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Woman's Hour: Nazanin's sentence and women's rights in Iran, The Barbizon Hotel, Orgasms

Nazanin's sentence and women's rights in Iran, The Barbizon Hotel, Orgasms

BBC Radio 4 - Woman's Hour, Nazanin's sentence and women's rights in Iran, The Barbizon Hotel, Orgasms

Richard Ratcliffe talks to Emma Barnett about Nazanin's latest sentence, how the family is coping, and what he thinks needs to happen to secure her freedom.

We now know that Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe has been sentenced to another year in an Iranian prison, plus she's banned from travelling abroad. This time she's charged with spreading propaganda. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, has not seen his wife since her initial imprisonment in 2016 and is living in London with their six year old daughter Gabriella. He maintains that his wife was imprisoned as leverage for a debt owed by the UK over its failure to deliver tanks to Iran in the seventies that had been paid for. Meanwhile, it's been announced that  Iran will sit on a UN committee on women's rights, yet it has a poor track record when it comes to rights for women. Rana Rahimpour is from the BBC's Persian Service. 

Built in 1927 The Barbizon hotel was home for the ‘modern woman’ seeking a career in the arts. It offered young women a safe and respectable place to stay while they launched their careers and looked for a husband. Students from the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School lived on two floors of the Barbizon while they learned typing and shorthand. Powers’ models and guest editors for Mademoiselle magazine also stayed there.  Many went on to writing careers, including Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Gael Greene, and Meg Wolitzer. In her novel “The Bell Jar,” Plath fictionalized the Barbizon as the Amazon, including details from her fateful last night at the hotel, when she threw every article of clothing she had brought to the city.  Its 688 tiny pink feminine boudoirs also housed actresses including Grace Kelly and Liza Minelli and Phylicia Rashad. Some residents became known as “the women” – those who checked in and never checked out.  Emma talks to Paulina Bren, writer and historian and Professor at Vassar College in New York, and author of The Barbizon- The New York Hotel That Set Women Free.

It’s reported that during sex only 20% of women orgasm from penetration alone.  Results from a nationally representative study of 4,000 adult women in the United States, and published in the science journal Plos One, identified Angling, Rocking, Shallowing and Pairing – four previously unnamed techniques women use to make vaginal penetration more pleasurable.  To discuss these terms and other ways women can achieve orgasm, Emma is joined by Dr. Devon Hensel Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Indiana, and Tracey Cox, sex and relationships expert and author.

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