Caitlin Moran's new book - feminism is for women and men.

[irishfeminist]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/caitlin-morans-more-than-a-woman-from-life-lessons-to-sex-advice-2pmn3d2kf

Bet you can't wait for this.

"But life for men, in the past 120 years, has remained almost exactly the same – save for the fact that men now don’t, generally, wear top hats. Or cummerbunds. Modern men have problems, too – suicide is the largest cause of death for men under 50; divorcing men tend not to get primary custody of their children; and I’ve lost count of the number of men who have said, if a child needed help in a playground, they would have to find a woman to offer aid: “People just presume you’re a paedophile.” There is something impossibly sad about this. Humans are programmed to want to help others. To make half our population feel that they can’t – that they are, just because of who they are, a threat – is a terrible position to put boys and men in.

I gradually realised that if feminism is “the belief in the social, political, economic and personal equality of the sexes”, then that meant it is for women and men. All of us. In 2020, my feminism has become unisex, and the chapters about men are some of the ones I’m most excited about."

@NiceGerbil

This is probably a derail now, sorry my fault.

Fine by me and a lot more interesting than talking about CM. People called Caitlin, eh? What are they like?

it took years (and tens of thousands) in legal fees to challenge it and make it so that no unsupervised contact can be allowed. We're talking about a man who has been in prison for domestic violence

Exactly this @twoHopes. This is currently my life and I know of dozens of women in the same position. Countless more are silenced by not wanting to risk making accusations of abuse when the stakes are so high: if you don’t have certainty (and money) you can prove what has happened behind closed doors, the mere fact you have made the accusation could (and in countless cases DOES) lead to the children being handed over to the abusive parent.

I have tiny baps and yet people comment when I don't wear a bra. I have to weigh up how much of a shit I give. Sometimes I just want the comments less than I don't want the bra. People shouldn't feel like it's something to comment on, but they do. It's easy to say women shouldn't care but sometimes we just don't want to be judged.

The DV/ contact issue is horrendous. It really does seem that contact with both parents is seem as preferable to children's safety. I have seen some friends and colleagues go through this and it's been quite shocking. Men with a police history and the courts treat it as though the woman is just making it up.

People often comment or give me funny looks if I don't wear a bra, and at least one friend told me it made her very uncomfortable.

I keep them in a cubby by the door to pop on if I'm going out somewhere with the kids as I don't want to cause them embarrassment, but I'll be buggered if I'm wearing the damned thing at home.

I read the Times piece today about CM’s daughter and I’m so terribly sorry to hear about her struggle. Awful.

I have not been a fan of CM since she decided to sell books about feminism without knowing what a woman is. Her point in the Evening Standard about both groups hiding from male violence does not suffice - either women exist as a distinct group or they don’t. Women cannot and will not give up their space and their identity and their name to men.

If this lack of critical thinking is because she wants to agree with her ‘intersectional’ daughter then that is a very woolly and weak way to go about things. I would agree with my child if she was right but when she’s wrong I’ll disagree because I don’t need to be down with the kids. I think CM’s need to be cool and relevant is inhibiting her ability to think critically.

And is she seriously not aware of some of the issues underlying trans ideology - most of which we are not allowed to mention here but which are at the heart of the problem ? Caitlin should have a chat with Janice - she’ll set her straight.

I thought the excerpt about her daughter's eating disorder was extremely well-written and affecting. She's an immensely talented writer and conveyed the awfulness of it brilliantly.

I don't, however, believe she's a thinker. There is no reason at all we should go to her for ideas about feminism. She is a journalist, and not the kind of journalist who makes her living from researching and writing in-depth pieces but the kind of journalist who makes her living from writing humorously about celebrities and about her own life, which she does very well. Compare her to Julie Bindel, say, who's spent much of her journalistic career talking to prostituted women or trafficked women - who do you think is better informed?

The one thing I felt after reading the story about her daughter was that an experience like that does provide the opportunity to join the dots, if only she was willing to do so.

I felt a bit queasy after reading that, well-written as it was - surely her poor daughter is still quite young and vulnerable and shouldn't be exposed in that way?

And yes to the joining of the dots - girls wearing binders and looking for mastectomies is just as much self-harm as anorexia and cutting.

I find her absolutely maddening because she constantly skirts around the edges of “getting it” then sinks right back into the libfem mire she has made for herself.

This.

To me, she writes about feminism like she's just going on intuition rather than having actually read previous insightful feminist analysis and done some research. Like someone down the pub rather than a scholar.

I think CM’s need to be cool and relevant is inhibiting her ability to think critically.

This seems to be the issue with The Times and Sunday Times in general.
I did not in sad agreement at her article about her daughter - the not eating is pretty much a rite of passage for year 8 girls.

divorcing men tend not to get primary custody of their children; and I’ve lost count of the number of men who have said, if a child needed help in a playground, they would have to find a woman to offer aid

She missed one - very occasionally a woman doesn't thank a man for holding a door for her

To me, she writes about feminism like she's just going on intuition rather than having actually read previous insightful feminist analysis and done some research. Like someone down the pub rather than a scholar

Isn't that how the world is for most people. It is not about dogma, so much as negotiated reality. All dogmas, even feminist ones, are constructs, not verbatim truths.

Compare her to Julie Bindel, say, who's spent much of her journalistic career talking to prostituted women or trafficked women - who do you think is better informed

Julie Bindel is a professional feminist, in the way that Jeremy Corbyn is a professional socialist. someone who adheres to a certain way of viewing the world and all relations in it.

Personally think Caitlyn should ditch the feminist tag, and just articulate the world in the way that she sees and experiences it. The way we view life changes with time and experience, and it is is not necessary to commit to any one particular philosophy or political ideology for the wole of one's life.

Well yes but if you haven't learned about feminism in the past, the arguments, the insights that people have, the research that's been done, the reasons why for example, people are gender-critical - then you are likely to just miss obvious stuff. Like her talking about men not getting residency as much. There are huge structural and societal reasons for that and furthermore it's actually women who suffer more from the system as it as has been so clearly explained below - by people who do know what they're talking about. Instead CM just took at face value the complaints of moaning men.

How things seem to her will only reflect her own experience which is of a well-off, apparently happily married woman who hasn't even been divorced or experienced what happens when an abusive man pushes for access to the kids.

She doesn't have to read every feminist tract ever written and treat it as a "dogma" - but she could check out the research and other viewpoints and angles before declaring something as truth just because it sounds about right.

Same with the trans issue - of course "be kind" and "poor trans people who are stuck in the wrong body, we should help them" might sound convincing if you don't stop to think or look into the issue properly.

The men I know who have always chosen to take an active part in family life tend to not be divorced so they don't count towards the poor menz with no custody.

The men who don't lift a finger and who do fuck all with the children tend to be divorced. The "no custody" thing for those dads isn't because of discrimination against them even though they like to claim it. When they have the kids for the weekend they come back early, have no laundry done, never have a dentist appointment on dad's time etc. That lack of will to parent is why they are divorced in the first place.

I agree that she doesn't have to adhere to any particular creed. I always read Julie Bindel and I am very interested in her views but I'm not convinced that she's right all the time.

The issue with CM is that she gets it. She wrote about the difficulty for her daughter in approaching womanhood. It' seems obvious to me that these eating disorders are closely related to the challenge of puberty and womanhood and the public ownership of women's bodies. It's an attempt to control the uncontrollable onset of adulthood. CM has written about these topics so many times and she writes about them very well I think. This is so very close to the gender dysphoria affecting our girls that I think the explosion in referrals to the Tavistock is best treated as an epidemic of self harm.

CM can join these dots surely. She knows. But she has said not one word. She will, however, write about her daughter's agonies. I'm not sure I know how to make that ok.

Well yes but if you haven't learned about feminism in the past, the arguments, the insights that people have, the research that's been done, the reasons why for example, people are gender-critical - then you are likely to just miss obvious stuff.

Thank you Joysofstring your post is exactly what I meant. It's like me telling someone, hey whenever an apple detaches from a tree it always goes towards the ground. I don't know why that is but aren't I clever for spotting it, I might write a book about it.

Love that analogy Antibles! :o

What we need is to liberate both women and men from toxic masculinity. On that I agree with her.

How we do that without the cooperation of males and the parents of future males I am not sure.

It is definite a conundrum.

I am thankful that she wrote about her daughter’s “agonies”, as you call it.
As a parent in the same position - I almost feel as if she’s written out the last three years of our lives -, tonight I am more than relieved to know that we’re not alone, that we are essentially more fortunate in that the health system where we live means my child has access to and is getting all the care that CM’s daughter did not get when she needed it.
Mental health stigma means that people are still too afraid to freely discuss their problems. She may be pussyfooting around the trans problem but at least she’s tackling another problem head on: the mental health issues of a whole generation of young girls and the lack of care and support for them (a waiting list of one year for CBT in CM’s case) and their parents who are blindsided by this.

I’m glad it helped you cats. I found it very moving and she captured her powerlessness despite being an intelligent, well-resourced, loving mother and doing everything in her power to bring her daughter back to safety.

I'm just so disappointed by Caitlin. When she left her difficult upbringing she made a point of not forgetting the issues involved. This made her more popular and it wasn't a risky approach. But now that she has a lot to lose she hasn't the guts to confront any other issues

namechangetoavoidmra's post is brilliant - I missed it earlier. If you're really interested in writing about feminism, and men's rights, and women's rights, then this information is out there. You just need to do the research - read the reports, interview the right people. CM's line about fathers not getting custody was obviously just written of the top of her head without any investigation at all.

Justhadathought said Julie Bindel is a professional feminist, which is true, but she is also someone who knows her stuff. It's fine to be a campaigning journalist, in my view. She co-founded the Centre for Women's Justice with her partner, and she talks to vulnerable women – prisoners, prostitutes, abused girls – about their experiences. If you want to know the reality of life for women today then read Bindel (or indeed a whole bunch of other less famous journalists), don't read Caitlin Moran.

I have now read four excerpts from Moran's book. The one yesterday was about how your clothes no longer suit you in middle age. It had no interest for me at all, apart from being amusingly written. Today she wrote about having Botox. Ditto. She is writing about her own experiences (and those of the women in her small social circle) as if they're universal. They're not.

The one yesterday was about how your clothes no longer suit you in middle age. It had no interest for me at all, apart from being amusingly written

You're easily pleased then if you found it amusing.

Apart from getting halfway through The Female Eunuch I've never read a feminist tract and don't intend to. I don't care what sort of feminist Moran is or what theory she's peddling.

She is a terrible writer. She is incapable of writing anything which isn't "me,me, me". The article about clothes was drivel. It was not in the least bit amusing. The overuse of swearing and "poo" was pathetic. She's a 45 year old woman- not a 14 year old boy.

If Caitlin Moran is the kind of woman who is thinking about having Botox and worrying about her clothes suiting her in middle aged then I fear her daughter will have absorbed some of this stereotypically “feminine” looks based anxiety growing up, which won’t have helped with an eating disorder. Not blaming her, but in my experience having a mother who is visibly concerned with looks can negatively impact the daughter.

having a mother who is visibly concerned with looks

I think that's a bit much. Everyone is concerned with their looks to some degree. In fact not giving a shit at all is seen as a sign of mental health problems. It's OK to put effort into looking how you want to, expressing yourself through clothes etc - but I think it's important that that is presented as a choice for everyone, rather than a thing women have to do.

I am not on board with Botox and I see that as a depressing development, but liking clothes and make-up is fine by me, as long as it's fine for everyone.