Tupperware! (The Party) a review

TUPPERWARE! (The Party)

On a wet, unpleasant Friday evening I made my way to the well heeled Melbourne suburb of East Hawthorn to attend Tupperware! (The Party).  A 1950’s American classic, Tupperware! (The Party) is suburban, affluent, female and white.

I arrived a little before the start time and was handed a glass of ‘bubbly’ upon entering the performance space, so I chatted meaninglessly to the other ladies present whilst the Tupperware Rep set the stage in full view of the audience. This is a device I have seen doom other productions to failure, but in this instance worked effectively. As the shiny coloured plastic drew our attention the conversation sputtered, failed and gave way to silence. We were ready to begin.

Janine, a career Rep of Tupper and other wares, appeared to be a prosperous bogan of the ‘hooker with a heart of gold’ school of address. The casting concerned me at first, the audience were professional women; lawyers, accountants, journalists. How would they take to this woman, who had all the charm of an illegal brothel owner and the originality of a potato chip? But my worries were unfounded. After the initial ‘thanks to the hostess’ and introduction, Janine’s experience (over 30 years she informed us) kicked in. I felt we were in safe hands with her and that very few wallets would leave this production unmoved.

Tupperware! (The Party) plays on our insecurities as women. Through our need for order in a world of utter chaos, our desire for perfection as mothers and wives and working women, it dips deep into our bottomless well of self-loathing and judgement. Its impossibly shiny brochures show endless rows of enviable well ordered cupboards, drawers, fridges and freezers. Phrases such as ‘domestic blindness’ and ‘pantry consultation’ seduce you into the belief that bright colours and moulded plastic can indeed save your domestic soul.

I had wondered briefly, before going out that evening how this classic 1950s work would be brought up to date, and what parallels to modern Australian life could be drawn. That very afternoon Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in an attempt to garner votes had announced his PNG deal and Tony Abbott’s hollow cries of “Stop the boats” were still big news. Australia was hurtling toward an election that would be fought on the backs of asylum seekers and refugees. How would Tupperware! handle these themes, where would it place itself in these uncertain times?

But here is the genius of the work. It doesn’t. It doesn’t even pretend to. Tupperware takes modern Australian women firmly by the apron strings and places them back in the 1950’s when a nice house and a happy husband were the zenith of our concerns. This is a world in which it is right that scary black people should be turned away from our shores and sent to live with other savages, whose neighbouring proximity can be blotted out with dishwasher safe storage options and burpable lids. This world is safe, it is sealed, it is microwaveable and freezer-proof.

Yet sitting here amongst the outpouring of joy at the new season’s colour-ways and exclamations that “the people at Tupperware think of everything” I couldn’t help feeling depressed, cheated and confused.

Despite the colour, the styles, the gifts, the fun and laughter of Tupperware Bingo, I realised I had spent an entire evening looking at empty containers. And perhaps this is the real message of Tupperware! (The Party). That, as alluring and seductive as these items are, the stuff of life is to be found in the contents of the vessel, it is not the vessel itself.  A concept that our leaders could consider when speaking of “stopping the boats”; that if we, as a nation, could shift our focus from the container to the contents, Australia could leave the 1950’s and be a much better place for it.

Tupperware! (The Party) is playing in a suburb near you. It is well worth a look, if only to remind us how little has changed in 50 years and how far we still have to come.

Sexism And The Seven Year Old

In the wake of the seemingly unending sexist attacks on high profile women of late and the outpouring of vitriol against Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli on Twitter, I took the opportunity, when it arose, to have a discussion about sexism with my 7 year old son.

It would break my heart if he turned into the kind of young man who threw sandwiches at a Prime Minister (or anyone for that matter) or the type of guy who didn’t know better than to tweet vile comments about a tennis champion because he deemed she wasn’t pretty enough. Or worse, did know better but did it anyway.

Most people who know my son acknowledge him to be a kind, deep thinking, enlightened individual so I was amazed to find, at 7 years old, an ingrained attitude toward women, a total acceptance of the inequality between the sexes as normal and right and a deep and hostile resistance to changing the status quo.

It started here:
Lars: “Mummy, which of the Ninja sisters would you choose to be if you could pick any one.”
Me: “I don’t know, what powers do they have?”
Lars: “They don’t have powers, they just get caught.”
Me: “Really? Then I choose to be one of the Ninjas.”
Lars: “No Mummy, you can’t be a Ninja, you have to be a Ninja’s sister.”
Me: “Why?”
Lars: “Because the Ninjas are boys.”
Me: “Why?”
Lars: “Because they just are.”
Me: “Well that’s not fair, why can’t I get to be a good character. Why do the boys get to do all the fun things and the girls have to be weak characters that don’t do anything?”
Lars: “Oh Mummy, that’s just how it is, you have to be a sister.”
Me: “Sure, but why can’t the sisters have special powers, why is it that only the boys get to have special powers.”
At this point he got quite annoyed with me, but on pursuing my line of questioning there followed an extraordinary and extensive list of reasons why girls did not, and should not, have strong, powerful characters and how me asking about it was only making him angry and I should not talk about it anymore.
The main reasons he cited that girls should not be more equally represented and why we should be happy with our lot were as follows:

• Not as many girls play video games, so they don’t need to have important characters.
• Girls are not as good as boys at video games.
• Boys are stronger and faster than girls so they should get the rewards.
• Someone has to get captured and rescued and it may as well be girls because they are good at it.
• The bad guys are all boys, so girls should be happy that they don’t have to be the baddies. (Here I pointed out that the bad guys were as important to the plot as the good guys and perhaps this was another example of inequality, so he changed tack.)
• In one game if the girl didn’t get captured there wouldn’t be a game, making her a main character and I should be happy with that.
• It would be sad for people to see girl characters getting hurt or losing in battles.
• He once saw a cartoon in which all the main characters were girls and that was really unfair for him.

Having patiently refuted all his points he became extremely upset and angry with me and demanded I stop talking about it.

What astonished me about all this was not so much that it was coming from a 7 year old but that it so closely resembled what was going on in the greater community. At one time or another I have heard all the points that my son made coming from the mouths of grown men (and some women) and put forward as serious arguments for keeping women out of positions of power.

That it would be terrible to see women hurt on the battlefield was used repeatedly to keep women out of the military.
That women had not the intellect or authority to lead was an argument used to keep women out of politics.
That men are stronger was, and still is, used as an argument to pay women less for the work they do.
That women are more suited to the domestic environment was used as an argument to keep women out of any male dominated and higher paid profession.
And any attempt to address the imbalance of women’s under representation in almost all positions of power in society is howled down as reverse sexism and deemed unfair to men.
What is more astonishing to me, is that when these arguments have been shown to be unreasonable and unfair, those same grown men become hostile and angry in their attempts to shut down the conversation in the manner of a 7 year old boy.

I felt I needed to understand why my son was so invested in maintaining a system that was so patently unfair and seeing that he was genuinely distressed I asked him why he was so angry. He answered helplessly “I don’t know.” I imagine most men would be similarly at a loss to articulate why any discussion about sexism generates so much anger and hostility within themselves, but few would have the honesty to say so. This gave me hope.

I carefully explained to him how much I loved that he was a boy, how fantastic boys were and that I was not blaming him for a system that was put in place long before he was born. However just because things had been a particular way for a long time didn’t mean we couldn’t change things for the better. That girls being equal to boys didn’t make him weaker, it made him stronger and wouldn’t it be great if we could live in a world where everyone was equal. I told him how clever I thought he was and what a good heart he had and that I thought that he could be exactly the sort of man who could make the world a better place.

When I removed the blame and replaced it with empowerment he became less angry and more amenable to the idea of change. I asked him to see if he could think of any examples at school in which things weren’t quite fair between girls and boys. On thinking about it he came up with the fact that even though there were mainly women teachers at school they had only ever had male principals. On further thought he came out with the idea that I was a woman and I had a great responsibility being in charge of him and his sister and he could see that there were a lot of women who had this responsibility and perhaps this needed to be acknowledged.

“Hooray!” I thought. “I’m not raising a sandwich thrower”.  And surely if I was patient and persistent and kind and understanding, if I continued to point out the inequalities until he was able to spot them himself without prompting and above all if I kept on having the conversation regardless of any unreasonable attempts to shut it down, he would become a man of real worth.

And I think there is something in that for all of us.