Caitlin Moran #2 She’s just insulting everyone’s intelligence now

[coolcapitalist]

I don’t want to dox myself but i was briefly in her orbit through dating one of her friends, went to dinner parties at hers etc. She was a great host tbf but the picture you are building is accurate and we’ve all met people like her irl, who think they are the most fascinating person in the room and their default is to broadcast at people rather than converse, if that makes sense. Not my cup of tea.

 

[Phil Anne Throw Pee]

I think you're all quite right that the debate has become so toxic and incendiary that its very difficult to have a respectful productive conversation, and as a public figure (especially one with a foot in both camps so to speak) it's understandable tht she is choosing to stay out of the fray, and also understandable that both 'sides' are disappointed in her for that. Incidentally, I remember her being supportive of transwomanhood n HTBAW, but as I say, we all know that that was a less complicated time with regards to trans rights.

Speaking for myself, the topic is very pertinent indeed to Caitlin 'the people's feminist' Moran. I am sick to death of being dehumanised and being referred to in NHS literature as a 'bleeder' a 'birth haver' a 'person with a cervix'. Nobody is being anti trans by questioning the lunacy of any male being able to wake up and 'identify' as a woman and able to access spaces where women and young girls are vulnerable. There was indeed a time 'that was a lot less complicated with regards to trans rights', it was a time when gender ideology wasn't insidiously capturing the very basics of human biology. It took women hundreds of years to get the vote and now our rights are being trampled on again. As a so called feminist writer I would expect Moran to at least express an opinion on the matter. But she won't; she's far too cowardly and too much of a people pleaser.

 

[Jelly Bean]

There is a ghastly article in The Guardian today by her.
How does she get any credence - I don't get it?
One thing, amongst many things, that is so annoying is her assertion that her opinion is fact. She describes women in a totally alien way to most women I know. Apparently we're always discussing our vaginas on the bus, shouting 'Yasss Queeeen' in toilets and on occasion removing our friend's tampons. And the belief all women have such a large group of 'mates' who all behave like this.
No thought that it might just be her. Her assumption is that her very small area of experience is universal.
Feminism is now sorted, by her obviously, and the men need her attention.
Does she ever look at the experience of women in some other countries and how feminism is panning out for them? She sees Muswell Hill and Glastonbury and thinks it is like that everywhere.

 

[Zelda]

Twitter made her and now it's breaking her.

All these people caught up in their Twitter bubbles (half the threads on here) have developed madly inflated egos and delusions about their relevance and uniqueness.

Before Twitter, Caitlin was posting anonymous gossip on PopBitch and no-one I was aware of ever mentioned her (well paid) Times columns, she was far away from the zeitgeist.

Twitter made her properly famous and along came the books and the adoration. She has no idea how out of touch she is, and always has been, because she has been happily ensconced in her echo chamber for so long. Making all that money and getting all that validation.

She's never been aware of her privilege, let alone checked it. Not working class, she was brought up boho-poor. Not an outsider, she has been a media insider since her teens (and has taken the Murdoch buck for over two decades).

Meh. I used to quite like her writing and for a while it probably influenced me a bit. Emphasising when I was EXCITED about something (cringe). To be fair, she was the friendliest of the mean girls Twitter gang, but that's not saying much.

I had to unfollow/mute her (can't remember) when she'd watched The Beatles Get Back kept going on and on and on about Paul being a sex god and wanting to have sex with him and teehee here I am talking about SEX and sexy times, aren't I wonderful and wacky.

Sorry for the essay, I've been lurking around here, glad that she's being called out for her bullshit.

 

[Old Harold]

Oh wow, she's really losing it on Twitter, haven't seen her lash out like that before. It's Sali Hughes-esque! Another example of Twtter ruining someone by pandering to their narcissism and sheltering them from the real world. I liked Caitlin when she was being funny about rockstars or Downton Abbey or the minutae of family life or whatever. The foray into Serious Topics was a mistake. I'm not being patronising; she has a good brain, she just hasn't disciplined it with any kind of education, formal or otherwise. Education isn't about just reading lots of books, it's learning how to think critically, how to defend your arguments and to question yourself constantly. It's about making a fool of yourself sometimes and realising your own ignorance. And if you're making big pronouncements about big things, you'd better be prepared to take flak, it happens to everyone. Some people right now (as she's well aware) are facing much worse for speaking up for what they believe in. So I don't feel that much sympathy. Twitter has a lot to answer for, though.

 

[emeraldopal]

I would like to a) assure any trans women who may be reading this that not all cis women think you are a threat to womens' rights. You have the solidarity of myself and many others and b) suggest that this line of discussion is taken the gender thread where those of us who don't wish to read transphobia can avoid it.

 

[Old Harold]

Sadly, I agree with you here. It’s ten times worse when a woman speaks out against this ideology than it is for a man, and even expressing an opinion as sensible as Murphy did can possibly be career ending.

However, I think my problem is that Caitlin Moran claims to be a feminist writer and thinks she’s up there with the likes of Germaine Greer yet we haven’t heard a peep out of her on this, one way or the other. It’s total cowardice on her part and I don’t think I can take her seriously in any way until she gives her opinion on one of the greatest threats facing women’s rights today or at least mentions it some form.

Totally. You can't have it both ways. Actual feminists were not liked. The suffragettes were beaten, kicked, sexually assaulted and force fed in prison. The second-wavers of the 60s and 70s were vilified as mad, man-haters, witches, in need of a good shag or a smack. I'm Caitlin's age and in my lifetime in Ireland, women were barred from working in the civil service after marriage, denied contraception, divorce and abortion among many other indignities. Women's rights were a generation behind the rest of Europe. While Britain had legal abortion on demand before Caitlin was even born, I was being jostled on the street in the 1990s by pro-lifers and called a fkng baby killer for campaigning for the right to access abortion information legally (abortion itself was too far on the horizon).

So I have no patience with her. I won't go into it here but it's clear that there's a massive existential threat to women and their rights going on, and what does she do? She writes a book called "What about men?"

Oh and another petty gripe of mine. Her first "feminist" book was blurbed as "Germaine Greer on a barstool" which makes it sound like Germaine Greer was never actually on a barstool. I'd like to see Caitlin take on Norman Mailer in a town hall debate!

 

[Old Harold]

I thought she was funny when she was a teenager writing for Melody Maker 30 years ago. I'm her age, so it's weird to read her now and it's like she's trapped in amber style-wise, I get no sense of her having grown up at all. Her writing has this weird musty feeling, making me think of pints of snakebite and disappointing Wonder Stuff gigs. How is she getting away with it indeed?

 

[NomDeGuerre]

Why is she so obsessed with genitalia? In my social circle of reasonably well-adjusted adults, I don’t know any woman who’d define their feminism by how often they wank or any man confident in their non-toxic masculinity who’d conflate that with happily chatting dick size with their nearest and dearest.

As with her treatise on feminism, Moron has resolutely failed to address the socio-economic factors that have a bearing on how masculinity is codified and displayed in the UK.

She is the walking, talking personification of the London media bubble. If you ain’t straight, white, knocking 50 and living in an Islington town house, she literally cannot begin to fathom your viewpoint.

 

[Grizzlybear]

The Crouch End black hole is the most hysterical, self serving, pauvre moi, Crouch End thing I’ve ever heard see also “it just made sense to get a Range, you know, with the kids, and sometimes we have to go to Winchmore Hill,” and “I’d do my shopping elsewhere but Waitrose is on the way to Alexis’ ballet”

 

[Jelly Bean]

She is literally telling a man (original tweet) that he doesn't know anything about being a man and only her book answers any questions. I just can't with her any more.
She seems to think that she, as a woman, is providing men with a handbook for life as she suggests solutions

 

[Hollaaa]

As a person who entered but did not win that Times competition she won her career from, I am mildly bitter but also glad I didn't win if this is what it does to you.

 

[SqualorVictoria]

I don't think the hair makes her look quirky or cool, it makes her look like someone who is trying too hard to be quirky or cool and is therefore a total melt

 

[Jelly Bean]

I know Sali Hughes has deactivated her twitter but looking at Caitlin’s tweets to people who aren't impressed by her book I can't help but think "where are her girls?" What is she doing?

She is embarrassing herself terribly now. Again.
This tweet. Sweeping generalisations about men. Isn't that what her groundbreaking book was meant to be dismantling?
And also there we have it. What a fucking snob. The 'right' kind of people like her book. It was never intended for the great unwashed.

 

[mchops]

Moransplaining- writing a book nobody asked for or cares for.

 

[Copacapybara]

It also seems so tired. Everything she says has been already said, and her idea of men is based on an outdated 90s stereotype which was never accurate or complete to begin with. She’s stupid, but also arrogant with it so totally incapable of serious analysis or self-reflection.

She’s also a massive snob, which sits weirdly with her supposed working class credentials. Only valuing professor feedback makes her whole argument fall apart. You’re not supporting or understanding working class men if you sneer at them and say their take on their own experience is invalid.

Even while she uses this fake caricature of working class stuff to buy favour with the privileged. It’s like Marie Antoinette and her pretend farm

On an actual council estate you wouldn’t go down well with that sort of arrogance. Most working class culture values at least some level of common sense. It’s as if she is mocking it by acting out the most lazy stereotype of it, but secretly thinks she’s superior….the predictable, boring rudeness of the privileged thinking they’re edgy.

 

[Flibbertigibbet]

Her wiki entry mentions the basics. Apparently she went to secondary school for three weeks then left.

Her upbringing sounds horrendous and I think her endless mining of it for books and scripts might be some attempt to brush off the trauma? Does she have a relationship with her parents? I find it interesting that when you Google them, you’ll find loads of interviews and quotes saying “my father this” and “my father that” but she doesn’t really mention her mother. Perhaps because she feels like her father’s story was more interesting, since he had ambitions to be a rock star before arthritis allegedly (cough) left him unable to work.

I do find it bizarre that a family so poverty stricken they couldn’t eat some weeks still chose to keep their children feral at home (not even bothering to make an attempt at home ed, it seems). At least if they’d gone to school they would have got lunch.

Reminds me of all the modern day horror stories you read about quirky / hippy / mentally ill / abusive (delete as appropriate) parents who go “off grid” from the authorities because they’re so paranoid and more interested in keeping The Man out of their affairs than keeping their children fed and warm.

Living in poverty doesn’t make you working class though Caitlin, ‘k?

"Bohemians" get away with this neglect and abuse, while working class families would be shamed for it. It's nothing new. The Bloomsbury set made indiscipline a point of principle. The Beatniks and Hippies abandoned their children while in a stupor on Hydra or in Marrakesh. Drew Barrymore was a drug addict before she was even in her teens. Then there was that dreadful case with Constance Marten last Winter (I think all vulnerable mothers should be searched for with such vigorous concern).

You know what would be really interesting, Moran? A book or documentary about this phenomenon, looking at what the parents were thinking, what the children experienced, and the sort of adults and parents this made them become. There's damage here that has to be acknowledged before it can be laughed off or worn as a badge of pride. Esther Freud has written about this. A.S. Byatt;s novel "The Children's Book" is absolutely brilliant (I lent a copy to a friend who was dragged up by New Age hippies. It really hit a chord.) But I think Moran is frozen in adolescence as a writer; she lacks the perception and analytical skills that maturity usually brings. In acting terms, she'd be the Harry Potter kids - cute when they made the films, rubbish as adult actors.

 

[HotesTilaire]

She had a book out in the 90s when she was 16.

The Chronicles of Narmo

"They don't seem to understand, don't seem to grasp tha…

www.goodreads.com

Absolute drivel. A well-known journalist at the time told me that they gave it to their 13 year old child as an inspiration. She told her, ‘If this dross can be published, anything can!’

Funny enough, it’s based on her upbringing where she lived on a council estate and didn’t go to school. I don’t know if you’re read her other fiction book, about a girl who lives on a council estate and doesn’t go to school and becomes a music journalist!
She also wrote the sitcom Raised by Wolves, about a family on a council estate. The main character is a teenage girl who doesn’t go to school. Then there’s the film with Beany Felstead playing the lead, about a quirky teenage girl who doesn’t go to school, who lives on a council estate with her family…

 

[Shimmering]

I can honestly say I've never discussed my vagina with friends or family.

I don't feel like I've missed out at all.

 

[Vanelope]

She is a very self centred person - all of her columns and books are about how she experiences something or how if affects her. It makes all her writing the same. She wrote about eating disorders as a mother of someone suffering (had never done so before and hasn’t really since as hopefully her daughter is better now), she writes about music as someone who wrote for NME and has never moved forward, she writes about women only as she experiences life, now everything is menopause. Same for men. I know ‘lived experience’ is fashionable but actual talented writers can look at many different points of view. She is either incapable or lazy. She has coasted at the times for years, and is probably vastly overpaid.