Dude, part of the reason is that women aren’t cool, stories about women aren’t cool, duffle coats don’t hang loose over our hips, and rage is only cool when it’s emerging guttural-like from Nick Cave’s throat (in Berlin preferably)

‘Swwwaaaamp-lands’

It’s also because other women who play those supporting producing/fundraising roles don’t think it’s very cool to produce/fundraise for another woman. They’d rather do it for a cool, duffle-coat wearing, whiskey-swigging, genius-boy-man.

Then there’s a whole bunch of other reasons that are simply confusing, subtle, depressing and unclear.

And then we get really tired and change career paths.

Augusta,

As an excellent t-shirt a friend of mine once bought said: “I’ll be a post-feminist in a post-patriarchy”.

Reality check, girls of the Australian theatre: there is nothing *post* about this patriarchy and we are in it up to our necks. We are living in a society where a theatre that receives government money parades the writers and directors of an entire mainstage season before an audience and there is only one woman on the stage. Where the same company responds to public alarm at this visual demonstration of gender problems by staging a panel about women playwrights that has no women playwrights on it. I know Alison Croggon writes opera libretti and has written plays, but that is not the point. It never was the point – just as it doesn’t matter which company it was, because we ALL KNOW that the problems are endemic across the industry.

The point is that patriarchy exists not because men are sitting in rooms plotting to destroy or denigrate women but because men are sitting in rooms with other men so often that it doesn’t occur to them that women should even bloody be there. The men who make these decisions are so used to seeing women in support roles that to have them anywhere else in the structural hierarchy seems aberrant. The structure is so enshrined that women vindicate, excuse and reinforce it. That’s how hegemony works.

Does anyone ACTUALLY BELIEVE that women do somehow have a different “intrinsic aesthetic”? Or aren’t as good at pitching or playwriting or anything else? My ovaries don’t determine my subject matter, my breasts have no relationship to my writing stylistics. I’m not good or bad depending on my capacity to bloody menstruate. Not that I’m saying “I got a break, women – stand up for yourselves and you can, too”. I’m actually saying “Change your name – my career got traction when I changed my name from ‘Vanessa’ to ‘Van’ and I seized the 12 months of de-gendered confusion to (ha ha) make a name for myself.” Allowing my actual gender to be revealed was, I am sure, the biggest mistake of my professional life.

The sexism – and that’s what it is, look at the damn chart at the top of the blog and tell me it’s anything else – is not malicious. Let me be very clear about that. Some of my best friends are the gender-blind, hegemony-affirming, patriarchal twits that are keeping Australian theatre firmly in the 1970s and the women busy making the lamingtons. God help me.

It’s a cocoon of privilege, self-interest and plain laziness on the part of individuals with power that keeps the status quo so blatantly oppressive to women in this business. It’s only going to change through two means; 1.) that the funders, the sponsors, government and audiences, actually force theatre companies to adhere to enshrined equal opportunity policies with their recruitment and programming or face funding withdrawals or subscription cancellations or 2.) some of the men enjoying the benefits of patriarchal inequalities actually MAN UP and bloody SACRIFICE some privilege to give women a go.

For either of these things to happen, of course, it requires a bit of fearless articulation on the part of the oppressed. It’s convenient for people with privilege to not have to hear actual dissatisfaction – and since this ridiculous state of affairs came to public attention last year, I have become sick to the earholes of hearing women who already have nothing telling me they’ll have less than nothing if they complain.

Bollocks to it. Bollocks to all of it – *I’m* complaining. Theatre, and I know a lot of people forget this, is part of the entertainment business and this ongoing gender misery is not entertaining. It’s prehistoric, pathetic and really very bloody boring.

As a strong willed, explosive, creative young woman back in 1930, I noticed a huge change in my career trajectory when I pulled back from supporting my artist boyfriend, (emotional support, cooking, cleaning, laughing at his jokes, listening, being the subject of his paintings), when I pulled back and told him about my dreams, how I wanted to write the great Australian novel and how I’d love him to support me a little bit, he didn’t want to, his male friends didn’t want to and the other women in our circle didn’t want to either.

They thought I was too aggressive and too ambitious and aggression and ambition are a little unattractive. Remember that lass in ‘All about Eve’?

Well this is when all my problems started, and soon after, someone whacked me over the head with crow bar and I died.

Everyone was relieved because they didn’t have to think about it anymore.

Thing is, 80 years later, I still think that’s the rub (not the crow bar bit, the support bit).

In the experience of the not-so-young-now writer I’ve been haunting for the last 10 years, she’s seen some damn feisty, creative, talented young female writers out there who use all that energy to get the first few shows up off their own bat, sacrifice their health, their relationships, everything really, just to get on stage.

And everyone loves something new, so there is interest.

The blokes (of same skill level and talent) also doing the DIY thang, in this part of the narrative, start to get more formal support, find lots of other women to produce and fundraise for them, even bake cakes as part of those fundraisers…

This doesn’t happen for the ladies.

And this is the rub. There comes a time when there is no energy left, no ‘Fuck you, let’s DIY’, because you’re all out. And at that point, it seems that the system steps in to support the male writers, push them along, help them get better at their craft, while the women are left dangling.

Yes the majority of the audience out there are women, and the majority of the audience out there are also middle-aged.

My not-so-young-now writer friend doesn’t believe the average punter chooses what to see based on whether a male or female wrote it, she believes the industry does, but not the punter off the street.

She talks to a lot of them you see.

So the female writer does need to strike off any thoughts about the industry popping in to have a look, but there is hope for her in the average punter (with a good publicity team and a catchy premise).

But how can these average punters vote with their bums, if it’s nigh impossible for women to get the show up in the first place?

A question of chicken or egg perhaps?

Oh and women aren’t cool. Doesn’t matter in they’re in pinstriped pants like Nick Cave or skirts, they’re not cool.

There’s something to be said for the cult of personality.

My not-so-young-now writer friend doesn’t believe women have a different writing style to men, they may choose to write in the feminine, but we all have equal parts feminine and masculine, and anyone can make a conscious decision which to write in or across.

Gee I’d love a cup of tea with a shot of whiskey in it, but god damn, can someone attach my head back to my body?

Gus,

It’s one thing to say “vote with your bum”, but the system of election in this system is first past the post and it doesn’t work.

I support women writers. I go to see their work. So do a lot of other people – “Molly” is right, the punters don’t care about the gender thing. My last show in Sydney was a commercial hit that did sold out houses, masses of publicity and great money. But so what? What did that change for a single other woman playwright? Noone in a theatre company lit department turned round and said “Well, Badham’s new one’s turning farts into raw crude at the Fitz, better include more women in our next season.” No-one cares – the theatre companies just don’t think that maintaining a 50/50 representative balance is important. Girls don’t feature in their internal culture, and so girls don’t get staged.

To think that attendance alone is going to alter programming to REPRESENTATIVE levels requires not only people to bum-vote their way into shows by women, but also to “boy”cott shows by boys: and that’s ridiculous. Look at the stats on this site. LESS THAN A THIRD of the productions cited were written by women. In a “vote-with-your-bum” scenario, to exert some market pressure on programmers, we’d have to deliberately avoid 2/3rds of the work staged so they lost money, or encourage other people to, or what, exactly?

And advocating that we change this boys-club culture by organising away from it is an activism cul-de-sac as well… because we’ve been doing this FOR YEARS. We did it with Playworks and now we do it with less money. Planning and meeting and talking and making cups of tea and seeing one another’s shows and writing on one another’s blogs tut-tutting about how bad it is and all we’ve got at the end of it is an artistic separatist commune and LOOK AT THE DAMN CHART, LESS THAN A THIRD OF THE SHOWS.

If you don’t take the fight to the people with the ACTUAL POWER then you are condemned to be crushed by it. The boys will grind us into the ground every time; they won’t be doing it because they’re misogynists, or bastards or out to get us – they’ll do it because our self-referential universe is so powerless, it’s irrelevant. They’ve got more important things to consider, like the publicity schedule for next year, and attaching name actors to the main season, and devising a show that can tour and yes, girls, have another cup of tea, these are lovely lamingtons, we’ll see you at the launch.

And, yes, we can always form our own collectives and make our own spaces and embroider very prettily on the fringes of the main game, but I’ve done that for 15 years and I’m over the goddamn bake sale – I want me and my sisters to have our half of our damn cake. I want the sexism to STOP, forcibly, and I want 50/50 representation of women on mainstage stages. NOW. I want one-for-one programming of new Australian writing and damn it, I am a taxpayer currently funding the theatres that don’t think that equity or representation is very important and I have the right to be BLOODY CROSS ABOUT IT.

You know, I don’t give two hoots about the supposed “quality” of the work, either. That’s a false issue used to make women paranoid and so obsessed with introspection that they curl up like stabbed turtles. A theatre company programmes to personal relationships and shared aesthetics and forced to actually represent women they will forge the first and find the second. I promise you, bringing in a one-for-one programming policy will NOT affect ticket sales, it will not affect the proportion of the work people like or hate. It just might make some boys get over themselves for five minutes and that, I’ll argue, is good for all concerned.

Supporting women and fighting the man are not mutually exclusive – they are BOTH NECESSARY in this struggle. It IS fighting-the-man time. It is stand up and start shouting time. It is ONE-FOR-ONE or the funding gets bloody pulled because it’s a disgrace time.

Growl! Bark! SNAP! SNAP SNAP SNAP!

I DO care about the quality of the work. Deeply. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be true to myself as an artist or a critic.

But I agree that in the context in which it’s often used, it’s just a straw man. This is said straight-faced by people who program David Williamson knowing full well that if he’s about as high quality as a chocolate kettle.

I’ve just finished co-writing a music theatre piece with Daniel. Writing it was a joy, and the result is a work which is about as 50/50 as you get: he wrote a bit, then I wrote a bit, until we got to the end, then both of us separately and then together worked it over. But I keep thinking of how COWBOY MOUTH is so often credited Sam Shepard’s work alone, and the fact that it was co-written by Patti Smith gets completely forgotten. That’s not because of Sam or Patti, but because it’s so widely assumed that any man in a partnership with a woman will be the senior and authoritative member, and his is the legitimate work. That erasure is just part of being a woman writer, as history so depressingly confirms.

I know damn well that my poetry is read in certain ways by certain readers (not all readers, thankfully) because I am identifiably female, and that if I had a man’s name it would be read differently. I’ve long experienced – and refused, insofar as one can – the subtle marginalisations that go with that, especially the one that goes with not being a proper “feminine” woman. I know as a critic that I attract a certain kind of abuse that would never be directed towards a man. My fantasy books – which are as epic as all get out – have attracted putdowns in some “hardcore” SFF circles because if they are by a woman and feature a heroine and are read by girls they are a priori soft and mushy romances, even though I write smarter and better epic than a lot of the boy’s Big Fat Fantasies.

In short, I’ve experienced all sorts of ways in which the reception of my writing is affected by my being a woman in ways which I believe are totally extrinsic to the quality and kind of the writing itself. I’ve often thought of writing under a nom de plume, even as an experiment, but, you know, another part of me feels quite bloodyminded about that – my name is my name. And I do sometimes wonder if I’m one of those writers who after my death will disappear, only to be rediscovered a few decades later by feminist researchers. Because it’s happened to so many women artists, it’s hard not to think it might not happen to me.

And this is why quality matters to me. My response to this kind of bullshit has always been to grit my teeth and write better than the men who are patting me on the head. It works. The annoying thing is that it works under the radar: it gets me readers, lots of them, but it doesn’t change the wider structural problem. But I do think one of the ways to combat this is that we get very articulate about what we consider quality to be in art, and how it is not predicated on having or not having a penis but on the work itself.

One thing I know for sure is that saying nothing out of fear of retaliation is the same as admitting defeat before you even begin.

An entertaining and intelligent conversation…from some of the leading creatives and thinkers in our industry. Thank you. Shine on!