Deborah Frances-White, founder of The Guilty Feminist podcast, brings her live tour back to Aotearoa this week. She talks to Capsule about grief, why all protests need joy as well as anger, and how choosing a child-free life after fertility treatments gave her freedom.
Back in 2015, Deborah Frances-White was worried she was a bad feminist. Or was she a feminist at all? Not to get too gender specific, but it was a particularly female problem to have – imposter syndrome, but for feminism.
“I just thought I was a bit of a numpty,” she laughs, chatting to Capsule in Auckland’s QT hotel. “All these feminists that I could see in the public eye, who I wanted to be involved with, seemed so certain, so strident, so informed. Whereas I was like… ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’”
As a stand-up comedian, Deborah knew that one of the pillars of good comedy is relatability. If she felt this way, she reckoned that other people might as well. What was born was the podcast The Guilty Feminist, where Deborah and her panel guests would discuss and debate different feminist-related topics. But the opening gambit was the hook – each episode starts with Deborah and the guests confessing something that makes them feel like a guilty feminist.
It was born out of Deborah needing a new headshot for her work, and asking her husband Tom if her chosen photo was a bit “Dove campaign for real beauty”?
“I remember thinking, ‘if I admit this, are they going to kick me out of the feminist club?’ If I say, I don’t want real beauty, I want billboard beauty? I knew that it’s absurd and ridiculous, and an arbitrary idea of what’s beautiful. But I’ve been raised in a system that’s schooled me that there’s only one way to look… and I want to look to look like that.”
It was the perfect example of how we want to feel as good feminists versus how we actually feel. The road to feminist empowerment is filled with many potholes and Deborah is on the journey with us. And it’s a journey that has turned into a global movement – there have been over 150 million downloads of The Guilty Feminist podcast. That’s a hell of a lot of imperfect feminists.
The Guilty Feminist Returns to NZ
Deborah is back in Aotearoa as part of her Oz/NZ The Guilty Feminist tour, and it’s already shaping up to be a very memorable one. Firstly, she arrives in Australia where the country’s growing femicide statistics are in the headlines, following yet another appalling month of violence against women – including the devastating murders at the Bondi Junction Westfield in Sydney.
“It was extraordinary to land in the middle of those protests,” Deborah says, of the country-wide protests that sprung up throughout Australia. “It’s extremely tragic – it’s gone up from one woman killed by an intimate partner a week, to one woman killed every four days.”
“Any woman is too many women, but that’s a horrifying statistic, in a country with a population of that size. But I also felt very empowered that women were taking to the streets.”
As part of The Guilty Feminist tour, Deborah is trying to get the Australian Minister for Women to appear on the live show. “There are a lot of platitudes,” Deborah says. “So to be able to spontaneously host a forum, is fantastic.”
It also shows the platform that Deborah now has – that she can make that request of a public official – and how dedicated she is to using it. The live tours act as a bit of a lightning rod for people who want to be more involved in their home communities and countries, but don’t know where to start. By including local activists and comedians in the line-up, Deborah says, “you get to hear what local feminists are doing and how you might be able to join in.”
In the Aotearoa shows, Deborah will be joined by the likes of Qiane Matata-Sipu (you can read about her journey as NUKU founder here) and Daisy Lavea-Timo.
The shows will be co-hosted by iconic comedian Michele A’Court, who has stepped in to replace the wonderful Cal Wilson. Cal, a hugely popular comedian across Australasia, tragically died late last year following a brief illness, at age 53. Her loss is deeply felt by many, very much including Deborah, who was a close friend.
“I’ve never, ever done a show in New Zealand without Cal,” Deborah says. “I’m very sad about that – so I’m very grateful to Michele, who was also a close friend of Cal’s. I know Cal would want us to keep going, so my husband gave me a locket with a picture of Cal’s face and mine in it, to take on tour with me.”
Deborah is also carrying another Cal-related talisman with her – a perfect clothing peg. “She had this joke that started in New Zealand, that said, ‘I’m a feminist, but my side quest is to find a perfect clothes peg,’ and people started bringing her pegs.”
In the end, her quest resulted in her finding the peg of her dreams – and that peg now sits in Deborah’s handbag, after Cal’s husband, Chris, gave it to her for the tour. It’s a perfect Guilty Feminist anecdote – warm, relatable, and just the right amount of specifically weird.
Deborah has a knack for nailing the tone – she credits some of the success of The Guilty Feminist to being ahead of the zeitgeist, as the podcast started the year before Trump’s presidency and the resurgence of the #METOO movement. But she also says the blend of humour with politics is what has created such an enthusiastic fan base.
“The thing that is missing from a lot of activist groups is joy – because it’s really easy to feel angry. And understandably, we should feel angry about the injustices in the world, and anger is a great motivator. But it can’t be the only tool in our box.”
She cites a quote from feminist activist Gloria Steinem: “If you want to have fun and laughter and sex and poetry and music at the end of the revolution, you have to have fun and laughter and sex and poetry on the way.”
“We need the uplift of comedy and music, and this magnetic community that makes us feel like we can,” Deborah says. “The Guilty Feminist is a space to recharge your batteries. A lot of people are doing very important work, and they genuinely don’t have the time, energy or funds to be creating a poetical, energised, creative, artistic space on top of that. Not everyone can do everything. So I feel like that’s my job.”
Choosing Her Hard
As her professional platform has grown, so has knowledge of Deborah’s personal life. This is, she jokes, part of having so many podcasts to fill – she has to talk about something. “I would recommend that podcasts say less,” she laughs. “But I am not leading by example.”
Part of what Deborah has shared was she and her husband’s decision to end their IVF journey. It’s not an angle that gets a lot of airtime – the private slog of hormones, injections, costs is usually only part of the parcel that ends up with a baby.
“I’m glad I tried to have a baby, because I’ll never regret it, never think ‘what if’,” she says. “But ultimately, I was so pumped full of hormones, and it made me very physically and mentally discombobulated, I just thought ‘I can keep doing this, or I can decide that if a baby isn’t meant for me, what can I have if I couldn’t have if I had a baby.’”
She told her husband that the baby-free life path was not allowed to involve them choosing to just “watch Netflix and die,” but rather pick the big, bold, freedom-requiring options. “Let’s find out what’s great about a life of independence and choice,” she says. It was that wonderfully freeing idea of ‘choose your hard’.
“Every choice you make, limits your other choices, but if you focus on the limitations, you’ll be unhappy. If you focus on the joy, then you’ll have a wonderful life. And I have such a wonderful life.”
The Guilty Feminist Live Tour starts Saturday 11 May in Christchurch at Aurora Centre, is in Auckland on Tuesday 14 May at Bruce Mason Centre and Wellington on Wednesday 15 May at the Opera House. For ticket information, click here.