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: 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.