麻豆约拍

This week marks the ninth episode of my podcast Jacob Hawley: On Love, and the ninth of these articles that I have written to go with it. Nine episodes covering everything from pornography to sex work, marriage to contraception, dating to sex education. It’s gone down pretty well, but when people hear about the subject matter of the episodes, I often get asked the same question. ‘... And is it funny?’

There are some topics around sex and love that are impossible to find humour in".

The answer is ‘yeah, kinda’. Nearly every episode has a couple of minutes of my stand up in it, some of them include some funny conversations I’ve had with friends. Some episodes are easier to sneak humour into than others - initially it was quite difficult to think of something funny to say about contraception, for example (until I looked down at my happy little accident of a daughter).

The fact that I’m a comedian making a podcast that’s more documentary than comedy often confuses the people that do the podcast charts as well - for a few weeks we were in the comedy charts, then the ‘relationships’ charts, now I believe we are competing in the ‘health’ section, against the exercise freaks and nutrition nuts.

But I’ve always wanted to keep a bit of comedy in the podcast. I think it’s an important way of adding lightness to the topics, a way of making them more accessible, and of making people take an interest and learn about something that they might not usually.

Even if we’re in the health section with the doctors and the joggers, I’ve always wanted it to be funny. Up until this week. However, there are some topics around sex and love that are impossible to find humour in, such as this week’s subject: image-based sexual abuse.

This week we’re looking at image-based sexual abuse (known as revenge porn); people having naked photos forced upon them, or naked photos of themselves shared against their will. At the top of this week’s episode there’s a conversation between myself and my girlfriend, in which she tells me that a guy she was seeing a few years ago sent her a picture of his genitals, unsolicited, whilst she was going through an airport, and it made her furious. And my initial reaction, when she told me this, was to laugh.

I can try and justify that all I like - the thought that she might be trying to open her boarding pass on her phone whilst swiping past a notification of someone’s nob does tickle me a bit. The added context that she was, at the time, travelling through quite a conservative islamic country adds another layer of humour. But on reflection, I look back at my initial reaction to laugh as quite worrying.

I should make clear the context within which I’ve recorded this episode. In the last week or so, we have had International Women’s Day. Shortly following this, we’ve seen a prominent broadcaster leave his role after casting doubt over a woman’s suicidal ideations. Then news broke that Sarah Everard, a woman who went missing in South London, had been killed by a male police officer, followed by pictures emerging of male police officers manhandling women at a vigil in Clapham being held in honour of Sarah.

In the last week or so it has been made clearer than ever that there is still a huge problem in our society with the way women are treated by men. The sad reality is that for every one of us men who does not behave in this way, we most likely know someone who has, who does, or who will.

There may be signs in their behaviour that we should be seeing. The policemen involved in the Sarah Everard case had been reprimanded for public indecency days before Sarah’s death.

But it could be a risque joke that crosses the line a bit. Perhaps it’s revealing that they have actually kept photographs of an ex without that ex’s consent. Perhaps it’s boasting that they’ve been forceful in the bedroom. All of these things are wrong in and of themselves and any one of them could be a precursor to committing a more serious crime,

The problem is, as men it isn't enough for us to just not do these things ourselves. It isn't enough to just say ‘Not All Men’. We have to do more to call out the monsters around us, the ones who hide in plain sight, the ones who push it a bit without giving themselves away. We owe it to the women in our society, and in our lives, to do so. We owe it to Sarah Everard and the people she left behind. Don’t just look the other way, don’t just say ‘boys will be boys’.

Don’t laugh off bad behaviour that could turn into something worse, whether that’s from your male friends, or when your girlfriend tells you she received a photo she didn’t want. As a man and even as a comedian, some things just need to be taken seriously.

Jacob Hawley is a comedian and the presenter and creator of 麻豆约拍 Sounds’s award-winning podcast Jacob Hawley: On Drugs. The second series Jacob Hawley: On Love is out now.

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