An award-winning play had to stop a performance earlier this week, after a male member of the audience requested medical help because he felt “faint” after watching a graphic abortion scene play out on stage.
I’ve tried very hard to be nice about this, but I’m afraid I don’t have the energy for it today. This specific story reminded me of a more general one I hear almost every day – about men fainting while their partner is in labour, men being unable to buy tampons, men finding their partner’s menstrual cups disgusting, being horrified by sex during a woman’s period, disliking the idea that women fart or poo or have any other bodily functions, and I’m just so deeply over it.
Maybe the most shocking thing about this story is that another man in the audience, rather than rolling his eyes at the fainthearted theatre goer, felt the need to volunteer his opinion of the scene. According to The Times, another ticketholder at the award-winning Almeida Theatre in Islington, north London, shouted from the circle that the scene “was a disgrace”. He added: “There was no warning.”
There was then an exchange between the actors and the audience member where they pointed out that there absolutely was a warning about the content of the play, both online, in the programme and in emails sent to ticket holders.
The warning read: “The Years contains sexual content, a graphic depiction of abortion, a coerced sexual encounter and blood.” I think even an outraged male audience member would be hard pressed to pretend that doesn’t constitute a warning.
The warning is especially ironic because the play is based on a quasi memoir called Les années, by Annie Ernaux, and it’s non-fiction. Much of what is seen on stage happened to Ernaux.
It’s easy to roll your eyes at these men. I know because I’ve been doing it all morning. In fact it’s much harder not to roll your eyes at them. They’ve gone to see a story about a woman’s life and ended up making themselves the main character of this story. But eye-rolling is not productive. Sneering doesn’t change anything. So I find myself wondering how this happens.
How do adult men – men who attend off-West End plays with an all-female cast – arrive at adulthood with this level of squeamishness about the female body (the fainter) and entitlement (the shouter)?
I wonder if there might be something in how we raise our sons. A few months ago a friend of mine asked me to keep an eye on her toddler son while we were in a public place, while she went to the bathroom. I agreed, of course, but he didn’t seem keen to stay with me. “Do you want to just take him in with you?” I asked. To my shock, she responded that she needed to change her tampon. As if that were a reason not to take him with her.
I didn’t argue, obviously it’s her child and her choice. But in retelling the story to other friends I’ve been staggered by how many of them wouldn’t change their sanitary pad or tampon in the same room as their toddler son.
Though, perhaps my judgement on that topic is hypocritical. Just this morning I woke up and realised that I have, once again, ruined a perfectly good pair of knickers by getting my period. I dropped them on the bathroom floor as I got into the shower and then, getting back out of the shower, scolded myself. What if my boyfriend had seen my bloodstained underwear on the floor?
Where does that desire to protect men from our blood even come from? I’m not precious. I don’t fit the Instagram Clean Girl aesthetic. Half my underwear has stains – the ghosts of previous periods. I’ve stained most of my sheets and occasionally other people’s furniture. And yet there is still something in me which reflexively goes to shield men from the reality of my menstruation. That’s not my fault. It’s hundreds of years of cumulative shame, every woman in my lineage will have been taught that her blood was something to be embarrassed about.
But if we want men to understand what it is our bodies do, and perhaps even learn to respect us for our resilience, they must first understand what’s actually going on. We need to tell them how it feels to have an agonising period, to suffer through a pregnancy scare, to pass a foetus you had hoped to raise as a child, to take an abortion pill and wait.
They can’t just see it for the first time as adults, in a theatre, they need to hear it and know it as part of an on-going conversation throughout their entire lives, the same way that we women do.
