Over a decade ago I learned about baking bread on a weekend course with a friend. I loved it and afterwards felt very enthusiastic in my desire to carry on baking, and to get other people doing it too.
I even thought about starting a community bakery.
In the end my family were not interested in eating my bread, I couldn’t actually digest it too well and a lack of practice in the absence of a supportive community around me, meant my skills and my confidence withered away.
I suppose I have always hoped to refresh that interest again at some later date.
In my heart I was still passionate and vocal about the many benefits I perceived to be related to bread making. I knew all about the nutritional advantages of baking one’s own bread, but I was particularly inspired by the potential of bread making for both individual self confidence and community building, as well as the empowering nature of being able to own the means of production of such a vital foodstuff.
Despite my understanding and genuine enthusiasm I didn’t have the capacity to carry on baking and I gave up.
Five years ago I started developing a project called Red Velvet Revelry.
Since then I’ve been collecting, celebrating and giving a voice to women’s happy stories about sexuality and recently about menopause too.
Because of my own demographic, the stories are mainly from white heterosexual midlife women living in Scotland.
My intention is to honour this particular aspect of women’s life experience by sharing stories with an audience through writing and performance.
In time I hope to expand the diversity of both my contributors and my audience.
My motivation has been to offer women who need it, permission to talk about their experiences and to hear those of others.
If you were to ask me why I do this work I would tell you openly that it’s because there was time in my life when I needed to hear the stories of other women around sexuality.
I needed permission to talk about my own experience.
In the world that I inhabited there was neither the permission nor invitation, to honour or celebrate that aspect of life in the way I needed in order to be a healthy person of integrity entering the second half of my life.
I wanted to hear women’s happy stories around sex because I needed to know that other stories, other experiences were possible to those of my own.
When I spoke to other women about this project I learned I was not the only one who had an interest in the subject.
Many women have laughed with delight and offered to share their stories with me.
Others have been intrigued or slightly embarrassed.
Others declare a supreme indifference to sex generally or a complete lack of a need to talk about it.
It’s not always easy to have these conversations.
Even in a society as “liberal” as the United Kingdom women of my generation were given certain parameters for talking about sexuality which were not clearly defined, but rather absorbed.
Recently I described to someone how I learned breastfeeding as a woman who had neither permission or any reason to ever touch her own breasts other than washing them.
It had never occurred to me that they might be massaged by me or the many professional massage therapists I’ve visited over the years for health or pleasure.
My large breasts were something to manage, subjugate.
They were for sexual pleasure certainly, but not primarily my own.
In a recent drama I watched (Daisy and the Six) my favourite line came from an extremely attractive woman who long legged beauty causes a stir among some young men.
She says: “You know it’s not my responsibility not to turn you on…”
I could never have expressed such a belief as a young woman.
Instead I felt I had to manage the responsibility of presenting the exact correct amount of sexual attractiveness.
Not too much, not too little.
My own particular upbringing encouraged me to err more on the side of less rather than more.
My choices in this area rewarded me with a certain reputation for modesty and respectability but also resulted in a certain amount of repression, numbing and distancing of myself from the sexually healthy woman I might have been.
Now I claim the right to talk about my sexuality with humour and honesty, without coyness or shame.
I have been also been granted the privilege to share the stories of women who want their stories to benefit other women.
I love to sing and to write songs and have created a collection of songs which give expression to themes around female sexuality, desire and menopause.
Over the last five years I have built a small audience of women ( and a supportive alliance among men who love them ) who value and support this work and these conversations.
I’ve collaborated with others to create sell out performances on these topics.
I’ve hosted supper clubs which have created spaces for conversations and witnessed these events generating the healing power of knowing laughter.
I never deny the dark side of the female sexual experience but I create an opportunity where positive possibilities of female sexuality are affirmed.
I have received lots of positive feedback and appreciation for holding space for these gentle, warm, humorous, and honest explorations of women’s sexuality.
Recently I moved from the city I have happily chosen to live most of my life in, to a rural area where I know only a few people and vitally who don’t yet know me.
So far when I meet women for the first time I tend not to lead with my Red Velvet Project as a topic of conversation.
I don’t want to cause social embarrassment.
From the kind of social contact and conversation I’ve had so far it would be only too easy for me to start to believe that it’s only me who has a expectation to be allowed to talk (appropriately) about sex.
After a few months without the feedback which tells me what I do is valuable, needed, wanted, I have felt my energy enthusiasm and self belief draining away.
I’ve started thinking :
“Perhaps that work was for a phase of my life. Maybe it’s not really needed. Maybe it’s time to move on to something else…?”
Then some weeks ago I received an email from a woman who lives quite far from me.
Her sex life is important to her state of wellbeing and yet she has no one in her life she can discuss this with.
As a contributor and supporter of my work she asked me if I can do something to facilitate such a conversation for her and for women like her.
At the time I felt isolated, disempowered and disbelieving that I might have the power to do anything in that area and so I didn’t reply at the time.
Now a much needed weekend winter break finds me reading a fascinating, inspiring little book about bread.
It reminds me of my belief in the importance of bread making for me and for others.
It makes me think I want to re-engage, to learn more, to talk to others about it, to use my energy in a way that creates a better food system.
First it makes me think maybe I could have another go at that bread making malarkey…
Then I see a pattern I recognise.
Isolation and lack of peer support can lead me to doubt my own abilities and to dis-engage from activities that I know to be valuable to both myself and to others.
One thing I know to be true is that if I am feel like this, there are bound to be other women in my local area and elsewhere who also feel something similar.
So now I’m choosing to believe now that my work around women and sexuality is worthwhile, my perspective is of value, my voice is useful.
I now see that recent email as a well timed reminder that my sense of the need for these conversations around sexuality is a sound one.
It’s brings it back to me the knowledge that it is not just my need alone to own the right to speak about my lived experience and hear that of others.
That knowledge helps me push forward once again and sustains me when my old conditioning tells me not to talk about sex, pleasure, desire, menopause, power, aging, abuse, anger and all those other taboos which can limit a woman’s right to speak about her own life.
In 1911 Rose Schneiderman addressed a group made up of mainly privileged woman in New York in the aftermath of one of the worst industrial disasters in US history.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 123 women and girls between the ages of 14 and 23.
She appealed women with resources to use their advantages to help their sisters who were not as well off as them.
“What the woman who labours wants is the right to live, not simply exist-the right to life the sun and music and art. You have nothing the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too. Help you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.”
I want to use my resources to offer bread and stories, solidarity and hope to other women. Maybe even roses too.
Red Velvet Revelry 