Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Asking For It

Adrienne Truscott delicately places a rape whistle on the stool next to her gin and tonic, "in case anybody needs it".

Her vagina is in full view below a tight denim jacket.

"I'm new to comedy," she admits on several occasions to the Brisbane Festival crowd during her provocative one-woman show, Asking For It.

But her frank admission of inexperience betrays the skill required to pull off an act like this. She knows exactly what she's doing.


"Thanks for coming. I bet you didn't think you'd hear that at the rape show," she says, drawing nervous laughter.

She swills from her can and falters around the stage flicking her blonde wig in white platform heels, saying she agonised over the footwear decision because it's hard for women to pick the right thing to wear if they want to be taken seriously. She's confident she nailed it, she tells us.

Things feel a bit uneasy in the theatre in that first ten minutes. Some people are there with their wives. Others are on dates. Some went alone.

Truscott addresses her nudity bluntly.

"I wish you could see the view from up here", she says, before describing one man's expression as a mix of terror and money well spent.

"How y'all doing, everybody okay?" she asks throughout the act. There is a sense she is nurturing us through this, as though she knows the social commentary is going to be hard to digest.

Her character is the endearing, giggly friend we have all watched go slowly downhill during a drunken night out.

A collection of framed comedian portraits sits on a table at the centre of the stage. All are guilty of the same crime. They have used rape, sexual violence or sexism as a tool of their craft.

Truscott toys with their pictures and takes particular aim at Comedy Central host Daniel Tosh, who during a set at The Laugh Factory fired back at a heckler who took issue with his rape jokes by suggesting it would be funny "if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now, like right now".

Tosh, some supporters argued, was a comedian and therefore should be able to say anything.

"He's a comedian, he should be able to say something funny," Truscott says, before holding up his photograph and declaring he looks like a date rapist.

It's not just comedians in her crosshairs. It's rappers who rhyme about sexual violence. It's politicians who delve into the debate with ridiculous theories of "legitimate rape". It's religion for proclaiming that pregnancies arising from a rape are a gift from God.

Truscott admitts the nudity is a gimmick, and perhaps unsurprisingly it's not the most confronting thing about this "rape comedy", if there is such a thing.

She shifts seamlessly between attacking and reflecting, spurting out sexual violence statistics, joking about her own rohypnol experiences and reciting her list of things women shouldn't wear if they don't want to be seen as "asking for it".

It's long. So long, in fact, that there doesn't appear to be a situation where a victim can't be blamed.

But Truscott isn't playing the victim. Her end game is deeper.

Condemning the prominence of sexual violence in our culture is one thing, but repurposing the topic away from sniggering male comedians - who use it for laughs while ignoring the absence of any wider conversation about why it's so taboo in the first place and how it could be addressed if there was a mature dialogue - takes courage.

Which begs the question, why does a woman need to take her pants off to deliver a serious point like that? And would this have been as effective if she hadn't?