The Guilty Feminist podcaster talks free-thinking, Andrew Tate and rebelling against her Jehovah’s Witness upbringing.
“I was in a cult,” says Deborah Frances-White, a former Jehovah’s Witness. Often the “men at the top”, the religion’s governing body, would tell the followers that a new thought, a “new light”, had emerged from God. It had to be accepted, immediately, as if it had always existed.
This unwavering devotion to an ideology is not too dissimilar to where we are today, she says. “We’re not allowing for any pluralism and we’re not thoroughly discussing things. The internet is not looking for complexity or nuance. It wants a hard line.”
Frances-White, 44, is a comedian and star podcast host whose show has hit more than 100 million downloads. She has a decades-long portfolio of (largely) comedy writing to her name. There was stand-up, a series for BBC Radio 4, an improv group co-founded with her husband, Tom Salinsky, and the seven-year-old podcast with a devoted following, The Guilty Feminist, which is essentially about having all the best intentions to be a good feminist but being a bit crap at it.
Comedy, she says, became an outlet while she was growing up. She was born in Brisbane, Australia, and adopted at 10 days old. Her family converted to become Jehovah’s Witnesses when she was a teenager, she was baptised at 16 and spent her weekends knocking on doors telling people Armageddon was coming.
She bristled against the patriarchal structure of the religion, though. She cracked jokes on doorsteps and even started an illicit comedy group with other young members. At 18 she moved to London to be a nanny and shortly after left the religious community, going to Oxford University to study English, where she joined a comedy improv class, the opposite to the high-control mentality of a “cult”.
She spent the next decades writing comedy radio series and traipsing around the stand-up circuit, famously encouraging Phoebe Waller-Bridge to deliver a monologue at her comedy festival at the Leicester Square Theatre. It later turned into Fleabag.
“Back then people did not believe that women had a harder time in comedy.” Comedy agents told her they couldn’t come to see her shows because they were “a bit saturated girl-wise”. One agent even dropped her “for being a woman”, she continues. “He absolutely said out loud, ‘I couldn’t get this last female comic who’s more famous than you on the TV, I’m not going to be able to get you on, there’s no room for women in comedy.’”
Yet she was convinced that there was a market for female comedians — so, enabled by the new world of podcasting, she launched The Guilty Feminist in 2015 with her fellow comedian Sofie Hagen and a rotating cast of comedians and activists, a sort of comedy chat show recorded in front of a live audience that covers childcare, equal pay, monogamy, sexuality, trans rights, eating and climate change.
All of these roles demand answers from her. “I’m often asked for my take on something,” she says. “Sometimes I do have a strong take. Other times I’m just thinking this through because what I think is complex.” Which is one of the reasons she has written a play, Never Have I Ever. “It’s liberating,” she says. “A playwright doesn’t need to have answers, they can have questions.”
Never Have I Ever is her first solo theatre project, although she worked on it collaboratively, and will open next month in Chichester. “Drama is not didactic,” she says, while doing her black liquid eyeliner in a compact mirror, in between rehearsals in Hampstead, north London. “It’s not telling you what to think or how to feel.”
The play, directed by Emma Butler, the former resident director at the Almeida, is about four university friends. Jacq (played by Alexandra Roach of Utopia) is a thirtysomething chef whose partner, Kas (Amit Shah of Happy Valley), has shelved his dreams because his girlfriend’s were better.
Adaego (Susan Wokoma from Crashing and Enola Holmes) is a privately educated, British-Nigerian broadcast journalist, and her partner, Tobin (Greg Wise, from The Crown and Sense and Sensibility), is a posh boy who runs a “sustainable investment fund” and seems to have learnt so much about feminism, privilege and race theory that he is able to mansplain it back to the people it is supposed to help.
Over a drunken night the power dynamic constantly shifts with each mention of politics, sex, race, identity. It is a play for the liberal elites, about the liberal elites — but it is funny because it knows it.
“I want it to cause debate,” says Frances-White, who is already in talks about a potential TV series. “People so far have said they flip-flop in their allegiance to different characters throughout. That’s exciting.”
That is the power of comedy, she continues. “If you go to a lecture about any of those topics [from the play], you would hold on to your own points of view more firmly, because it feels like you have to admit you were wrong and that makes you feel like you are losing status. But it’s exhausting carrying all these fighty points of view around all the time. When a play is funny you’re able to rest.”
Comedy was one of the reasons her podcast was so successful, she continues. When it launched they were hoping for 2000 downloads of the first episode. After one week they had 10,000. “It just hit the zeitgeist,” she says, an era when feminism was becoming pop culture. Beyoncé performed in front of a huge screen reading “FEMINIST”; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie famously spoke about why “we should all be feminists”.
“Every woman I know wanted to be talking about [feminism], we couldn’t stop ourselves,” Frances-White says. “And that’s why I started The Guilty Feminist, because we talked about being liberal, but what were we doing to make the progress we said we wanted?”
Now, compared to then, men behave better in the workplace, she says, harassment is acknowledged and squashed, and good behaviour is modelled for the next generation. She is hopeful. “There might be a pushback and a fury from some men,” she says, referencing the Andrew Tates of the world, “but not all of them. It’s important that we say that. Because I hate the ‘men are trash’ [narrative]. Because most men are not like that.”
The podcast was created to move things forwards, to have all the conversations she wasn’t allowed to have growing up. The play is the next part of the process, her way of trying to loosen up our cultural stalemate. She left the “high control group religion” 30 years ago — but Frances-White has been running away from it ever since.
Written by: Megan Agnew
© The Times of London