Anna Paavilainen’s monologue Play Rape is not just about theatre, it’s about me. And it’s about the rape culture we’re all part of. About being forced to choose between fuckability and invisibility. About anger and hurt and fear and anxiety, and about feeling shame for these emotions. About being ridiculed, called too sensitive, too demanding, too difficult, too serious: Relax dear, it’s just play! In fact, Anna voices what I’ve never been able to voice, because I didn’t have the words. Because I was taught by our culture to be quiet, obedient, adherent and pretty, and that someone else always knows better. And to be ashamed of myself. Ashamed for wanting to be seen, when the only way to be seen was to be seen by men, wanted by men, even though at the same time this was expected of me. And even if I hadn’t wanted to, the choice wouldn’t have been mine to make. There was nothing else, I didn’t exist outside of this context.
Anna asks herself: what now, what does she want instead? Does she want revenge? To rape all those men back, all those men who raped her on stage; who wrote, directed, and produced the rapes. Well, she ponders, if someone is going to be raped back, it must be the young boys, those insecure, fragile beings, who have just started theatre school and will do anything for acceptance. But that’s insane, that’s just stupid, ridiculous. But what if, anyway, just because I can? Because it’s just play. Alright, here we go: Anna rapes them, all these boys, hard! With a fervour that expresses all her silenced emotions, nothing of it censored. There! She’s done it. Did it help? No. Revenge isn’t what she wants, that’s the method of the rapists, that’s representing the rape culture. And she’s done with that.
The feminist theatre group called Blaue Frau also speak publicly about rape culture and grievances in the theatre world and in society as a whole. Their most recent production is a performance called 11, that celebrates their 11 year-long journey as Blaue Frau. It consists of them singing 13 fantastic electro-pop songs about how others have kept defining them, about their constant movement to defy that, to keep on growing and keep on defining themselves and doing whatever they want to be doing. They sing about not agreeing to receive grants that would tie them to a certain way of being, and not agreeing to do any play they don’t feel like doing. And about how difficult this anarchy has been for others to accept, how hard it has sometimes been for them to keep going. They sing about how much hate they get when they mention how heteronormative and conforming to rape culture the theatre world is. About rape, they ask in one of the songs: “When do interpretations differ from what’s going on, the unclear lines that are common in everyday situations? Whose truth is the truest, and which truth counts?” They sing because that’s what they want to do. Their songs are who they are.
Anna too shows us who she is. She feels ashamed for raping those boys. She apologizes for bringing all this up, for inviting us all to watch her rant. She serves us some sherry and urges us to laugh it off and forget, to go on with our lives. Until she doesn’t. Until she stops and looks at us: this is me, this is my voice and this is what I have to say. She reads a theatre manifest, where she states that theatre shouldn’t be about raping women. That it shouldn’t be about patriarchal power systems. That the heroes and lead roles shouldn’t always be represented by the same white men. That everyone should be represented, and celebrated as they are, and as they want to be.
I clap my hands. I clap and clap and I feel a wave of emotion that is a mixture of pure joy, pride, strength, relief. I clap for Anna because she is she, not because she has just been excellently raped on stage. I celebrate with her, I celebrate her.
And I clap for Blaue Frau. Because they are who they are, and because they say no. Because they defy everyone and everything who tries to define them. Because they don’t care. I want to dance to their music because it’s true. I want to dance from the joy of wanting to dance.
Finally, I clap for myself. I celebrate myself. Because I am me, and because I decide what that means.