Before we start, just remind me what a
feminist is, again?
Scarlett Curtis. 
Yes, Emma Freud?
So pleased I chose that name.
It's such a good name.
When did you start calling yourself a feminist?
Interesting. I think... I remember I definitely wasn't a
feminist at school. I didn't like the
word.
Why?
Because I think.. it was that
thing where, like, I didn't think we
needed feminism any more and I
thought it was kind of cool not to be a
feminist.
Did you think we didn't need it
because you didn't see any inequality
that you thought needed addressing?
Yes, so, I think I just thought it was done, like,
I remember we studied the suffragettes
in history and I was like, "Great! Good for
them, like, they sorted it." You know, my mum
and dad both work,
my mum's more powerful, if anything, than my
dad, like, emotionally. Like, it's, you know, I just thought
it was something that was sorted.
So, what changed?
I was really ill as a teenager, which you
might know? Uh, lots of doctors didn't
believe I was actually ill and I think
some of the way that I was treated by
the doctors had a lot to do with the
fact that I was 15 year old girl. I
wasn't in school so I started reading a
lot. People like Virginia Woolf and
Gloria Steinem and Audre Lorde, and
starting to read a lot more articles
online and just put that together, and
then I kind of started applying that to my
real life and what I was going through
and, you know, just things that I knew.
And where did you see inequality?
It's meant
to be a back-and-forth interview...?
Oh, sorry.
No. I think, well, that's the thing. I think,
you know, I'm very privileged and very
lucky and the inequality that's around
me is much less than it is in so many
parts of the world, so I think it
was a combination of starting to read
about issues like child marriage and FGM,
but then also kind of seeing it a bit
around me, you know, I think... I've seen it...
yours and dad's relationship is
extremely equal, but you know, you're always the one that
is at home and did our homework with us
and cooked dinner for us and that was
always like a given, and never even
occurred to me growing up that he would
do any of that and I think those kind of
things have nothing to do with you and
just have all to do with the
expectations that we have of women and
of society and...
It's...I still haven't
quite worked out how come I have more of the kids than Richard does.
Did you
talk about being a feminist growing up?
No. It just, I mean, a little bit like you
I... I really appreciated the
suffragettes and I really
appreciated the women in the 60s and the
fact that I could get the pill at 15 –
which I did – and other than that I
thought, "job done." It was different then,
you know.
But it wasn't! You just didn't talk about it.
Exactly, and it felt
different then and there wasn't the
world view and I think we were all much
more myopic and didn't know. I mean, you
said you were slightly awakened to it by
FGM and child marriage and, you know, the
sort of atrocities happening to women overseas
and without the news information that we
have now and without social media and
without the kind of awareness that your
generation have crashed into the world,
it just wasn't staring you in the face.
Now, no-one has an excuse but then there
were excuses
that you could go, "Oh, I didn't know!"
But you must have felt it. I mean,
did you never feel it in relationships
or in work or, you know, all these
stories that are coming out. It's been a
year now since the #metoo campaign
launched and all these stories that are
coming out, not just of sexual harassment
but of the ways that women are treated in
work, did you... did you never feel any of
them?
Yes. I experienced that level of
sexism. It never really occurred to me
that it was sexism. It just was how it
was. So, of course I got the letchy thing
and the bum-pinchy thing and the
"communicate with me through sexuality in
a workplace thing," and the, you know,
attempted-rapey thing, and the "being
groped on the tube" thing. Every single
woman of my gender
had that so often that you didn't even
talk about it. It was... it was like saying,
"I just was on a really crowded Tube." I
wouldn't come home and tell you and you
would go, "But the Tube shouldn't be
crowded," it was just a given that that
was one of the hazards of the workplace,
like breaking a heel on your way into
work or something. So, it all happened but
it never occurred to me that there was
an option on it because as far as my
stupid little twenty-something brain was
going it was like, "Feminism? We've done
that! Completely done that. This is just
how the world is."
Did you know any feminists? Because I almost sometimes feel like when I was growing
up there were some women that we know maybe, like,
tangentially, who were very successful or
very powerful, and I sometimes feel like –
not you guys – but the way people would
talk about them growing up was, like, "Oh,
she's, you know, a man-eater or she's, like,
no fun, or she's too whatever," and now
that I know some of them and am a bit
older, you kind of realise, "Oh, wait,
those were the feminists!" But did you
know feminists? Were any of your friends,
like, feminists?
I'm sure I knew active feminists when I
 was younger and would
have probably thought they were just a
bit strident and a been strong. I
remember when Caitlin Moran first
brought out her first book, was it called
how to be a feminist?
How To Be A Woman.
How To Be A Woman, but it was very much sold
on a feminist ticket, and I remember
worrying about her and just thinking, "Don't say
feminist things, cos then you
get all this shit thrown at you,"
people going 'Ooo you're a feminist,'
and no one, you know, work into it in a different way!"
And realising that that was her point and
then thinking, "Wow that's very...brave."
Just to be talking about it!
Okay...
I love this!
I wish we could do this
all day, every day.
What do you think of all my activism,
and how involved I am in politics?
Oh! What a question.
Just to give a bit of
background...
Yes.
Before the Free Period
protest, for a week all you and dad
asked was if you didn't have to come...
We did.
...and you thought they were gonna be two people there.
Yeah. 
And how many people showed up?
Two thousand.
Yeah. Yeah, okay. Case made.
I think... I think I can die happy, now. I
think I... literally, if I went under a
bus tomorrow I could say in the one area
of making Scarlett Curtis my job... my job
is done. I mean, it goes beyond pride, you know?
I'd have been proud of you if you had, at
this stage in your life, managed to
secure a job as an intern. You have
exceeded every expectation and outdone
every dream that I ever had for you.
That's just silly now.
Yeah, well. You shouldn't have asked me that.
You surpassed my achievements on about the
second hour you began thinking about
these things.
But I think it's also a lot easier now,
you know, to be effective.
Yeah. The only way I find out about
anything I do is online, you know. I
follow a million feminist activists on
Instagram and we do this thing in Pink
Protest called AirDrop activism where
if we've got a protest or a campaign
we go and get people that follow to go
to really busy Starbucks' and if you have
that AirDrop on their phone on you just
AirDrop them the poster of the thing and
then suddenly they're, like, scrolling through
their pictures and they're like, "What's
free periods?"
Oh, that's clever! What, everyone who's in 
the Starbucks? Is that legal?
No. But people do it with, like, dick pics
all the time, so you might as well do it...
WITH DICK PICS?
Yeah, I've had dick pics airdropped to me.
No you haven't!
Yeah, and then you're scrolling through
your phone and you're like, UGH! And then once
I got a hundred pictures of
someone doing yoga and I wanted to be
like, "You're really great, but I don't
know you."
Have you dropped a dick pic to anybody else? 
No.
Oh, good. Just checking...
I've dropped feminist pics.
Okay.
I think it's got to be your own dick.
I don't think people just find pictures on
the Internet and send them.
One of my favourite things about what you've done with The Pink Protest is that, ummmm...
In a way, saying "I'm an activist" or "She's an 
activist" is a little bit like saying, "I'm a
feminist" before Caitlin Moran. You know, 
it's... it's one of those words which
hasn't quite settled yet, because in my
old head being an activist means having
an absolutely rock-tight political
argument and going into Parliament and
shouting with MPs about the minutia of a
bill, and to be that person is so
many million miles away from, you know, my possibilities and most people's
intellectual... kind of, reach! I certainly
couldn't do that, and what you've done
with The Pink Protest is you've made the
acts of activism relevant, but so
achievable and so enjoyable, very
often, and so, sort of, potent in all the
right ways without being complicated and
all the alienating ways. It's, like, really
is... it's... it's... it's I don't know what the word is. 
It's accessible activism
I don't know if you've noticed but you've 
written a book.
Oh, I didn't know. Dad did actually say
to me yesterday, he goes, "Um, I'm just making
a family announcement that for the next
three weeks, Scarlett is allowed to be as
obsessed with her own book as she wants to be."
That is not gonna stop anyone in
this house teasing you the next time you
mention it, I'm afraid. Dream on. 
What do you want people to take
away from the book?
I've read a lot of
feminist books and there are a lot of
incredible ones and they're written by
amazing academics and I think, for me,
the gap that I saw was personal
stories of women that aren't feminist
academics and haven't dedicated their
whole lives to it, but are still feminists
and, you know, still want to be feminists and
want to be involved and want to help and
notice things in their everyday life
that they are affected
disproportionately than men, and so we
made the book! We put it together. It's 52
women's stories. It's very much not...
I keep saying it's not a how-to it's
more like a why-to. Everyone we emailed
about doing this book wrote back being
like, "I don't think I know enough"
But that's exactly the same as what I was
saying about activism! I thought to
be an activist you had to know
everything, but you don't! You just have to
care!
You just have to feel it, you know, you
literally have to think women... women
and men should be equal and, kind of, want
to do something to make that so.
This might have been my favourite hour of my entire life.
Yeah, me too. We should chat like this more.
We only ever talked about, like, clothes and
stuff.
Why did you just leave home? Come back!
