Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny