Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
