powerful stories that are coming out about all the different people who are there resisting Putin's invasion with every fiber of their body. Very harrowing and, you know, dangerously telling their stories and They kind of epitomize, you know, what we're talking about. Now, interestingly, this is a bit of a— when I read books like this, I sometimes have to put the book down and have a bit of a stream of unconsciousness carry on writing away. And something that I wrote down halfway through the book was, unfortunately, women are just not being tamed as easily as they used to be. How very problematic. This book shows the many ways women are doing this. Misogyny is really having to up its game. Have you seen patterns and themes of how people are upping their misogynistic game? Well, I think that— I think that— or you mean resisting the misogynistic game, if you will? There's— I mean, there is much that's come out about in the last few years, the so-called, you know, the MeToo movement, but also the degree to which, you know, very sadly after the murder of Sarah Everard last year, there was— there's a lot more attention has been paid, rightly so, to the way in which police services are failing women because they're not prosecuting rape, you know, the number of women who still die every year through male violence, whether in the home or stranger violence, as was the case with Sarah Everard. Yeah, in all of those respects, I mean, my partner is, you know, in talking about him, he's sort of been laughing at me being on the radio and things like that. Well, of course, I mean, he is, because I said, oh, I don't know quite why. And he said, oh no, this, this book, um, this book sort of, um, touches a nerve, doesn't it? Because, um, you know, I think there's been attention drawn to male violence, um, and, and the fact that, you know, in, in the case of Sarah Everard, her, her killer was actually in the police service, um, in, in London. And that is something that has been very much in the public eye. And a book like this, which projects a cacophony of different voices that are articulating in different ways why the additional dangers that women face are unacceptable in the 21st century, if they were ever acceptable, and they never were.— let's be clear about that. That the book therefore touches a nerve, and that's one reason why, you know, why it's— the publication of it has received perhaps a little bit more attention than I— surprise— than I expected. But I've been incredibly pleasantly surprised. With somebody who's read it cover to cover with and has such evident enthusiasm for something that for us has been a labour of love. No, I devoured it. I love things— this is why I do this show, because books are a fantastic opportunity for people to just understand lots of different perspectives and help us to learn things that we didn't even think we needed to learn. And that is what Dangerous Women: 50 Reflections on Power, Women, Power and Identity is about. Now, I normally ask— we're coming to the end of today's show, we've been going on, we could keep on going on for at least another couple of hours, I think, I'm sure we could. I normally ask for 3 tips on mental— how to achieve good mental health and good mental well-being. This is a well-being station, um, Get Booked gets aired on women's radio station and men's radio station, but I'm going to twist it a little bit, and I'd like to ask you, what 3 ways can we be dangerous women? What 3 ways can we be dangerous women? Yeah, okay, um, I think that the most important way that we can Be dangerous women for me is, is that we need to be authentic, which doesn't mean that we have to sort of be necessarily completely always honest about, about everything, including bearing our weaknesses and so on and so forth. But we need to be authentic in, in terms of our expression of who we are and what we do. And that's, that's something that's very, very important to me. I hold a management position these days at the University university, and it's very important to me that I, within that context and the responsibilities that I have for staff that I'm— and students— that I'm seen, I'm expressing, makes me dangerous, then that's something I would live with. The second thing is that we do need to be brave. Sometimes we have to step outside our comfort zones, and we need to do and say things that aren't necessarily what the people that we're talking to want to hear. So that's the second thing is we need to be authentic, we need to be brave, and we need to be patient. I think I would add that finally as the third thing to make us brave— sorry, to reinforce our dangerousness, that things don't change very quickly, that across the world there are many different ways of being dangerous, many different situations that women find themselves in, and change is slow. It is sometimes reversed, but we need to stick with it if we want to improve well-being, as you say. Wow, I love those completely. And I must say a huge thank you because I've thrown some rather random curveballs at you throughout our chat. That's all right, that's my job. I get a lot of random curveballs thrown at me, you have no idea. Well, Well, I thoroughly loved it, and I'm pretty certain you've excited a lot of our listeners to go and buy the book and find out more. I'm going to do— going to read a little bit of an excerpt of one of my favourite ones as well shortly. But I would say thank you so much for joining me on Get Booked for Women's and Men's Radio Station. The book already is a success by the sounds of it, and I want people to go and find out more at dangerouswomenproject.org. Go and buy the book, buy it for your daughter, buy it for your neighbour, your postman, fight for everybody. Absolutely, I can't, I couldn't agree more. Thank you very much, Hazel, for having me on your show. You're very welcome. I'm looking forward to having you back in again when you release the next book with yet more dangerous women. There may be another book, I gather. Yay! Thank you so much and thank you for joining us on Get Booked. Okay, thank you. Dangerously Provocative Provocative by Jessica Wolfendale. The provocatively dressed woman is dangerous. She's disruptive, a distraction, and a temptation. She leads good men to thoughts of infidelity. She distracts men and boys from the important tasks of work and education. She must be monitored and controlled. Schools should ensure that girls don't wear provocative provocative clothing to class, such as tank tops or leggings, so that they don't distract boys and teachers. In the workplace, women should dress conservatively so that men can focus on their work. But the provocatively dressed woman also poses a danger to herself, since men are sexually aroused by a provocatively dressed woman By dressing like a slut, a woman runs the risk of sexual harassment and even rape. If she wants to avoid danger, she should make sure that she doesn't wear short skirts or skimpy shorts, just in case her attire provokes the attention of a sexual predator. It is up to her to make sure that she doesn't send the wrong message with her outfits. This means that if she is If sexually assaulted or harassed, the provocatively dressed woman only has herself to blame. She knew that wearing a provocative outfit would attract unwanted sexual attention, and yet she went ahead and did it anyway. If she sends the invitation, she can't complain if men take her up on it, and men can't be blamed for responding to her invitation. This narrative of the provocatively dressed woman is consistent and widely held. It is implicit in numerous school and workplace dress codes, in media coverage about sexual assault and harassment, in the advice given to women and girls by police officers, and in depictions of sexy women in advertising. At first, the narrative of the provocatively dressed woman seems to offer an enticing and uniquely female form of sexual power. Just by wearing skimpy clothing, it appears a woman can sexually arouse men. She can make them forget their girlfriends or their marriage vows, and she can even threaten their commitment to their work and their education. She is the classic femme fatale, the woman who uses her sexual appeal to control and manipulate men to get what she wants. Men in this narrative are hostages to their sexual desire. At the mere sight of a short skirt or tight top, they can't control themselves. Against their better judgment, they can become powerless in the face of a woman's allure. Perhaps then the provocatively dressed woman is a sexually empowered woman. Rather than fearing her own sexuality, she embraces and celebrates her sexual power over men. She is dangerous not because she is a threat to sexual morality, but because she knows she is powerful and she exercises her power when and how she sees fit. If she chooses to wear short, tight-fitting, and revealing outfits like those worn by female celebrities such as the Kardashians, it is not because she thinks that she has to dress like that in order to please men, but because she wants to celebrate her sexuality. She is sexy, cheeky, and liberated. And feels no need to hide her sexual appeal. This seems like the very definition of the sexual empowerment that feminists have fought for. But this empowerment is an illusion. Once we unpack the beliefs and attitudes that are expressed and reinforced through the narrative of the provocatively dressed woman, we see that she's not powerful. She does not have genuine sexual agency. In contrast, Her apparent dangerousness and sexual power are embedded and reinforce disempowering and objectifying conceptions of women's bodies and women's sexuality. The narrative of the provocatively dressed woman tells us that women are responsible for men's sexual behavior. In this narrative, male sexual desire is an omnipresent and potentially dangerous force that women must learn to avoid arousing if they don't want trouble. When a man acts on his sexual desire for a woman who is provocatively dressed, it's not only because he's overcome by lust, but because he sees himself as entitled to act on his own desire, even if she rejects his advances. After all, a woman who wears a provocative outfit is asking for it. So the narrative of the provocatively dressed woman privileges male sexual desire over the wishes of the woman who is the object of that desire. Social and cultural attitudes such as those expressed in media discussions of sexual assault and harassment reinforce the privileged status of male sexual desire. When women's clothing is taken to be relevant, the privileged status of male desire, male sexual desire, is even reinforced in the law when, as has happened many times, a rape victim's clothing and behaviour are put forward as a reason to mitigate a defendant's responsibility for sexual assault. This narrative of the provocatively dressed woman also reflects and reinforces the belief that women who wear revealing clothing want sexual attention from all men, not just from men they are attracted to or from whom they would like sexual attention. Thus, the narrative implies that men who who sexually harass or assault women aren't fully to blame for their behaviour because women who wear revealing clothing want sexual attention from any man. Men's diminished responsibility for their actions towards women is implied by the very use of the word provocative to describe women's clothing. Men's clothing, no matter how revealing or tight-fitting, is never described as provocative. Women's sexual arousal is not depicted as a potentially dangerous force that men must be wary of, Men are not warned against tempting or distracting women, and men are not blamed if a woman sexually harasses or assaults them. So the power of the provocatively dressed woman is an illusion. The power attributed to the provocatively dressed woman is based on the belief that women's bodies are inherently sexualised. That clothing that reveals sexualised women's bodies— body parts— is an open invitation to any man, an invitation that men are entitled to act upon regardless of the intentions and wishes, wishes of the woman in question. This reveals the insidious message of the narrative of the provocatively dressed woman. When a woman's outfit is described as provocative, she is reduced to a collection of sexually charged body parts: breasts, buttocks, legs. In addition, a specific subjective desire is attributed to her. The desire for sexual attention from men because of what she wears. She must want sexual attention regardless of what she says. Her actual preferences are dismissed if they are not— if they are inconsistent with the intentions that men attribute to her as not reflecting what she really wants. She says no, but her outfit says yes. Thus, it is men's interpretations of her desires that are taken as authoritative. His 'you want it' trumps her 'no.' Her so-called empowerment and sexual freedom are truly an illusion if her own desires, preferences, and choices are overridden in the face of men's interpretation of her desires. That is not freedom, it is radical disempowerment. Contrast this with the narrative of the male seducer, the debonair playboy exemplified in the character of James Bond, who actively seeks sexual attention from women only to use them and leave them. The playboy figure might wear a dashing tuxedo. He might even emerge from the ocean clad only in skimpy Speedos, as did Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. He might drink and flirt outrageously, but no matter what he wears, how seductive his behavior, or how many women desire him, he's never accused of sending the wrong message, nor is he viewed as deserving or asking for a unwanted sexual attention. If he rejects a woman's advances, his rejection is taken as authoritative. She cannot then claim that his no means yes. A woman's 'you want it' never trumps a man's no. But the provocatively dressed woman's supposed sexual power over men can be turned against her at any moment. To hear more, go and get yourself the fantastic book Dangerous Women: 50 Reflections on women power and identity at dangerouswomenproject.org. Thank you for listening.