Man, I feel like a woman

Sat in the genteel surrounds of the Scottish Storytelling Centre on a sunny Edinburgh afternoon, Alan Bissett is happily chatting away about his new pet interest: hardcore pornography. It’s an odd juxtaposition, highlighted all the more by the temporary arrival at our table of a little girl—no more than four years old and obliviously playing at our feet—who brings a swift and uneasy silence with her. For while Bissett finds himself politically galvanised by porn, finding an uncontroversial way of talking about it is proving hard.

Pornography is central to his new play, Ban This Filth!, which sees Bissett playing both himself and the radical feminist writer and anti-porn campaigner, Andrea Dworkin, as they discuss the impact of hardcore pornography on culture and society. 

But the ambition of the piece, coupled with the sensitivity of the subject matter, has clearly put him on edge. As demonstrated by the occasional Twitter pronouncement that sounds suspiciously like a cry for help (”Just out rehearsals. Oh my fucking god, this new Fringe show is THE biggest creative risk I will ever take in my entire life #hyperventilate”), Bissett is clearly worried about how Ban This Filth! will be received. “This is not the sort of show I want to be misquoted on. The one about the spiders [last year’s offering, The Red Hourglass] is fine! But this one you need to get right, because it’s really on a knife edge.”

Bissett’s unease is understandable given that engaging in the highly charged arena of feminist politics is not easy for any man, let alone for a public figure whose profile in Scotland has been raised not only by his career as an acclaimed novelist and playwright, but as a vocal and visible campaigner for Scottish independence. After all, there’s a danger that to do so insensitively is to effectively say, Bissett acknowledges, “‘I’ve cracked feminism, ladies! I’ve got the answers! Sit down and take note.’ That’s bullshit!” 

Despite his good intentions, he’s already found that wading into this arena in a public way has a habit of biting you. Shortly after reading Dworkin for the first time, and with the exuberance of a newly converted zealot, Bissett began “making public pronouncements about my radical feminism, which was a bit controversial because I’m not a woman. And there’s a lot radical feminists who would go: ‘Well, that’s very nice, but what the fuck makes you think you’ve got the right to lecture us?’

“And then I started getting all this stuff on Twitter from sex workers and more liberal feminists explaining the holes in my position. And again, I’m not a woman and I’m not a sex worker. And I thought maybe I’ve gotten this wrong? I don’t know. I don’t have the answer. It’s only now that I’m realising that feminism is so large and diffuse.”

However, while he acknowledges that the issue of pornography is not as black and white as his most radical self might have it, our pornified society still leaves Bissett uneasy. “I think porn is one of the great social issues of our time, because it’s so prevalent in our culture. When I was growing up, we encountered porn when some kid your age had found a porn mag in the woods in a puddle. And then the bat-signal goes up, y’know, and every boy under 15 goes round and has a look. There was an excitement about it, a frisson, because you very rarely encountered porn. But the availability and content of online porn and the speed at which it’s evolving... It got to the stage where I thought ‘Right, this doesn’t look like healthy male-female relations.’”

And it’s through exploring his own porn use that Bissett feels he can truly engage an audience with the old, radical feminism of the 1970s. But this comes at something of a personal cost. “Of course talking about porn is embarrassing, aye! But all the more reason to do it. If you’re on a stage, that’s a kind of safe place where people allow an openness or an emotional transaction that wouldn't take place if you were standing at a bus stop. If you said ‘Do you watch porn?’ the answer would be ‘Excuse me!’

“A lot of us have seen a shit lot of porn, but no one talks about it. Of course we don’t talk about it! No one says they’re wanking! But I want to talk about it. I want to start a conversation.”