AliceFraser
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This Week in Alice
🕑 Added 2023-09-23 11:23:02 +0000 UTCLast weekend was a wild one of travel and podcasts. I went directly from Global Pillage at the London Podcast festival to The Bugle at Leicester Square Theatre, which was just so lovely. I am such a fan of Chris Addison’s jokewriting, and despite having done a few bugles ‘together’, we’d not yet shared a stage.
Thanks so much to Alison Spittle for taking over on the writers meeting; traveling between the gigs and home did the thing that traveling does, and meant I would have been on a train while running the meeting otherwise. Alison is such a great note-giver and I was glad that I could give her a bit of work, too.
I was approached this week to write an article for The Telegraph, based on a tweet thread I did: https://x.com/aliterative/status/1702935474875093076?s=46&t=GvlI5wHwVikA6UNRZIauZQ
I was hesitant to do it, but figured I had a specific enough thing to say, and an angled enough ‘take’ that it avoided the extremes of the culture war and was therefore worth throwing it to the sharks. It’s also handy to have an excuse to take a few days off social media in order to get this book finished!
Here’s the link to the article, though it’s behind a paywall: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/alice-fraser-why-comedians-dont-speak-up/
Because you may not want to use your money to subscribe to the telegraph but might still want to have a sense of what I wrote, here’s also a link to the longer, unedited, messy draft brain-dump version before I cleaned it up and bounced it back and forth with the copy editors and lawyers: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12XIxICpFUE9ZAc_gkGkHa_4g1HNY3pUE1uEPKfIg-yw/edit
Patreon Fun Times
The Google calendar with all upcoming things you can come to is up at the linktree. https://linktr.ee/alicefraser but the next virtual events are below.
Writers Meeting and Workshop
Sunday, 24 September⋅2:30 – 4:30pm (UTC +1)
Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84252034678?pwd=MjhEQjRESlV2NXRMczVOWGhzMHM1UT09
Weekly Salon
Monday, 25 September⋅4:00 – 5:00pm (UTC +1)
Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89096323680?pwd=MXlyN3ExMDJYTlB3SC9OdHFEVGdadz09
Book Club
The no-homework book club returns with another piece of work that we can read and then explore together.
Friday, 29 September⋅2:30 – 3:30pm (UTC +1)
Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86811358343?pwd=RmNzSDJRcWw3YzQ3WEZjSlNSS3g5Zz09
Bring a Friend Offer [THIS MONTH]
Remember, if you would like to bring a friend along to a salon, book club or writers meeting, DM me here on Patreon and we'll organise it.
Comments
Great piece, and calls to mind Suzi Miller's mind-blowingly excellent play Prima Facie recently starring the equally excellent Jodie Cromer. The UK's legal system (& I guess so many others, written by men, for men) is so badly stacked against the victim, it's no wonder many abused women choose not to proosecute. Progress should start by believing the victim, and for venue management to take seriously the rumour mill and not book the known pervs. There has to be a back-pressure against gross behaviour that even the most insensitive will eventually get the message that it's not acceptable.
Well done. You covered all the areas I would have covered. Sexual harassment/rape/torture/murder is a spectrum of "yeeuuuckkkhhh" that, I suspect, every generation of homo homo sapiens has either experienced or perpetrated since our forebrain-to-hindbrain conflict developed. I know my daughter has experienced it, my mother's daughters experienced it, and (likely) my mother and her mother did too (but you'd never catch those good Irish Catholic women talking about it). I know quite a number of men and non-binary folks who have experienced it. It's funny how we victims, with all the wrath that society puts on us, are expected to lug the weight of the crimes into the foul air and further traumatize ourselves, sometimes into perpetuity. And funny how the only men (and they are men) I personally know who have done the deed are men who have committed the act on me and/or my loved ones and are prancing around right now, going about life like they never did or would do any damage. Why doesn't society focus is ire primarily on these assholes more than the victims? I suspect the reason is that the loudest detractors of victims' experiences are perpetrators themselves. So that makes a whole lot of us. Funny how that works out.
