The latest generation of feminists is somewhat lacking in star power. Jessica Valenti et al haven’t been able to fill the gap left by Naomi Woolf after she detonated her credibility by writing 80,000 words on the subject of her vagina. Apparently, even for progressives, there is a limit. Enter Caitlin Moran, whose British ancestry hasn’t stopped her from captivating Women With The Right Sort Of Degrees here in states.
Moran, a broadcast “journalist,” and music critic, wrote a book called How to Be a Woman. But it’s not a how-to. It’s a feminist tract for the 21st century, wrapped up in the kind of jaunty cool-girl prose Cosmopolitan wishes it could achieve on a monthly basis.
As of last July, How to Be a Woman had sold 400,000 copies in sixteen countries. It’s been reviewed in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and excerpted in The Wall Street Journal. So it’s a big deal. (If you’re asking why I’m adding the only-slightly-less-august Spearhead to the list, I’d direct you to Sun Tzu.)
The book’s structure is a combination of memoir and polemic. Moran is quite a writer, doubly so if you consider her intended audience: young, urban female professionals. She speaks their language, that scatterbrained, hyperkinetic look-at-me conversation style that will be familiar to any readers who’ve had a conversation with a woman under thirty.
But Moran has something to say; she’s an effective memoirist, and the scenes of her childhood are touching and very real. Her project-dwelling family is populated by left-side-of-the-bell-curve characters whose surpassing stupidity is funny and a little terrifying. Her childbirth story is literally hair-raising. She’s attacked by local street thugs for being ugly.
But beyond the emotionalism, there’s an uncomfortable conclusion in the offing. Moran’s childhood and intellectual development were devoid of culture, comfort and understanding love. When she writes about rapturously about her dual pleasures of masturbation and library books, it becomes clear why feminism is twisted, stunted ideology: its adherents come from backgrounds that are totally beyond the broad spectrum of Western bourgeois experience. Feminists are either wealthy, or grossly poor. They either have no family, or a horrible one. Moran’s explicitly Marxist leanings come from an upbringing full of the uncaring cruelty of the stupid.
And that’s just the memoir. As a polemicist, Moran is neither convincing nor outrageous. She is hamstrung by her preoccupation with developing feminist pornography. She complains that heterosexual porn is as “detrimental to women’s collective peace of mind as it would be if 12 percent of images of men on the Internet were of them having their heads horrifically blown off by alien laser guns.” Sailer’s law strikes again. Pornography needs to change because pornography makes Caitin Moran feel unsexy.
Moran then strikes out on the parade of horribles that is modern female grooming. “It is pubic hair that is now the most politically charged arena” is sentence that will stick with me to my dying day. She’s an inveterate user of the passive voice, which enables her to evade placing the responsibility for social phenomena on groups she doesn’t want to. Anything men do that is obviously positive or women do that is obviously negative is hidden by bad writing. (“Until the twin sink was invented”) Or women’s victories “are seen as uncool.” But who sees them as uncool? It’s no secret that women, as a group, determine what they think is cool in other women.
Then there’s her chapter on abortion. She got pregnant in her thirties and didn’t want another child, so she had it killed, full stop. This is a chapter which has been hailed as courageous numerous commentators in the media. But is it courageous to snuff out the possibility of human life because a woman doesn’t want to spend “another three years of being life support to someone who weeps for me and rages against me”? There is no nonsense here about fetuses. She knew she was killing a person, and she knew that she had to “in the same way I know absolutely that I don’t want to go to India, or be blond, or fire a gun.”
Ultimately, How to Be a Woman is a fun little jaunt through feminist history. Even if she’s not a particularly deep thinker, Moran has a future as a humorist. I certainly thought the book was funny. But, at the end, when you learn that the baby she aborted was a boy and read, two sentences later, “my two girls are all I want,” you’re left with a profound sense of disquiet. And a little pity for the boy who never lived because his mother was a feminist.
