Lucy Worsley - Ladykillers

[Feckedupbundle]

I listen to this podcast whilst I'm working. It's not heavyweight,but entertaining and passes the time.
All of the cases are commented on by professionals either working in the fields associated,or members of the communities affected. For instance,the episode about the death of an indigenous child in Australia,had a member of the modern day community explaining what had and hadn't changed in the intervening years,and the effect that more recent government policies was having. It was really interesting,and have me a lot to think about.
One of the other episodes was about a very young lesbian couple,in the southern US at the end of the 19th century. There were two lesbian commentators and a bit of talk about how historically and contemporarily,lesbians are not given the cultural exposure that they merit. Excellent,thought I,about time this was mentioned.
One of the commentators started talking about who gets to use what bathroom,and the ban on drag queens in public places. Then we get another person popping up. Yes,you guessed it,on a programme bemoaning the visibility of lesbians,the person they chose to talk about their experience,is a drag queen. Quite what a man has to tell us about lesbian invisibility,I don't know,as I skipped forward until I got back to the historical discussion again.
Depressing,but I shouldn't have expected anything else really,as it's a BBC production,and I should have realised where it was going as soon as the word 'queer' started being used.

Very very disappointing. I love Lucy Worsley, shes great. I would imagine this was the decision of some trendy blue haired member of the production team, rather than anything to do with her

Thanks for the heads up. I have listened to all the previous episodes and enjoyed them but will give this one a swerve.

I'd complain as that's definitely not centring lesbians.

Thanks for highlighting this - I’ll give this mansplaining episode a miss. The other episodes that I’ve listened to are great, it’s a really good podcast from the fab Lucy.

I had a similar experience listening to this. I can't remember the specifics, but it was related to prostitution, and one of the "experts" decided to hold forth about how it was important to decriminalise prostitution and how the Nordic model made things worse. It was horribly biased.

There was another one that was downright weird - it was a woman abortionist in Australia, who used to charge a lot of money for women to have abortions, and then a couple of them died and she was charged (on separate occasions) with murder. The "expert" they had on (who I think was the woman from The Guilty Feminist Podcast) said she saw the abortionist as a heroine who was providing a valuable service for women. (As opposed to what I thought, namely that she was a greedy woman preying on women at their most vulnerable and putting them in harm's way.)

Yep I love all of Lucy Worsley's podcasts except for the 'queer' one. I skipped it as found it very offensive. Hoping it was just out of her hands.

I'm glad that it wasn't just me being over sensitive about it. I just wonder whether Lucy,whom I normally enjoy listening to,didn't spot the obvious issue with a man pretending to be a woman,mansplaining lesbianism to the audience. It really jarred with me.
Royal corgi I remember that Australian one too. Again, I found it incongruous and bizarre that the editors thought that those juxtapositions were suitable. Very odd.

Quite what a man has to tell us about lesbian invisibility,I don't know,as I skipped forward until I got back to the historical discussion again.

Oh, thank goodness it wasn't just me who did that!😂

This episode was so disappointing. There were interesting things they could've gone into (e.g. the obsessive nature of teenage love, or how lesbians actually coped in those days with the expectation that they'd marry a man).

When it sticks to the topic, this is an excellent programme. I already knew some of the cases, but the background information/wider discussion was always interesting or thought-provoking - or in the case of the escaping enslaved woman, heart-rending & anger-inducing.

I hope there'll be another series, & I hope it gets back on track.

Which episode is it? So I know which one to skip!

#28 Forbidden Love

Overall it's not as interesting as the others because it lacks their depth. Basically two girls were at school together & then one has an obsessive love for the other & kills her. I was listening while doing something else & had difficulty remembering which girl was which!

I skipped that bit too. Apart from anything it really jarred anyway (in terms of sound, ambience and voice) and didn't fit, felt crow-barred in!

I think this was the last series where there was a crime where a lesbian was murdered. Some fool came on and banged on about how she was murdered because of her ‘gender identity’. FFS

You got mentioned in the Daily Mail

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13015647/Lucy-Worsley-fire-feminist-BBC-Lady-Killers-podcast-episode-lesbian-invisibility-shifts-focus-discrimination-male-drag-artists.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/27/lucy-worsley-bbc-lady-killers-backlash-male-drag-artists/

I think the Mail nicked it from the Telegraph? Direct quotes from this unusually short thread (given the length of so many threads on here) 😄

I had the same reaction. Was out running and actually stopped I was so cross at one point. The usual hyperbole was trotted out with the predictable "gosh, that's SO awful" response...I eye rolled hard.

If felt very jarring and out of step with other episodes. It felt very much like a point was being forcibly made.

Other episodes have been so thoughtful, and nuanced, and compassionate. I really enjoyed the episode with Kate Mosse where they discussed whether women who have done heinous things should be remembered, despite their crimes. KM made an incredibly valid point that history is all typically about remembering men, always, and never limited by whether they were good or socially acceptable. Women are 50% of the population and should be given equal weight in the history books, and that should not mean they are sifted out if they fell short in some way.

Shedunnit went the same way so I have up in that.

Why do they have to ruin every bloody thing that is just for women?

I feel like this about exhibitions that are supposed to be about women. Not only are the notes to the side tedious and semi-hectoring rather than educational, they're very rarely actually about women.

I've been really enjoying the podcast - I listen at bedtime and sometimes during the night as I have terrible insomnia - but I got to this point and like you, thought "WHAT!?"

Didn't listen to the rest.

Yep. I was pissed off about this, too. Shame because I really enjoyed it and have had some brilliant reads from it.

Don’t they see that people drop out at specific points?

@RoyalCorgi re: the abortionist, the women who sought her services would be seeking to end their pregnancy any way they could. She was the closest thing they had available to healthcare - in those circumstances, what would you rather do? Visit an abortionist who has experience of previous procedures, or try and do it yourself with no experience? It was massively dangerous either way and highlights exactly why women need access to safe, legal abortion.

The lesbian couple episode rubbed me the wrong way when the majority of the discussion centred on how in love the murderer was and how lost she felt, instead of highlighting that this was domestic violence at the hands of an ex-partner. No different or less heinous than if the murderer had been male in my opinion.

Yes, and how they framed it as her carrying out an agreed plan, as if the victim had somehow consented to being murdered. I think they described it as a Romeo and Juliet type plan.....but the murderer, despite ample opportunity did not then kill herself.

I'm sure they went to the abortionist out of desperation. The key point for me, however, was that she was charging them vast sums for the procedure. If she had been doing it out of the goodness of her heart, she'd have charged a nominal sum. In the 19th century, lots of people were making money out of desperate women by offering dodgy abortion services.

What happened to Shedunnit? I used to skip about in that & I thought I'd heard everything - just noticed there are some new episodes.