In 2018, Elsa Couvrer performed a live show, ‘The Sensemaker’, in which she is interviewed by a robotic voice that asks her to strip. Because of COVID, she later put a recording online. Shortly after she took it down, she received an email from someone claiming to be a ‘feminist student’, so she sent them a link. The five minutes of nudity in the hour-long show soon went viral on xhamster, Pornhub, sub-reddits, and other sites catering to fans of ENFs (Embarrassed Naked Females, specifically women who don’t look like porn performers and aren’t having sex on camera). Attempting to take down these pirated recordings (some of them monetised) led her to engage online with the admins and the “*normal*” subscribers. 

Despite the attention-grabbing title, this show contains no nudity except for a brief glimpse of a still image, so if you were thinking of buying a ticket solely in the hope of seeing a naked woman, Elsa will encourage you to leave in the first few minutes. Instead, the audience was regaled with the comments of the men who tried to justify their collecting images of ENFs when confronted by an actual woman aware of their existence. (To be fair, at least one of these men has seen naked women, and not just online: he publishes a list of nude scenes at Edinburgh Fringe shows).

This may seem like kink-shaming creepy cyberstalkers for a few laughs (actually, a lot of laughs: it’s one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen and the audience loved it), but the show is also much-needed serious examination of an artist’s right to own their work and their image, and the vitally important issue of consent in what threatens to become a post-privacy world. Buy your tickets now.