Wednesday, July 18, 2012

They Don’t Make Feminists This Outrageous Anymore


The drunken, furious, delightful life of Caitlin Moran. Her U.K. best-seller, How To Be a Woman, comes to the U.S.

Caitlin MoranPhotograph by Chris Floyd

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Not long ago, a group of prominent British journalists, all female, went out for an evening to get drunk on gin. Very drunk on gin. One of them walked headlong into a door. Another confessed to having been caught in flagrante delicto at a funeral. Eventually, they settled into one of their favorite pastimes: bemoaning—increasingly loudly—the sorry state of contemporary feminism. How had a movement that had once been so incendiary, so vibrant, and so effective become so … tedious? How had it been hijacked not only by stodgy academics but by Sex and the City divas: women who, as Caitlin Moran, a columnist at the London Times (and, as it happens, the woman who banged into the door), said, would have us believe that “if we have fabulous underwear we’ll be somehow above the terrifying statistic that only one percent of the world's wealth is owned by women.”

Was it any wonder recent polls had found that 52 percent of British women and 71 percent of American women didn’t identify as feminists? The assembled ladies banged their fists on the table. They tossed back more gin. Finally, someone—it’s unclear who—said that one of them needed to write a book: something raucous and real about why feminism still mattered. A taking-stock of womanhood in an age of unprecedented freedoms and nagging contradictions.
And Caitlin Moran responded: “OK, I’ll race you!”

Five months later Moran finished her memoir-slash-manifesto, How To Be a Woman. The book, which will be released this week in the United States, spent nearly a year on the top 10 list in England. It has been published in 18 countries (when we met it was being translated into Portuguese, leaving Moran, who spends several pages fulminating over the rise of pubic deforestation, wondering what Brazilians call a “Brazilian”). She has amassed nearly 240,000 Twitter followers (the modern metric of success) as well as a dedicated fan blog, fuckyeahcaitlinmoran, based on the viral meme popularized by Ryan Gosling enthusiasts. The photo from the book’s cover—Moran with her distinctive skunk-striped bouff of a hairdo and winged liquid eyeliner—was acquired by London’s National Portrait Gallery, tucked in among other superstars of the realm: King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Paul McCartney.
Full piece at Slate.

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