Project XXX

“Tim, I'm not going to buy you porn. You can get it from railway sidings like everybody else,” was a line in the sitcom Spaced. It was on TV in 1999. Ah, bless. A gag meaningless now to the Kids of Today, of course, with their Blurred Lines and their selfies and all that stuff that makes increasingly less sense to us oldies with each passing day. ‘Twas ever thus; but there is something about today’s technology – and how teenagers are using it to explore sex, often quite publicly – that is of ever-increasing concern to adults (and basically anyone who wishes Miley Cyrus would put some clothes on and stop twerking). When Kim Wiltshire and Paul Hine decided to call their theatre company Laid Bare, it turned out to not just be a clever name. The pair had collaborated on arts projects with health remits before, but when each they found themselves tackling the issue of sexual health and pornography with young people, the whole host of issues it raised became too intriguing to ignore. They teamed up; and the stories they gathered from young people in the North West became the inspiration for new multimedia theatre show Project XXX, which is touring the region and comes to Ormskirk’s Rose Theatre on January 29 and the Lantern on February 8. “We both believe quite strongly in using theatre as a forum for public discussion, and that’s something very important,” Kim - a member of North West playwrights collective The Alligator Club says. “We know there is a lot of surveys and research [about teenagers and internet pornography] out there, but they’re all coming from Australia, the States and so on – we wondered if they really were relevant to here.” So the pair set about staging a series of workshops in Manchester, Bolton and Crewe, in total reaching nearly 100 young people from all ethnicities and backgrounds, aged between 13 and 19. In the groups, they listened (and tried to remain unfazed) as the teens set about discussing their experiences of pornography. Sneaky peaks at dad's old Playboys, this most certainly was not; a whole world of hardcore exploits was available to them at the touch of a smartphone, and boy did they know it.“It opened our eyes and really made us realise there’s a lot of talk about parental control, government regulation of the internet and so on, but young people are too savvy for that to stop them," Kim explains. "Teenagers have always experimented with sexuality, and that goes together with technology. It is such a secretive area for adults, but not for young people anymore.” She continues: “One of the young men was aged about 13 and told us it was a badge of honour to watch quite hardcore pornography in a group; the kind of notorious scenes that really move pornography away from being anything to do with sex. On the other hand, another young man at a Catholic school argued that with no sex education, where else was he going to learn about it? “The flip side is young women had body image issues and were really aware of porn being part of their daily lives. One of them said to me ‘in your day, when you were taking naked photos to send to someone, you’d have had to go somewhere to get them developed, wouldn’t you?’ It is just part of what they do. When I explained it wasn't something we did, she looked at me like I was weird.” Project XXX tells the story of Amy, who chooses to take matters into her own hands when a film of her and her boyfriend she did not consent to goes viral. During a rainy summer in a northern seaside town, she decides to show that sexual choice is firmly in the hands of women by persuading new love interest Callum to film her first time. Callum, positively ancient at 25, is obsessed with a faded porn star – a concept Kim and Paul found held little interest for young men looking at pornography today. Despite headlines in the media about young women rejecting the concept of feminism, Kim found the girls they spoke to had plenty of admiration for strong females in the public eye who could handle themselves, and therein lay a paradox. “Their role models were quite feisty, Miley Cyrus and Tulisa were the kind of people they identified with. They were very intelligent but had a confused relationship with sex. “There is a whole heap of issues, and the play serves as the collective stories and the difficult relationship with wanting to reclaim feminism and own your own sexuality - and yet they don’t. It is still being dictated by young men and how they think sex should be.” Gaining an insight into young peoples’ attitudes to sex ultimately had an effect on Manchester-based Kim, 42, who came to realise the issues surrounding pornography these days are not necessarily black and white. And the play, she thinks, is now more squarely aimed at adults (particularly those working with young people today) rather than teens themselves, as it was in the start. “I went in staunchly old-school feminist, thinking porn is wrong – by the end of it I had become used to it, desensitised,” she says. “Saying ‘porn is bad, don’t watch it’ is not an argument – lots of people do, women are making and producing it, and there’s lots of young people who are having some kind of sex education from it. In the end, the kind of message we are trying to say is you’ve got to find your own way of enjoying sex.” Project XXX – whose Twitter page was ironically shut down over Christmas by moderators confusing it with something genuinely hardcore (it’s up and running again now) – is suitable for audiences ages 15+. There are no sex scenes in the production.