Caitlin Moran - a bit more interesting than usual today

I love her

I think she's been like this all along though, tbh.

I thought so too - a recognition of biology isn't what I've come to expect from CM, so this was a pleasant surprise. Still frustrating to see refs to gender rather than sex though.

She's saying it without saying it. Or, I'm hoping, preparing the ground...

Sums up my experience perfectly (minus the recreational drugs in the 90s!)

The anger I feel is what I should be feeling given the s*#%tfest of a clusterf#%k we are living in. Things are going backwards for girls and women. Economic inequality is growing not reducing. Political corruption is something just to be laughed off. More kids in poverty, more kids exploited, and the internet, which could have been such a force for good, is an incel-ridden cesspit.

Maybe the TRAs have got it right. Maybe we should put all men on high dose oestrogen and then we'd have less to be angry about.

Is it just me reading this and completely unable to relate?

A whole column about women and their biology. I am not old enough to relate. Happily no one on the comments has told her off.

I quite like the prospect of Caitlin Moran becoming furious and menopausal. I think it could be very interesting!

I really dislike her but this was wonderful! Nobody on twitter mentioning the unashamed articulation of biological fact?!

I don't relate to this at all. I've been angry since I was about 15! The only similarity I'd say is that when I was younger I turned my anger in on myself (in the form of eating disorders) and now I have a more healthy outward focused anger.

Oestrogen, the compliancy hormone?
Long gone here.

I love the not GAF of perimenopause. I completely relate to the stuff she says about not feeling the need to nice any more.

And this is interesting. Could there be a chink of light in the wokeness?
"These can be years of great upheaval in nuclear families: teenage children whispering, “Mum’s turned into a total bitch,” husbands distressed by their wives suddenly shouting about equality and feminism and “everything being different from now on”."

Bloody hell, yes!

PMT for me was like in vino veritas. My feminine Be Nice filter would break down under the influence of PMT, and I would be bluntly, brutally honest.

Oh I recognised myself during peri and meno. Thank god for HRT. I get to keep the PMT clarity, without the PMT rage.

Is it just me reading this and completely unable to relate?

No, me too. It's as piffling and as "me, me,me " as always including the obligatory " ooh I'm mad I am" in her tedious showing off that she once took illegal drugs.

In fact I really resent the implication that female hormones make women 'nicer', more tolerant and more optimistic.

I never took drugs, but I still recognise what she describes.

I want to go drinking with her. I don’t drink but that’s fine, she can drink and I can listen. She’s just described my life. The life I couldn’t describe to my DH.
She smiled at me once. I went all unnecessary and liked away.

I’ve long had an internal battle between nice me and not so nice me, perhaps because I eschewed all synthetic hormone contraceptives two decades ago and have learned to roll with my natural cycle (a few days before I’m due on is a GREAT time for knocking out partition walls or cutting down trees) but I have definitely felt the tip towards not giving a fuck more and more of the time as Perimenopause has gone on.

I do hope this is a sign of Moran giving less of a fuck about being nice too - I’ve said before that I love the mum character, Della, in Moran’s Raised By Wolves sitcom, there is absolutely no way that Della wouldn’t be a bit tervey.

I've just turned 45 and read her column in the bath today, it was brilliant, summed everything up for me as a SAHM. This is my favourite paragraph from the article.

I think reaching perimenopause definitely made me lose my generic, conditioned "be kind" filter, of younger years.

And I was a kick ass feminist, in a male dominated profession, seen as a trailblazing woman during my entire working life.

Yet still, conditioned, apparently

Yes, of course I was still kind, but only when it was warrented.

And yes, it infuriates a lot of men.

Hence the hate aimed at so called "dried up old hags" etc, who no longer gaf. You only have to see some of the vitriol aimed at women of a certain age, on Twitter

But it could just be an age related thing, rather than hormonal?

After all, by around 45 - 55 ish, perhaps women have just had enough of the #bekind stuff?

And I am definitely a huge ball of rage at the moment, lockdown with two young children isn't helping!

our conception of the menopause – something that happened in 1962 to Ena Sharples, which she referenced only by mouthing “troubles down below” to Minnie Caldwell

This made me chuckle