Feminists

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How To Be a Woman isn’t about how to do half-a-dozen things at once or even about how to keep your husband interested. It isn’t a how-to book of any kind. It’s about how Moran struggled to cope with having a woman’s body. When she tells you that “in many ways there is no crueller or more inappropriate present to give a child than oestrogen and a big pair of tits”, you believe her, even though you know that when you were 13 you’d have swapped your big thighs for big tits any day of the week.

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Moran rejects academic feminism, which is just as well, seeing that academic feminists are not sure that there is such a thing as a female body and have theorised that menstruation is a cultural phenomenon. Moran has no truck with such nonsense, and good on her. She is helped on her way by her sister, Caz, who is as unsentimental, clever and funny as Moran herself.

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Moran might be amused to know that in the Seventies I was frequently caricatured as forever prosing about my womb. What I actually talked about in those days was the womb. The Female Eunuch was written in the expectation that most people who read it would disagree; How To Be a Woman is written from the opposite point of view. The womb under discussion is very definitely Moran’s own. There’s plenty of argument wrapped up in her narrative, but it usually ends up as shouting, in storms of capital letters and exclamation points. Moran can hardly fail to draw inferences from her experience but she cannot allow herself to become too serious. It’s left to her readers to ask themselves how, in the 21st century, such a clever woman can have been exposed to so much gratuitous butchery. Moran doesn’t believe in misogyny on any level, let alone institutional misogyny; readers of the grimmer parts of her narrative may come to a different conclusion.

A good deal of the argument in How to be a Woman is with someone called Germaine Greer or Goddess Greer, who bears a fitful resemblance to myself. This straw woman tells women to taste their own menstrual blood (I didn’t), went off sex in the Eighties (more correct to say that sex went off me), opposed the election of a transsexual lecturer at “Newnham Ladies College” (there was no such election) and so forth. More disconcerting is the way that Moran revisits themes that I have written thousands of words about, and even made TV documentaries about, the C-word and pornography for two, and restates my case in pretty much the same terms, with not the faintest suspicion that anyone has ever said any such thing ever before.

Moran doesn’t need to do research to find out if her ideas have been voiced before. She is still, as she was in 1994, a genuinely original talent. I hope that I’m around to see what happens when she cannons into menopause.

http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/1240055-The-Saturday-interview-Caitlin-Moran/AllOnOnePage