Tell me about it: The new Stuff podcast where women share their own, complicated stories

Friday, 19 November 2021

Tell Me About It is weekly podcast offering an intimate and expert look at the messy complexities of feminism, gender and simply trying to survive as a woman in a world built for men.

A new Stuff podcast takes listeners behind-the-scenes of news stories to hear from the people at the centre of them, in their own words. Tell Me About It is an intimate look at the messy complexities of journalism and its impact on real lives.

A rape victim who has to testify in court twice, because a judge makes a mistake. A young mum who faces a gruelling cancer treatment after her smears were misread. A woman who was told to get up and change her own baby’s nappy hours after a c-section, because she had to learn to do it herself. A wife who realises her husband is a predator, and has been lying to her for 25 years.

Once you’ve listened to women’s stories for long enough, themes begin to take shape.

There’s often shame, and guilt, laid on top of trauma. Being sexually assaulted is one example, but it goes wider than that: not giving birth the ‘right’ way, not being the right shape for that dress, not leaving an abusive relationship the first time. Not being paid as much as a man – or a pākehā woman – doing the same work as you.

Not fulfilling all the roles you’re expected to, in all the ways you’ve been brought up to think you should. The perfect victim, the perfect mother, the perfect wife or partner.

* No warning of rapist's release for victim because she didn't fill out a form

“I think the only way we can start making a difference to the shame that is instantly allocated to you when you are a victim of a sex crime, is to talk about it,” says S, whose real name we can't use as she has name suppression, in the first episode of Tell Me About It.

“It was about more than just me, it was about standing up for women, for women who didn’t have the strength to go to trial, and standing up against rape and a rape trial.”

Stuff investigative reporter Kirsty Johnston, Bird of Paradise broadcaster and writer Noelle McCarthy and Stuff national correspondent Michelle Duff at Wellington’s Matrix Studios.

Still, in 2021, there are gendered rules we are expected to play by. Not all victims are considered equally deserving of our sympathy. Did you really try hard enough to breastfeed? Are you doing enough to homeschool your kids during Covid, while putting in enough hours at your paid workplace? Don’t you think 6am is a bit too early to open the window and let a primal scream out into the neighbourhood?

The narratives that have been constructed over time, in a system built for and by men, are powerful. Seeds of self-doubt are planted, and those caught up in it often question whether they are the problem.

It’s harder to speak up when you think you’re the only one. But what if you could hear the stories of others in different circumstances, living different lives, all hitting up against the same systems that feel rigged against them?

After years of reporting, Stuff colleagues and friends Kirsty Johnston and Michelle Duff saw that these stories aren’t happening in isolation. The brush strokes of each might be different, but the larger picture they paint is the same: a world where women's lives are undervalued, where they haven’t been listened to, caught in the currents of sexism and racism, their experiences too easily dismissed.

What’s it like to be a single Māori mother, with a four-year-old daughter, who has just been diagnosed with cancer?

That’s when they started trying to figure out a new way to bring people together to tell their own stories, in a space where they could be themselves and have their voices heard.

The result is Tell Me About It, produced by broadcaster Noelle McCarthy’s production company Bird of Paradise, in partnership with Stuff.

“The power of the series comes from leveraging years of specialist reporting by Kirsty and Michelle, their deep understanding of the issues so many women face because they’ve been up close, listening to them, gathering their experiences into first person testimony that you can’t unhear,” McCarthy says.

Stuff journalist Kirsty Johnston: “I started re-evaluating what I knew about the world.”

“The interviews on the podcast – with survivors, parents, workers, mothers, aunties, friends – are intimate and unfiltered.”

She says Tell Me About It gives a listener the time to connect with every interviewee as they tell the stories of their lives in their own words – what happened, what it was like, and what it’s like now.

Stuff journalist Michelle Duff: “Multiple, little layers of unfairness are really difficult to get across in a news format.”

“There’s a real value in bringing these stories together, in talking about the way they affect all of us – because the whole of society suffers when only the voices of the powerful are heard.”

Duff and Johnston explain more about how it all came together.

Kirsty: I first started calling Michelle regularly in early 2018. I was working on stories about how more women than ever before were reporting their rapes to police, but they just weren’t being prosecuted. Around the same time, I found out my journalism lecturer had been accused of sexually violating a woman. It felt like, suddenly, not only was I surrounded by these stories but that they were my stories too. Some of the rape files I was reading felt so similar to experiences I had gone through, it caused me to begin re-evaluating what I thought I know about the world.

Michelle: I was part of the #metoo team at Stuff, also talking to loads of women about experiences of sexual assault and harassment. At the time, Kirsty and I were working for rival organisations, so we probably shouldn’t have been talking. But sometimes it was so lonely, and you just needed a laugh and a debrief, to make sure it wasn’t just you.

Kirsty: I remember specifically, sitting in my car outside the Green Bay four square and talking to Michelle for two hours. We were both trying to figure our way through the #metoo world. The stories were almost impossible to report and frame and write, because it hadn’t been done before. And Michelle told me: “It feels hard because it is hard. You have the entire weight of the patriarchy pushing back against you, and it isn’t going to just give up overnight.”

Michelle: And when women are trusting you with their stories, and you try to push them forward and sometimes it feels like being a hamster on a wheel, telling the same thing again and again. I got to a point where I wanted other people to hear what we were hearing – what we are hearing now in the studio – to see the same frustrations and patterns and to care about it, and to care about these people.

Kirsty: Right now it’s more important than ever to hear these stories, because of the pandemic. Women’s work has doubled and the world is still designed for men and they’re overwhelmed and it feels like we are all shouting “WILL YOU LISTEN TO ME YET” and the answer is no. It’s never been this hard. There is extreme discrimination, but it feels like no one is listening.

Michelle: And it’s the complexity and those multiple, little layers of unfairness that are really hard to get across in a mainstream news format, where you’re writing about one issue or one investigation and you have to stay on-topic. When in reality, people’s lives are messy, victims are not one-dimensional, and sometimes it’s funny as well as tragic.

Kirsty: In the podcast, we can capture all that. We are hearing from women about their lives in their own words and we can get into the details. And the stories we are telling in some ways are more everyday stories of discrimination – they’re not the extreme – like Natalia who we talked to about her birthing experience in an upcoming episode. Nothing went drastically wrong, it was just traumatic in a very mundane way. It’s their experience, but it’s every experience.

Michelle: We also wanted to look at privilege and understand privilege, and the intersections of other factors in people's lives, like disability, ethnicity, gender identity, poverty. Some of this is about uncomfortable conversations, like the episode about equal pay where we talk to Pasifika worker’s advocate Nia about how Pākehā feminists pushed for a law to address gender discrimination but not ethnic discrimination, and now Pasifika women are left with the biggest gap. And we find out, after hearing from Wairarapa mum Sara, how Māori women are being let down by the health system.

Kirsty: I think in trying to be good journalists – and feminists – we’ve realised that actually, we have to get out of the way sometimes and that’s part of what this is about.

Michelle: We wanted to create a space. To platform women and in particular women who don’t look like us and sound like us, but who are ready to talk. Because they are. Not a single woman has said no yet. They’re all so keen. We really hope people will listen.