‘Do we want a world that reflects a kind of tech-bro zone? I don’t think so’: Suzie Miller on raising sons

Suzie Miller is an Australian playwright, novelist and lawyer. She has written more than 40 plays, including award-winning productions Prima Facie and Inter Alia – the latter adapted into a new novel examining issues with everything from modern masculinity to motherhood, and systemic justice within patriarchal structures. Her latest play, Strong is the New Pretty, premiered in Brisbane this month and tells the story of the birth of the women’s Australian rules football league, and how the AFLW went from a pipe dream to a sensation.

Suzie, you gave a speech recently about a “relay of women”. Can you expand on that? What I was talking about in that relay is that no one really makes change on their own. Basically, we are generations and generations of women who have been running our leg of a relay and we pass the baton on to the next one when we’re exhausted or when we’ve run out of capacity and someone else takes that baton. We might pick it up later and run again. But I feel like generational change comes from women being united and seeing the big picture and working together, not as a hero or heroine’s journey where one person gets to the top and everyone’s like, “That’s the person who did it.”

My new play, Strong Is the New Pretty, is really me recognising the underground relay that’s going on behind the scenes all the time. It was really extrapolated into this little microcosm of how the AFLW came to be. It’s an analogy for how women really do make change, and I wanted to study how that came about because I think that’s exactly the great skill that women can use to really effect change.

I think what’s really interesting with the AFLW is all these women at grassroots level who’d been trying for generations to get women to [be able to] play football, all of the young girls who really begged to be able to play and their mothers who agitated. Suddenly, there’s a woman on the AFL Commission. Then there are two women on the AFL Commission, and suddenly these men are confronted with their “no” because it was a hard “no” about women’s [Australian rules] football. “It won’t sell. No one wants to see it. There’s no merch attached to it, and also this is a boys’ zone. This is a men’s zone. It’s a hard no. There’s no space for it.”

Was there a sense that women should be “feminine” and shouldn’t play sport? Oh, absolutely. “Why would women want to do it anyway? Won’t they get hurt?” I mean, lots of men get hurt. But it was just that it was an invisible possibility. I got invited to the grand final of the very first AFLW. I grew up in Melbourne where AFL is the landscape. I didn’t really engage with it … because I used to say, “but there are no girls playing. I don’t understand why we just watch boys run around. Why can’t we watch girls run around?” It never occurred to me to say that women should play. I just thought, “I’m not interested in boy stuff.”

The other reason I wrote this play is I thought this is what a “fair go” means. It’s about finding people who are left out and including them. And I feel like Australia has this incredible mantra, which is the fair go, but we’ve let it die and be a bit kind of co-opted by the far right. We’ve also not modernised it for contemporary society and I think the rest of the world is going in a completely other direction.

Let’s bunker down and grab our mantra, which really does define Australia in so many ways, and actually interrogate it for a contemporary society and be proud of it and use it in the way that it’s meant to be used – which is about widening it, not about closing it down; which is about inviting anyone who is “other” into that conversation and recognising and having empathy for their experience so that we actually are the community we could be, which is a very rich, culturally rich and inclusive society. Rather than letting the mantra die, [we should be] re-energising it and actually making it our point of difference in a world that’s becoming very polarised.

You have a new novel coming out – an adaptation of a play that you wrote called Inter Alia. How did you convert a play into a novel?

It was so much fun to convert it into a novel because I could say all the things and write all the things that you can’t fit into a 90-minute play. The next iteration of that for me was, well, what? Where are men in this conversation? I was very adamant about protecting women, and I thought, if you’re a mother of a boy, what happens if you’re a feminist and you’ve raised your son to be a feminist and informed and respectful of women? And what happens when they reach those teen years and they’re a bit beyond the reach of their mothers?

So I had to dig deep into the manosphere and into what online porn is doing to young men in particular, but also to young women and how it’s basically robbing them of their own sexuality in terms of dictating to them what sex is, what intimacy is, and so on. And I wrote this play with a main character as a woman called Jessica Parks, who’s a judge in London.

“I think what is really horrendous is that young people have access to porn 24/7”

The story is about more than just her. It’s also about how you raise a feminist son. I was fascinated by how do we make generational change in terms of violence against women. What happens with young boys is they get to a certain age of about 14 or 15, where their peer group really kicks in and really impacts how they think and what they feel, but also they’re being given a different message to the one that perhaps their feminist mother has instilled in them. So there’s a dissonance about what they’re hearing at school among their mates and what they would tell their mother.

I think what is really horrendous is that young people have access to porn 24/7, and I’m not just talking regular porn. I’m talking pretty aggressive porn, and a lot of it incredibly difficult in terms of how it portrays women. The 24/7 access, with no interrogation and no conversation around what the paradigm of porn is, is really detrimental to young people’s sexuality and also to the way that young boys and young girls relate and how they discover their sexuality together.

That’s where my call-out is – to fathers, to godfathers – anyone who’s in a mentoring role or has a relationship with a young teen boy needs to have the responsibility to reach out and have a male-to-male conversation about the concepts around porn and the dangers of porn and “Don’t think that what you see is normalised or what’s expected of you in your sex life”. I think that it can only come from other men who can say, “I remember when I was your age, this wasn’t around, but I know what it means to try to impress your peer group.”

“Do we want a world that reflects a kind of tech-bro zone? I don’t think so.”

At a certain age, men need to step in. That’s when they come to the fore and they don’t just talk about their conquests or all their successes. I think it’s hard for men to talk about the things that they haven’t got right or the rejections they’ve had. But I think it’s also hard for men to talk to their sons about sex and porn.

The number of men who have contacted me to say “as soon as I saw that play, I went home and I walked my son around the block the next day and had that conversation”. And I think, you know, you might have saved your son from some real confusion and potentially lost him to a sort of manosphere zone. You might also have saved some girl somewhere that’s going to actually date your son or even just be at a party drunk with him, where he doesn’t understand the boundaries. I say this with sympathy because we’re expecting our boys to disentangle toxic masculinity that’s all around them, and to self-educate through the internet because we’re not giving them a structure around it.

So how do we expect a 15-year-old boy who’s trying to live up to his peers’ expectations to understand all of that, detangle it, and then come up with a rational understanding? We can’t possibly expect that, and yet we do. We get a shock when they come out at 18 or 19 with something that we think is completely untenable. And you think, well, what influences have they had? Just because they’re coming home and saying “I love you” to their mother every night doesn’t mean that they’re actually not in that bro-zone themselves.

AI can’t write a play that makes change like that, can it?

Well, it can’t at the moment. I’m very, very strong on the human side of writing, and I think that great art and great stories are born of the insight that someone has of putting things together and juxtaposing things, and suddenly seeing how it has a structural kind of content to it that comes together because you’re grappling and grappling with it.

You could ask AI the same question and it would come up with a very rational answer, I’m sure, but it wouldn’t have the guts of the reason, and it wouldn’t have the guts of the experience, and it wouldn’t be able to extrapolate from that feeling into a systemic change capacity.

That’s my view. Obviously, at some stage or other, that will probably change. I don’t know. It depends on how we manage AI now, and I do think that we are a digital community. It is part of who we are. It’s almost an extension of ourselves. Whether we like it or not, we have been shaped and we have relied on technology and digital and digital works for so many years now.

Do we want a world that reflects a kind of tech-bro zone? I don’t think so, and I think that the terror of that is it undoes so much of the good work we’ve done because in railing against a world that is a patriarchal, male-dominated world, we’ve actually shown moments of great joy and great light and great capacity, and women have contributed incredibly to shaping the world and to giving power to girls and to people from a non-dominant paradigm or non-dominant culture. So I think what will happen with AI if it’s fed everything mainly from a tech-bro systemic kind of view of the world, then we’ll end up with that world. Do we want to live in that world? I don’t really want to.

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