Sick of seeing women portrayed as squeaky clean and virtuous, Jaya Beach-Robertson created PSUSY to prove they can be anything but. Liam Maguren sat down with her to talk through the ups and downs of creating a worldly web series.

If you haven’t come across the New Zealand web series PSUSY yet, I’m not sure how I can describe this homegrown comedy beast to you. A dumpster-plucked version of Broad City? A spiritual Kiwi cousin to German flick Wetlands? A women-led ‘Louie’ for the Tim & Eric generation?

I don’t think any of those comparisons accurately describe what writer-director Jaya Beach-Robertson has created, and that should excite anyone looking for something defiantly new in a Kiwi series. And nothing quite screams “fuck your sensibilities” like the opening minute which sees its two female leads awkwardly inserting acid-soaked tampons up their anuses.

Mere days after her HP48HOURS short Charlie Loves Me Most played at this year’s national grand final, Jaya explained her web series to me while I chugged a beer.

LIAM MAGUREN: How do you pronounce the title?

JAYA BEACH-ROBERTSON: “Pussy.”

Like the cat?

Or the vagina.

That could have been tricky to Google search.

Yeah. People were like “Why don’t you just spell it right?” Because I understand marketing.

What’s PSUSY about and why did you make it?

I was bored of the way women were portrayed on programmes I was watching. I have actively fought against any stereotype or any other depiction of young women I have seen on any media format and tried to present that.

What’s the #1 trait you’re bored with or that frustrates you the most?

Women being pretty, clean, and nice. We’re not. When was the last time you saw a depiction of a female character that made you go “Ewwwww”? Particularly in television. It’s better now, but there’s not a huge amount of really flawed, gross female characters. And we are very flawed and gross.

What is the worst thing a web series could do?

Bore me. I get really frustrated when people don’t take enough risks because it is the internet – you can NOT just baby it.

I don’t think PSUSY is the second coming of anything. I just wanted to make people feel something. Whether that’s disgust, if they hated it, if I offended them, at least I made them feel something rather than them saying “Huh, *murmur murmur* it’s a thing.”

It’s the internet – you can take risks. There are some amazing, amazing web series out there that are breaking ground on different fronts. High Maintenance was ground-breaking because it had a different approach to character, really authentic, and with amazing performances. It’s just fucking great.

Did you make this for a specific audience or were you looking to please yourself first?

I think there’s definitely an audience but I don’t think that audience is going to be solely in New Zealand. It is a niche thing that’s not going to connect with what gets put on New Zealand television.

A lot of people were saying I should send it to TVNZ but there is no way they would ever like that and I would never want to compromise my vision to suit their platform. It’s not the TVNZ platform. It’s not the Mediaworks platform. It’s for the internet generation. Maybe the 10:30pm time slot for Comedy Central.

If it was animated, I’d say Adult Swim would pick it up.

Yeah, if it was animated, it would be an Adult Swim kind of thing. Definitely. But that’s not New Zealand mainstream television, but I never really intended it to be for New Zealand television. I intended it to be seen internationally. That’s what I’m trying to do, but promoting a web series is very difficult.

Let’s say you get picked up by a network – do you have an idea of how this series could work in a longer time period?

Yeah, definitely. It would need some work, but if it got picked up by a network, it could suit a 23- 25-minute time slot.

There’s definitely a lot of uncharted territory I want to cover – we don’t know if they have jobs or what their family life is like – but without being too Auckland-centric. I don’t want it to be like…

*breaks out into improvised song*

This is New Zeeeeeealand,

Here’s our birds,

And here are our cities.

*end of song*

I want to explore their family lives but still feel quite generic. There’s a lot of room to play around with.

How long did it take to shoot all six episodes?

We shot an episode a day over – roughly – a six-week period on the weekends.

How long did it take to write?

It was a pretty tough process. It took me a really long time to find somebody else to do it with me because I was very specific about not casting another white person – that’s another thing I’m sick of seeing; these encore casts of white women – so I wanted someone that contrasted me not only in look but also in background. Diversity’s important to me.

That took a really long time. I eventually got Arzi Dehar on board who had never acted before. Her first scene was the grapefruit blowjob scene. She was SO good. I was amazed.

I was so fucking nervous as well. I was like “Oh my God, what am I doing? WHAT AM I DOING!? Why are these people doing what I say?”

Who did the foley for that scene?

That was actually ripped from an actual viral YouTube video called ‘The Grapefruit Technique’ – I do recommend you watch it. I wanted to email the lady and ask if I could use the audio for it, but I didn’t have time for that, so we just used it.

Were you constantly gaining confidence as a director as you were making it?

No. The first half of making this, I was shit scared. I was worried about portraying myself, getting these people to work for free, fucking them around, and using their time inefficiently. It was fucking hard.

The confidence came after I showed people who were outside of my friend group and hearing them telling me that they liked it.

Can you give me a taste of season two?

There’s a bit of incest. I also want to address the massive issue of consent and rape culture within the sporting industry.

I want to keep addressing big subjects which I only just started getting into in this first season. The bit about Andrew Judd in the episode Bernie; I felt that wasn’t pushed heavily enough, how he got ousted because he stood up for Māori seats in the council.

Watch PSUSY season one on Vimeo here.

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Video games are crafted, introspective experiences. Frequently though, these small worlds demand or produce skills that spillover into the physical world. Expert gamer and at-least-average real world person Dan Taipua sets out some of the better skill trees developed through a life of gaming.

1. Hooking up

2. Cooking up

4. Defacing

Once a player knows how a game works, the next thing to do is break it. Hacks and modifications are the thin bridge across the divide between users and developers, letting everyday people at the tools of game programming. It’s a bit like fan fiction, only less embarrassing and usually more illegal. Mods have been a gateway for many a future-legitimate IT worker, exposing them to the architecture of a program and allowing them to make adjustments they’d like to see, and the number of programmers I personally know who started their career by adding boobies to video games is as high as it is appalling. Because of the grey status of modification, most practitioners are either autodidacts or community educated through online forums and tutorials – and that kind of model for education persists into the realm of ‘real’ software management too.

5. It’s lit

Video games can’t compete with the lessons gained from non-fiction reading (nothing can), but they probably impart the same degree of real-world learning gained from fiction. Take for example Dynasty Warriors which is based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, one of the central works of classical Chinese literature and comparable to Homer’s Iliad in its treatment of history and legend.

Dynasty Warriors is a cartoonish beat-em-up with 1,000-hit combos and magical powerups, but the settings are sites of real historical battles during the tripartite state conflict between the kingdoms of Shu, Wei and Wu (Battle of Hulao Pass, Battle of Shiting etc.) and the playable characters are all based on historical generals and statesmen. If nothing else, it’s a window into the enduring appeal of nationalising mythology – which is a flag we we can all gather under.

6. Es ist feuer

The little worlds of gaming are often microcosms of our real world and, much like IRL, are coded in many languages. Years of exposure to foreign-developed games will gift the average gamer an ear for pronunciation, while the military themes of most AAA titles mean 12 year olds can recite the full NATO phonetic alphabet and Greek callsigns. The most impressive example of learning a new language came from a member of my Facebook game group, who learned musical notation via Super Mario Maker.

7. Physics

All video games are simulated worlds, insofar as they establish a set of virtual boundaries or quasi-physical laws in which a set of obedient interactions can take place. At the more serious end of this scale we have flight simulation programs, used to train actual pilots. At the less serious end we have play simulators like the recent Kerbal Space Program (2015) which operates with near-Newtonian dynamics for planetary orbit and rocketship design. So while most of us will never travel to space we can at least gain an appreciation for the physical limitations and affordances involved

8. Shmysics

Most video games don’t approach the detail of real-life simulation, but their approximation can still provide useful real-world knowledge. In my early encounters with Gran Tourismo (1997) I learned about the auto-mechanical physics of camber and suspension, the effect of gearing ratios, and the minimum effect of aero spoilers on a 1993 Honda Civic Hatchback. Is this the same as the experience of driving a real race-car? Not all, but understanding the general principles of driving physics has definitely helped me as a motorist, and I’ve never under-steered a front wheel drive while taking a sharp corner.

9. Sharpshooting

The visual stimulus of video games and the physical reactions they elicit trains every gamer into a sharpshooter of sorts, even if they’re matching three pieces of candy on their cellphone, and years of repeated practice make gamers look faster and react quicker as their neurons fire signals down well-tread paths. The ability to identify fast moving 2D objects won’t always find a place in everyday life, but I know a number of professional video and image editors whose game-addled brains can process massive amounts of visual data very quickly. When I worked in image archiving none of my colleagues would trust the speed at which I could scroll through screenshots without ever missing a target and I was often, annoyingly, forced to slow down so colleagues could keep up.

10. The reduction of sex difference in spatial skills

Of all the real-life skills and benefits listed here, this is the most complicated but also the least speculative. In 2007 a team of researchers from the University of Toronto monitored the effects that video gameplay had on subjects mental rotational ability, that is, their ability to track and predict the movement of shapes in space. While it’s not a perfect example, it might help to imagine the tracking your brain performs when an overtaking car leaves your hindsight: you have to mentally map its location based on the speed of approach so you can ‘tell’ where it is in relation to your own car.

A better example is the shape tests presented in many forms of IQ testing, which face criticism due to notably high gender differential. What the researchers discovered is that 10 hours of gameplay for a 3D action title markedly improved women’s results for spatial skill testing – significantly diminishing the gap in results between them and male subjects. The implications of this are quite far-reaching as it undermines lay assumptions that the deficit in skills needed for mathematics and engineering are biological sex differences, rather than socialised gender differences affected by everyday activities. In short, as women play more video games they begin to ‘catch up’ to the spatial skills exhibited by men, and so dismantle the gender narratives that mark women as less able. And that’s a lesson everyone could stand to learn.

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