Would you like to have sex? The question Jess Hill wishes more people would ask

Would you like to have sex with me is a simple question, but Jess Hill, author, advocate, educator and investigative journalist, wishes it was asked more often.

It’s what sexual consent should sound like, explains Hill at our lunch and also in her new three-part SBS series, Asking For It. “Consent is in the zeitgeist,” says Hill. It’s also in the courts and in the news thanks to Saxon Mullins, the woman who successfully advocated for NSW’s Affirmative Consent Bill and was the complainant in a highly publicised rape trial.

Mullins is in the show, as is Grace Tame, advocate for survivors of childhood sexual abuse and 2021 Australian of the Year, along with other victim/survivors of sexual trauma, to help spell out exactly what consent is.

Then-NSW attorney-general Mark Speakman and Saxon Mullins on the day new sexual consent laws took effect last year.Credit: Peter Rae

“We need to know what a mutual consent culture looks like and ask how we talk to boys and men about it, so they don’t feel like they’re the enemy,” Hill says. “We need to find the words that help articulate feelings for men ... If we are really going to address this – they need to be part of the conversation.

“If someone is drunk and confused, it can be hard to know the language around consent, it is a nuanced negotiation. But consent should be what Saxon models ... It is about respect, kindness, and a loving empathic approach.”

Hill knows a lot about survivorhood. She spent four years investigating domestic violence in Australia, which culminated in her book, See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, which won the $50,000 Stella Prize in 2020. An SBS series followed. She spent much of the Arab Spring years from 2010 to 2012 giving voice to the oppressed in the Middle East as a researcher/producer for ABC Radio’s PM under presenter Mark Colvin’s wing, and again at The Global Mail, which sent her to Beirut as a foreign correspondent.

Then, in Lebanon in 2012, her life turned upside down, literally, when she had a grand mal seizure on a plane. Next, a Beirut surgeon removed a tumour from her brain. She was 29. When The Global Mail made her redundant, she still had staples in her skull from the surgery.

We meet at Bathers Coogee, a new restaurant at the south end of the Sydney beach, where we both live. She orders the roast pumpkin, lentil, coriander and currant salad with chicken, while I have the school whiting tacos, and we share a rocket parmigiano salad. We both order pretty pink watermelon mimosas because we both understand the spectre of living with a brain tumour and feel life is worth celebrating.

Mimosas with author Jess Hill at Bathers Coogee.Credit: Brook Mitchell

My husband lived for a decade with the same sort of low-grade tumour as Hill, and was around the same age at diagnosis and died at 41 after four brain surgeries. Hill is 39, and has agreed to speak to me about her cancer “because there’s still a stigma around brain cancer” and it would feel “cagey” or “dishonest” to ignore it — instead, advocating for those with brain tumours, as she has done on behalf of survivors of all forms of sexual violence.

For almost a decade, her cancer was kept at bay but, in February 2020, one of her biannual scans revealed a spot on her brain that concerned her oncologist. They waited out the COVID-19 years, and hoped it would be nothing. Hill continued her work, writing essays on the #MeToo movement, speaking engagements, living with her partner David, a therapist, and relishing the joy of their daughter, Stevie, 5, who has just started kindy.

But soon she suffered massive personality changes, and very severe depression. She thought these were due to her work around domestic violence, and stress from lockdown. After another grand mal seizure and further scans, it turned out they were symptoms of tumour growth.

By December 2022, right at the end of shooting Asking For It, she was again under the surgeon’s knife, this time in Sydney.

“The day that I had the tumour cut out, I felt like the depression had been cut out of my brain entirely,” says Hill. “It was just such a discombobulation between what I was told by my surgeon in Beirut, which was ‘don’t worry, we got it all you’ll just need scans twice a year for the rest of your life’ ... that was confronting, but I did not have any sense that I was living with cancer.

“Most people, when they think of cancer, they think it is either a disease that will end up killing you or you will go into remission. But brain cancer never goes into remission. You live with the spectre of it for the rest of your life.

“I’ve been living in a bit of a fantasy land about it, which helped me to have a good 30s basically. I don’t think I could have taken it on at 29 when I got the tumour. It was too depressing. Reading things online, like median survival rate is seven years. It is massively stressful.”

School Whiting Tacos at Bathers Coogee.Credit: Brook Mitchell

What many won’t realise when Asking For It premieres next Thursday, is that Hill will be undergoing chemotherapy at the same time. She now sports a head wrap, to hide the surgical scars on her skull from her second surgery, and will most likely lose her lovely curly locks.

“I filmed the final episode pieces to camera the day before I went into surgery. I was doing the voice-overs while going through radiation and often when I’d look back at the footage of me on film, it was honestly like seeing a past life. It’s like, that person has no idea of what’s about to happen.”

Roast Pumpkin, salad and chicken at Bathers Coogee.Credit: Brook Mitchell

Hill has always taken an unconventional approach to her life and work. Raised with her brother on Sydney’s northern beaches, at 15, brimming with ambition, she tried to start her own women’s magazine. “I thought I’d be the Poppy King of magazines”, but the venture failed. She also had a brief stint as a child star on Breakers, a Network Ten drama in the late ’90s. “I played a character who died of bloody brain cancer. It was the easiest money I’ve ever earned laying on the hospital bed in the last episode but, yes, that is a horrible example of life imitating art.”

Without going to university, she got a job on a travel magazine, but found herself drawn to human stories about the staff in the five-star luxury hotels she was paid to stay in and write about. Her interest in social justice eventually led her to an entry-level job at the ABC as a transcriber.

“I don’t think of myself as a journalist anymore. I’m an educator and an advocate and I feel as if this is my life’s calling.”

When coffee comes, I realise we’ve spent more time talking cancer than consent, so we return to discussing her show.

It looks at how courts, and the entire adversarial system, may not be the best vehicle to deal with rape accusations, and looks to countries like South Africa, where a different sort of system is in use.

Jess Hill in 2020 when she won the Stella Prize.Credit: Louie Douvis

Her premise is sex is about power, and cautions about the pernicious impact of porn, given the increased access to it online for minors. She believes there is an urgent need for consent education in schools as called for by student Chanel Contos, whose petition kicked off much of the discussion on the topic.

“If we are going to talk about consent, and we’re going to invest a lot of money into it, but we’re going to be fine with kids under the age of 16 watching hardcore violent porn online, then we are pissing money down the drain.

“No boy wants to be the guy who rapes someone. And yet, there are young men raping women in predatory ways regularly. How do we talk to young guys before that happens? That’s what I don’t think we’ve done well yet.

“This whole idea of the so-called sexual liberation of the last 40 years made sex sort of like shaking someone’s hand. Dating apps really supercharged that. But while that’s been very liberating for some people, mainly men, it’s left others with no guidelines about what to expect when dating; no woman should be expected to do anal on a first date, but who is explaining this to women, when all boys see about sex is what is online. ”

She speaks about her work with her trademark candour, and brings the same matter-of-fact approach to her cancer.

“Cancer’s been really wild, interesting, and life-changing in a really amazing way. When it first happened, my first feeling about it was gratitude. Which was quite mysterious to me. Like, why are you grateful for having a brain tumour? Part of it is because I felt I would survive. But I was also wanting to learn lessons. It’s one thing to die from what you’re learning from, but I just felt I had access to a broader range of empathy and compassion for the human experience. There’s something about when you come right up to your own mortality. And life suddenly is really alive.

The bill for lunch at Bathers Coogee.

“As someone who’s just terminally curious, I feel as long as I can write about it, learn from it, whenever I can come back to fascination and curiosity about it, I feel like I can cope with cancer a lot better.

“I never felt it was unfair ... after living in the Middle East during the Arab revolutions and the aftermath, I’ve often thought, what the f--- is fair anyway?

“But recently, the oncologist assistant, who’s wonderful, said to me on the phone casually, oh you have at least 20 years ... but I’m not yet 40.

“What that says to me is I may have 20 years from now. My job is to do whatever I can to keep this tumour stable for as long as it takes for them to develop something new treatment-wise. Stable is good.”

While in treatment, she’s contemplating a new book on the idea of undoing patriarchy. Her next goal is to bring music, specifically playing the piano and singing, into her life.

“I love singing and music, and I’ve asked myself what would be my biggest regret if I didn’t pursue it, and it is singing. I hope I have the time. But you never know, maybe you don’t. ”

Asking For It, premieres April 20 on SBS.

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