Moranifesto Read online

  Dedication

  To “Lizzie” and “Nancy”—hang the wet towels up they cannot dry on the floor for the love of baby jesus hang the towels on the towel rail you are breaking a good woman here

  Also to Nye Bevan. Thank you for approximately half of my life

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part One

  The Twenty-First Century, Where We Live No One Wants to Go Out

  I Can’t Stop Listening to “Get Lucky”

  In Defense of Hipsters

  I Am Hungover Again

  I Don’t Know What to Do When I’m Alone

  Printers Are Evil

  The Exact Amount of Famous I Am: 35 Percent

  All the Different Ways I Have Annoyed Famous People

  TV Review: Shakespeare and David Bowie—England’s Beautiful Boys

  Why We Cheered in the Street When Margaret Thatcher Died

  The Rich Are Blithe

  How to Handle Other People’s 5:2 Diets

  BACON!

  The Rainy Jubilee—God Bless You, Ma’am

  TV Review: Imagine If You Didn’t Love David Bowie

  The Smells of Your Childhood

  The Unhappy Bus Tour Guide, New York

  Part Two

  The Feminisms My Muppet Face

  The Two Things Men Need to Understand About Women

  Women Keep Fucking Things Up

  I Propose Not Having Opinions on Women for, Say, Five Years

  A Woman’s Monthly Faultiness

  Stop Making Everything Sexy

  The Most Sexist TV Show in the World

  No More Page 3

  Let Us Find Another Word for Rape

  Perhaps I Don’t Believe in Redemption Anymore

  FGM—It Takes Just One Person to End a Custom

  This Is a World Formed by Abortion—It Always Has Been, and It Always Will Be

  Oh, Hillary. Suddenly, I Love You.

  I Have Given Up Heels. Like, Totally.

  The REAL Equality Checklist

  Why Can’t Life Be More Like a Musical?

  What Really Gives Me Confidence

  Women Getting Killed on the Internet

  How to Run a Half-Arsed Global Internet Campaign

  Slash & Burn—My Life with Cystitis

  On the Set of Girls with Lena Dunham: “She Is the Very Thing”

  When the Oscars Won’t Be Evil

  Mums Are Superheroes

  All the Lists of My Life

  Part Three

  The Future I Love Pete’s Car

  Reading Is Fierce

  Austerity—They Killed My Library

  12 Years a Slave

  New York Will Save Us

  Syria: A Man on a Roof

  The Refugees Are Saving Us All

  We Are All Migrants

  Swarms

  We Need a New News

  Je Suis Charlie

  Paths

  How Wind Turbines Keep Us Free

  Russell T. Davies: The Man Who Changed the World, Just a Little Bit

  Coffee Is Killing Us

  TV Review: Elizabeth Taylor: Auction of a Lifetime—“Not So Vulgar Now, Is It?”

  The Frumious Cumberbatch

  The Poor Are Clever

  Ironic Bigotry—Because Only a Cunt Would Pretend to Be a Cunt

  How I Learned About Sex

  We Should Ban Homework

  To Teenage Girls on the Edge

  My Beauty Advice

  It’s Okay My Children Do Not Read

  Part Four

  Epilogue My Posthumous Letter to My Daughter

  About the Author

  Also by Caitlin Moran

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  So, welcome to my second collection of writing. Hello! I embrace you. I am sorry about the smell. I get very sweaty when I write. I don’t know why. One day, I will learn how to varnish my armpits, and it will be easier to be my friend again. Until then—I apologize.

  I’ve been a columnist for twenty-three years now. I started when I was seventeen, at The Times, when I faxed them a speculative column from the fax machine at the Stars newsagent on Warstones Drive, Wolverhampton.

  The Times offered me a job, so I moved down to London and started writing about what I knew: pop music, TV, film, radio. Life stuff, like “What to do in a nightclub” (always work out a dance routine in advance; keep your money in your bra) and “How to smoke a cigarette in a cool way” (always make sure you put it in your mouth the right way round; the taste of smoldering filter is deeply unpleasant).

  Mainly, I just tried to be funny. And I stayed away from anything political—because politics wasn’t for seventeen-year-old girls trying to be funny. That was for serious adult men, in suits, who knew people in Parliament, or had been politicians themselves, or wanted to be politicians in the future. Politics was for the political people, and I was not one of them.

  Anyway, the years passed and I grew up, and, as one does, I read the newspapers, and I watched the news, and I started to have opinions on politics—this is stupid! that is amazing! why are we not doing this?—but still I didn’t write about politics: because I wasn’t a Professional Politics Person. I thought that “the grown-ups” would round on me if I did—that they would read that column and point out that I did not have the education, or knowledge, to have an opinion on these things, and I would be shamed for writing something foolish, or ignorant, or which didn’t go into huge details about the Whig government of 1715.

  But then, in 2011, I wrote How to Be a Woman in a huge, five-month frenzy. I had spent years wanting to write a book about feminism, but had thought it would be the same deal as with politics: that feminism was a job for Professional Feminist People, and that it wasn’t something you could rock up to unless you’d been to the right university, joined the right groups, read the right books, and learned the right history and terminology. Maybe you’d even need to know about the Whig government of 1715 here, too. I didn’t know. It was entirely possible.

  However, the arrival of my daughters viscerally overrode that fear: as they began school, I became so wild with panic that they would, as they started to go out in society, have to deal with all the same crushing, debilitating, time-wasting, unjoyous bullshit I’d had to deal with when I was their age—the same, anxious, enraging, dull deforming of the female spirit—that I wrote the book anyway. I wanted to write something that laid out, all in one place, as much as I was able, why the world is as it is for women, and pass on as many tools as I was able for them to analyze it, and deal with it, while at the same time detailing all the times I’d been a massive knobhead, so they could, maybe, avoid perhaps half of all the mistakes I’d made.

  And when How to Be a Woman took off, in the most unexpected way—despite me not being a Professional Feminist Person—I started to think, “Maybe there’s something to learn here. Maybe you don’t need to be the ‘right’ kind of person to write about big things. Maybe anyone thoughtful, and making an effort, can contribute to the debate. Maybe there are thousands of us who are not thinking, and not writing, and not talking—just because we think we are the wrong kind of person. So—I am going to write about politics now. Firstly, because I think I should; and secondly, because I’m old enough now not to care if people think I can’t. I love getting older. You might lose skin elasticity, but you also lose the amount of fucks you give. It’s awesome.”

  So I rang my editor at The Times and told her that I would now like to give up my humorous column in the Magazine, and move to the Op-Ed pages—because that’s where all the Professional Political People write—and that I would write only serious politi
cal pieces from now on. Because you can’t write a column for a glossy magazine where, one week, you detail how much you hate printers and then, the next, Syria. That’s just not one of the careers on offer.

  And she replied, “You massive idiot. Of course you can do both. In fact, you should do both. There’s a whole section of people who’ll never read the Op-Ed pages, because they don’t think politics is for them—but they’ll read it if they come across it accidentally, in a glossy magazine. Really, it’s the only place you should write about politics if you want to reach as many people as possible. I’m going to say it again—you’re a massive idiot.”

  So, I stayed—and this collection is the result of that conversation.

  To my great relief, I didn’t have to give up the fun, joyous stuff—and so half of what follows is getting drunk with Benedict Cumberbatch; boggling over the rainy, catastrophic Queen’s Jubilee; hangovers; cystitis; and being quite angry about the utter betraying motherfuck properties of printers. It’s reviewing documentaries about David Bowie and falling in love with him all over again, and sharing all my hard-won advice about dealing with people on the 5:2 diet.

  And the other half is about the wider world, which starts to feel far less abstract, and closer, and more pressing as you get older: Syria, abortion, welfare, rape, the death of Margaret Thatcher, FGM, renewable energy, ironic bigotry, refugees, austerity, and inequality. The things which shape the outside world—which seem distant, merely “issues”—but which at any minute can come into your house, or that of those you love, and blow all their plans away. The stuff we think we can escape when we shut the front door—only to find it has come in through the kitchen window and is sitting on the table, waiting for you. Setting fire to your books, and your calendar, and your life.

  And as I collected all these pieces together for this book, I started to see that a lot of what I was saying all seemed to . . . join up a bit. That these things interconnect—of course they do! everything in the world is interconnected! the primary point of that Kevin Bacon game was to teach us this!—and that my instinct was to start trying to lay these things out in some form of worldview, in which I might make suggestions for how I think things might change.

  Basically, I thought it would be cowardly not to. After twenty-three years of commenting on things, you’re not really just commenting on things anymore. You’re starting to . . . suggest alternatives. You’re forming a plan. And once you’ve thought of the word “Moranifesto” you know what you have to do. Make a cup of tea, roll up a ciggie, put on David Bowie, and play that classic working-class game: “How I would change the world.”

  But alongside this blatant attempt at world domination, this book is a snapshot of where we are now, sixteen years into the new century: why hipsters should be loved, how Lena Dunham’s Girls changed all the rules of television, how bacon rules the Western world, and why it’s a toss-up between the urethra and the face as to which is the most problematic part of a modern woman’s body.

  I hope you enjoy reading it. I ate a lot of cheese writing it—not that I regret this decision at all. If I have any motto, in my later years, it is “Never regret the cheese.” Je ne regrette Brie-en.

  Part One

  Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

  —Milton Friedman

  Oh my god, a change is coming—can you feel it?

  Of course a change must come! All the signs are there. We have wealth inequality that has returned to Victorian times. We have fifty million refugees across the world—the most people in transit since the Second World War ended. Regardless of where you stand on climate change—with, on the one side, the 97 percent of scientists who say it’s a certainty or, on the other, Donald Trump taking advice from his wig, like the deludo chef with the rat under his hat in Ratatouille—you can’t argue with the fact that we’re demonstrably running out of lions, fish, glaciers, and sparrows. I’d like to think they’ve all just popped down the shops to get the papers and some fags, but I suspect they’re kind of . . . extincting.

  With industry in terminal decline in both the UK and America—replaced by financial services and banking—the best contribution the average, low-wage citizen can make to the economy is to get in debt. Debt was what hectically fueled the economy before the 2008 crash—and that economic reliance on debt is still there now, as the economy slows, picks up again. The basic underpinning of the economy has not changed. Your country needs you to accrue loans for your education, to take out a large mortgage, to max your credit card. According to Fortune, the average debt for a US citizen is $204,992 in mortgages, credit cards, and student loans, on a median household income of $55,192. That’s a debt-to-income ratio of 370 percent. And this huge national debt is a key part of our current economic model. We are now an economy largely based on people buying money. It’s seen as normal. But it is, of course, incredibly risky behavior—because if interest rates go up, so will the number of people in financial ruin. This seems like . . . a bad plan.

  And then, of course, there’s inequality: the frankly mortifying underrepresentation of the working classes, women, people of color, and the LGBT community in any seat of power—business, government, finance, or media. The underrepresentation of the majority of people, in other words.

  Things are . . . unbalanced. There are too many monopolies and bottlenecks. The spread of power—of ideas—is puckered and lumpy. The upward generational rush of social and economic improvement—the hallmark of the twentieth century—has ended: my children and your children, are, by all indices, set to fare worse than my parents, or your parents. If history has taught us anything, we know that, by necessity, a change will have to come.

  Because a change is always just about to come. One of the delightful delusions we have as a species is that changes only occur very rarely—and when they do, they are seismic, and sudden. In between these seismic changes, everything is still, and peaceful. Old maids cycle to church, and the thwack of cricket bat on ball, etc., etc.

  In reality, change is constant. We are a species that is always on the move—all our civilizations were built on the run. There is no walking pace. There is no rest. Change was happening yesterday, and last year, and now, and tomorrow.

  You are, infinitesimally, changing things now, by Tweeting, or drinking Fairtrade tea, or booking a flight, or talking to your child about Equal Marriage—or, more likely, listening to your child tell you about Equal Marriage, because your children are often far ahead of you. They cannot remember the past, and they see more of the future, because they will be in it for longer than you. That’s why they’re posting pieces about teenage coders in Ghana on their Facebook pages, or telling you what “vontouring” is. (Don’t look it up. It’s plastic surgery for your vagina. You don’t want to know. Just imagine your flaps looking like the Bride of Wildenstein and leave it at that.)

  So! A change is coming—and there’s no change there. As far as humanity is concerned, change is business as usual.

  “Revolution Number 2”—The Song the Beatles Never Wrote

  I have heard, in the last five years, the word “revolution” mentioned more times than I did in the preceding twenty. In protest groups, at meetings, and, overwhelmingly, online, I have heard people talking about “revolution” as if it is a coming thing—a necessary thing. Occupy, Syriza, Podemos, the Arab Spring, the near breakup of the United Kingdom during the Scottish referendum—we slip into talk of revolution easily these days. It’s where the heat is. When Russell Brand wrote a book called Revolution, it sold over half a million copies, and his interview on Newsnight was watched by eleven million people—twice the number who regularly watch EastEnders. For a man discussing the overthrow of the entire political system, dismantli
ng multinationals and setting up anarchist collectives! Not even the drunkest gambling addict would have put their money on that in 2000.

  Personally, I’m thrilled with the current modishness of “revolution,” because I like the word “revolution.” It’s my third favorite, after “cathedral” and “shagreen.”

  But, I should make clear, I like the word “revolution” as defined in the second entry in the dictionary, and not the first.

  The dictionary’s first definition of “revolution” is: “Rebellion, revolt, insurrection, mutiny, uprising, riot, insurgency, overthrow, seizure of power, regime change, anarchy, disorder.”

  Personally, I’m not up for that. The kind of people who are up for mutinies, and riots, tend to be young men—the kind for whom an afternoon of being kettled by six hundred Metropolitan policemen before breaking free and wanging a brick through the window of Greggs feels like a life-affirming alternative to sports.

  I, however, am a forty-year-old woman with very inferior running abilities and two children. I don’t like riots. I don’t like anarchy. I’ve read enough history books to be resoundingly unkeen on extreme politics of either the left or the right, breakdowns in society, anarchy, overthrows, seizures of power, and disorder. They tend to work out badly for women and children. They tend to work out badly for everyone.

  My general rule of thumb is that you’re always a little bit closer to the conditions that led to the outbreak of the Second World War than you think you are—which is why I’m all for political and economic stability, nontumultuous cultural change, the bins continuing to be being emptied on time, etc., etc.

  I like order. I like calm. I like not Googling “how to get/hide gun cache in case of breakdown of society.”

  That’s why the revolution I like is the second dictionary definition: “Revolution: sea change, metamorphosis, transformation, innovation, regrouping, reorientation.”