Interview with Catriona Smith, founder of Mini Schmidt Productions
Catriona Smith is a writer, curator and artist based in London & Glasgow. In 2018, she founded Mini Schmidt Productions with the aim to create work on what she feels society around her needs to hear most about. She has recently produced a series of sex positive events for those who would like to know more about sex positivity, equality within sex and consent. The project is a collaboration between Sex+ Zine and The Empowered Woman Project, led by Kim Loliya and Mandy Rose Jones.
What can you tell me about Mini Schmidt productions?
My own company is a bit of a mishmash, I started off as an
actor and became quite disenfranchised with the profession. It’s quite
daunting, specially, for women regarding things like aesthetics and weight. I
think it’s quite soulless and I just sort of thought, “I’d like to be in charge
of the projects that I want to do, I want to be my own boss, I’m tired of
bubbling around people”. In the acting industry you’re a product and you are
cattle marketing yourself. I wanted to make my own things and from that I ended
up writing a couple of short pieces, and that bubbled up into a fully-fledged
festival. That’s where I met Kim [Loliya] and we put on the Heartbreak
Hotel in February. It was like an anti-Valentine’s day movement and we had a
wide range of different performances, workshops, panels and discussions. We
closed with the Cocoa Butter club, who are a really big queer POC collective
with the most incredible performances. They’re a huge deal in London so the
fact that we got funding for it was cool. From that I’ve sort of become an
event manager for sex positive productions. I worked freelance for a sex
positive festival that has just moved up to Scotland. I was speaking to Kim and
since London has such a big sex positive scene, I was thinking that we need to
do more things up here in Scotland and dip our toes in the water. So, I guess,
I terms of my own production company, I do anything I want to do. I still act,
I still write spoken works and it’s all encompassing in that production. So
it’s not a one set, creative thing, the event management is the forefront of
it. I do any project that I want to try my hands at.
Have you organized other sex positive events apart from Heartbreak
Hotel and Sex+ Zine X The Empowered Woman Project?
The first festival I did was
Lovefest London 18 (LoveFestLDN18). I thought that the music festival would try
and sue me over the similar names (laughs). I was looking at different aspects
of love, the highs and lows and everything in between. In my opinion sex is a
huge part of love and I wanted to portray that through many different creative
mediums such as photography, animation, dance, monologues and performance art. So I managed to get Kim, Phil (Kim’s partner
in Sex+ Zine) and Maya, a sexual disease spokesperson on removing stigmas
around STI’s. Then we had Africa Brooke, whose looking at finding stillness and
peace within your sexuality and within sex. A lot of the sex portrayed in
mainstream media and in porn doesn’t reflect at all what women actually find
pleasurable. So we wanted to look at what pleasurable sex should actually be
like and that it shouldn’t be the fast jack-hammer style or the Hollywood
version of it. It was really interesting and a really great night and from that
it just opened up a whole new world for me.
How so?
Because I realized how important
events like these were. Growing up, as girls, in sex education, you don’t talk
about women’s pleasure. The way that you talk about sex is, that it is
completely for reproduction. I didn’t know that women could cum until the third
person that I had sex with and then I was like, “Oh, now I see why everyone’s
so obsessed with sex, I get it now! That makes sense!”. It probably took me two
years of being sexually active to realize that it was actually nice and not
painful. And then still, we use porn as education so I think there’s so much
shame and stigma around women’s pleasure. We should also have that space of
self-worth and be like, “no, I should get to cum as well”. Sex isn’t just for
the man. We should open up that discussion and if you can sexually empower
yourself, it will spread into so many different aspects of your life as well.
It’s a beautiful, positive thing and we should all be talking about it more so
that there’s less fear around it. In Britain, especially, we’re all quite
intimidated by it, we don’t talk about it at all.
What’s your goal in organizing these events?
Kim and I always say that if you
affect one person in a positive manner, then you’ve done your job. If you can
give them the confidence, the skills and the tools to take something away and
put in into their life in a positive sense, then that’s great. That’s what we
want to do, we want to empower women and men as well. It’s not just women.
Probably speaking from my experience, as a bisexual cis woman, I always think
of heterosexual couples, but there’s obviously a beautiful broad range spectrum
of people who now feel comfortable to be exactly who they want to be. We’ve
still got miles to go but there’s a lot more communication and acceptance about
it than there used to be. For our event, we’ve organized a non-hetero
speed-dating. It’s genderless, you basically just get numbered randomly. It’s
quite nice because as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, speed-dating can almost
alienate you, it’s very cis. So this is quite fun because it’s not about
speed-dating to meet someone, you’re just gonna have a talk and you’re gonna
have a laugh. We’ve got crazy questions and Mandy is hosting it (The Empowered
Woman Project). It’s just a good time and if you like someone or you want to
hang out with someone a bit more, we have a little postal service and you can
write that person a little letter. We’ll then give it to them so that it’s not
awkward between you and that person.
Do you think consent isn’t taught enough in schools? Were you taught
about consent?
Not at all, what we were taught
about was just, “don’t go talk to the old creepy man by himself”, “if your ball
runs away, just leave it there”. We were taught about rape in a very severe
sense and I guess back in my day, when I was kid, what society now sees as
sexual harassment, sexual abuse and domestic abuse in relationships, they were
completely different things before. For us in school, consent just wasn’t a
thing. Essentially, they’d just give you some helplines and make you feel
responsible for whatever happened to you. And it’s absolutely not your fault. This
is still a thing today, where schools will tell girls not to wear short dresses
instead of teaching boys how to control themselves and not harass them. There’s
a really good project called the RAP project, they’ve gone to a couple schools
in Scotland giving consent workshops and proper sex education. They take the
girls and boy aside and teach them how to respect each other and boundaries.
So sex education in schools definitely still has a long way to go
right?
Completely, especially in British
ones. In our society, there’s still so much sexual shame. In Germany, they have
informative articles about sex in teen magazines and they also give out handy
sexual tips. It’s more openly spoken about and for us, we still get nervous
about nudity and sex education is so clinical. There’s nothing about LGBTQ+,
only now are schools starting to implement that. And that’s good, but it should
have happened a long time ago. There should also be more focus around STI’s. If
there wasn’t so much shame around STI’s, maybe we’d be more open about them and
people would catch them less. A lot of people don’t know you can catch them
orally. I have a mate whose mom is a sexual health nurse, and he didn’t know
that.
Sex education should be more
accessible for children to actually want to listen and pay attention. If I ever
choose to have children, I would like to be open with them. A lot of kids are
sheltered too much. We have to be more open with them and bridge that
communication gap. If you put barriers up, that’s how you get all these
misconceptions. By making everything more accessible and creating sex positive
platforms and communities, young confused teenagers can look them up and go
“I’m not alone, I’m not weird, I’m not dirty, this is perfectly normal”.
Do you think most people still view sex as a taboo subject?
Yeah, I think so. We’re a lot
more lax than we used to be but we’ve still got a lot of work to do. Sex comes
from self-worth and asking people for what we want. And it’s just been tainted and
portrayed in such a fictitious way in society no thanks to porn and movies. We
need to be more honest and talk about it better.
What are your views on the porn industry?
I like ethical porn and porn made
by women. I can’t speak for other women or men but I think it would be better
if we made more realistic porn with everyday bodies. The bodies we usually see
don’t paint a good picture. It’s a difficult subject because there are some
dark depths to this industry but at the same time the people in it are free to
do as they choose. We need to relook at what it actually promotes because at
the moment I think it can be very harmful. We need stronger sanctions on under
18’s watching it because you can access everything so easily on the internet.
One of the talks in your event involves “the orgasm gap and what to do
with it”. Why is this talk particularly important and what are your views on
this subject?
The inequality between
heteronormative couples in the bedroom is ridiculous. Not that many women
orgasm from sex and a very small percentage actually orgasm from penetrative
sex. There are so many other ways to have an orgasm and that’s the beautiful
thing about women. We can derive pleasure from so many different things and in
so many different ways. It’s really exciting but you have to have the courage
and confidence to play with that. The key is to trust and communicate with your
partner. We all deserve to have an orgasm and ask for it.
What do you think is the best way to fight the gap?
The best thing to do is to equip
women with tools to do so. It doesn’t happen overnight and having the
confidence doesn’t either. Mentally, you should always tell yourself, “no, I
deserve this”. So, having confidence in yourself and finding the right way to
communicate with your partner are the best ways to bridge the gap. It’s easier
said than done and there are a lot of trials and errors. But if you are with
someone you can trust, give it a try. And if the person isn’t interested or doesn’t
want to listen to you, they’re not worth your time.
Do you think you’ll do more of these events?
Definitely, Kim and I are going
to tour in the UK and do that. I’ve got my own projects that I’m going to be
working on. I’ve got an artist residency which I’m quite excited about. I’m
going to be working with Mandy on more of her projects which is cool. She does
really big events, she’ll be doing a feminist weekend next year in March.
There’s going to be dinner, workshops, talks and discussions dedicated to
women. I’m looking forward to that. It’s nice to do things that you’re
passionate about. It’s difficult and I’m very lucky to get to do that. So… be
happy and if you are lucky enough to be doing what you love, do it. And, be a
good fuckin' person. That’s it. That’s my Ted Talk (laughs).
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