Ban This Filth: A Male Feminist Writes

To be sure, the feminist movement is a pluralistic entity, full of competing strands that share only a concern with the status of women and a sense that things aren't quite right. There's the Dworkin/MacKinnon school, which identifies pornography with sexual assault; there's the followers of Camille Paglia with their sex-positive emphasis; Third Wave Feminists; post-feminists, body essentialists, lesbian separatists...

In all of this, only the male feminists have a single, simple role. They need to shut the fuck up and listen.

By this standard, Ban This Filth is an abject failure. Not only does it provide an example of a male artist parading his wounds at the hands of patriarchy, it picks out one writer (Dworkin) and makes her the epitome of feminist wisdom. Never mind that her work is problematic - for all her talk of male violence, her work is full of brutal imagery and aggression, or that her anti-pornography laws led to an urban myth that her own writings were banned by them - Dworkin is only a single voice, and is a divisive figure.

Her final years were marred by a controversy that is tragic and depressing: when Bissett calls her an Old Testament-style prophet, he could add that these prophets were, generally, unpopular during their lives. Her later exile may be seen as part of a failure on the part of society to accommodate her opinions.

Although the episodes from Bissett's life are familiar and funny, they work to marginalise the voices he supposedly supports. He makes a point of how women have supported him in his career, before writing and performing a one-man show that is all about him. Sure, he challenges himself, noting that his passion for Dworkin can be seen as a simplistic response to liberal guilt. Sure, he admits that he is climbing on the backs of women, but he makes that fundamental liberal mistake.

Expressing an opinion is not the same thing as working on strategies towards liberation.

Bissett can bang on about how bad he feels for looking at naughty videos - he can even offer to strip off on stage (thereby experiencing vulnerability). He can champion Dworkin, an extreme voice who lived an oppression far worse than getting shouted at for dancing funny in a Falkirk nightclub. He can ignore the serious critique of Dworkin by Nussbaum, allowing her a philosophical free pass (and making her sound like a radical feminist beat poet when he reads from her writings).

None of these things actually change the systematic oppression of women, or do anything about the pornographic industry.

(Note: this does not reflect my complete opinions on Ban This Filth).

Ban This Filth,Sister, JSA: A Dramaturg Writes

The influence of the cabaret format - a series of sketches moving towards a general analysis of a central theme - has been one of the more dynamic innovations in contemporary theatre. The Behaviour Festival provides plenty of examples (Job Seekers Anonymous, Ban This Filth, even Sister) - and it is ironic that artists from a literary (Alan Bissett) or live art tradition (the Cade sisters) are leading the trend, despite the health of Scottish cabaret.

The advantage is clear. Construction of a performance becomes a matter of stringing together a series of distinct episodes, allowing the creators to focus on their skill set (Bissett's superb parody of a big night out, JSA's sketches set in the dole office) and switching quickly between moods and styles (Sister flickered between the ambience of a lap-dancing club and a familial conversation). It also avoids the danger of presenting a single, dogmatic position. Sister and Ban This Filth both deal with the relationship between sex work and feminism, a topic that does not resolve into an easy conclusion.

Even the ambitious Cain's Book has a whiff of the cabaret. It is clearly an example of post-dramatic theatre (that is, a self-conscious performance that tends towards the cerebral rather than the emotional), but the jumps between the recitation of text, video footage, dancing girls and local rockers The Smack Wizards fit within the vaudeville format.

The other side of this influence is the danger of dilution. JSA is incisive when it comes to comparing the government's claims of a credit crunch against the ten million pound state funeral of Margaret Thatcher, but the patchwork quality of the structure distracted from the harsh political point-scoring. Equally, Sister has some brilliant interludes - in a stomping, sensuous dance, Rosana Cade sums up the conflict between a feminist resistance to sex-work and an acceptance of a woman's right to choose how she earns money - but often gets lost in memories of childhood.

There is a power in the loose format of cabaret, and The Creative Martyrs have been working out a way of

combining vaudeville with a theatrical consistency for years (and currently in Glasgow's Southside). There is also the possibility that these artists could be put together as part of a bill that takes their finest moments as self-contained and sharp routines. At the same time, in themselves, each performance has a habit of wandering and relying heavily on the charisma of the performers.

For all of these productions, the problem becomes one of structure. Rather than holding the attention, and following a clear narrative, they meander: Sister makes enough serious points in the first half an hour that the repeated flashbacks to the sister's childhoods become predictable and Cain's Book captures the ennui of the junkie at the cost of immediacy. Ban This Filth, which traces one man's battle with erotic capitalism, disappears into tales of the protagonist's youth which only tangentially connect to the main story.

On the other hand, this might be a problem of expectation... the episodic structure reflects the way that the internet works, the flicking and clicking between sites and tabs... a cyber-kinetic paddle through the shallows with breadth more important than depth... a set of specimens for further examination... less demanding... more allusive... playful... incomplete... until considered...

Ban this Filth: Introduction

In the nicest possible way, Alan Bissett is a pain in the arse. Ban This Filth deals with some uncomfortable topics (patriarchy, internet pornography, the guilt of the liberal mired in a culture of gross masculinity) that demand an answer. Mixing up cheeky routines that could stand alone as cabaret turns (a night on the lash with the boys becomes both a satire of lad culture and a sharp exposure of male insecurity), extracts from Andrea Dworkin's writings on pornography and episodes from the life of the author, Ban This Filth is a necessarily tentative investigation into the contemporary relationship between culture and pornography.

Bissett frames his exploration within an autobiographical context: the first half of the show is filled with anecdotes from his life. Bissett comes across as slightly self-obsessed (this is a performance persona, of course, and does not reflect on the 'real' Alan Bissett), guiltily considering the role of women in his success, but takes time to acknowledge the pressure on men to conform: a list of 'reasons you've been called a poof' and the energetic admonitions of the P.E. teacher ('being eleven is not an excuse for failure') are familiar to any sensitive young man.

Gradually, Bissett moves towards adulthood and, inevitably, the arrival of internet pornography. Running parallel to his erotic discoveries, he reads from Dworkin's autobiographical memoirs of abuse - a parallel process of education into gender identity. But where Bissett's (male) persona is being offered the freedom to dominant, Dworkin finds sexual abuse and institutional oppression.

The second half of Ban This Filth grapples with the implications of Dworkin's anti-pornpography stance for Bissett's own compromised engagement with feminism. He recognises how inept and self-satisfied his attempts to be an active feminist can be (a plant in the audience harangues him for being patronising, and the status of Dworkin within modern thought is dismissed with a mocking laugh), and advances a few, awkward thoughts on how he can, like Michael Jackson says, 'start with the man in the mirror.' The Bissett that concludes the show is less bumptious, less arrogant than the one who begins it - by addressing pornography, he seems to have begun to address his own sense of male entitlement.