Review of Caitlin Moran’s Book About Men

[UtopiaPlanitia]

I found the analysis in this review by O’Neill very interesting and thought I’d share it with FWR. He calls for ‘cross-sex solidarity’ to defend women’s rights and for single-sex spaces for both men & women.

‘Call me a cynic, but it isn’t hard to work out why. Moran doesn’t want to jeopardise her standing in the eyes of the right-thinking elites. She doesn’t want to suffer the fate of JK Rowling that heroine of reason, who’s been damned – and also celebrated – for her defence of the scientific and social truth of womanhood. How much easier it is to bash boys who sext girls and google Andrew Tate than it is to confront the full-grown men in dresses who tell women who disagree with them to suck their cocks. Ms Moran that’s the sexism, bigotry and patriarchal fanaticism you’re looking for.’

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/29/leave-men-alone/

"A square person's idea of what a cool person is like."

Ouch. Chapeau, Mr O'Neill 😁

'A square person's idea of what a cool person is like."

Ouch. Chapeau, Mr O'Neill 😁'

That is some top class skewering right there! Laughed a lot throughout that article. I do have quite a bit of time for Brendan O'Neill. I certainly don't agree with him about everything, but I do feel that he actually gives more of a shit about women than 'fun feminists' like Moran, who has been utterly woeful on the trans issue. The book sounds like utter dogshit. I am enjoying the reviews though 😁

Men aren’t talking about their penises, Caitlin, because they’re busy fighting fires, digging for oil, mending roads, fixing the plumbing and safeguarding society so that people like you can sit back and write fact-life fluff about their lives.

Says a man who writes snarky columns for a living. And who’s just produced a column deriding another writer’s use of masculine stereotypes.

Hilarious that he thinks men do the safeguarding.

Safeguarding society from who, Brendan? From all those out of control women roaming the streets is it Brendan?

She deserves every fucking word of that snark. The reviews have universally panned her execrable book and deservedly so.

The arrogance of writing a book on a topic about which you know nothing is quite something.

Poor Caitlin - I’ve yet to see a positive review for her book.

'Hilarious that he thinks men do the safeguarding.

Safeguarding society from who, Brendan? From all those out of control women roaming the streets is it Brendan?'

Absolutely fair point. The section on how masculinity keeps society functioning was pretty 🙄

I don’t for a minute doubt that her book is superficial and awash with lazy stereotypes. And so is his writing.

But just because he says men are safeguarding society he’s not necessarily saying that it’s only men!

Disclaimer -
I’m a Caitlin Moran fan. I like her style of writing and her throwaway cultural references (1980’s TV, coming from a shit town, living amongst the North London organic hummus crowd) are close to my own. I’ve always enjoyed her stuff when I had a subscription to The Times (no more).

BUT -
I’ve noticed that she actively avoids any kind of debate about feminism or trans, while trumpeting her feminist credentials. It’s all rather vanilla and her views on women in the face of gender ideology are deliberately, politically, opaque. IMO she is protecting Brand Moran, and she won’t hint at feminism or women’s safely being challenged by gentler woo - i.e. any TERF-y stuff. So, I’ve seen her big up Hadley Freeman’s interviews with retweets and they communicate on Twitter as v good friends, but CM is omertà for HF on any gender matters at all.

I think he's taking the piss @LoobiJee

Not disagreeing with you that O’Neill might have a blind spot re some aspects of masculinity but the jobs he lists aren’t exactly full of women carrying out those tasks. I’m not saying some women might not want to be plumbers etc, I’m just saying those are largely physical labour and possibly the male bodies are better suited to it - what are your thoughts? I’d be keen to know.

Utopia

My thoughts are: that it’s a classic MRA line you see everywhere online - BTL comments in the DM, on here when the midnight Friday poster used to turn up regular as clockwork, from Jordan Peterson. And not just online. It’s a “look what we men do for you lazy b’s” to justify belittling women. As if women don’t do any hard physical work. And as if the majority of men that O Neil associates with are doing are doing heavy physical labour. Well, if he counts typing words as hard labour, maybe, because that will be what the work of the men he associates with involves.

In my view she’s a fraud, always wanging on about her working class credentials and studiously avoids mentioning that she sent her daughters to private school.

Thanks Loobi, if I understand you correctly it’s sort like the double-edged sword that is acknowledging physical differences in sport: some men hear the list of ways in which the male body is stronger and interpret that to mean the male body is better than the female body and, therefore, men are somehow automatically better and should be in charge. I’ve never understood the logic in that one - it kind of gives these men away in that they’re basically saying ‘we could beat you up to get our own way’. They’re sexist bullies.

I’m not sure O’Neill means anything like that, I’m basing this on having listened to interviews with him and some of his writing: he really thinks that women’s rights and children’s safeguarding are worth protecting. He also frames a lot of his analysis from a working class, material reality POV - so he hasn’t much time for effete elites who are really into postmodernism. But I agree, there are MRAs out there who are loving this chance to punish women and I seethe every time Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh tries to blame gender identity ideology on women/feminism.

As for Caitlin Moran, I’m enjoying the negative and sarky reviews of her latest opus - she made it into middle class journalism and pulled the ladder up after herself. As far as I can see, she has no interest in rocking the boat in any serious way or fighting for women’s rights in the current climate.

Ooft that was a good article. Agreed with most of it.

I'm not sure how Caitlin Moran thought she could write a book about this exact topic right now and not mention trans stuff and it be a bestseller again, yada yada.

I think everyone is bored of Caitlin Moran's dull and predictable style of writing. There seems to be another boring TV show incoming too. She is a coward not addressing the elephant in the room. The Times needs to give her and India Knight the boot as they have become unbelievably clichéd

I'm not a CM fan, but I'm confused about how growing up working class prevents you sending your own children to private school?

CM bangs on tediously about her own childhood, but I've never seen her claim to be working class now.

Never gonna happen with India, as her stepfather is in a senior position at the Times.

I think he means “safeguarding” in the sense of all the “manly” things that keep society safe — policing, firefighting, emergency response, soldiering, and other work that requires physical brawn — as opposed to “safeguarding” with respect to looking after the well-being of vulnerable people.

(BTW the above isn’t my own view, just trying to clarify what I think of a word use.)

The sentence I like best in the essay is: “Men should absolutely stand with women whose privacy and dignity is being violated by trans agitators, and women should stand with men who want their own spaces too, in which to roughhouse with their male children, strengthen themselves, become gentlemen, become confident. Both sexes should confront the social-engineering authoritarianism of both the trans ideology and anti-men elitism”

“Word after cursed word, you feel your will to live drain away.”

😂

I agree with him about her thinking the solution for men is to feminise them, when I see the issue is about men and boys learning to integrate their aggressive drives in healthy ways, instead of making out they are shit people for not simply suppressing this volatile energy women don’t generally have to live with.

That review reads like a MRA wrote it, except for the (pretty good) bit about Moran's total cop-out in not mentioning the trans issue. Easy to see why she didn't though - who wants to invite the type of pile-on that KS, JKR, AB and others have endured?

Lots of folk on FWR aren't 'out' at work about being GC, because we're afraid of harming our careers.

Caitlin Moran has become horribly smug, and is now an astonishingly lazy writer. Did she think everyone would overlook the omission of trans issues from her book?