Hi, I’m Maeve Marsden and you’re listening to Queerstories.
Before we get into it, on July 18, 2020, I’ll be making a tentative return to the stage with three socially-distanced mini shows at Giant Dwarf in Sydney. The 5:30pm show will be livestreamed with Auslan interpreters, so if you’re listening to this podcast from regional Australia or overseas, you can book for the livestream at giantdwarf.com.au. It’s a pay what you feel situation, including a free ticket for those without funds. The streamed show will stay online after the event for people who have other things to be doing with their Saturday night.
And now, Nina Oyama is a stand-up comic, writer, actress and worm girl who needs you and loves you and will hold you in her arms, upon request. She has appeared as Courtney on Utopia on ABC, has performed all around Australia, and has written for radio, stage, and TV, including The Project and Tonightly with Tom Ballard. She’s the co-creator of comedy web series The Angus Project which was part of ABC’s Fresh Blood 2017 initiative, and last year, Screen Australia selected Nina to be a recipient of the Talent LA Grant. Nina performed this story at Brisbane Comedy Festival.
Nina
Hello everybody! So, today I’m going to talk about the time Sky News did a hit piece on me because I said that Scott Morrison would suck people off for Jesus. [audience cheers]
That’s pretty much the story you guys, see you later, bye! Nah. Let’s go back to the beginning. So, the story I’m telling today, starts in a place called hell. Sorry – I mean twitter. It starts off on twitter dot com. You guys heard of it? Stop laughing, I’m trying to tell a story! This is really cool coz I can’t see anyone, I can just hear people laughing, it’s very surreal.
About a year ago, I went viral on twitter for doing a tweet about cum. And it changed my entire life. I’m not even joking. The tweet was ‘you say: we’re trying for a child. I hear: my husbands been doing big huge cums in my pussy’.
Anyway, please follow me @ninaoyama.
A lot of heterosexuals seemed to relate especially, and it was shared on heaps of meme pages and also Reddit, which was very good, I made a lot of new friends, and it was so big that people from my high school started messaging me to be like ‘oh Nina you’re like a real comedian now!’ At this point I had been on the ABC for like three years but no one watched.
It was also a pretty big career milestone but I couldn’t call my parents about it. I couldn’t be like ‘hey Mum, I just did a viral tweet! Oh about what, oh never mind. This is a prank call!’
When you do a viral tweet, you get lumped into the category of that tweet, so I became part of Twitter called Cum Twitter. Which is exactly as great as it sounds. Whenever I log on, people just send me more cum tweets. It’s such a great currency for joy. It also meant that because I was part of Cum Twitter I had to do more tweets about cum and stuff. People were expecting it, you know? So I had to do more disgusting tweets, and then people would like the tweets, and then I’d be like ‘yay’ because I have low self-esteem.
Anyway this is a story that starts with cum tweets and ends with death threats. Which is, like, not the natural progression of cum tweets. But it does sound like a cool band name. Like, ‘Hey guys, we’re the Cum Tweet Death Threats…anyway, here’s Wonderwall.’
‘Today, is gonna be the…’
So, one night in December 2019, I was having an early dinner with a friend. That’s right, I have a friend. I was having dinner with a friend whose best friend from primary school works for the Scott Morrison Government, and my friend was like ‘Hey Nina, do you wanna know the latest goss from Parliament House?’ And I was like, ‘Um, does a bear shit in the woods?’ Kidding, I said yes because I’m not a psychopath that only speaks in riddles.
Anyway, I was really excited for parliament gossip because I used to work for a political satire show called Tonightly, did anyone watch Tonightly? Just kidding, of course not. What? Oh my god, it’s like the 10 people who watched our show! Thanks for coming. Anyway, I used to work for a political satire show, and when you work in that kind of newsy comedy world, you hear a lot of salacious stuff that comes out of Parliament House, things like allegedly Tony Abbott had an affair. Or allegedly, Bill Shorten had an affair. Both sides. It’s the ABC training.
I actually identify as tri bi – biracial, bisexual and bi partisan. Nah just kidding, I’m left-wing as fuck. Anyway I was really excited – um I have to say ‘allegedly’ before this entire set because I’m too poor to get sued – but I do like hearing gossip because some of the gossip is real facts. Like Malcolm Turnbull used to run a blog from the point of view of his puppy dog. It’s as cringey as it sounds. It was like ‘Today I woofed all the way to the park. Father kept me on a long leash.’ Like, even the dog sounds rich.
There’s another one, Greg Cunt, sorry, fuck, health minister Greg Hunt, at 4 am he liked a porn tweet from @bbwcumpumper69 and then everyone was like ‘What the hell, Greg’ and he was like ‘No, I got hacked!’ and Australian Federal Police conducted a full-on investigation that took months and so much time and resources and guess what they found? He wasn’t hacked! He likes beautiful big women cum pumps. That’s what BBW stands for. So I was really excited to find out some cool gossip from the Morrison government, and I was expecting something really bizarre or sexy.
But it turns out that there was no gossip of that nature because Scott Morrison is really fucking boring. But I did – allegedly – find out two things which really freaked me out. I have to stress this is information is from a friend of a friend, so it may not be reliable, but I believe it to be true, because I believe men. I’m so radical.
The first thing is that the Morrison government apparently bullies any Liberal Party members who aren’t Christian. They’re like, ‘You can’t sit with us… on Wednesdays we wear crucifixes’. But the other thing which is somehow worse is that allegedly Scott Morrison and three of his closest advisors will occasionally go into a small room in Parliament House, and lock the door and stay in the room for 20 minutes at a time and no one is allowed to go in or out and no one from outside can contact them, even Liberal Party members. And when they exit the room, they have a full agenda and a full plan for the day. This rattled me quite a lot because this is not democracy, that’s like four cunts in a room doing random shit, and making decisions for the country. And I didn’t like it. I was also quite drunk by the end of the dinner and I also had to catch a plane that night. And I was just thinking about, in the car to the airport I was thinking, ‘What should I tweet about this moment?’
I was on the plane and just before it took off, I was like, I’ve got it. So I tweeted: ‘my friends mate works for the morrison govt and says they are like a super christian clique & they bully anyone who is not christian. they also said morrison & co keep going into rooms with closed doors to do weird secret christian shit, like suck each other off for jesus & stuff’
Send tweet. And then I put my phone on flight mode and I went into the air for two hours. And I did not know that during those two hours, a right-wing pundit had screen capped the tweet and disseminated it amongst conservatives on Twitter in Australia, crediting me as a proper ABC journalist. So by the time I had landed, I turned my phone off flight mode, and it just exploded with notifications from people being like ‘Excuse me, our Prime Minister does not suck dicks for Jesus’, and I was kinda like hmmm the lady doth protest too much.
I thought it was pretty funny so I was like, this is cool. But then the next night at around 10 pm, I got a text that was like ‘Hey Nina you’re on Sky News right now’. Do you guys know what Sky News is? Of course you do, it’s Brisbane, it’s like your main channel isn’t it? I’m sorry, oh no, now I’ve lost them. Just kidding, I love Brisbane. Sky News, for those who don’t know, is like the normal news but racist. Like it’s owned by the Murdoch press so of course it’s racist – that’s a real tinfoil hat thing to say, like ‘the Murdoch press, they started Brexit and they voted Trump in and’ but they are.
Anyway, I turn on Sky News and there’s a reporter reading out every single tweet I’ve ever done about a politician sucking a dick. Which, it turns out, there’s quite a lot. And I’m going to read you my favourite one now. It’s from 2018 when Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister and it says, ‘I heard Malcolm Turnbull got his back bone removed so he could suck his own dick’. Which I’m like quite proud of, coz it’s like a very strange Venn diagram of like Marilyn Manson joke and Malcolm Turnbull being shit joke. Anyway political satire in Australia’s going real well guys. And the reporter that was reading it, his name is Chris Kenny, he’s like a right-wing conservative pundit and he’s most famous because the Chaser photoshopped a picture of him having sex with a dog on the Chaser’s tv show. And probably no one would’ve seen it, but then he sued them, and then it was on the front page of a bunch of newspapers in Sydney. If you don’t know what Chris Kenny looks like, he looks like his origin story was he was a normal person that got bitten by a radioactive egg. And he retained none of the powers but all of the whiteness. Did someone just smash a glass? Anyway, when he sued the Chaser, he sued them because he didn’t want his young son to see the picture and be ashamed of him. But his ‘young son’ was like 22 years old and he loved the picture. He loved the picture so much he wrote a 500-word article about it for junkee.com. And the last sentence is truly like the cherry on the shit sundae, it was like ‘I’m not ashamed of my dad because of the picture where he fucks a dog. I’m ashamed of my dad because he’s a huge bigot.’
So at this point, I still thought it was pretty funny that a newsreader was reading my dick tweets on the news. I even thought it was funny when he said I hated real Australians, because I don’t hate real Australians, some of my best parents are real Australians. But the next morning, this video was uploaded to Facebook which we all know is where all the racist baby boomers live. They saw this and they went freaking crazy. I received so much online abuse, I was harassed on every platform, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, I was sent death threats. Initially, I was kinda like ‘hell yeah’ coz I really like attention, but by the third week of deleting ‘kill yourself’ tweets from my bikini pictures on Instagram, I was like ‘oh, this is… I’m tired’. Also, I just need to tell you, most of these people’s profile pictures were cars. I actually have this theory that if you’re racist on Facebook, you can tell because you’ll either have your profile picture as the Australian flag or a Japanese motor vehicle.
But anyway, I think it is weird though because I got sucked up into the culture wars. And as much as the people on the right were proclaiming their hate for me, people on leftist Twitter were really complimenting me on my bravery. I felt like Bernie Sanders, like I was starting a revolution, one dick tweet at a time. But I really wasn’t, I was just trying to be crass and dunk on the Prime Minister because he’s shit, and I think he’s bad, and I don’t have enough time to explain why but you guys know why.
After about a month, all the attention completely subsided, and it was kind of sad. I was like, ‘What happened to my death threats?’ But I do think that kind of culture wars hysteria, it’s something very modern. We chose the media we want to see and that validates our pre-existing opinions, and we get very angry or defensive or whatever it’s cool to be angry or defensive about at that moment, and it’s just an endless cycle that goes on and on. And I guess, maybe in some way, it’s like we’re all locked in a room, just sucking each other off for Jesus. Thank you, guys, see you later, bye.
Maeve
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