Caitlin Moran defends best-seller How To Be A Woman at Hay Festival

[maddezmom]

Best-selling feminist author Caitlin Moran has hit back at critics of her award-winning book, claiming she’d only written about things that most women can relate to.

Pregnancy, pornography, abortion, boyfriends and child-rearing are among the topics covered in How To Be A Woman, which has been dubbed, “The Female Eunuch As Written From A Bar Stool”.

“I chose stuff that would have happened to pretty much every woman,” the journalist and author told audiences at the Hay Festival.

And she pointed out that such typical subjects shouldn’t be brushed under the carpet.

more:
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle/showbiz/2012/06/03/caitlin-moran-defends-best-seller-how-to-be-a-woman-at-hay-festival-91466-31105651/

Has anyone read this book? Thoughts? I've just pre-ordered for my iPad.

[Catherina]

1. I haven't read it yet either

I know Julie Bindel can't stand her and dismisses her as a *funbot*. That right there is a recommendation.

I just went to look for it and found this. I'm halway through laughing so hard! If you get it, please update us.

[obamanut2012]

2. lol

[Catherina]

3. Another one to lol at

Thanks Maddezmom, now there are two things I want- a power washer and Caitlin's book

[Starry Messenger]

4. I'll put it on the list!

That right there is a recommendation.

Oh yes, yes! x 1000

[maddezmom]

6. thanks for the link

she is fabulous, smart and funny as hell.

[Catherina]

7. Here's another good one where she reads from the book

I'm listening to it right now and know I'll like her book. She's even more fabulous than I thought last night.

[maddezmom]

10. LOL

I've got a nuclear bomb going off down there.....

[Catherina]

5. Germaine Greer did a very nice review of the book

...

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.

...

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.

...

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

[LadyHawkAZ]

8. I'm reading it now

I'm not far in but so far it's delightful.

[Catherina]

9. More, more, more girlfriend! n/t

[LadyHawkAZ]

11. I am 40% into the book

and it's still delightful.

"Over the years, pubic hair has gone from the very least of a woman's worries - when I was 17, around BritPop, the idea of waxing your bikini line was bizarre, marginal, for porn models only - to a pretty routine part of "self-care". Pubic hair must be confined to a very small area, or, increasingly, removed completely. The industry standard pop-video crotch shots of girls in bikinis make it very, very clear: there should be nothing there. It must be smooth. Empty. You must clean this area of fur. To see even a single hair, curling out the side, would be to have the whole world going "Is that a PUBE I can see? A PUBE, Lady Gaga?"

Whilst some use the euphemism "Brazilian" to describe this state of affairs, I prefer to call it what it is - "a ruinously high-maintenance, itchy, cold-looking child's fanny".

In fact, in recent years I have become more and more didactic about pubic hair- to the point where I now believe that there are only four things a grown, modern woman should have: a pair of yellow shoes (they unexpectedly go with everything), a friend who will come and post bail at 4am, a failsafe pie recipe, and a proper muff. A big, hairy minge. A lovely furry moof that looks - when she sits, naked - as if she has a marmoset sitting in her lap. A tame marmoset, that she can send off to pickpocket things, should she so need it - like that trained monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I am aware that my views on waxing run contrary to current thinking. As far as pubic hair is concerned, I am like someone sitting in a pub, tearfully recalling how exciting it was to go into Woolworth's and buy the new Adam Ant single on seven-inch vinyl. I am "vagina retro".