Last night saw the first in what will hopefully be a series of Lightning Talks on feminist issues, organized by the Bath Gender Equality Network. For those of you not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks are conference presentations that are just 5 minutes long. Some people (me included) can carry an hour-long presentation, but a lot of people can’t, and in any case you don’t want to learn by being put in front of an audience for that long. Lightning Talks give the audience an opportunity to sample a lot of different ideas in one evening, and they give the presenters a shot at getting before an audience in a fairly low stakes way.

There was a wide variety of talks in the program, including sexism in anarchist communities, women in movies, and dating while trans. It wasn’t all women either. Daryn Carter of Bristol Pride explained why such events are still needed; my boss, Berkeley Wilde, talked about the work of The Diversity Trust; and there was a presentation on the problem of male suicide. Some of the presenters were obviously nervous, and the tech set-up didn’t allow for presenters to see their slides except by turning round to look at the big screen, which didn’t help. But most of the presentations were pretty good. A couple tried to address issues that were too complex for five minutes, and one or two clearly hadn’t timed their material in advance, but mostly it was a good evening.

The star of the show was undoubtedly Alice Denny, who is a superb poet. I have been lucky enough to see her on several occasions over the years now, and her performances are getting much more assured and sophisticated. She had the Bath audience spellbound and in tears.

While I was there I got to meet some of the women from the Bath branch of the Women’s Equality Party. We are talking. This is promising.

Well done Ceri et all for organizing a great show. Thank you Alice for being wonderful. And thanks also to Sophie for revealing some of her experiences of online dating. I am so using some of those in my talk for the PopSex conference in September.