Caitlin Moran: My Favourite Things

Caitlin Moran, best known for her autobiographical book How to Be a Woman, is arguably the UK’s most prolific feminist thinker. She examines girlhood, womanhood, and sex—lots of sex and let’s not forget masturbation—in her brilliant, filthy and gasp-inducing books and columns. Her latest novel, How to Be Famous, the sequel to best-selling How to Build a Girl, is her most brazen book yet. “I wanted to write about what you do, as a girl, when someone more powerful than you tries to sexually shame you,” says Moran. “I started the book before the #MeToo movement but once that hit the news it couldn’t flow out of me fast enough.” Here she talks about some of her favorite things, like being a funny feminist, the necessity of defined eyebrows and “a good fiddle”.

Credit: Instagram @mscaitlinmoran

How far have women come? In the last hundred years, the women’s movement and feminism, has expanded the idea of what it is to be a woman a billion-fold. How to be a woman has become limitless, huge and elastic—we can wear what we want, speak the way we want, generally we’ve brought along our trans sisters. Where does that leave men? We haven’t expanded the idea of what it is to be man. This is a guy problem. Men need to step up. Mental health is a massive problem for men. They can’t talk about their feelings. That’s a problem of equality and feminism. That’s a gender problem. As a woman you have a one in four chance of being sexually assaulted—we get paid less, we don’t get child care and men can’t talk about their feelings and they are dying by suicide in vast numbers. There’s work to be done on both sides. Men need an equivalent to feminism to expand the range of possibilities of what it is to be a man. For me, feminism is the belief that women should be allowed to be as nuts, fat, dim, deluded, and lackluster as men, on exactly their same pay-scale. I don’t want women to aspire to succeed if it means having to be groundbreakingly excellent. That’s EXHAUSTING. I want us to aspire to just getting away with the bare minimum, like the ho-hum dudes currently sitting in the chairs of power. That’s true equality. Favorite things about men: John, Paul, George and Ringo. Feminist book I love: Little Women. Jo wanted to earn her own money, leave home, bang a lovely clever man and not faff around with lace gloves or stupid dresses. I’m careful with anger. It’s good to use as a fuel, but make sure you convert it into humour, rather than pumping it out unprocessed. It stops people hearing (and reading) what you actually want to say. People just respond to the anger, and get angry back at you. Ninety per cent of social media communication is ruined because of this.