Lynn Enright and Natalie Fiennes in Conversation with Shantel Edwards

This week’s episode brings together journalists Natalie Fiennes and Lynn Enright to discuss their books, Behind Closed
Doors: Sex Education Transformed and Vagina: A Re-education. In conversation with Birmingham Literature Festival director Shantel Edwards, they talk about the politicisation of women’s bodies and sexual desire, the importance of sex education and the impact of the porn industry on our attitudes towards sex and our own bodies.

The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.

Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/

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Credits

Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands

TRANSCRIPT

BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 8: Lynn Enright and Natalie Fiennes  

Kit de Waal 

Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the  Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the  next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about  writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. This week’s episode brings together journalists Natalie Fiennes  and Lynn Enright to discuss the politicisation of women’s bodies and sexual desire, the importance of sex  education and the impact of the porn industry on our attitudes towards sex and our own bodies. In  conversation with Birmingham Lit Festival director, Shantel Edwards, this episode continues the  conversation about sex, intersectional feminism and gender started by the authors’ books, Behind Closed  Doors: Sex Education Transformed and Vagina: A Re-education.  

Shantel Edwards 

Welcome to the Birmingham Literature Festival podcast. I'm Shantel Edwards and I'm the Festival Director  and I'm really excited today to welcome writers Lynn Enright and Natalie Fiennes to the podcast, and to join  them in discussion about their books. I'm going to introduce them both and their books to you, and then  we're going to dive into a wonderful chat about their work and all the ways their books are challenging our  ideas about sex, women's bodies, intersectional feminism, and last, but most certainly not least, vaginas.  Our first guest is Lynn Enright and she's a journalist who has written for Vogue, The Irish Times, the  Guardian and BuzzFeed, as well as many other publications where she writes about feminism, current  affairs, women's health, fashion, the arts, politics, and pop culture. The book we're here to talk about today,  Vagina: A Re-education, is her first book, and it provides people with information that's often obscured  about the female body, confronting taboos and the patriarchy in the process. Our second guest is Natalie  Fiennes, a journalist and film-maker who writes for the Guardian and the Independent. She makes  documentaries and has taught sex education and consent classes in schools, universities and youth centres.  Behind Closed Doors: Sex Education Transformed is her first book, and it offers a manifesto for an inclusive  sex education that offers young people an honest insight into sexuality, whilst identifying the varied and  layered inequalities that currently stand in the way of sexual freedom. A very warm welcome to you both.  Thank you for being here. 

Natalie Fiennes 

Thank you for having us.

Lynn Enright 

Thank you. 

Shantel Edwards 

I loved both of your books. I thought they were really compelling reads and I came away from them feeling  like I'd learned a lot. And when I was reading them it really felt like there was real passion and impetus  behind them. And I wanted to start by asking you both – and perhaps we could start with Lynn – about what  had inspired you to write them? 

Lynn Enright 

So I was working at The Pool, which is now defunct but was a website aimed at women. And it was a place  that kind of covered a broad array of topics, and I was Head of News and Content there. So commissioning  stuff about politics and feminism, but also, you know, kind of film or books or, you know, really everything.  But when we did, when we covered subjects about women's bodies, and about kind of taboo subjects like  fertility, infertility, miscarriage, childbirth, post-childbirth, vaginas, all of that kind of stuff, there was just a  real response from the readers. So that got me thinking and, you know, I could sense that and I wanted to  do something with that. And then also around that time #MeToo had happened and the Repeal the Eighth  movement in Ireland was underway – so the push for free, safe legal abortion in Ireland, and we'd never  had legal abortion in Ireland but we were on the cusp of it then when I started to write this book. And so I  got to think about how the basics of biology and the fact that so often just the basics about our bodies are  obscured, whether that's in sex education or even in the way we're spoken to with a sort of woolliness and  a lack of clarity around the way we speak about our own bodies and the knowledge we actually have  available to us. So I got to think how that's connected to then these much wider concepts and problems.  Like, you know, like what we saw with #MeToo, so like sexual assault and sexual abuse, and like the fact  that, you know, abortion wasn't legal in Ireland until two years ago. And I think that that was connected to  our discomfort around biology. So it was kind of bringing those two subjects together was how this book  started. 

Shantel Edwards 

Thank you, I think you can really, you can really feel that in the book as well. As I was reading it I certainly  felt like I could see the intersections of the ways all those things were working together. And the same for  your book as well. Natalie, I thought you did a really good job of showing the ways that women's bodies in  particular are the intersection for a lot of those things. The same question to you really. Was there a  particular moment that led to you writing the book?

Natalie Fiennes 

Yes. So I was also working at a magazine called Consented magazine and we used to kind of publish these  pieces on an array of different topics. But we also used to go into schools and teach classes and lead  workshops. And I, with a kind of a few other people, and we were attached to this kind of activist collective  called Resist and Renew, started teaching consent and sex education wo...