In this episode, Chantelle talks to comedian and former stripper Siân Docksey about sex work and the integral role that sex workers have played in activist movements. Their conversation covers everything from the 2008 economic crisis to how we can (and should) be engaging with feminism critically.
Reading List
We're doing our reading list a little differently this week. To find out more about activism around sex work and decriminalisation in the UK, Siân recommends engaging with the following organisations:
English Collective of Prostitutes
You might also want to check out:
The Life and Death of Marsha P Johnson
Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly Smith
Pole the Other One, a brand new podcast all about Pole Dancing presented by... Siân Docksey!
Transcript
Chantelle 00:03 Hello and welcome to the Revolution Begins at Home, a podcast about activism, what it looks like and who gets to do it.
My name is Chantelle Lewis. I'm a Public Sociologist and the co-founder and co-host of the Surviving Society Podcast.
Throughout this series, I'm going to be speaking to activists and advocates about their work. We'll be talking about what it means to be an activist, what it involves, and how structures of power determine what we consider to be activism or worthy of an activist movement. In today's episode, I spoke to Siân Docksey.
Siân Docksey 00:49 I do - I feel like a bit of imposter syndrome using the word "activist" because I'm not particularly organized (laughs) in how I do stuff.
Chantelle 00:57 Siân is a stand up comedian and writer. She's an advocate for decriminalizing sex work and I spoke to her about her own experiences of sex work, the kinds of changes that sex workers are fighting for, and how conversations on this subject can be difficult.
Just a quick content morning on this one - we do discuss sexual harassment from the point of personal experience, and do share non-graphic examples. Before we hear the full interview, here are Siân's activists influences.
Siân Docksey 01:29 Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who I think most people will associate with the Stonewall uprising, which is very mythologized and chaotic in its own way. So Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were two trans women who were sex workers, they set up something called STAR which is the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. And these two incredibly marginalized women, who were living in the most like precarious circumstances constantly getting beaten up, irregular income, struggling with drug addiction, homelessness themselves, from their own survival sex work income, they rented a flat, which became a homeless shelter for other trans youth, marginalized youth, sex workers. And they, like, they did that completely out of their own pocket because they wanted to create a community space for queers who had nowhere else to go. And from that, they started doing more organizing for like gender nonconforming people in the states as well as being tied up with the Gay Rights Movement more generally. But I just thought that was amazing. Because these are two people who were working in precarity, it's not like they had just a convenient pot of money that they were like, "okay, well, we've taken care of ourselves like now we can look after other people..." literally from income that they were living on, from one day to another, they were like, it's more important that we create community resources that can pull other marginalized people out of homelessness, and they can come live with us and find community.
Theme music
Chantelle 03:02 Hello, everyone. We are really excited today to be joined by Siân Docksey, who is a comedian, writer, former stripper and advocate for decriminalizing sex work. Siân, thank you so much for joining us today!
Siân Docksey 03:19 Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be on the show.
Chantelle 03:22 Siân, please tell the listeners where we are, where you are right now. where you're-where we're recording from.
Siân Docksey 03:28 I'm in a very glamorous basement in Belgium where I've been for too long.
Chantelle 03:34 Aww bless you! Can I just say the basement looks very chic. I'm really likin' it, like I always think of Belgian being very cool, like so you're really, yeah, really, emphasising that right now.
Siân Docksey 03:45 Thank you, just doing what I can for the brand.
Chantelle 03:49 So, Siân, could you tell us a bit about your connection and why you are so passionate about sex workers rights?
Siân Docksey 03:55 Sure. So it starts off a bit grim, but don't worry, it does get better. It was a dark and stormy night in November of 2015. [laughs] I've had I think what is quite a typical millennial experience of the immediately post crash UK job market of a few years out of uni, I was still just running into a lot of dead ends with day jobs. I was doing comedy, but as my day job, I was working in communications and PR and I was just like going through this loop all the time of okay, right, I just kind of grit my teeth and did this internship because I was told it would lead to that and then it didn't or doing a six month contract somewhere which didn't translate into then another job, but it was all very piecemeal. And I was working in a bar at the time to make-make money while I was trying to lock in something more perminent. And I got to the final stages of four different job interviews for PR and comms related things and then didn't get hired. And in the bar I was working in, sexual harassment was part of the job. Basically, it was something that as a female staff member, you were told, like, this is just how it works, wear less makeup, wear baggy clothes, the management wouldn't help you. And it was just it was just really, really gross because all the like the main client base was these, you know, incredibly well paid people from all the big shot like finance institutions like KPMG, Ernst and Young, Deloitte, and it was just horrible. And one night I was working and the sexual harassment got so bad that I just thought, fuck this, if this is going to happen anyway, I'm going to make some money out of it. So I auditioned for a strip club with (that's definitely the worst reason to audition for a strip club or get into sex work. I would not like in any way [laughs], like, recommend anyone go through that thought process...) But, I auditioned for a club in Bethnal Green, which was my first club. It was still honestly my favorite if the money was better. I'm seeing it a bit through rose tinted glasses now, but um, yeah, I loved that place. My stage audition was to Britney Spears' Gimme More. I was awful.
Chantelle 06:09 Anthem! Absolute anthem, can I just say. [laughter]
Siân Docksey 06:14 It was kind of the only option that I recognized. They needed girls. So I was hired. And so from then over the next three years, I worked on and off in three different clubs. Auditioned for fourth one, didn't get in because they told me that my dancing wasn't sexy, my outfit choice was poor, but my spoken English was very good. So it was useful personal growth on multiple levels. So yeah, so I was working on and off as a stripper. While in the day, I had a bit of a better run of luck, then with day job stuff. And I was still taking shows up to the Edinburgh Fringe and doing comedy. But stripping was my kind of backup side hustle. And it was part of my life.
Chantelle 06:58 I really like, Siân, I really like your introduction to the subjects because of obviously how personal it is, but also kind of creating that normalized narrative around that time period, particularly for women who were and continue to be in precarious situations and relating that to sexual harassment in hospitality, like I've been on var- I mean, it's not, I've been on various podcasts, I talked about this very openly about how much sexual harassment has been very much a part of my - a part of my everyday life. And I like you talking about that, in the connection to that between... the connection to hospitality, like I kind of had like a physical bodily reaction to that, because I just remember it all so well, and then you then linking that to the decision to go to start stripping and engage in sex work. Like for me, that is such a rational choice, and something that I looked to do as well, myself. I mean, I'm very much pro Sex Workers Rights and the choice to be a sex worker 100%, hence, why during this podcast, but I was fortunate enough to not have eventually not have to go into it. But I did I signed up to be an escort. Like, because I didn't have any money! And I was then, everything day after day after day was harassment. So it's exactly. As you said, why would I not just make some money out of this? It's so overwhelming. It's so overbearing, and so thank you so much for saying that. And I think that there will be a lot of women, particularly that are our age that sort of, were either graduates or non graduates at that kind of like, post or like, the beginnings of austerity times, like so few jobs that were just so desperate. I think it's such a powerful way of introducing your your relationship to the subject matter.
Siân Docksey 08:46 I'm sorry that it relates to you because of that, as you say that completely normalized-
Chantelle 08:51 No, don't be sorry! [laughter] Like I said, I think it's, I think the - please don't apologize, because I think it's really powerful for us to be able to have these kinds of retrospective discussions that are also present, present as well about how our relationship or our proximity to sex works, but also our relationship with sexual harassment. And it it I think, having distance and years away from that time, even though, sexual harassment still is part of my life now, I think helps us to create like a kind of more linear understanding of what was happening to us and how we ended up where we do. So I think that Yeah, absolutely incredible stuff that you're saying.
Siân Docksey 09:26 And yeah, so much of what you described from your experience maps on to so many of the experiences of my friends, and there's also this conflict, especially with just the prevalence of sexual harassment when you present as a femme or a gender nonconforming person, mainly - cis men get sexual harassment as well, but it is a very gendered experience. Yeah, I should just, I guess, maybe mentioned that one of the things that really surprised me about Metropolis is the first club I worked in. So that was a club where if anyone touched you as a customer, like even if a customer casually touched your leg, they would get booted out. And if you did a private dance, you were always standing a meter away from the customer.
Chantelle 10:09 Wow.
Siân Docksey 10:10 And you've had a lot of agency in that environment. And it really, really surprised me how I would experience more sexual harassment on the walk to and from my like city job in the daytime, than I would at work. I'm absolutely not claiming that a strip club is a feminist utopia, where there's no patriarchal, exploitative power relations, you're definitely not departing from those really gendered interactions. But yeah, it really struck me how embedded it was into the nature of the job that you were acknowledging that these were transactions that it was shifted to make money from it. Again, I want to repeat that, like, I really, even though it was sort of what created the entry point for me monetizing your experience of sexual harassment is really not the best [laughter].
Chantelle 11:01 No, but I to me like it, it was a rational choice. I see it as something that, yeah, for me, like, it's like hearing you say it, I'm like, yep!
Siân Docksey 11:11 It's important to state from the offset as well, that the majority of people, certainly in the UK, but I'm sure, globally as well, people enter sex work, because they have exhausted all other options. And Sex Worker Activism has always been poverty relief is its number one priority. The English Collective of Prostitutes in the UK, they very demarcate their priorities as, number one, put money into the hands of vulnerable people so they don't have to start selling sex out of desperation. Secondly, to create exit routes from sex work for the people who want to, and then they are advocating for rights that are working conditions, decrim. All of the things that create safety for current sex workers. But yeah, that like desperation that you talked about is you're resorting to it because you're broke, you know, like brokeness is the driving force of people into these industries. It's kind of a weird one, because it's still a very awkward area with my family to talk about the time I was stripping, because they were really shocked and disappointed. They were like, how is this girl who has a first class degree from Cambridge... Like, you know, I had all of the markers of what would typically be like not the sort of profile who ends up stripping. But yeah, and you know, and I'm still very aware that like, I kind of entered that industry as someone with relative socio-economic privilege compared to a lot of the women and gender variant people who I was working with, but there was that crunch time in the immediate kind of combination of austerity Britain, and also the financial crash where
Chantelle 12:56 We have no cash! I say it to people all the time. We had no money, like, we didn't have any money, like, well people still don't have money now, obviously. But that, that stripping of resources…
Siân Docksey 13:07 Ayyyy, good fun!
Chantelle 13:09 Oh, oh yeah! [Laughter] Like 2010, like 2008, you get the crash and like, if you're from a family that felt it, you're from family that felt it and you remember it well. And then you get 2010s onwards, like we didn't have any money. And there's still and I don't want to just reiterate, there are still people that don't have any money, that are still struggling, has died, have like just the state has just brutalized, working class communities like so much over the past few years. But like, I do really like having these conversations with people like you Siân because we go back to those times and really remember viscerally how little cash we had, whilst still working. And also I'm sorry, I'm sorry to hear that must have been really dif- that must be really hard and awkward within your family like having the relationship you do have to sex work. But one thing that sort of sprung to my mind is that how, even within families, amongst kin, amongst our friends, the sort of city, male-dominated, sexual harassment that we know, that we have to experience, what was that not? Is that not? Is that not shameful that that goes on? Like, why is that - why is that positioned as so common sense? The types of - the types of sexual harassment upskirting, hands up my dress, like, so much of that, and it's so common? Yeah, absolutely. So I always find it really interesting as to what becomes the respectable basically, in that sense.
Siân Docksey 14:46 Oh, my God. 100%. And like, yeah, all the things you described. Exactly. It just word for word is what was going on in that bar, where we were just told as employees like this is this is normalized, and to be honest, it's kind of what keeps them coming in. Just these like absolute pieces of shit on like six or seven figure salaries, who would like bark at you like a dog and just be like, you know, just like incredibly gross in ways I won't like dignify but I try to be honest with people increasingly about stripping and that I 70% hated it. Like there are so many grim things about those working environments. 30% loved it. And I could wax lyrical about those, but I don't want to romanticize the profession. It's under a lot of strain at the moment, as well. But part of what made the experience, yeah, mentally very demanding about doing this. And I was like, also, side note, I really think my parents or at least my mom knew, before I came out to them, because I mean, it was like, Siân is fine for money and mysteriously good at pole dancing. You really don't need to be a genius to link those. Yet, to me, the paranoia constantly that one of my sisters would grass me up, or it would become clear that this is what I was doing on evenings and weekends. Living with that paranoia was exhausting. So I think that it's that stigma that you internalize that harms you as much as the working conditions as much as negative experiences on the job. And we know from other kinds of activism, HIV activism is a good example that sometimes it's the stigma itself that i-i-it kills people. It means that people don't access resources they need they don't ask for help, because outing themselves as being part of a stigmatized occupation or social profile actively gets in the way of you agitating for your rights or getting the help that you need. So yeah, sex worker stigma is a wild time.
Chantelle 16:46 It's hard to put into words like trying to say to you Siân, like I have so much empathy and compassion for sex workers and strippers that do do this work, but don't enjoy it. But equally, the fact that we have the choice to do that is also good. Do you see what I mean? It's kind of like this... that juxtaposition is really hard to reconcile with.
Siân Docksey 17:15 Yeah, yeah. I think that it's, I think that well, so Sex Work is such a broad church and the needs of, for example, the kind of sex worker that people might recognize from cultural depictions of Sex Work like Secret Diary of a Call Girl, for example, which is a blonde, white, cis, able-bodied woman -
Chantelle 17:39 Big up Billie Piper though, I'm just saying...
Siân Docksey 17:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah I think she's brilliant but, you know, the needs of a white, educated, privileged woman, for example, working as a dominatrix in London are not the same needs as an undocumented migrant sex worker in a less metropolitan community where you can't maybe network with other sex workers and share resources. Someone who doesn't speak English, people who aren't able bodied. And for me, I found a really useful way of thinking about this is there is an amazing activist called Nim Ralph.
Chantelle 18:11 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah!
Siân Docksey 18:13 They're really cool.
Chantelle 18:14 Very cool.
Siân Docksey 18:14 Yeah. They're mostly organizing for Trans Rights. Now, I think. But they've been across so many things, Climate Activism, they've been looking at yeah racism within the Climate Activist Movement as well. They've done so much stuff. And I was watching an interview with them, where they said that if you want to organize your activism and prioritize, because you can't do one single thing that meets the needs of everyone, (just a side note, the important thing we need to do is decrim). But anyway, what they said is identify the person in a stigmatized and marginalized community who is most vulnerable, identify their needs, look at those, and then work outwards from there, because the changes that you bring about that benefit, the most vulnerable person you're trying to help will have a ripple effect. So for example, yeah, the imbalance that I just described of, if you were fighting for the rights of a street working migrant, not able bodied sex worker and you prioritize their needs, that will have a positive ripple effect on your white privileged, highly educated dom in London, who will have different sets of needs as well. Especially within sex work where, you know, poverty and sex work do go hand in hand, like talking about sex work without talking about poverty is like talking about lung cancer without mentioning smoking. I don't think you can decouple these things. Not everyone's gonna like me for saying that because there's a separate movement that's almost trying to like gentrify the sex industry and make it a kind of aspirational profession and honestly, cracking for those people. I'm genuinely delighted that people are finding income security and pleasure in their jobs. Like that's really great. I would love it if that was the main conversation that we can be having about Sex Work, but in the UK the reality is that, as I said before, people overwhelmingly resort to selling sex when they've exhausted all other options, and it's an income solution. That, yeah, is often also like precarious in and of itself. It's definitely not a silver bullet that fixes all of people's problems at once.
Chantelle 20:25 Following on from that Siân, it would be really good if you could just give us a little outline of what decriminalization looks like and what it means and then perhaps after that, we could talk just do a little bit of myth busting around the Nordic model as well, would that be OK?
Siân Docksey 20:40 Yeah, absolutely. So criminalization means you're doing a crime [laughs] being punished for any activities. And with regards to sex work. In the UK, we have partial decriminalization of sex work. So it is legal to trade sexual services as an adult, but there are some things about it that mean you can be arrested, you could have your earnings confiscated. For example, working with other sex workers is called "brothel keeping" and you can be arrested for doing that. So it's like kind of half legal. Decriminalization and legalization are not the same thing. So in a model called legalization, which up until recently, they had it in Victoria, I think, sex work is legalized but it is then subject to lots of other parameters that the state controls. So it's not like whatever you're doing, it's not criminalized, you can organize, you can do what you want, it's fine. You will have a situation with legalization where external bodies impose measures on what you can be doing. For some people, this works better. I know a sex worker who was working in Victoria, where the model is legalization, so like a more controlled form of sex work and she loved the fact that if she was working in a brothel, which is legal, which was legal in that context, if a client was being funny about using a condom, for example, she could point at a sign on the wall that says, it is illegal for you not to use a condom, and then they go, "oh, okay, blah, blah, blah". But the law was kind of on the sex worker's side. Decriminalization, full decriminalization means that any activity associated with sex work would not be criminalized. So it would be an expansion of the model that we have in the UK today. So sex workers would not only be allowed to trade sexual services, they'd be allowed to work together, which is honestly, like, from anecdotal evidence, that's the thing that people
Chantelle 22:42 Keeps people safe.
Siân Docksey 22:44 Yeah, exactly - it's a safety thing. Clients also know about this - in Juno Mac's TED talk on why decrim is essential, she describes a situation where she was working with another sex worker, they were sharing a flat, a client got violent with her friend. So she came in and tried to interject, and this client knew that if they called the police, they would be arrested because they were working together. So this partial decriminalization model that we have doesn't keep sex workers safe. The Nordic Model, or it's called the Swedish Model, sometimes, it exists currently in France, as well as several Scandinavian countries. There's this weird system where it is legal to sell sex, but it is not legal to buy it. So one side of the transaction is legal, the other side is illegal. And this has been conceptualized as this sort of like "feminist" (I'm putting it in quote marks) idea because overwhelmingly, the majority of people who sell sex are women. In the UK, actually, the majority are single mums, so people with dependents. The idea behind the Swedish model is like, well, we're protecting the people who have to sell sex, so we're not going to punish women for meaning to sell sex. But we don't like male entitlement, we don't like objectification, so we're going to criminalize anyone who buys sex. But the evidence shows that where the Nordic Model has been put in, you don't get fewer people engaging with sex work, what you do get is people having to do it much less safely, because clients are aware that they will get criminalized. So you don't get the same kinds of clients who are likely to do things consensually, because they don't want to put themselves at risk. So sex workers who need to continue selling sex are pushed further and further underground. And they then have to take the nasty clients, they have to go with the people who if there was more choice, and if they had more rights within it, they could avoid and it's mainly self organizing sex workers who were like we need full decriminalization because it's the safe option. But in case that's not enough because it is generally not treated as enough which is really gross, Amnesty International, The World Health Organization, UNAIDS, all of these bodies from the point of view of human rights, health, they all advocate for decriminalization as the way that best protects people's safety. And also, you know, if-if people's engagement with Sex Work is like, well, we prefer if people weren't doing this, you know, or maybe it's like a stopgap until they get another job. Having a criminal record for doing sex work does not help you get another job and where criminalization is brought in, overwhelmingly, what you're doing is you're criminalizing people for the conditions that drove them to selling sex in the first place, and just making people even more precarious and unsafe, so it's not straightforward, but yeah, decriminalization, decriminalization, decriminalization is what people need [laughs].
Chantelle 25:52 Like, just on a basic level, why isn't it being decriminalized? What are the powers that be say, what are the people that are resistant to decriminalization, what do they say? What's their argument?
Siân Docksey 26:04 What underpins it, to be completely honest with you is a generalized distaste for the idea of Sex Work. So the Nordic Model has come back into the news because Priti Patel's horrible little baby, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill,
Chantelle 26:20 Oh, God, yeah..
Siân Docksey 26:22 Yeah, there are a couple of politicians who want to bring the Nordic Model in as part of this, which would mean we'd have the Nordic model in the UK, many of these people fighting for the Nordic Model are women and it's women who tend to treat sex workers as like women who've like defected somehow, that it's women who have like, yeah, just joined the patriarchy, "our value is our sexuality" you know, there's there's lots of like toxic attitudes. If I'm being completely honest, like one of the reasons that I'm constantly re-engaging with like, this is why decrim works is that I think that the propaganda around the Nordic Model probably would have drawn me in if I'd been less knowledgeable about sex worker rights, because it's always, always put under the pretext of protecting women from gendered violence, like don't let these sex workers tell you what's good for them, because how could they possibly be the experts on their own lives. And what we've seen over and over again, is despite decades of self organizing in sex worker communities, where the message has been pretty consistent, that decriminalization is what sex workers need, and like, don't target sex workers who are already stigmatized and vulnerable target the economic conditions that are driving people to sex work. This is where these kind of weird like, you know, things like the Nordic Model, come about. It's something also that is, is quite tricky, because there's a bit of a lack of joined up thinking in this. So, for example, you might have a lefty woman who is a Nordic Model supporter, but who's also an activist for Universal Free Childcare, Universal Free Childcare would probably prevent a lot of people from having to resort to Sex Work, like my kind of sad fact is that around November is when a lot of people start going into sex work so they can get Christmas presents for their kids like these are real people.
Chantelle 28:19 Yeah
Siân Docksey 28:20 You know, there is a - there's often a bit of a disconnect of, especially within feminist activism, that sex worker rights is absolutely enmeshed in other rights that feminist activists have been campaigning for for so long, but yeah, it's it's whorephobia, there is just this kind of distaste for people who have done this like disgraceful and degrading thing of selling sex, of selling sex!
Chantelle 28:44 I think one of the key points that you've made that I think it's really important that listeners kind of sit with is that although like we aspire to be feminists, I should think like both of us on this call, now. We just have to understand the ugly side of feminism, like this is part of feminism, like part of feminism contains whorephobia. That's why our feminism is so... it's so - it's so broad, but it doesn't necessarily - feminism hasn't always protected the most marginalized.
Siân Docksey 29:15 Yeah.
Chantelle 29:16 Feminism has got a long history of upholding patriarchy, but also sorting out women that I've got the best class position. I think it's really important (and just to make sure that's not my argument - Professor Allison Phipps talks about this) like in order to understand why we get women at the forefront, why we get women at the forefront of saying we need the Nordic Model and blah, blah, blah is consistent with history. And we're just in a renewed era of that, and I think we have the same, we have the same I feel like there's definitely a crossover with the Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists as well.
Siân Docksey 29:54 Absolutely. Yes.
Chantelle 29:56 The again is this consistency like, not protecting the most marginalized women and gender non-conforming people, like because it is suited, it's suited the status quo, it's suited their class position, it's suited what they what they want. And it's deeply... it is deeply troubling, but I think one thing sort of hope that we can take from this, that there has always been people like yourself, that are contesting and arguing against and doing what they can within their everyday life to say that these feminists are not the ones that we want. This is not the type of people that we want representing us.
Siân Docksey 30:35 But the truth of that, as well is that people have been very patient with me, because I think I'm
Chantelle 30:40 Very modest, Siân, very modest!
Siân Docksey 30:43 But, I think there is, you know, like, in any sense of, I guess, like political learning or political engagement, you're constantly having to like, learn and unlearn things. And so I have been trying to think a little bit more strategically about how to engage with people who are pro Nordic model, because and it goes a little bit back to sexual harassment, I think that sometimes my impression of not necessarily politicians, but people who hear about the Nordic model, who would say, "oh, no, that sounds smart." Pretty much every woman. I know, by the time you reach adulthood, you will have had experiences of catcalling, sexual harassment, objectification, assault in the worst case, it's really grim stuff. So when Sex Work is brought up, which is a very, I mean, for sex workers, you know, like sex workers are humans who have their own complicated relationship with sex and power and, you know, trauma. But I think that sometimes when people and I'm gonna say, especially women and gender variant people, at the risk of excluding men who've experienced sexual violence and harassment, but just to kind of keep it like it is a gendered experience, what you get when you start talking about Sex Work is all of this trauma suddenly surfaces. And so it's a really knee jerk reaction to become like, yeah, but "Sex Work bad!" because some of my experiences of sex and abuse of power within that bad and so you're like, what's the Nordic Model, we'll, we'll make it go away. It's really, it just takes a lot of time and patience to have these conversations, because sometimes what you're having is not a conversation, it's just people's different sets of trauma, knocking against each other. And then you're not even looking at what I described within decriminalization, which is the evidence based argument for decrim. In terms of like, just like, don't even think about the sex work part -it's a workplace rights issue. Like it isn't really even really about sex anymore. It's about labor rights. And it's about, it's about poverty. It's about Disability Rights. So, it's about all these other things, but I'm trying to get a bit wiser on the emotional side about why people are so pro Nordic Model. Kind of always wondering, what are the negative experiences that someone's had that means they're so pro Nordic model, and you're just kind of wondering, what aspect of people's own trauma is locking a kind of -
Chantelle 33:09 Siân I love that. I love that. I love that so much. I feel like we so need that more within our movements. It's hard to do, though, that don't get me wrong, like, and I don't think everyone can do it within our movements. So we're thinking about, like, where do people start from when they come to these conversations? Like where what are they bringing to the table? What is their lived experience of this? How can I get them to see beyond that? And I think that having more people, I try my best to do this in my everyday life, and you just saying that off the cuff shows me that you you're trying to do this. I think we do need more of us doing this. But equally, I think that those that are most marginalized in our movements shouldn't shouldn't necessarily have to do it. Because it's, it's hard. It's really hard to do that. Like, where is that person starting from? And where are they coming from without trying to do respectability and without trying to do stability around conversations that are damaging to other groups?
Chantelle 34:07 Yeah, yeah.
Chantelle 34:08 It's a very, very fine line, but it is one unfortunately, I think we're gonna have to keep trying them.
Siân Docksey 34:12 And it takes time is the thing.
Chantelle 34:19 Siân, that was such a great conversation. You are so inspiring and you're so clear
Siân Docksey 34:24 Thank you so much for having me!
Chantelle 34:25 You are an absolute credit to the movement. And you are yeah, very, very brilliant. Thank you.
Chantelle 34:38
Thanks for listening to the Revolution Begins at Home. If you enjoyed it, you should check out other podcasts supported by Content is Queen.
This podcast was presented by myself Chantelle Lewis and produced by Cerys Bradley. If you want to hear more of our work, there are links in the description.
Many thanks to Siân for talking to us. You can find out more about Siân's work via her website Siândocksey.com. Siân's just started a new podcast all about pole dancing, so, if you enjoyed this episode, you should have a listen to Pole The Other One available to download from all good podcasting apps.
The music for the podcast is from Blue Dot sessions with additional sound from freesound.org.
See you next time.