It’s ten past three on a Thursday afternoon and Shappi Khorsandi is talking nether regions. “I spoke to a comedian the other day who is 26 and he has never seen a woman with pubic hair,” the British-Iranian comedian says, enunciating incredulously. “They just haven’t seen it. Just the very idea, it’s like: ‘Whoa! Why would you have that, why would you keep that on?’
“And I know young women who are horrified at the idea … I think pornography has made it look like women do not have pubic hair. And they do.”
And that’s why we’re discussing bikini lines – or the lack thereof – at her kitchen table in Ealing, west London, over tea, bananas and glasses of coke. Since January, Khorsandi has been president of the British Humanist Association, which campaigns for high-quality sex and relationships education (SRE) to be made statutory. For her it’s the ubiquity of online porn that makes proper education so critical.
“We have to be much more open about what we talk about and really understand the difference between fantasy and reality,” she says. “Every fantasy, every kink between consenting adults is fine, but I don’t like the idea of any teenager watching pornography and not having an outlet to talk about what they’ve seen.
“A very young friend told me when she first started sex she just started acting out porn stuff because she thought that’s what sex was meant to be. It’s said so often, but there are so many pressures on kids these days and they’re subjected to so much damaging nonsense on the internet, on TV, on their phones. If we don’t give them all the information they need to stay healthy and happy and safe, we’re letting them down.”
The last Labour government had been set to make personal, social, health, and economic education (PSHE) – which includes SRE – statutory, but dropped the plan to get its schools bill passed before the 2010 election. After that Michael Gove and Nicky Morgan rejected calls for statutory PSHE, most recently in February this year. Last week the new education secretary, Justine Greening, told the education select committee she was looking at the possibility, but was yet to reach a formal view. Figures published by the Department for Education last month reveal a 29% drop in teaching time given to PSHE in English secondary schools between 2011 and 2015.
“The emotions around sex need to be talked about in a safe place and I can’t think of a safer place than school,” says Khorsandi, mother to Cassius, nine, and Genevieve, three. “We need to let our guard down and be less prudish. You’re not ruining a childhood by talking about sex and relationships.”
What was her own sex education like? “Rudimentary. Something about a rabbit and then some diagram. When I was 11 this girl called Paula told me you got one baby if you had sex for five minutes, and twins if you had sex for 10 minutes. At 11 I want my children to be a lot more clued up than that.”
Born to non-religious parents in Iran, Khorsandi, 43, grew up in Ealing after the family fled to London following the Islamic revolution. Her Edinburgh show this year, which she’s now touring, sees her “sending a love letter to her adopted land”.
This summer her first novel, Nina Is Not OK, which explores issues around alcohol and consent, was published.
“There were incidences when I was younger, one in particular, where if I had known the law I would have gone to the police,” she says. “And I’m so glad for this generation that historical rape cases are being brought forward, and people are being charged. And that women who make a complaint after being raped when drunk are taken seriously.
“I don’t think it happens more often, I think that my generation just ‘put it down to experience’ … you weren’t walking down an alley, you weren’t dragged down by a stranger and therefore you haven’t been raped.
“So in my book my character and what happened to her was a way for me to create someone to rescue from that sort of situation and give her that awareness that this was wrong.”
Khorsandi got involved with the BHA after meeting its chief executive, Andrew Copson, while appearing in fellow comedian Robin Ince’s Christmas show, Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, several years ago.
She has spent her life countering assumptions, including in the media, that she must be a Muslim. “I’ll be at someone’s house tucking into a pork pie and someone will go: ‘Oh, should you be eating that?’” she says. “What a bizarre assumption to make – you don’t even know my name, you just looked at the colour of my skin.”
She became a BHA patron and was delighted to be invited to be president when physicist Jim Al-Khalili stepped down. “I really believe in the campaigning they do. It just felt like a really warm and lovely thing to be asked to do.”
Another key part of that campaigning is against faith schools. “Faith off!” says Khorsandi. “I support parents in raising their children with whatever faith they want. But in a state-funded school there is no room for exclusion.
“We wouldn’t expect that in our health service or our fire service – ‘these fire engines will only go out to people whose favourite colour is purple.’ A public service is a public service.”
The negative consequences of faith schools “know no bounds”. “So much is made about how increasingly segregated we are becoming as a country, and that has been more apparent in the last few weeks than it has in a long time,” she says, referring to the reported rise in hate crime since the EU referendum. “It’s as clear as day to me that religiously segregated faith schools are one of the key drivers of division.”
News of Theresa May’s intention to lift the 50% cap on the number of pupils new faith free schools can choose based on religion has been condemned by the BHA as a “catastrophic setback”.
Khorsandi’s own school days at a London comprehensive were marred by learning difficulties that were not picked up: dyslexia that was recognised only at university (the first essay she submitted came back with a single comment: “Are you dyslexic?”) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which was diagnosed last year, after a spell of therapy.
“I enjoyed primary school very much, I hated secondary school with a passion,” she says. “It was full of really scary kids who picked on me. I was ignored by teachers and I came out with four GCSEs … they just sort of left me by the wayside.”
Getting an A in her English A-level, with the help of a teacher who spotted her talent for writing, changed her life: “I used to go and sit with her at lunchtimes and she’d go through things with me.” She went on to study drama, theatre and television at the University of Winchester.
Is it less likely today that problems like hers would go unnoticed? “I think you have to have a school and parents that are on the ball,” she says. “You can’t just expect a teacher of a class of 30 or 40 to pick up on every little thing.”
A few days after our interview, the women and equalities select committee published a report detailing widespread sexual harassment and violence in schools. “Of the 90-odd pieces of written evidence submitted to the inquiry, only one didn’t recommend statutory SRE,” Khorsandi points out in an email. “A comedian could only dream of the kind of approval ratings this policy has, so what is stopping the government I do not know.”
