Mamamia Out Loud: A Content Warning About A Content Warning

Mamamia Podcasts 4/26/23 - Episode Page - 43m - PDF Transcript

Transcript
Show Notes

You're listening to a Mamma Mia podcast.

Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on.

Mamma Mia Out Loud!

Hello and welcome to Mamma Mia Out Loud,

what women are talking about on Wednesday, the 26th of April.

I'm Holly Wainwright.

I'm Mia Freedman.

And I'm Jessie Stevens.

And tomorrow night, if you are in Sydney,

you can come and see a live recording of Cancel.

That's a podcast I do with my twin sister Claire Stevens.

We are going live at the Powerhouse Museum at 7pm.

It's a free event.

You just need to register.

I registered for a ticket.

I learnt about it on yours.

I'm sure they would have let you in.

I learnt about it by looking at Jessie's socials.

And it said register here and I'd registered, but now I can't go.

So I'll give my dick somewhere in the middle of the ticket.

Okay, well great.

So now there's an empty seat.

So please come out louders.

And fill me a seat.

Yes, please.

There's lots of podcast stuff happening between five and nine.

So you can come early.

Our producer, M. Gillespie, is on a panel talking about podcasting

if you want to learn more.

There's a link in the show notes for more information.

And remember to register online if you're actually coming.

Thank you.

I got a dinner invitation.

It was more interesting.

It was better.

On the show today, Joe Biden is running for US president again.

And does the reaction tell us something about ageism or about realism?

Plus the comic who tried to resist trigger warnings and what happened next

and the green flags that mean you're a good person.

How many can you claim?

But first, in case you missed it, Prince Harry has revealed

his brother William took a big cash payment from Murdoch's news group

newspapers, AKA the creators of the modern tabloid.

Harry's not so happy.

This wasn't a leak for the next volume of spare.

He is currently suing Murdoch's news group newspapers for multiple unlawful acts,

allegedly committed on behalf of its tabloids, The Sun, News of the World

from the mid 1990s until 2016.

And basically we've come full circle back to phone hacking.

Because in a 31 page witness statement, Harry has railed against news group figures

and a secret agreement with Buckingham Palace.

In the statement, Harry revealed a settlement that was made between

William and these newspapers.

And he said they had settled William's claim for a huge amount of money in 2020

without any of the public being told.

And seemingly, and this is interesting, with some favorable deal in return

for him going quietly.

So Harry's lawyer claims that under the secret deal,

the royals had agreed not to pursue further claims.

And frankly, they were just worried about the damage of another tampon gate

or something like it.

So there was a bit of a I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine.

Well, settlements, I don't think we should suggest that settlements mean

that there's something nefarious at play.

It often just means that two people agree that they don't want to either spend

more money by going to court or they don't want everything to be made public.

So the reason is Harry has just thrown William under the bus again for like

the 25th time.

I didn't understand that.

Can you explain how this is throwing him under the bus?

So Harry very much wants him and Meghan to be the royals of integrity, right?

If you read his book and I know we all did.

Very large recurring theme.

We will not shut up about the bad things that the tabloid press have done to us.

My family is often in cahoots with them.

You know, I will not walk past that standard is very much what Harry's doing.

So Harry, the reason he won't let this drop and it's complicated,

but News Corp or whatever they're called these days are saying,

you've left this too late.

This stuff, all this stuff that you're bitching about happened way too long ago.

Well, News of the World doesn't even exist in that.

Exactly.

So you've left all this too late.

The reason Harry is still pushing, as he said,

that way back when all the News of the World thing fell apart,

News Corp promised a public apology that they never gave, right?

Harry still wants it, even though it was a very long time ago.

He loves an apology.

That means a lot to him.

He does.

It's important to him that there's some accountability.

His favorite word.

Whereas William apparently agreed to not keep pushing for this apology and got a settlement.

That makes him look like he is in bed with the tabs,

which is what Harry's always saying about William and Charles.

And that he has no integrity.

Whereas Harry has bags of integrity.

Now, as Mia pointed out, the reason that the Royals might have settled isn't only because,

oh, go easy on us or some kind of nefarious agreement, as Mia said,

it was also because they just don't want the embarrassment that another court case can bring.

So very often defamation proceedings or any kind of case like this,

where you're pushing a defensive truth or whatever,

will be incredibly damaging to you in what comes out in the interim.

They're going to dig up all the dirt and it's going to sit public in a courtroom.

A royal person would literally have to probably sit there.

If somebody is trying to prove something about you,

they might in the process of doing that reveal all these text messages, emails, conversations you've had,

that might not reveal a massive bombshell, but just make you look bad.

Think about all of us and how exchanges between us might be seen

if we had to sit in a courtroom and have them read out.

So you would have the future King of England sitting in a courtroom in a witness stand,

having to read out his text messages or acknowledge that they'd been sent.

I mean, it would be yucky. I get it. You would want to settle.

So that's why it's seen that generally the royals were like, let's not sue.

Let's not go there. Let's not do that.

Let's not bring more attention.

But Harry is very much about this and he's like, no, no, no, these bastards will pay.

That's basically his business.

Yeah. And if you have read Spare, he talks a lot and in all his interviews and stuff,

but particularly in Spare, about the way it screwed his head

and affected his romantic relationships and friendships with his staff

and people he worked with because for years he thought someone in his inner circle was leaking.

He couldn't understand how stories were finding their way to the press,

which is ironic given how much he's talked about how his family does do that.

I guess you could even argue that the seeds of that paranoia were quite rightly sown

because he was paranoid, but he had every right to be paranoid.

It was justified because the media was secretly listening to his text messages.

They were following his girlfriend.

They'd put like listening devices and all those kinds of things.

So I can definitely see why he's pushing forward, but it's the slagging off of William.

Like, why did we need to know that?

Well, because yet another thing that would be tricky to make small talk over a coronation quiche about in a few weeks

is like William is now going to face an enormous amount of scrutiny about what was in that agreement.

How much money did you get? Where did that money go?

What did you do with it? What did you agree to give them in return? Blah, blah, blah.

That has opened a massive kind of wounds for William.

That would be kind of hard to overlook, I think, at the next garden party.

But did Harry reveal this because he wanted to

or because it's part of a very public court case? You know what I mean?

He has revealed it as part of the court case.

But he didn't have to. He chose to pop it in there.

And when you pop something, when you pop,

when you include something in a legal document such as this,

you know it's going to become public.

So it is a way of actually getting things out into the open or not.

Around the country, Maggie extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms.

Cutting social security that you've paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy.

Dictating what healthcare decisions women can make.

Banning books and telling people who they can love.

All while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.

In news that made me smack my forehead and exclaim bloody Nora,

US President Joe Biden has confirmed that he will run for re-election in 2024.

Here is what the current president said in his announcement video that was released today.

When I ran for president four years ago, I said we're in a battle for the soul of America.

And we still are.

The question we're facing is whether in the years ahead, we have more freedom or less freedom.

More rights are fewer.

I know what I want the answer to be and I think you do too.

This is not a time to be complacent.

That's why I'm running for re-election.

Because I know America.

Oh God. Okay, so look, it would usually be a smart thing.

The strongest candidate for a political party to choose to lead them into an election

is the one who's already doing the job, also known as the incumbent.

But Joe Biden is 80 years old and he's already become the oldest president in US history

when he took office in 2021, aged 78.

And the bid for a second term makes him the oldest president to ever seek re-election.

The person he beat for that honor was Ronald Reagan.

Some of you may remember him.

He was an actor turned president in the 80s and he left office at the age of 77

and he was later quite famously revealed to have been suffering from dementia

during the last years of his presidency and his wife Nancy

and some of the other people around him were pretty much doing the job

because he was not completely incapacitated but, you know, everyone knew that he was not up to the job.

Now, if Biden were to win next year, he would be 82 years old at his inauguration

and he would be 86 at the end of his second term.

And it gets worse because it's looking fairly likely that the Republican candidate

who he'll be running against is probably going to be 76-year-old Donald Trump.

Now, he insists he's going to run no matter how many criminal charges he's facing

so it's shaping up to be a complete nightmare replay of the 2020 election in the US

except with men who are four years more elderly.

Even when he was running in 2020, there were a lot of questions around Joe Biden's mental acuity.

Is that the word? How sharp he is basically.

He has got a stutter which is no indication of anything to do with mental capacity

but he also has been making a lot of gaffes.

He's fallen over quite a few times and all of that seems to have accelerated in recent months.

Last week, he couldn't spell the word eight and he keeps getting confused on stage

and he fell upstairs boarding Air Force One in Poland recently, not for the first time.

People have noted it's very interesting that the announcement was done via a video

rather than a press conference or a speech for these good reasons

and nearly three-quarters of Americans actually don't want him to run for president again

even people who are pro-Biden and who voted for him last time.

It's not like a campaign when you're not the incumbent where they might run candidates against him.

The Democrats will run candidates against him like if he says he's running, he's running.

So they won't. It's a sign of respect. It's very different.

In Australia you know you can have someone in your political party challenge you

but remember in America you don't even have to be a politician as we know with Donald Trump.

You don't even have to be an elected official to run for president.

There's a real sense of disappointment hence my bloody Nora comment

that there was a real chance for generational change

and for Joe Biden who was seen to be a safe pair of hands quite rightly

after the absolute chaos and anarchy of Donald Trump.

A lot of people were disappointed and I would say I was one of them

that after all of the Democratic primaries where it's like a big audition

that happens over a couple of years for candidates before the election on each side

and it was kind of a bit of Obama that all they could come up with

was a guy who'd been Obama's vice president.

He was already in his late 70s or I think early 80s already

and it wasn't generational change but it worked. He won.

But now Jesse what's the right age to be the president of the United States

if you could pick the right age.

I refuse to answer that question and I have been very defensive

of what I see as a lot of ageism that has come at Joe Biden.

I think we've also got to acknowledge that this is the number one Republican strategy

is to make him look old and doddery.

So a lot of the clips and stuff I just take those with a grain of salt

because I kind of go the Republicans they had a big document where they all signed it

and they were like we need to make sure that he doesn't have dementia and blub.

It's absolute concern trolling because hello Donald Trump.

If we're going to talk about intellectual capacity to run a country

then Donald Trump is where I'd be looking.

But I think, hang on, it's different being an asshole to being not sharp enough to make decisions.

But Donald Trump isn't sharp.

No, no, I know.

But it's a very physically and mentally taxing job.

And this is why this is troubling because it opens the door wider to all of that criticism.

But remember when Hillary was running against Trump

and there were all those things about her health

and what was she wearing under her clothes and she fell over once.

It's a very well known strategy.

And she was so young, she was 69.

Yeah, in comparison like a sprightly.

I also sometimes, and especially in the age of eight,

like when I see those videos that go around of him stuttering or something,

I often go, is that real?

I'm sure it is.

And there's two things at play, right?

There's his actual intellectual capacity, which he has been subject to tests.

They're subjective in some ways, but he doesn't drink alcohol.

He exercises every single day.

He's a man who takes really good care of himself.

And the 77 year old Reagan decades ago is not the same as an 80 year old man today.

It's just not with health.

But that's not true.

It doesn't matter how much you take care of yourself.

There's a certain mental capacity.

You know, we all know people who are 90 and incredibly sharp.

I mean, Rupert Murdoch is 92, right?

He's still running his company.

Generally, it does decrease.

Your mental capacity decreases as you age.

Even your ability to grasp concepts like, what is TikTok?

Yes, but I mean, that can happen to a 60 year old,

as it can happen to a 70 year old, as it can happen to anyone.

I just think that 90 isn't 90 isn't 90.

There are lots of different versions of that age.

So there are two things at play.

And I think that the Murdoch example is quite funny

because he's a 92 year old who is saying, I am immortal.

I will never die.

I will run these companies until I die.

But he doesn't have the nuclear codes.

He doesn't.

But I would say in a lot of ways, he actually has more power.

He does.

He's probably the most powerful than any president.

He's not answerable to anyone.

So it's like, if we should be talking about age and capacity,

it should be Murdoch.

The real question here is whether it's a clever political strategy

and objectively, it just isn't.

It isn't.

Because the Democrats don't want to vote for him.

I think that if he really looked at this

and went, what's the best thing for the Democrats,

he would give it to Harris.

Kamala Harris, who is his deputy currently,

is going again as vice president.

But you've got to remember this is a different political system.

So you have to get people excited enough to queue up,

take a day off work, get their kids looked after, vote, right?

Join a line, spend the day.

No penalties if you don't.

The biggest challenge you have in America, there's two.

There's one who to vote for,

but the other is just getting people to give enough of a shit

to get out.

This is not going to do that.

And what age does, if we put cognitive decline to the side,

when you are in your 80s, your chance of dying soon are higher.

15% chance both Trump and Biden have a dying before the election.

And what that does, apart from being sad, is create political chaos.

We saw it with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barack Obama sat down with her

and asked her to step back and say,

please, I think this is the best thing for the court.

So that they could replace her with a more progressive judge.

Exactly.

And what happened was Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't.

She said, I want to keep doing this,

even though her health was in decline.

She was battling cancer for the second time.

And when she did die, it meant that Trump was in a position

where he could push in a conservative high court judge.

And that will change the course of American history,

which we've seen with Rovers Wade.

It means that things won't change for decades and decades.

I think it's tricky because to criticize Biden does sound like ageism,

for the reasons that Jesse is saying.

And also we're living in a moment,

when we've discussed this a little bit,

where longevity is this new big focus and everybody wants to live forever.

And I entirely understand how difficult it is for the boomer generation

to let go, right?

It's incredibly hard.

I mean, I'm only 50-ish.

I think I said in a podcast last week,

the biggest jealousy these days is for people who are younger than me

because they've got more time, right?

There is something incredibly confronting and difficult

about facing your mortality, about agreeing that, you know,

maybe my better days are behind me, whatever.

And if you're, Biden is still an incredibly smart man

who knows a lot of things,

and he can be very useful in many ways.

So it must be incredibly difficult to let go of that.

But as Mia said, how can you understand the rapidly changing everything at that age?

I have a question.

Do you reckon we would feel differently if Joe Biden dyed his hair black?

No.

Oh, God.

No, no.

Because why is it that Donald Trump doesn't feel as old as Joe Biden

when they're actually quite comparable?

He doesn't.

Well, I hate to ever give Trump any kind of positive reinforcement

because I don't think he needs any.

He seems to be quite, but his energy is very different.

His energy is very different.

His energy?

Even despite the fact that he only drinks Coca-Cola and whatever.

He also doesn't drink, and he doesn't smoke,

but his energy is aggressive, though.

I don't like his energy.

No, no, no.

I know, no.

I am not.

Don't you?

The point of aggressive energy is that it feels more alpha.

So it feels younger.

Like, it feels like he is up for a fight.

He's got energy.

And one of his biggest ways that he criticizes his rivals,

even when he was running for the Republican nomination,

Jeb Bush, who was the brother of George Bush,

he would call him low-energy Jeb.

Yeah.

And that was like an insult.

It's like calling someone a small dick man.

It's interesting, though, that he has resisted age through the spray tan

and through the hair and everything like that.

He looks absurd.

But he doesn't look like an old man.

I don't think that.

Joe Biden looks old.

I think that's a very Trump-esque thing.

And they keep trying to put Joe Biden in aviators, sunglasses,

every time he's in public and like try to make him look a bit top gun

with like a leather jacket and aviators.

And do you remember when he was inaugurated and he jogged onto the stage?

Yes, always onto the stage.

He always runs up stage.

He's very fit.

It's funny to me that when I was young,

and I'm sure that people in their 20s feel this way now,

the average age of American presidents used to be like late 40s, early 50s.

Old man running the world.

Like now.

That seems positively useful.

They're really going to make me vote for Joe Biden.

How is the best case scenario, Joe Biden?

So I read an interview today that gave me a reason to rethink the conversation

that we've had on this show a couple of times about trigger warnings and content warnings.

Ironically, before we start this,

obviously I need to flag that as you might imagine,

if it's a topic that warrants content warning,

I'm giving you a content warning about the content warning.

This next topic that we talk about does deal with serious themes.

So skip it if that is not what you're in the mood for.

But just to refresh, generally speaking,

when it comes to trigger warnings or content warnings on stories,

on podcasts, in books, on films,

Mia hates them.

Jesse also hates them, but it's a bit less strident.

I don't mind them at all.

Anyway, this story is about a Scottish comedian called Daniel Sloss.

Now, if that name's familiar,

he went viral a few years ago for a show that he wrote called Jigsaw

that was about relationships.

And it was about why most relationships are bullshit.

And he now credits that show with thousands of divorces.

So if you heard his name around, it's probably about that.

55% of marriages end in divorce.

90, 90% of your relationships that are started before they are 30.

If those were the stats for surgery, none of us would fucking risk it.

But because it's love and we're stupid,

we just lie on the operating table like maybe this time I won't die inside.

All I'm asking is if you've ever been in a situation like that,

in a relationship where you felt trapped,

like you couldn't get out of it and it was just easier to stay in it,

all I'm asking is if even for the briefest of seconds,

have you ever accidentally caught yourself thinking

how much easier life would be if they were to just die?

And not because you want them to die,

but just because them dying is like the easiest way.

His show after that was called X

and had more challenging subject matter again, Rape.

He was very determined in the show that he was going to talk to men

and about men-

How did you do a comedy show about Rape?

Well, it wasn't entirely about Rape.

A really central theme to it was about men standing up to other men.

He tells a story in there about a friend of his.

But when it comes to sexual assault,

even though I've never been sexually assaulted

and I've never done a sexual assault,

to say that it doesn't affect me just isn't true

because it affects people I know and love

and that in turn affects me.

Like one of my closest friends of five years,

she's been sexually assaulted,

you don't get to tell me that this isn't a me issue too.

Me and her were having dinner last year,

just happened to be in the same city I was gigging,

she was working there while we were having food.

Second coincidence today happened,

two of my guy friends walked by

and they were like, who's that?

And I introduced him.

Two days later I met up with her for breakfast

and I was like, so how was the rest of the night?

She was like, I'm not telling you.

Turns out after I'd left,

one of my closest friends of eight years,

raped her.

I was horrified, I was shocked, I was angry,

I believed her.

I asked the questions that I think you want to ask

when you're in that situation

and I was like, are you okay?

And she was like, no.

And I was like, yep, no, fair points to the question.

Can I have another one, please?

And then I asked a question I didn't want to ask.

Now in hindsight,

I understand that I should not have asked this question,

but I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that I didn't.

It was an ignorant question

and it came from an ignorant man.

I asked the question.

I said, I have to ask,

I've known this guy for eight years.

Did you say no?

And these are her words, not mine.

She went, yeah,

more times than the two unlimited song.

So that was his show, right?

He goes on to make the point in that show a lot

that men have to stand up to men, right?

He's like, there's no point in men walking around

saying, I'm a good man, I'm a good man.

If one out of the 10 isn't,

then the other nine have to stand up.

It's about allyship, basically, right?

Now he was really determined

when he was performing that show, he says,

both live, it eventually has been streamed,

that it did not have a trigger warning

because he says he really wanted it to reach men.

He said, if we put a trigger warning on the show,

the types of men who need to see it

are gonna go, oh no, I don't wanna fucking see that.

But then when he was performing it,

he noticed something about the audience

every time he got close to that section of the show.

And this is his quote.

He said, when you speak about rape on stage

within a millisecond, within a millisecond,

you can see everyone who's been raped in the audience

instantly, instantly in their body language,

in their demeanour.

These people have come to a comedy show,

and what you've done is you've brought up

the worst moment of their life.

When a woman left the show during this routine,

he said he realised he'd lost the argument

and he added a trigger warning.

Now, if you go to watch X on his website,

it comes up with a little box that says,

warning contains adult themes

involving sexual assault and strong language ages 16+.

Now the reason I think this is worth discussion

is this idea of prioritising, right?

So Daniel Sloss, I think we would all agree,

like his intentions were in the absolute right place

in A, making that show and the people he wanted to hear it.

He had to weigh up and prioritise the show reaching

an audience he believed would be deterred by a trigger warning

with how people, and in this case women,

would feel hearing this material.

And I guess once he'd witnessed firsthand

that not putting the trigger warning on in his mind

came at a cost to the women he decided to do it.

So Mia, those priorities feel impossible.

What should he have done?

It's really hard, isn't it?

Because I'm not usually a fan of slippery slope arguments

because they're lazy,

but I'm going to make one now

because I think that he's clearly very sensitive

and trying to do the right thing by women

because he wants more men to hear his point

and he also wants to protect women from being distressed.

The problem is when you consume a piece of art,

a piece of theatre, a comedy show,

a book, a TV show, a movie,

go to a, you know, a TED Talk even,

what do we give trigger warnings for

or content warnings for and who gets to decide?

Because he might have had another joke in there

about being in a car accident

and there might be people who come to the show

who lost a loved one in a car accident.

Now, there might also be people

who have lost loved ones in a car accident

who would be fine with that,

but if we're talking about outsourcing your protection

for your mental health to the world,

that is a really, really bad precedent

for the person who's been traumatised, I would argue.

Forget the responsibility of the person

putting things out into the world.

Are we going to accept that we outsource?

Now, does that mean sometimes you'll have to close a book

or turn off a movie or walk out of a comedy show

to protect yourself?

Yeah, you might have to.

I've certainly done all of, not all of those things,

but I've certainly done some of those things

to protect myself because I have specific triggers

around certain things.

And sometimes when you say trigger,

what does that also mean?

Does it mean that you suffer from PTSD

and you're thrown back into a panic attack

or does it just mean you feel sad or bad or upset

or you're reminded of something distressing?

So that's where I stand, Jesse.

I went and watched this

and I found the sort of bait and switch of the show clever.

Was it like a Hanna Gadsby style?

Yes.

It's comedy, but not comedy.

Yeah, and also if you watched the trailer for this special,

you would have no idea that's coming.

No.

Right, so like, I mean, if you think about the Hanna Gadsby example,

Nanette didn't have a trigger warning.

It did not.

And so sometimes you're sitting there watching a...

And after Nanette was so successful,

it felt like every comedy show did this

where you went to have a laugh and then halfway through,

you're like, oh my God.

Yeah.

One of the things that's different here is it was obviously aimed

at a male audience.

But anyway, Jesse, what were you...

What he said in the show,

which was an interesting explanation

of why he set it up like this,

was he talked about that analogy about the frog

in the boiling water.

So if you throw the frog in and it's boiling,

it'll jump out immediately because it's hot and it feels it.

But if you put it in and you gradually increase the heat,

then it will burn alive because it doesn't notice.

And he actually used that to describe how he wanted

his male audience to respond to what he was saying.

So he started off with a joke about how much he loves children.

And then he kind of paused and everyone went, ooh.

And then he said, yeah.

He was making a point about men and loving children

and how we're not pedophiles and blah, blah, blah.

So he kind of started with these little seeds of discomfort.

And then he built it and he built it and he built it

and got all the men in the room on side to then get to this point.

Because I would feel uncomfortable if he was using her story

or telling her story in a way that felt like...

Exploitative.

But actually, his whole point that he comes to at the very end

is about his own shame,

which is that over that eight years of friendship,

there were signs that this man was bad

and that he had done bad things.

And he wasn't someone who only raped his friend.

He was someone who this was repeated behavior

and he said, I've got to live with that.

So in a...

Which is why he wanted to make that point.

Yes.

And in a creative way, the question is if that could have worked.

If on the ticket, I don't know.

I don't know if I saw that on the ticket and it said...

I don't think it's going to put anyone off, to be honest.

To argue against myself.

I don't think it'll put anyone off.

I don't think anyone would look at that

because he could have made just a crass joke about rape.

It could have been a sexist joke about rape.

It could have been...

I've been at other comedy shows where...

And I've seen them where it's...

Like the stuff that Louis C.K. does, that are just gross

and that aren't in any way for any higher purpose

or educational reason.

I know you say, well, there's no harm in it.

It's not hurting anyone.

It's not going to put anyone off.

What's the harm?

The harm is that the more people see trigger warnings

and content warnings, the more they expect them.

And because we live in such an individualistic society,

people expect to be protected

from whatever it is that triggers them.

I mean, I agree that an overuse of trigger warning,

actually, I more think makes people blind to them, right?

Like they don't mean anything anymore.

If they're on everything all the time,

they don't really mean anything.

I think that what you're talking about

when you're talking about things like sexual assault

is trauma, right?

And you don't know there might be people in that audience

or in any audience or reading the story

or consuming the content

who have done so much work on their trauma.

I mean, we were just talking about how a story

went absolutely viral from Mamma Mia this weekend

about trauma.

And it's something that a lot of women are walking around with

and are working on and trying to deal with

and being thrown back into a very...

But it's a moment of trauma.

Life will always throw you back.

It's not to be dismissed.

I understand.

No, I know, but it's not to be dismissed

because it can seriously affect somebody

and, of course, life will always do that.

But if you can avoid moments of it,

then why wouldn't you?

If there are opportunities that aren't harmful to do it

because life will always do it,

you'll bump into it everywhere.

I think it gives you a false sense of security.

I think as someone who has experienced trauma,

I think if you start believing

that you will be protected.

So I believe that you become less and less resilient

to those triggers.

But I think it's arrogant to be yelling at sexual assault victims

that they should be more resilient.

I think that we should maybe be a little more empathetic.

Hey, there's just a warning on this

that says some of the content on this deals with sexual assault

16 plus.

I know, and this is why I'm torn.

Because obviously I'm not saying

harden up victims of sexual assault.

But when I think about the things that trigger me,

not many of them,

it's impossible to make my life safe from them.

So I have to learn coping mechanisms

but my point is that then where does it end?

And is there a hierarchy?

Because the word rape, even us discussing it now,

elicits a visceral response in most women

because of an experience that they've had

or because it's one of the worst traumas

as a woman or a man that you can experience.

The reason he noticed so many people bristle in the room

and could tell who had experienced it

was probably because they were bracing themselves for,

this is the time in the comedy show where rape is a joke.

And I've got to sit here and ha ha ha next to my partner

and we've all got to pretend like we're okay with it

and then I go home and deal with it later.

And the fact he didn't do that, I think changes things.

But I've had an experience of being at a writers festival

and I was talking about grief

and I remember I brought up miscarriage.

And I don't think it was bad.

I don't think that people were triggered

but I had this moment of going,

I could just tell every single woman in front of me

who's had a miscarriage.

Like their body language changed.

But this is what's really interesting

is performers play with the energy of a crowd, right?

I mean, Hanna Gadsby talks about that really openly in the net.

Like they've crafted a piece of work

as he has done in this instance

that lulls people into a sense of security then, throw something at them

that shocks them, then brings up something.

They're deliberately playing with the atmosphere in a room.

But when does that become irresponsible?

That's what's interesting to me here is that I think

when you're weighing up the priority of like

the average bloke in inverted commas

considering their dodgy mate, you know,

this is a really important message for them to hear, right?

So I would say more men in that room, please.

More men go see this show.

Absolutely, let's not put any barriers in front of them to do so.

But then does it become,

I know that dangerous sounds like too big a word

like if it comes at the expense of female victims,

then I'm like, well...

I think he probably made the right decision,

but it always becomes like,

well, is that set a precedent?

And does every comedian need to list all the things that they joke about?

I'd love the out loudest to let us know

in the My Mayor Out Loudest Facebook group.

He also said that in the marketing,

in the lead-up to the show,

he intentionally had a really blokey tone

and almost put in little almost misogynistic tidbits

to entice the type of man he wanted to sit in his audience.

I think that's interesting.

If you want to make out loud part of your routine five days a week,

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and a big thank you to all our current subscribers.

This week, I came across a list of green flags

to recognise in yourself

on an Instagram account called Monk Nation.

I inhaled them immediately

because I think I'm full of red flags

and I need an intervention with myself.

I'm going to read them out, the ones that came up,

and I want you both to tell me

whether you recognise these green flags in yourself

or whether you need help.

All right?

Number one.

You've learned how to manage your emotions

and create a pause between stimulus and response.

No.

That was intentional.

Yes, except in an unguarded moment.

Except sometimes.

Yes, except sometimes.

When it's too overwhelming.

Holly's good at helping me pause.

Yes.

Before I respond.

That is a work in progress for me over here.

That is a giant red flag.

Holly's orange.

I reckon I'm not too bad at this,

but I fail at many others.

The example they often give of that is the angry email, right?

Yes.

Is that if you get an email in your inbox

that really annoys you.

Do you pause?

Do you pause and breathe before you reply

or do you reply straight away?

Yeah.

Number two.

You understand that people and situations

aren't black or white.

We're all that, right?

We all know that, don't we?

Mostly.

I do.

But sometimes I forget.

Yeah.

I do always eventually remember,

get to the gray,

but I think the older I get,

the more shades of gray I see.

But sometimes again,

back to the emotional response to something,

things feel very black and white to me in that moment.

Yeah.

Number three.

Hence the reason for the pause.

That makes a lot of sense.

You don't need to put others down

to feel better about yourself.

No, I don't need to do that.

I don't need to do that.

But sometimes it's nice though.

Yeah.

And I don't think it's to feel better about myself.

I think it's just because I'm quite a negative person.

I'm very critical of others

and that's something I need to work on,

but I don't know why.

You do get hit just by human nature.

It doesn't make you feel better,

but it does give you a charge,

like a little hit of adrenaline to be negative

with someone about something.

It warms me up.

Yeah.

So it can be quite activating your energy.

And it doesn't make you feel a bit dirty afterwards.

You always feel dirty.

Number four.

Your self-talk is becoming more positive

and empowering.

No.

I reserve most of my visceral criticism for myself.

Oh, the self-talk is bad.

Really, really bad.

Man, how's your self-talk?

It's fairly stern.

Yeah.

It's fairly stern,

but about others and myself.

But that's not self-talk, is it?

No.

Well, yeah.

Yeah, it is.

If it's in your head.

Like when you walk out of this record,

are you going to go good job, neutral job, bad job?

I feel a lot of shame for various things,

particularly around, you know,

when I've been too full on

or when I've reacted too fast

or all of those kinds of things.

I do feel a huge amount of shame,

but not in the form of self-talk,