Same Penis Forever | Rebel Lyons

It all started with a trigger warning: “full frontal non-sexualised female nudity”.

I didn’t realise the intensity of our sexualisation of the female body until I saw performer Rebel Lyons’ non-sexualised female body. I didn’t realise the intensity of social conditioning endorsing marriage until I saw Same Penis Forever.

The female body is something we rarely see depicted in its own right, free of the insidious male gaze. Whatever media you’re consuming, be it magazines, movies, or porn, it is riddled with glossy images of the female body featuring bouncy tits, tiny waists, and flat stomachs. Although a very small percentage of women do in fact have these bodies, by and large, this image is deceptive.

Another common deception that circulates in the media we consume is that marriage is the pinnacle of womanhood; the only way to achieve a ‘happily ever after’. It’s this lie that leaves women dreaming about their wedding day, pining for their prince charming, and waiting for the ‘happiest day of their life’.

ENTER Rebel Lyons, centre stage, wearing a wedding dress with cut outs over the nipples, revealing her WHORISH red bra (her words, not mine).

Same Penis Forever was a mixed bag of scenes, musical numbers, and audience interactions. Rebel mined her experience of getting married and divorced when she was 24 to create a piece that picked apart the social conditioning telling women their value comes from being a wife and a mother. Rebel personified different elements of social conditioning: Disney Princesses, the beauty industry, mother-in-laws, marketing moguls, the list goes on.

The ‘happily ever after’ clique appeared numerous times, but the real discussion of fairy-tales came with Rebel’s remix of Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid, where she sung about her domestic confinement and bemoaned her lack of freedom. Seeing Rebel using a fairy-tale song to flip the narrative that fairy-tales perpetuate was one of my favourite moments of the show.

Until recently, Disney’s princess movies have been created solely by men. Surprise surprise, this bleeds into the world of the story. A study conducted by professors at Pitzer College investigated the Disney princess movies from 1989 – 1999 and found that even on the simple level of how much characters speak, the films are startlingly male-dominated. Men speak 90% of the time in Aladdin and 71% of the time in Beauty and the Beast. These fairy-tale movies set the precedence for what young girls should aspire to, always ending on the ‘and she got the man and they lived happily ever after’. Yet these widely consumed stories about the female experience aren’t even told from the female perspective, which is what makes Rebel’s show (which she independently wrote, produced and performed) so powerful.

My second favourite conditioning character was the old white man who introduced the diamond engagement ring via an immensely successful marketing campaign. This section was perfect, with everything from the pacing to the costume to the mannerisms making the crowd cackle with laughter. But in the comedy was a searing observation about the fragility of our traditions.

Humanising the different agents of social conditioning demonstrated that people make traditions, and traditions aren’t these immovable structures that must be obeyed at all costs. Traditions make culture, so if the diamond engagement ring was something some marketing mogul came up with to sell more diamonds, then why the hell do we take this ‘tradition’ so seriously.

When you have one narrative for something, that narrative becomes the definitive narrative. But despite what we’ve been made to believe, diamonds aren’t everlasting. They can be scratched, chipped and shattered. And so too can culture.

Rebel’s piece successfully offered a counternarrative to the dominant ‘and they lived happily ever after’. Same Penis Forever chips away the idea that a woman’s purpose is to be a wife. Instead, she can be a full-bodied person in her own right, standing naked on a stage in a venue that she paid for with her own money, acting out a play that she wrote, singing songs that she reworked, forcing a sold-out crowd to have a long hard look at everything they think they think about marriage, and ask ‘why?’.