This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
In her thoughtful new book, the “strident feminist” dares to peek into what it means to be born with white male privilege.
Caitlin Moran has built a very successful career as a self-described “strident feminist” who, with sharp humor and openhearted candor, takes a very real, very relatable micro and macro look at being a woman in her The Times UK columns and best-selling books. She’d just started her follow-up to 2020’s More Than a Woman when, during an arts college discussion she led about how women fear sexual assault, she witnessed an impromptu uprising of young men.
“The boys just weren’t having any of it — they hijacked the event!” says Moran, who is every bit as hilarious, vivacious, and engaging as she was during our last discussion about More Than a Woman a few years back. “The girls were trying to talk about their fear of sexual assault and how many had happened in the college, and the boys were like, ‘Your fear is nothing next to our fear of being falsely accused of rape, or being mugged, or attacked, or stabbed!’ They just kept saying, ‘We don’t want to talk about women’s problems anymore! It’s easier to be a woman than it is to be a man!’”
Understandably, this display of anger and frustration from a population steeped in inherent privilege caught Moran off guard. “Whenever you meet a cohort of people who are angry, it rings my alarm bells because when you’re talking to angry people, they’re usually scared people — anger is just fear brought to the boil,” says Moran. “One of the rules of any kind of cultural bigotry is if people are judging you for how you were born. The teenagers, Gen A, go, ‘I have just lived in an era where all I hear is the future is female. Whenever I hear the words ‘straight white male,’ it’s a pejorative, and you presume something problematic is about to happen in the conversation.’ You have no control over being born a straight white man, but if you cannot name the category you’re in without associated shame or guilt, that’s when you start getting these very angry, radicalized, straight white young boys.”
It was this instance — coupled with the zillions of times she’d been asked every International Women’s Day when International Men’s Day was — that crystallized Moran’s decision to scrap another book she’d started and focus on the topic of men instead. “I am so tuned in to women’s problems, how much fear we live in, and how careful we have to be. One in four of us will be sexually assaulted or raped, and that’s just the women who declare it. And I was like, how could it possibly be that these middle-class boys are scared of their place in the world compared to these girls? We’ve come here today to talk about sexual assault and rape. How is it that you as boys feel disadvantaged compared to them? That’s very interesting to me. That was the point that I was like, I need to go and find out why this is.”
Like More Than a Woman, her new book, What About Men? A Feminist Answers the Question, is a sociological study with the full Moran treatment. What that means is that she uses personal anecdotes and research to buttress her theses, illustrating the myriad issues plaguing men and weaving together relatable threads to spark important conversations about everything from penis size to “bantz” (based on banter, a favored male communication method), to heavier topics like how porn molds the minds of boys, to tackling myriad tropes about men that clichés and TikToks are built on, like doctor avoidance.
Caitlin Moran attends a drinks reception ahead of the world premiere of the English National Ballet’s Raymonda by Tamara Rojo in London.
David M. Benett//Getty Images
Early on in our discussion, I tell Moran that I feel her book outlines how so many of these issues boil down to the art of communication — or a prevalent lack thereof. “What I find really interesting is that until very recently, men were seen as basically being the foremost practitioners of language and communication. Like all the great novelists — Shakespeare, Dickens, Chandler — they were the words guys. We were very much back-lined on that. It’s just this sudden falling off of templating of conversations, particularly in the last 15 years,” explains Moran.
“I can’t think of a single difficult subject about being a woman that I have not seen any human do an amazing routine on, or in Bridesmaids, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writing an amazing speech about it, or Beyoncé singing a song about it. We’ve got so many templates, either heavy and dark and truthful, taboo-busting, or playful or joyful. We’ve got so many different modes that we could switch between, whatever the material is that we need to communicate to each other. There’s just a paucity of templates for men to start so many conversations on so many of these big things. It’s not something you can change with politics — it’s a cultural thing. That’s why I’m writing a book and going, ‘I’m showing you now what you could be having.’ This is a technology that women have enjoyed. We have learned to be able to talk about f--king anything, and it’s set us free.”
It’s not like the teaching of communication and social-emotional skills often takes precedence at home or at school — and culturally, we collectively pay the price. “It’s down to the luck of the draw of your family,” Moran explains. “If you have the kind of mother, father, and siblings around you that can give you a proper education about privilege and sex and racism and all this kind of stuff, you’ll be okay. But in the general culture, if you’re not lucky enough to have a good group around you or a good family, then what messages are you getting? If you’re a troubled girl and your parents are just dogs--t, you’ve still got these incredible resources of movies, books, and the [feminist] movement, and blogs, and social media hashtags that you can go out there and find the information that’ll get you through this tricky phase of your teenage years. But for a boy, if you aren’t lucky enough to have the infrastructure of a good family or a good peer group around you, then you are very open and prone to getting bad information and messages.”
I mention how I think the prevalence of internalized homophobia plays a part in toxic masculinity. To this, she says: “We think of patriarchy as a relational deal between men and women. Patriarchy’s there, and all the men have all the patriarchy, and it’s there to oppose women. It’s not. The main thing the patriarchy is doing is a small amount of men define patriarchy, and they use it to f--k up other men with internalized homophobia with all these fears: with the fear of violence and having to [suppress] your emotions. It’s mainly men at the moment that are being screwed over by patriarchy because they haven’t learned to recognize it or rebel against it, whereas women have spent 100 years becoming f--king superheroes, laser-eyed aware of patriarchy, and are rebelling constantly against it.”
It’s not exactly like there’s an abundance of positive, progressive, personal-growth material for grown men either. Moran points out there’s no shortage of women’s sections in bookstores, or personal-development books and content aimed at women, but there’s little out there for men. As such, the space has become fertile ground for alpha-male misogynist propaganda from the likes of the jailed, emphatically self-proclaimed misogynist millennial influencer Andrew Tate, or older use-’em-and-lose-’em charmers like psychologist Jordan B. Peterson — and the theories of both are swiftly dismantled by Moran in her text.
Caitlin Moran seen during day 3 of the Hay Festival Queretaro at Taconologico de Monterrey in Queretaro, Mexico.
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“Every major economy in the world would collapse if women had to withdraw from the workplace,” says Moran, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. Her best recommendation for a cultural antidote? Mentoring. “Every woman in my generation spends half their time mentoring younger women and solving their problems and being out there in the culture spreading feminism,” she says. “The men of my generation, the elders of the tribe, have not realized that the young ones are in trouble.”
I tell Moran it’s probably because the Gen Xers women married had to figure out how to act for themselves. “My husband says basically everything he learned about being a husband and a parent was from looking at his dad and doing the exact opposite,” she says. “Our parents were infamously s--t. We were not parented; we were left alone to sort of get on with it. I meet so many men of my generation who do have unaddressed trauma and sadness. They don’t quite realize that they don’t have the kind of friendship groups that women enjoy. They don’t have the ability to access their emotions, or they think it’s a limited deal, like once or twice in your life you could say, ‘I’m going through a bad time.’”
Moran realizes she leans on the word “heartbreaking” a lot in the book, so I ask what she learned about men that was the most heartbreaking. “It’s a really fundamental thing: At a very early age developmentally, boys are basically trained not to admit when they feel scared, when they have tender feelings, or when they’re anxious,” she says. “It’s very much that ‘man up!’ thing. Women have developed the language to name our problems and feel no shame in voicing these things. I make wild generalizations; there are 4.4 billion men in the world — obviously, there are men who do talk about their problems, but men now are in the same position that women were in maybe 50 to 100 years ago in that they have not been given the language and the ability and permission to name their problems.”
She continues, “When you go through the list of problems boys have, they’re more likely to be put on medication for disruptive behavior at school; they’re more likely to be excluded; more likely to join a gang; more likely to become addicted; they make up the majority of the homeless and prison populations; and suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 50. Those are all, as a consequence, teaching very small boys, ‘No, don’t admit your problems. Man up; you’re not allowed to have any emotion other than anger, and the only way you will learn to self-soothe is either to use pornography, or to drink, or to take drugs. You cannot talk about your emotions; you must find other ways to self-soothe and to cope with the pain of your life.’”
In a chapter about pornography, Moran talks to a young man called “Sam,” who admits how it dismantled his ability to function in an actual relationship — a problem that nobody else seems to be addressing, offering solutions for, or is even willing to name. “Your child’s introduction to the world of pornography is highly predicated on usually the most troubled kid in your school getting their phone and going, ‘Look at this,’” Moran says. “When I was talking to social workers in my research, they were like, it’s usually children who’ve suffered sexual abuse themselves and live in an un-boundaried, oversexualized house. Because you’re not aware of how young your kids are when they see pornography for the first time, you haven’t prepared them and given them the vital information they need to know before they ever see a pixel.”
Caitlin Moran attends The Q Awards 2019 at The Roundhouse in London.
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She adds, “That’s why that chapter is so important because the key thing we need to tell our kids before they ever see any pornography is it’s not a one-way street. You don’t just look at porn; the porn looks at you. Anything you see at that age is going to become your sexual fantasies and preferences because that’s how the human brain works. No normal f--k in the world looks like porn! That’s two people at work. You’re surrounded by witnesses who will stop [a choking scene] if it becomes dangerous, whereas if you’re a 15-year-old who thinks it’s normal and you’re slightly drunk with your girlfriend or boyfriend, you’re entering into something that’s incredibly dangerous.”
It’s impossible to imagine Moran penning anything drained of her conversational voice and comedic timing, but she admits her initial iteration of What About Men? was so packed with stats and research, she felt it read like a textbook.
“There are two ways you can convey information: You can stand on a box and use your fancy words and be quite dry, academic, and superior, but it will only reach the kind of people who are interested in having their minds changed and are already interested in these subjects. The other way, which is harder, is you try and write it in such a way that someone who isn’t interested in these subjects or doesn’t have any skin in the game would want to read it just because it was funny, gossipy, or dirty. It was easy to do that when I was writing about women because I could share disgusting, horrible, amazing, shameful stories from my life and draw people in. But doing that second draft when I was trying to make the book a pleasure to read was the hard bit: just finding that tone and who would want to read it.”
What About Men?: A Feminist Answers the Question
Hero that she is, Moran fueled herself up with dopamine by listening on loop to a song called “Feel It” by the Tamperer featuring Maya, and rewrote the parts of the book niggling at her in just 18 days to make her deadline, humanizing the text by talking to men and sharing their experiences. “Half of this book is aimed at the dads in my generation, and the other half is aimed at the kids,” Moran explains. “We all know the stats — 80 percent of books are bought by women. There will probably be women initially who will buy it and show chapters to either their husbands and go, ‘This is about you,’ or use a chapter to start a conversation with their sons. That was my thinking of the way the information would pass from me [to] out there. There’s no point in having an idea if you haven’t worked out how you’re going to get it to people who’ll read it!”
Prolifically productive, she writes every day from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and is responsible for producing two columns a week and two features a month for The Times UK. She casually adds that she once wrote 8,000 words in a day. “It’s my happy place,” she smiles. “If I’m feeling anxious or unhappy, I sit down and write a 2,000-word feature.” She’s quite content with her role as a provocateur: “That’s what being a columnist is! ‘Caitlin says this; do you agree, or don’t you agree?’ I love starting a difficult conversation and just using all of the mind that I have to try and make these difficult conversations, in the end, hopefully enjoyable.”
Of all the writers I’ve interviewed, Moran is possibly the only one (and I share this with her) who offers music as her primary inspiration. She favors early ’90s rave “for its remorselessness and its effectiveness” and digs early acid house a) because the lyrics don’t distract her from working, and b) because that time heralded what she calls “a seismic cultural change” in the U.K.: “We had such a huge problem with football hooliganism before everybody started taking ecstasy, and then suddenly there was no football hooliganism.” I explain this might be because everyone was high off their rocker. “You don’t have to wait for politics. Culture, time and time again, will come up with a new way of being a human or a new way of living that can change things really quickly without there being any discussion or any analysis of it,” she counters. As far as influential writers go, Moran says the older she gets, the more she cares only about Virginia Woolf: “She’s still so conversational now; it is just like sitting and talking to your cleverest f--king friend. Her anger gives her energy, and she buries it so beautifully. She uses it as a forge of white-hot heat to make every word super-strong and have the impact.” Just like Moran herself, no?