What about men?: Caitlin Moran
Photo credit: Alex Lake
In this episode
Is the patriarchy also screwing over men too? Caitlin Moran thinks so. Twelve years on from the publication of her hit book ‘How to Be a Woman,’ the journalist and author turns her attention to men, and why she thinks the lack of an equivalent movement to feminism has left many young men and boys struggling. Ed and Geoff dig deep on the topic of modern masculinity, whether it can be inclusive of cardigan wearers, and how to tackle issues that predominantly affect men, such as addiction and suicide.
Guests
Caitlin Moran, Author and Journalist (@caitlinmoran)
More info
Caitlin’s book ‘What about men?’ Is out now and published by Ebury Press. Order a copy here.
We'd love to hear from you over the summer with your ideas, feedback or experiences of forest bathing, get in touch via email (reasons@cheerfulpodcast.com) or via the website!
Episode transcript
Geoff: There she is, Caitlin Moran!
Caitlin: Hello, my darlings.
Ed: Hello.
Geoff: Excellent posture!
Caitlin: Thank you very much. It's yoga. It's yoga and carrying quite a fat little cockapoo up and down the stairs. I think it's given me upper body strength.
Geoff: And cold water swimming! So, I mean, I wanted to get this out of the way because Ed became an aficionado sometime within the last two or three years, and it is all he talks about. So it's so nice for him, I guess, to have somebody who can go there with him.
Ed: We can bore for Britain, can’t we Caitlin.
Caitlin: I know it's great meeting a fellow cold water enthusiast. The people who don't swim are just bored senseless by us just going: ‘I dunno if you've heard of this thing, it's called cold water swimming.’ And they're like, ‘yeah, we've heard about it.’ Everyone talks about it, but it is addictive, and that’s why we go on about it!
Ed: It is addictive to talk about it. I mean, that is definitely true. I think Stig Abel said that nobody who's ever been cold water swimming hasn't boasted about it, and that is a hundred percent true.
Caitlin: How cold have you gone, Ed? What's the coldest?
Ed: Two.
Caitlin: I've done two, I think two's easier than six.
Ed: But I tell you what I think most and then I will shut up. I actually think doing it at two and at six, it makes the summer absolutely brilliant because then 18 or 20 feels like…
Caitlin: Oh yes. The Mediterranean, isn't it?
Ed: Balmy, Mediterranean…
Caitlin: I'm one of those people who now complain that it's too warm. I'm like, ‘I'm not getting the buzz, it needs to be colder’.
Ed, I'm intrigued to hear that you started cold water swimming. So unbeknownst to you, you have been my husband's nemesis. You are called the ‘Mili-nemesis’ in our family because you do the same Park Run as my husband. And for about three years he was pacing himself against you. Only on one occasion has he managed to best you. And he nearly killed himself on the last steep incline of the Park Run to get past you and had to spend three weeks in recovery.
And then he was triumphant. He was like, ‘finally, I’m level with Miliband! This is good.’ And then you disappeared for about six weeks, and then you came back and you'd shaved three minutes off your PB! And at that point he totally gave up and he wants to know - and I'm passing on a message from him - what did you do in that six-week absence?
Ed: You know what? I think it was pre and post pandemic. I think I lost weight and then, that then made me go faster. I've sort of slightly fallen out of the Park Run habit and so I'm worried that my 23-something PB is now unattainable.
Caitlin: Well, this is good news for my husband because at the time he had undiagnosed incredibly high blood pressure and the one time he managed to beat you - looking back now when we found out at that point his blood pressure was 220 over 120 - and he literally came back covered in sweat, having nearly literally killed himself to beat you that time. You could have been responsible for his death. So if you have slowed down, it's good news for him and his heart.
Ed: And indeed it's one quite important chapter of the book, which is about men never going to have their health problems looked at. And your husband seems to be a case in point despite many, many, many, many conversations with you about it.
Caitlin: Yeah, so this has been a huge…I'm doing the live tour at the moment and the amount of women who've come up to me afterwards and just gone ‘that chapter, I'm literally showing it to my husband tomorrow.’
So I was talking to a GP. She was saying that whenever a male patient comes into the surgery and she says, ‘why are you here?’ They say, ‘because my wife made me’, ‘because my partner made me’. Whereas when you ask a woman that question, she simply lists her symptoms.
And the fear that men have or the reluctance that men have to go and get something checked out, the lack of self-care is quite terrifying. And I asked why it was that men are so reluctant. The common thing that you'll hear from men if a woman is nagging them to go and get a general health check-up is, ‘I'm not going to go yet because I'm not in shape’. So ‘in about a year and a half's time, I'm going to lose two stone and I'm going to improve my cardiovascular fitness and then I'll go and get my general health check-up’, which of course is the wrong way around to do it. It's when you're at your least healthy is when you need to go and get that check-up!
Ed: I think there is research on this saying that this is the case, isn't it? Something about men with partners are more likely to have conditions diagnosed, than men without partners I think.
Caitlin: Yeah, because we notice the massive badger sized goitre hanging off their neck! And we say things like, ‘that's been there for six months, it's not going to go away.’
Geoff: I thought you were about to get ‘not all men’ Ed, because as a hypochondriac, you don't relate to that at all!
Ed: Well, you and I are definitely the exception to Caitlin's rule, aren't we?
Geoff: Yeah, so I will sometimes not go to the doctors, but it's because I don't wanna go too much. I don't want to get flagged as a hypochondriac.
Caitlin: I have had a small cohort of very determined people going, ‘yes, not all men’. Like it is true that many will not go to the doctors for a variety of reasons. But there is a small, determined hardcore who go to the doctors all the time and are always on Google going, ‘I think I've got Handmaid's knee’, or ‘I think I've got dengue fever’.
Geoff: Can I tell you the worst thing I ever went to the doctors for?
Caitlin: Oh, go on. Yeah.
Geoff: I felt that the odour coming from my scrotum was out of the ordinary. And looking back I’m like, ‘what was I thinking?’ Because what am I expecting a doctor to do in that situation?
Ed: No, you didn’t do that, Geoff.
Caitlin: Okay. I have many questions. So what was your normal scrotal basenote like? Kind of what would be a normal kind of smell?
Ed: I think you're making this up, Geoff.
Geoff: No, no, it's real. You can ask Sara. I would say not odourless. There was definitely a basenote there.
Ed: I just want to tell our listeners that I am cringing...very much.
Caitlin: I'm taking screenshots of Ed's face at the moment because it's a series of the most agonised expressions that I've ever seen on a man's face.
Ed: I'm sorry to ask this question, but did Sara sort of raise this?
Geoff: She didn't tell me to go and get a doctor to sniff my scrotum. But, you know, she's not backwards in coming forwards about that kind of thing.
Ed: Can I just say, Caitlin? We have done 300 plus episodes. We've heard about Geoff’s penis, but I'm afraid Geoff’s scrotum has, I'm glad to say, been verboten. It’s its first appearance on this podcast.
Geoff: But isn't that great that after six years…
Ed: Please let it be the last.
Geoff: Okay.
Caitlin: This pleases me though because for like the last 10 years – because I write about the panoply of women experience stuff and because I am so open about the vagina and the vulva chat - for the last 10 years I've just had women coming up to me telling me everything about their genitals, which pleases me.
But honestly, one of the things I wanted most with this new book, ‘What About Men’, was to start having men having the same kind of silly, half delighted, half disgusted conversations that women have about their penises. And it's worked! You're telling me how your balls smell and we're only seven minutes in, I have succeeded!
Geoff: Hang on, I wanna say smell sort of circa, 2014, 2013.
Caitlin: Oh, are you back to your kind of…
Geoff: The, the issue seems to have righted itself. Look at Ed's face. Ed is so uncomfortable. He's so desperate to get us off this subject.
Ed: Caitlin, part of the thing in your book - and I think this is a really powerful chapter - is about the impact of porn. In some senses it's obvious. I don't mean that in a pejorative way, but I think the way you talk about it is really important because you talk to a guy you call Sam. Do you want to just say a bit more about that?
Caitlin: Yeah, so when I wrote ‘How to be a Woman’, I wrote about pornography from a women's point of view about how unpleasant and damaging it is, and also under-representative of female sexuality. If you look at like the categories on any of the online porn websites, it's all kinds of women. So it's obviously made for the male gaze. There's nothing there for women.
I was saying that I hope by the time that - not only my girls, but also the young boys I know - are of an age to watch pornography, we will have started making brilliant and more expressive and more feminist pornography that's joyful and tender and uplifting, and that will be what their sexual education is. And Sam is now 22, and I went on holiday with him a couple of years ago and he went, ‘yeah, when How to be a Woman came out in 2011, and you mentioned me and hoped that by the time I started watching porn that there would be lovely feminist stuff, I laughed! Because I was already watching it and I was eight’.
And I think as parents, we think, ‘oh, maybe we'd have the conversation about porn when they're 13, but I want to be on the front foot and do it at 11 when they start secondary school’. But your child's entry into the world of pornography is absolutely predicated on the naughtiest boy in your school who's going to come at them with a mobile phone and go ‘look at this! This is weird, this is disgusting, this is horny’.
And the problem with that is that we don't know that our kids are watching it at that age, and we can't give them the talk that they need to have about pornography, which is: It's not a one way thing. You don't just look at it and laugh or feel horrified or feel aroused. It looks into you. Because you are like soft, malleable clay at that age, and whatever sex you see is going to become your sexual imagination, it's going to become your sexual fantasies and the stuff that you're seeing in pornography. It's called pornography for a reason. It's separate to sex. Sex is not like pornography.
The extreme things that you're seeing, those are people at work who have contracts that explain what they're doing, and these are things that generally you're probably not going to be able to do in your real life, but of course you don't know that at that age, and you're literally having these chemical reactions. It's hardwiring into your brain.
And Sam, when he was watching this stuff, he became incredibly troubled by it. He has OCD as well, and he became obsessively consumed by it and worried about it, addicted to it. He got erectile dysfunction after watching it. He couldn't have a functional sex life because whenever he was having sex in real life, he was just thinking about porn.
He preferred porn to having real relationships, and in the end, he became so anxious and destroyed by what he'd seen. Very extreme stuff. That he couldn't sleep at night and his dad was having to get into bed with him and hold him like a baby so that he would sleep.
As parents we grew up at an age where pornography was something that you found seemingly growing in a hedgerow. And the stuff that our children are watching at eight is stuff that we still have not seen in our forties and fifties. So we need to find a way to have this conversation with our kids far younger than we'd want.
And I see my job as being able to start difficult conversations. That’s the point of every chapter that I write so that you can basically blame me. You can just go, ‘oh, Caitlin wrote this thing about porn. What do you think about this?’
Ed: I've got two boys who are 12 and 14. And it made me think quite a lot about this. Isn't the problem, or part of the problem, that we talk about sex education for kids and most of people's ‘sex education’ comes from porn. But that's a terrible version of sex education!
Caitlin: Oh, absolutely. Well, the stats are that 97% of teenagers said that their primary sexual education was pornography. And of course the other thing is as well, in a lesson where you're talking about it, the kids are like, ‘well, I've been watching it for years. You’re using really weird words to talk about this’. Everyone's sniggering: ‘we don't really need sexual education. We need sexual gossip’. So at the moment we're in this thing where anything that happens with kids or adults, we're like, ‘well, education needs to fix it. The schools need to fix it.’
And this is a societal problem. We should be able to have these conversations. I just looked at the template of feminism. There are comedians, female comedians, talking about every aspect of sex from a woman's point of view. But I don’t see men tackling it in the same way.
Ed: Talk to us a bit more Caitlin about your conversations with younger men for this book. How you had the conversations and what you picked up from the conversations?
Caitlin: Well, that was the big eye opener. I've been writing about women and girls for like the last 10, 15 years but increasingly I was hearing people going, ‘yes, but what about men? What about men?’
Ed: Which is why you wrote the book, fundamentally.
Caitlin: Yes. Literally that. ‘What about men?’ And then it was International Women's Day two years ago, and I was doing an event at a college, half boys, half girls, 15 and 16 year olds. It was International Women's Day, so I thought we were here to talk about feminism and the boys weren't having it. They basically hijacked it and said, ‘no, why are we talking about girls and women? It's like women are winning now and boys are losing. It's harder to be a man now than it is a woman. Feminism has gone too far.’
And they were angry. And I'm always interested when you see a cohort of people who are angry because anger is just fear brought to the boil. And it was like, well, why? Why are men scared of what has happened to women? Why do they feel disadvantaged now?
So that was it, I cleared the decks and I was like, ‘I need to write this book. I need to find out why this is.’ First of all, I was like, well, ‘how could men think women are winning?’ We still aren't. Economically, politically, socially, like, you know, the pay gap still exists. We're still underrepresented in business and in politics, and we know the terrible statistics that one in four of us will be sexually assaulted or raped. How are women winning?
And then I was like: the only thing that women have got that men don't have is feminism. We've invented this thing over the last 150 years. That means whatever problem a woman has, there is a solution out there. Someone's writing a blog about it. Someone's written a book about it. There'd be a comedy routine about it. And boys do not have that resource. There isn't a sense of progress and taboo busting and this removal of shame and excitement. Like these 15, 16 year old boys that I was talking to, their fathers, understandably progressive feminist men, were like, ‘yeah this recent burst of feminism is a small and recent corrective to 10,000 years of patriarchy and Benny Hill chasing school girls around a tree. We are not going to talk about men for a bit’.
But now their sons have grown up and all their lifetime, all they've heard is ‘the future is female’. ‘Here's a list of 50 women who are going to change the world.’ ‘Toxic masculinity, the patriarchy, typical men, typical straight white men’. And you suddenly realise that's all these boys have ever heard. They don't have this perspective of how recent it is, and so into that void, the first person in their lifetime who’s stood up and gone ‘actually, boys are great, you can never have too much masculinity. I'm gonna stand up for the straight white boys’ is Andrew Tate.
I do not know a single school in this country that has not had to have a staff meeting about talking about the way that he's become a massive problem in radicalising young men. They disrupt lessons, female teachers are having homework handed back to them by boys that have ‘make me a sandwich’ written on the bottom. ‘You should not be teaching me, you're a woman.’ Male teachers being asked, ‘do you let your wife go out on her own, sir?’
Ed: Just say a little bit more about Andrew Tate and what people have picked up from him and so on. Just for those who don't know.
Caitlin: Pretty much any parent or teacher, or anyone who works in support services will have had to have a crash course in him. He came onto sort of adults’ radars about a year and a half, two years ago. So he was a former kickboxing champion. He went on Big Brother and then was removed from the Big Brother house when videos of him choking a girlfriend surfaced, which he said was consensual.
Basically he's opened a kind of a academy for young men where he gives them ostensibly business advice. But it's his toxic misogyny that is the most worrying thing. So he said that he's absolutely misogynist. He says that women are at their best between 18 and 25 and then after that they're all used up, they've had too much sex and you must discard them.
He has 22 girlfriends who've had their names tattooed on him, and he runs a sex cam operation in Romania, and he moved to Romania because he said the laws were laxer there and they allow you to get on with what you want. He’s been accused of multiple accounts of sex trafficking.
And he is not the solution for teenage boys. His belief is that the anxiety and depression and insecurity that young men feel at the moment is because women have now gained power over men, and that what would solve these boys' heartache is if men now regained power over women, and women went back to just being at home and being used for sex and raising children.
And this is a bad offer to young men! Because power never cures your anxiety or depression or feeling about yourself. What these young men actually need is empowerment. You know, they need to feel part of the movement. They need to be able to talk about their feelings. They need to be able to feel that they've got jobs for them.
They need to feel that being a boy or a man is not a shameful or embarrassing thing to be. And that's what feminism has done for women. We have not gained power over men. We have gained empowerment to learn the skills that have allowed us to move towards equality.
Ed: Just on the list of people who write about boys and men. Talk to us about Jordan Peterson.
Caitlin: Yes. For the last couple of years, I had loads of people going, ‘what do you think about Jordan B. Peterson?’ ‘He's got interesting ideas. I think he's like genuinely quite fascinating and intelligent. What do you think of him?’
So I finally dipped into his oeuvre. I was well aware that Time Magazine had called him ‘the most important intellectual of our generation’, and that he wears a suit and he's Canadian and he appears to be reasonable.
And as someone raised on a council estate who didn't even go to school, let alone university, I was surprised to find that halfway through his book I was going, ‘this is not an intellectual, this is not the cleverest man of our time. This is a very depressive, fundamentalist Christian, who is deeply misogynist and is not giving good advice to young boys.’
Like I think if you're going to give life advice- his book is called ‘12 Rules for Life’ – then you should be a happy person who looks like they’re having a great life, and he doesn’t. I listed in the book the amount of times he says things like, ‘life is suffering, life is misery. This earth is hell manifest.’ He has a very bleak, nihilistic view of the world. And when it comes to women, the subtitle to 12 Rules to Life is ‘an antidote to chaos’. And we find out sort of halfway through the book what his definition of chaos is. And it's women, it's feminine energy. Whereas men are about orderliness and structure and civilisation.
Ed: I'm a particular agent of chaos, as you will know from 2015.
Caitlin: So the book is aimed at you. Did you take it personally that he was just going, you are an antidote to chaos?
Geoff: So what's interesting there, Caitlin, is you're identifying as a failure to have parallel conversations inspired by that wave of feminism that you were part of has left a gap for these people to define what masculinity is?
Caitlin: Hugely. There are stats like: women buy 80% of books. And I had this massive moment where I went into a bookshop. Every bookshop has a woman's section. You know, women, feminism, motherhood, adolescence. There is no man’s section. Like we're not used to writing about men as a category, which is why I think I've had a lot of pushback - which is the polite word - in the last week on social media. I don't think men are used to having some kind of titty David Attenborough like me turning up and going, ‘Hmm, let's look at men as a species. Let's see what their problems are.’
And so when someone like Jordan B. Peterson comes along - because men aren't used to reading self-help books in the way that women are - they weren't really able to analyse it and see it for the frankly horse shit that it is.
One of my rules in life is never trust a man who takes a single species from the animal kingdom and extrapolates what humans are supposed to be like off the back of it. So Jordan B Peterson's lobster theory - which is basically that men need to be aggressive and must never lose - because when a lobster loses in a fight, a chemical reaction happens in its brain, where its brain liquefies. And it becomes basically slightly brain damaged and beta forever.
And he goes, ‘this is what happens with men. This is why men must be aggressive and never lose a fight’. Now, first of all, we diverged from lobsters 800 million years ago. Secondly, we're obviously very different from lobsters. We don't piss out of our eyes and we don't have big, delicious hands. And thirdly, if human beings did genuinely have their brains liquefy and become brain damaged every time they lost. Then the Olympics would be a blood bath! And even the average family Christmas game of Boggle would be a human rights issue.
So you cannot extrapolate from the behaviours of lobsters anything to do with humanity whatsoever.
Ed: Now, maybe part of the pushback you've had, and you did draw attention to this pushback, is people saying: ‘Hang on. There are men who aren't Jordan B. Peterson or Andrew Tate who write for young men.’ And presumably you would acknowledge that. The point is you are looking at who some of the dominant people are. Is that a fair summary?
Caitlin: Hugely. It's the vanity of small differences and it's obviously something that happens a lot on the liberal left. But of course at the beginning of the book there's just a cohort of facts that I just put out, which is why the word ‘heartbreaking’ is the most recurrent one unexpectedly in this book. And it's that boys are more likely to be medicated at school for disruptive behaviour. They're more likely to be excluded from school. They're more likely to join a gang or become addicted to drugs, alcohol, or pornography. They make up the majority of the prison population. They make up the majority of the homeless population and the leading cause of death for men under the age of 50 is suicide.
And all these things tie in together, particularly with that suicide statistic. So even if you are emotionally illiterate and feel that you don't need to read my book, you've got a cousin, there's someone you know at work who genuinely struggles with talking about these things.
It's ridiculous to pretend that there isn't a problem there. You know, one in five men say they have no close friends. The statistics on loneliness. The lack of ability for men to feel they have the kind of network that women do when they have a problem is very palpable.
Ed: And this is going to probably come out the wrong way, but is the underlying truth of your thesis in this book that what we've seen in the last 20, 30, 40 years is a transformation of the image and role of women in society. I think there's an expression about this in relation to sharing of parenting and men at home. But the second shift hasn't happened. Which is the dominant view of men's role in society remains very entrenched in what it would've been 20, 30, 40 years ago. Too entrenched.
Caitlin: Yeah. I mean obviously there are exceptions to this, but like if you look at the last 150 years, the definition of a woman and what we expect for her life has changed absolutely. You know, 150 years ago we couldn't own property. We became the property of our fathers and then our husbands, you know, we couldn't start our businesses. We couldn't get a loan in our name. Marital rape was still legal in this country until the 1990s. But what women have done over the last 150 years is identify the problems of their gender in really enjoyable bitching sessions, and then come up with solutions to it.
And consequently, the possibilities of being a woman now are endless. We have all these brilliant role models. We're in space. We're ruling countries. We wear trousers, we have contraception. We've taken things that are traditionally seen as male, and we have gone ‘there's no reason why these should be male. Let's have them. These are useful to us and they empower us and make us feel good.’ Men have not taken these things that would be traditionally seen as female.
Ed: But to be clear, you are not saying that about all men.
Caitlin: No, observably. I mean, things with parenting. For instance, you know, lots of men are going ‘I'm a good dad’. I think I'm an equal parent.
Yeah, you are. But like we can see societally that that is not all dads. Mumsnet is a huge political force. Every potential Prime Minister must go and talk to Mumsnet. There is a Dadsnet. Which in itself is a surprise. But they have so few people using it they offer a crate of beer to anybody who joins up as a member.
It's very common that men's first marriages will break up and then they marry again, have a second family, and then they go ‘this time around I’m there for the kids. This time around, I'm doing the nappies. This time around, I'm enjoying them’. And it's absolutely heartbreaking to me that we're still at a point socially where men are so busy working and society is structured in such a way because of paternity leave and economics that the first time around when you're a young man, you don't get to be a parent properly. And you have to wait with all the heartbreak and all the social disruption that it takes, you have to be divorced and start again before you can finally actually do the necessary stuff of the heart and be a fully engaged parent.
So these are big structural problems with being a fully engaged father that, you know, feminism has really tried to tackle for women, but there is no conversation about men.
Geoff: I think me and Ed struggle sometimes because I think we both baulk at the idea of masculinity in a certain way. I think it's so sort of antithetical to both of us to define ourselves as ‘masculine’. We did an episode on it and somebody asked us to name male role models where the fact that they were men were part of that. We really struggled!
Caitlin: Well, that makes me sad because there is a cohort of feminism that argues that extreme femininity is kind of lesser. I think extreme femininity is just as brilliant and defendable and fabulous as extreme masculinity. Like there's no reason why any aspect of being masculine should be seen as lesser.
Ed: It's so interesting when you say ‘extreme femininity’ and then ‘extreme masculinity’. Extreme masculinity provokes a very different reaction in me. Extreme masculinity sounds bad, doesn't it? I suppose it depends what you mean by ‘extreme masculinity’. I suppose If you're meaning Andrew Tate, then it's a different kettle of fish.
Caitlin: Well, exactly. And the thing is, it's all about who claims that ground and defines it. And at the moment, the only people who are interested in sort of claiming and defining extreme masculinity tend to have a sort of darker, sort of more disruptive view of it. I come from a family where they're just huge Welsh miners.
And then at the weekend they would give their wives a break and you'd wrap the babies up in the shawl and all the granddads and the dads would take the babies out for a walk while the mums had a rest. You know, the working-class extreme masculinity that I grew up with was tough and hard and amazing, but also, you know, in the words of my Welsh nana just ‘soft as shit’ with the babies. They just love their wives. So I’m just interested in detoxifying the idea of masculinity.
Geoff: I wonder if there's a feeling like amongst nerdy men that you talk about the anger and the defensiveness coming from fear, which I think is an extrapolation of Yoda perhaps…But, I wonder if there's a type of nerdy man who feels so far removed from what masculinity stereotypically is that they become defensive when people start talking about it because they feel so different to that.
Caitlin: For men of my generation, you had to define yourself against that. Like you go to school and you land there on the first day and the conversations are about football and like kind of, ‘we don't do girl things.’ And so for men of my generation, my husband's generation, becoming like a nerdy indie boy wearing a cardigan, being sort of very gentle and sweet, was in itself a massive sort of rebellion against those traditional roles of masculinity.
There's a bit at the end of the book where I kind of make a plea to men just going, ‘who is it that you are being this man for?’ Whose approval is it you are seeking? Whose disapproval is it that you fear?’ Like whoever it was that you were trying to impress or rebel against is long gone or dead now.
In the way that women have really examined over and over again, possibly to the point of men being bored, what being a woman is. There's just a bit more fun and and joy to be had I think in looking at what a man is and just going, ‘well, what would work, what do I want? What would make me happy?’
Geoff: And is part of it, you know, making sure that the conversations about defining masculinity include the cardigan wearers?
Caitlin: Oh, hugely. Like, you know, they're a very important part. I’m strictly of the belief, particularly when, if in a social media age where everything must be split into a binary. Everybody has to take a team on whatever it is. But, you know, I'm firmly of the belief that most people are very sort of quiet centrists. Just watching all of this, just going, ‘well, I'm not on one team or the other, so I'm just not gonna say anything at all.’ Because it looks shouty and angry out there.
So I'd be interested to see what - as they say in, The Thick of It - the ‘quiet bat people’ who you don't normally speak would actually say if there was a quiet, reasonable centre-ground where you could have a relaxed conversation.
And that was very much the intention of this book. I observed that that worked quite well for women when I wrote ‘How to be a Woman’. The feminism wars were quite intense when I wrote this book. It was difficult to start a fun, light-hearted, silly conversation about being a woman.
That was what I wanted to do with ‘How to be a Woman’. I don't want to be part of any revolution or change that isn't a bit silly and relaxed and can't sort of pivot from being very sincere and honest to just making silly jokes about what it is to be a human being. Because that's where we finally feel safe enough to say these things that we've been keeping quiet.
Ed: And why do you think has provoked the reaction that you've had? You say that on your tour - which you're in the middle of - you've had a really good reaction, you know, from men and women. But it's obviously provoked another reaction. Why do you think that is?
Caitlin: Hugely. I mean first of all, social media's just there for a fight, isn't it? I would never trust a serious conversation to social media because it is the gamification of conversation. But most of the reaction was before anyone had read it. So I think feminists presumed that I'd gone, ‘haha, screw women. I'm joining the men's team now’. Very much not that: this is an extension of my feminism. You can't fix the girls until you fix the boys.
I just had loads of messages from male writers and comedians and people in the public eye, private messages going, ‘I have been thinking about writing a book like this for years, but I was just aware that I would be stoned to death if I put my head above the parapet. You've been very brave.’ Which hugely alarmed me. Because I go out of my way usually to do nothing brave at all.
I think men aren't used to being written about as a class in the way that women are. I don’t know, slightly wounded ego? The vanity of small differences? The fact that I am trying to just chill everybody out? Really weirdly, in 2023, if you go ‘calm down, everyone, let's relax’. That seems to make people more angry!
Geoff: When you reflect on ‘How to be a Woman,’ and the legacy of it. All the conversations you've had and all the tweets and all the email and the difference that it's made in people's lives. Because that's happening like one tweet or one comment at the time, you don't get a chance to sort of like, think about what a huge thing that was. Do you ever do that or would it send you mad?
Caitlin: I was having this conversation yesterday because at all the live events, I get women literally shaking and crying going, ‘you saved my life. I feel that you have raised me, you stopped me feeling shame. You made me feel normal.’
And on a very deep level you can't acknowledge that because if you're just leading a normal life, especially if you're writing on your own, like if I sat there every day going, ‘I've saved lives, and maybe I will save more with what I write now’, you would just become weird and maybe a bit like Bono. Although I love Bono, but I couldn't have that level of belief in changing lives. But what I do see is a mandate, kind of like you just get people going, yeah, ‘it's working for me, carry on!’
Ed: Let's end with some optimism. Caitlin.
Caitlin: Oh, I can give you endless optimism! I mean, I am an absolutely berserk optimist, like kind of like to the point of being demented and enraging the people around me.
I just genuinely do believe that most people are good and want things to be better, if not for themselves then for their children. Also, the thing that gives me hope about this book - and particularly boys who I think are troubled at the moment and don't have the kind of panoply of role models and stuff that women have. Is that what worked in feminism was giving women hope and joy. Feminism stopped being this dutiful, fibrous, intellectual pursuit that you sort of did if you were a good person or an intellectual person, and just became this joyous, fun, pop cultural moment where you've got Beyonce quoting Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on stage and people wearing ‘I’m a feminist’ t-shirts.
That’s where things change, when they stop being an academic or intellectual pursuit and it just becomes a conversation in the pub or on a bus or it's a pop song or it's in a movie. And I want that kind of sense of joy and transformation for our boys now that we've given our girls in the last 15 years.
And I really hope, from all the mums that I'm meeting, the teachers I'm meeting the people in support services. They're just going, yes, ‘that is what we need’. I think there is a slight sense of despair in young boys at the moment. Even saying ‘straight white man’, I've been saying it on stage every night for the last week now, and I still feel uncomfortable saying it because it usually starts a problematic conversation where someone's about to be racist or sexist or homophobic.
Like it's a category that has a lot of shame and guilt associated around it now. And if you can't say ‘I'm a straight white man’ without immediately getting some kind of judgment on you or, or it being supposed that the conversation is going to get difficult, no wonder these boys have this shame and fear and anger in them.
Boys need to be able to describe themselves with the same hope and effervescence and joy that women do. Why would we not want our boys to have that hope and joy and uplift and expanding of the lexicon that we've given to our teenage girls?
Ed: Well look Caitlin Moran, it's a real pleasure to talk to you. The book is, ‘What About Men?’ and it is out now.
Geoff: Would you be up for a race, like a sprint? You versus Caitlin's husband, Pete.
Caitlin: Oh, he would love it. It'll kill him. But Ed, please, could you just, could you just throw the race though? Like just once?
Ed: We could run together and cross the line, arm in arm in a symbol of modern masculinity.
Caitlin: That would be beautiful! I'm so up for that. Yes, let's do that. See you at Park Run in two weeks’ time.
