Laura Jackson has always known she is a feminist, but didn’t know to call herself one — or how to articulate it.
In 2011, while travelling in the US, she found herself shocked by the level of objectification she witnessed all around her. Jackson describes being surrounded by strippers and prostitutes, and became aware of all the mechanisms by which women are disempowered in every day life.
“All of a sudden I felt this deeply personal gloom about the state of the world, like I really understood a lot of things for the first time. And I thought, what can I do?” she tells Women’s Agenda.
Jackson wanted to share with the world her experiences and her understanding of the need to change the way we treat women. As an actress and writer, she had a perfect medium through which to do so.
When she returned from the US, she started writing a one-woman play called Handle It, which has now had four seasons and is preparing for another two in coming months.
She says writing and performing the play is her way of starting a conversation about the issues facing young women today. To do this, she focuses on the impact of the internet and social media on the way young women are treated and the way they treat themselves.
The play, written and performed entirely by Jackson, tells the story of a young woman who has an explicit photo of her shared on Facebook without her permission. But it doesn’t stop there – the photo then goes viral on social media, gets turned into a meme, and ends up on a porn site.
By telling this story, Jackson says she wanted to help people understand how treacherous the new landscape of technology can be for young women. She wanted to portray the very real danger that is associated with having your privacy breached in ways only today’s technological world allows.
“We are the first generation to have our relationships so deeply impacted by this new world of the internet and we don’t even know yet what the long term impacts of that will be,” she says.
“Gen Y’s experience of intimacy and privacy is very much impacted by social media, facebook, iphones and now Tinder. It impacts the way we interact with each other and it affects our relationships, particularly as young women, because it affects our safety as well. This is something that has always made me uncomfortable and I wanted to start a bigger conversation about it.”
She wrote the story of her protagonist Kelsie having her privacy breached and having photos of her shared all over the internet. Jackson tells the story from the perspective of 7 different characters – all of whom she plays herself – who represent different elements of this new dynamic of privacy, intimacy and technology.
Although Kelsie herself does appear in the play – right at the end – she does not say a word throughout the entire performance.
“Kelsie – like any victim of these kind of privacy breaches and attacks on young women – has had her voice taken away from her. It was a very deliberate choice not allowing her character to speak. Her lack of voice throughout the whole ordeal is very symbolic,” Jackson explains.
“She has also had her ownership over her body taken from her. At the end, she comes on stage and undresses, symbolising her personal attempt to reclaim her body and her power.”
Since Jackson first wrote the play in 2011, she has been updating it every season to reflect things that have happened to women publicly as a result of the new landscape she is portraying. During her Sydney season, she added a line about the Jennifer Lawrence images as she felt this spoke to the broader issues she was dealing with in the play.
“Everyone called the Jennifer Lawrence scandal a ‘leak’ and that just shows how little understanding there is of these issues. In reality, her privacy and safety were being compromised, and that’s not fair.”
Jackson originally set out to start a conversation about the serious issues young women face in day-to-day life, and she has succeeded.
“After every show, someone has come up to me and asked, what can I do? How can I help?”
Her answer? “Listen to the young women around you. Listen to women in your lives when they talk about these issues, make sure they have a chance to be heard.”
“I hope that Handle It serves to open a conversation between men and women, old and young, about what it really means to interact in a technology driven world. Why women are sometimes hurt in terrible ways. What we can do about it.”
Handle It will be performing it’s fifth season at the Adelaide Fringe Festival from February 16th to 21st at the Bakehouse Theatre. It will then perform a season in Canberra from March 13th to 15th at the Street Theatre, with a possibility for an extra date to be added.