Caitlin Moran in the Guardian today

[RoyalCorgi]

I promise I'm not trying to start another argument about Caitlin Moran. It's just that I want to record my annoyance and despair at her rewriting of history. Apparently in the 1980s there were no female role models for girls apart from Mrs Thatcher and Miss Piggy. And no one ever wrote about female masturbation until Caitlin wrote about it in her 2011 book. Plus more in that vein.

I remember back in the 80s reading Dale Spender's marvellous book "Women of ideas and what men have done to them" where she painstakingly writes in detail at the lives of amazing historical women - scientists, philosophers, writers, campaigners - and looks at how they were simply forgotten about and written out of history. Thanks in part to Spender's work, female historians went about the business of researching more forgotten women and writing their biographies.

Now it seems as if all the work of feminists in the 70s and 80s on, for example, female sexuality or in political campaigning has just been forgotten about. Feminists hadn't achieved anything of note until Caitlin Moran wrote How to be a Woman.

Once again, women's achievements are being written out of history.

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/29/caitlin-moran-reread-how-to-be-a-woman-marvel-what-i-got-wrong

Kate Adie

Selina Scott

Moira Stewart

Fuzzbox

Muriel from The Tube

Camille Paglia

So, so many and yes CAGNEY & LACEY - have been watching reruns

We could take it back to The Bionic Woman if we want (non sexualised woman as opposed to Wonder Woman)

I am so glad this conversation is happening. I truly am lost at what is going on but for me, it is not just in the media - it is in many areas.

I worked in a school where the Learning mentor (a woman with little formal education who believes in angels) was allowed to order in books and ordered them from Disney. The Deputy Head ordered a load od of inappropriate books (age/level/ability) for mainstream and the Head insisted we threw out all the existing ones. They want nice, pretty, clean covers and it is all superficial - design/media centred rather than based on something substantial.

I am also working in tech with lots of people who seem to have zero knowledge of history. Zero. No knowledge of social history and movements, no knowledge of literature and the ideas covered.

In the past, whether you had studied formally or not, this knowledge was in the air - we had it and somehow, we have now got a situation where by if it wasn't born digital, it doesn't exist Only it did. And instead of continuing a legacy and building the next layer up, we are letting spaces and resources be pulled to build literally, cut-price ivory towers.

Siousie Sioux. You wouldn't mess with her. Fantastic.

Melroses she also voiced a character in Chuggington allowing me to show her to my daughter and fan girl a bit. She was my absolute hero as a child. She’s also in a trashy Joan Collins horror movie from the 70s called I Don’t Want To Be Born. I love her. She’s fantastic.

@Gingerkittykat

Oh and reading Miz magazine in the late 80s was my sex education which taught me about masturbation, orgasms and other aspects of sexuality. More magazine had the position of the fortnight which I found really distasteful but still proof girls sexuality was talked about back then.

I can remember the man who ran the local shop refusing to sell me Mizz magazine when I was young because it was ‘unsuitable’.

It’s just like Caitlin Moran to assume she came along and enlightened us all. She’s insufferably smug and believes she exists on a different plane to us normal folk.

Annie Nightingale 🥰

JSP?

Sorry if someone else mentioned it already but the story in the article about being recognised on the tube by teenagers who she inspired to start a ‘wank club’- that’s the most cringeworthy and obviously untrue thing I’ve read in a very long time. Like, I physically winced.

I will say however that the film version of ‘how to build a girl’ (on Amazon prime I think) is really great and the lead actress, Beanie Feldstein, is amazing. Whatever Caitlin Moran has become today, she was something else in the 90s- a weird teenage girl who managed to live her dreams in a way that few others were. I’m sure there’s lots of self-mythology in her “origin story” but the gist of it (working class dorky girl from poor family makes it as a rock critic/media personality from a startlingly young age) is true. It’s like she never really grew past that and became an adult, though.

CM should look at my aunt, she wrote a newspaper column because she travelled round the world in the 1940s when few women did this. She was from a 2 up 2 down council house family and worked to pay for a boat passage abroad then got a job and worked to raise money to go somewhere else. She's dead now but carried on travelling until she was 90.

Was there no other feminist, working class, young women writers with an interest in music around in the 1980s? No “hip, young gunslingers”?

It’s a head scratcher.

Annie Nightingale!

Janice Long

Liz Kershaw

Kirsty MacColl

She’s just trying to make herself seem important. She’s too safe and lightweight to ever be of consequence.

What the hell is she on about. Tons of women in the 1980s, and especially famous sportswomen - could do with a few more prominent ones now.

Thatcher and Miss Piggy were great role models. They took shit from no-one.

Caitlin Moran is very safe in her life, and if she wants to make history she’s going to have to get out of her comfort zone.

Ohhh, Annie Nightingale! I used to stay up listening to her show on a tiny little portable radio. I wanted to be her when I grew up, knowing so much about music and stuff. I wrote into her show once but when my request was chosen she was on holiday and Mark Ellen read it out instead - I was gutted

It is also little girl playing at grown up in an often, sexualised way, rather than woman owning her space. And completely playing to a male audience that is petrified of women and can only deal with 'girls'.

It frightens me that, in a house of 3 women and one man, when the man hid a camera and secretly recorded us, none of the other women were alarmed and the landlady did nothing. I was the only one angry and contacted the police who told me there was nothing that could be done, it was the landlady's responsibility.

I really feel we have lost ground, and power. I was fearless in the past - now I feel that we cannot assert ourselves and have to 'ask' permission timidly for everything. Although, I can see some men are in the same boat so it seems to me a social issue as opposed to just women's rights.

@serenada

Yes to your list of women! They loomed large in the 1980s! Now everyone is so self-absorbed and talentless....

The way she said “hi” was iconic.

In the past, whether you had studied formally or not, this knowledge was in the air - we had it and somehow, we have now got a situation where by if it wasn't born digital, it doesn't exist

That's no excuse for Caitlin Moran. She was born in 1985 - well before everything went digital.

I suspect the self-aggrandising stems from the fact her lifestyle is now just that of any another well-off forty-something - husband, 2 children and even Botox - so she's desperate to hold onto some kind of 'edgy' credentials

Get Botox if you want, but don't try to present it as an empowering, feminist decision. Like millions of others, you've bowed to the younger = better narrative thrust on us by men who have no use for middle-aged women.

Yes, it is not just 'famous' women either. Something has really unnerved me in the last 20 years with all this girl stuff. We have always had very strong women in society who fought on equal terms and were respected as such yet a book came out that was for girls that listed iconic women and it was treated as though it was a completely new concept. Well, in the void of ignorance, anything new is something, I guess but it is though a frame is being built around certain material that excludes so much of what has gone before.

I have thought about this so much, thinking perhaps there is something i am missing, something key but when I speak to the people I meet I find that they don';t actually know of this history. It is not deliberate, it is just our expectation that if you enter a certain space - academia, media, spotlight it is a given that you know the history of your subject and what significant things happened to get us to this point, yet many of the people now inhabiting that space don't have that history or awareness of it. It is seen as a middle class perspective? perhaps, but ironically, the material existed in the wider sphere precisely so that it wasn't monopolised by one class.

I personally am finding this a dangerous thing as it is obliterating so much progress and I am met by so much apathy, it scares me.

Grace Jones.

@DidoLamenting

if it wasn't born digital, it doesn't exist

I meant, it isn't seen as relevant or significant to them.

Shooting from the Hip - Lesley Gore

I confess I am woefully lacking in feminist education, but at least I bloody know about it. This thread has been fantastic, I've got books lined up on kindle and tabs open on google for later.

I think the best argument you can make in her favour is that she took these topics into the mainstream with an easy and entertaining book.

Much of ‘How to...’ is cribbed from The Whole Woman. I read them almost back to back and it was staggering, but how many people read Greer without having previous knowledge and awareness of feminism? Moran’s book was a mass market best seller.