Caitlin Moran in the Guardian today

I wonder if it's simply that Moran is having some sort of Peter Pan style midlife crisis.

I mean, it's normal to think, aged 16, that your generation has discovered sex, drugs and rock and roll for the first time ever.

Less so aged 45.

But maybe Moran is just suffering from an extreme case of arrested development.

What were those soft porn films Emmanuelle back in the 70`s but a wake up call that women were entitled to enjoy sex.

Who was the author who wrote about sex and enjoyment something to do with helicopters. Sorry my old brain cannot recall. Was back in 70`s

she came from a background of being quite poor according to her biography

Yes, I know she likes to promote her working class credentials, but she didn't really have much of a working class experience. She was homeschooled, by her own account had nae pals and buggered off very quickly to start working in music magazines. living the media life since.

She may have lived in a working class area but if she wasn't actually living amongst other working class kids and families she won't really have understood what working class life, or education, was like.

I’m a little bit older than her and have always found her brand of feminism pretty toothless, fine if you’re in the mood for reading a bit of ‘girl talk’ while your intellect is taking a snooze I guess but nothing that’ll ever change the lot of women for the better.

She made a fair point though about how women shame each other on Twitter for being insufficiently right-on, and young feminists are scared to say what they think in case they contravene the accepted groupthink:
"So many young feminists I meet are in such a state of anxiety about accidentally saying the “wrong” thing – so terrified of making a mistake on social media, despite wanting, desperately, to be kind and good – that they would prefer to remain silent on various subjects."

Also The Women's Room is my favourite book of all time. One book that really did change my life.

Fatima Whitbread, Tessa Sanderson...

The Vagina Monologues!

Marilyn French's The Women's Room.

I said on the other thread that to me she writes like she's just doesn't bother researching much or reading previous feminst analysis.

Annabel Lwin, Neneh Cherry, The Belle Stars, most of Amazulu, We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Going To Use It, Siouxie Sioux, Toyah, Sheila E, Wendy and Lisa...

I'm near ages with CM. There's no fucking way that she wouldn't have been aware of, if not read, The Female Eunuch.

Yes, the late 80s/90s were a time when a lot of young women decided that feminism was a dirty word and the second wavers were all braless, hairy man-haters, but they were still aware that feminism and feminists were a thing that existed.

And yes, Judy Blume, Nancy Friday, Cosmopolitan and endless smutty bits in popular women's fiction were doing a fine job of demystifying masterbation.

How about Sally Ride? Martina Navratilova?

Patti Smith, Nina Hagen, The Slits, Poly Styrene, Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Marianne Faithful...

My friend spent weeks at Greenham common. I tied down with children read "The Womens Room" published 1977 three times. OH got a real life lesson from me when I had absorbed that.

www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0057MLQ4K/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

Agree with the PP who have mentioned Cosmopolitan already, and Helen Gurley Brown who wrote a book about Having it All in the early eighties.

I have never read any of CM's stuff, which would be a good thing by the crap she's written in that article. Amazingly I'm older than her and have read books that she says apparently didn't exist in my time. Pity she couldn't recognise and appreciate those who have gone before her.

Deeply annoying ever since she was a precocious brat in her teens.

She makes lots of good points, often making them well. She does serve her audience well.

It's the silly self aggrandisement that grates!

Re: authors who write about older women: Anita Brookner, Barbara Pym, Penelope Lively, Elizabeth Gaskell.

But I think she makes a fair point here:

"To be a capable, middle-aged woman, essentially holding society together in the unpaid care you give to those around you is still, in this century, an invisible task"

That's the daftness isn't it?

She could write all she has written and be precisely what her target audience wants. But she chooses to ruin it with all that "Ooh, I am unique in writing this" twaddle.

Great post by Absinthe upthread. CM is earning a living as a media-friendly ‘feminist’ in quote marks. Fair enough. It’s OK. Music journalism is absolutely fucked now so I absolutely don’t blame her for any of that.

But thank fuck we also have actual feminists in the public eye- like JK Rowling, out there writing and informing and leading public debate. I am so bloody grateful for her.

So as piss-boilingly daft as Moran’s claims are, the feminist historians of the future really won’t be interested in what she’s written about herself. Unless they’re studying ‘acceptable feminism in the UK media in 2020’ in which case, great. Because that will be juxtaposed with the news coverage of the unacceptable, controversial, ‘problematic’ feminism of JKR. Globally newsworthy because she has dared to talk in a serious, non-cute, #thisisnotadrill way about today’s actually female experience, modern misogyny, threats to freedom of female speech, threats to single sex spaces and to the safeguarding of children, which is splashed some of the same newspapers that CM writes for. Proving the point really..

I remember the 1980s. Role models included Barbara Castle, Shirley Williams, Diane Abbott, Harriet Harman, Martina Navratilova, Sally Gunnell, ...
Books I read included The Female Eunuch, Fear of Flying, ...

Annie Lennox, Alison Moyet, Muriel Gray, Sandi Toksvig (presented the ITV Saturday morning TV show number 73 back in the 80s)

Politically Barbara Castle (more 70's than 80's, but still), Shirley Williams. (I'm sure there are more, but these were just people I was aware of as a child in a not very political family)

Oh YES! I'll play too. Another big thumbs up for Nancy Friday, and I don't think there's been another politician since Shirley Williams who I've wholeheartedly admired.

And Stevie Nicks! Don't ever forget Stevie Nicks.

As for Moran, tongue-in-cheek her writing may be but even the title How to be a Woman makes my hackles rise. I am not 'acting out' or in the process of 'becoming' a woman. I just am one.

Sister, you ain't no feminist ...

I've been watching repeats of The Gentle Touch with Jill Gascgoine and am surprised how feminist it is. She really kicks back at sexism.