How To Be a Woman by the Times columnist Caitlin Moran is classified by its publisher as Humour/Feminism. This sounds like an oxymoron because, while female humorists are all by definition feminists (comedy has always been a man’s game), feminists are not, by and large, humorous (what’s funny about 10,000 years of oppression by the patriarchy?). But Moran’s view is that being a woman in today’s society is too serious a business to be treated seriously. So, while she tackles some of the most pressing issues facing women today — abortion, ageing, sexism and high heels — she does so with a Wodehousian command of language and many, many jokes about cystitis.
It is a brave combination and mostly a successful one. Readers of Moran’s writing in The Times, where she has been a columnist for half her adult life (she is 36) will be familiar with her killer wordsmithery — here is her definition of a feminist: “Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be.”
This freedom, she believes, should extend to underwear. Moran spends a whole chapter talking about the size of women’s pants: “Scarcely a woman in Britain is wearing a pair of pants that actually fit her…they’re wearing little more than gluteal accessories, or arse-trinkets.” She thinks that women are wearing inadequate underwear on the off chance that they “might have sex in a brightly lit room, with a hard-to-please erotic connoisseur… On those kind of odds you might as well be keeping a backgammon board down there, to entertain a group of elderly ladies in the event of emergencies.”
Men, she points out, don’t suffer from “this demented level of over-preparation, they don’t keep two tickets down their boxers in case they meet a girl who fancies a weekend of romance”. The serious point lurking in her rants about pantorexia is this: “How can 52% of the population expect to win the war on terror if they can’t even sit down without wincing?”
It is addictive stuff and extremely funny, but it’s not exactly new; it’s the kind of shtick that Jenny Eclair, Jo Brand and Rhona Cameron have used in their acts for years. I agree with pretty much everything Moran believes in, from a woman’s right to choose to a woman’s right not to shave, but her belief system doesn’t strike me as radical. Maybe it does need restating all over again for the Wag generation, this time with jokes; but Moran is not a ground-breaking Germaine Greer de nos jours.
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The most original and for me successful parts of the book are where she tones down the rhetorical gymnastics and writes about her extraordinary childhood growing up as the eldest of eight children in Wolverhampton. She never dwells on what it was like to live in a house where there wasn’t room for everyone to sit down at the same time, but the glimpses into the making of an autodidact through the offices of the Wolverhampton public library are the strongest argument I have ever read for keeping libraries open.
Of course, Moran, whose aim is to be One of the Guys, doesn’t extol the mind-altering properties of Jane Austen and George Eliot (although she surely read them, too); no, she writes about the relief she finds on encountering the bonkbuster oeuvre of Jilly Cooper. Male writers find their dad’s dirty mags; Moran discovers masturbation in the company of Rupert Campbell-Black, Cooper’s studly hero.
It’s very funny, and to be honest I rather wish that Moran had written a straightforward memoir rather than her feminist credo. She is such a talented writer that it is a treat when she relaxes into her prose and stops haranguing the reader with CAPITAL LETTERS. The penultimate chapter, on having an abortion, is moving and beautifully observed, and all the more effective for not being littered with upper-case sentences.
But I suppose my real beef with the humour/feminism niche is that it is so solipsistic. I loved reading about Moran’s coming of age, but I don’t really want to be told that it is all right to have pubic hair or abort an unwanted baby because she’s done it and it’s okay. Moran wants women to be One of the Guys, but one thing that guys don’t tend to do is to write books telling each other how to be men. Guys quite like to figure that stuff out for themselves.
I applaud Moran’s honesty and her complete absence of pretension, but I am not sure you can tell people how to be a woman based wholly on your own experience — even if you have the entire Twittersphere to back you up.