Review: LET'S TALK ABOUT CONSENT, Edinburgh International Book Festival

Chaired by Glasgow poet Leyla Josephine, Let’s Talk About Consent is an hour-long panel with three speakers on the subject of consent. Novelist and playwright Alan Bissett has recently published Lads: A Guide to Respect and Consent, screenwriter Emma Dennis-Edwards who wrote a factual drama called Consent for Channel 4 and Holly Bourne who shares extracts from her new novel You Could Be So Pretty.

Leyla Josephine is a fantastic chair for this event and invites the two novelists to read extracts from their books. At the top of the event, we’re told that it's okay if anyone finds anything a bit heavy and needs to leave during the hour and staff are on hand to help and there is access to a quiet space. For the Q&A section at the end, she asks the audience to be mindful of not sharing their own histories that might be triggering to anyone in the room or overly intrusive to the panelists.

A lot of ground gets covered in the hour and one issue raised by Josephine is whether Bissett found it difficult to share examples of times where he hasn’t behaved impeccably himself. He explains that examples need to be given and accountability needs to be taken- otherwise, this is just a lecture. As a teenager, he thought he was hitting it off with a girl at a nightclub and she went to the bathroom shortly before the club closed and he waited outside the bathroom for her. It wasn’t until he heard her friend say “it's ok, I think the creepy guy has gone” that he realised he was the creep in question.

Holly Bourne has a lot to contribute to the conversation. She’s worked in schools and as a sex and relationships educator with teenagers. She was warned that nobody lasts more than two years in the job and this was definitely the case for her. Emma Dennis-Edwards adds that sexual violence has been normalised in the age of the internet and the statistic is that children as young as nine have watched hardcore pornography. Porn is most young people's introduction to sex now and the content they're consuming isn't the ethical kind.

This panel is covering a deeply sensitive topic but the four onstage handle it in a very accessible and articulate way. Events like this that bring together writers of such acclaim for a discussion like this is what makes the Edinburgh International Book Festival so special.

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