Betty Grumble zips up her pants and says how it’s funny what some people think is indecent.
Some people think women’s bodies are indecent, especially women’s naked bodies – and don’t get them started on those bodies shamelessly feeling and giving pleasure.
If clowns help us to accept or challenge life’s absurdities, Betty wears neon and gold make up to encourage us to act. Her recent Sex Clown Saves the World was about healing through ecosexual love – thank you, Annie Sprinkle – and trashing ridiculous concepts of beauty. Love and Anger is a more personal call to radical action.
Betty and her creator, Emma Maye Gibson, consult a 1968 call for women to join together to fix the world’s problems: Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M Manifesto. Fifty years later, it’s still time to be radical. As no one really wants to reinstate the Society for Cutting Up Men, Betty calls on us to embrace a more radical act.
Pleasure is a radical act. Who hasn’t criticised themselves for indulging in pleasure? Loving ourselves and the imperfect people in our lives is so radical that it’s sometimes called indecent.
Not in Betty’s world. In a physical tour-de-force, she confronts the absurdity that naked is something women need to protect or withhold. #YoniPride is radical.
There is nudity – you will see the beautiful skin tag on her vulva – and bodily functions and what is legally defined as a sex act. But there’s not a moment of indecency.
Love & Anger is humane, life affirming and important.