Caitlin Moran interview

Neo-feminist Caitlin Moran on why being clever, funny and honest is better than presenting a sexy shield.

The day we’re due to speak, there’s an email from the gobby, brazen, somewhat unlikely new It girl of post-feminist feminism. It’s headed “Hello! Emergency!” The emergency: a change of phone number. The email ends with xxx. Three kisses and we haven’t even met. Go, the sisterhood.

But then, Caitlin Moran (it’s pronounced Catlin, because she says so) is a creature of wild punctuation, reflex hyperbole and profligate affection. In essence, her radical new definition of feminism comes down to “I think we should all be polite and nice.”

Her new book, How to Be a Woman, has been in the top 10 of the Sunday Times best-seller list since its release nearly five months ago. It has the tagline, “Caitlin Moran rewrites The Female Eunuch from a bar stool”. An exaggeration, surely. New Feminist as New Lad? Moran, 36, is married and has two daughters, eight and 10, and a garden. She writes three columns a week for the Times, and has now produced this manual about what she calls “analysis-y, argument-y, ‘this needs to change-y’ stuff. You know. Feminism.” She must find it hard to think, never mind drink. As she told an interviewer last year, “I’m turning out pissing 5000 words a week for Rupert Murdoch – I haven’t got time to menstruate, let alone write a book.’’

Though I note she seems to have emailed me at 1.30am, London time. Perhaps – emergency! – I’ve got the interview time wrong. But no. It turns out she was up late and, when not emailing New Zealand, getting pixelated. Thus she has the sort of steaming hangover that would gratify any publicist trying to market her as a cross between Emmeline Pankhurst and a Riot Gurrrl. “My sister Weena announced, apropos of nothing, that she’s planning to move to Australia with her boyfriend, so we had to sit around drinking whisky until four o’clock in the morning,” explains Moran brightly. As I will discover, she’s a relentlessly glass-half-full sort of person and last night her glass was full.

Telling a journalist from the other side of the world about it is the least you’d expect from a working class girl from Wolverhampton who was the Observer’s Young Reporter of the Year at 15, published a novel about her bizarre family when she was 16, had her own late night music show on television when not much older and hasn’t shut up for a millisecond since. Once, Women’s Lib was “I am woman, hear me roar”. Now it’s “I am woman. Just sodding hear me”.

According to Moran, among the things women need in the 21st century is a lot of capital letters. What we don’t need are heels: “WE CANNOT WALK IN THE DAMN THINGS.” Pants: too small. Pornography: okay. Lap dancing: uh-uh.

Burqas are a male solution to a man-based problem and therefore bad. Cleaners? Yes. Brazilians? Don’t ask. “Do you actually want to spend £40 a month removing all the hair from your vagina and then having it feel itchy and painful?” she roars down the phone, mercifully not pausing for a reply. “It’s like paying a tax on being a woman! The recurring thing in the book is ‘Are the men doing this?’ No wonder they’re richer than us! Not only are they being paid more in their jobs but they’re not spending their money on ridiculous things like removing hair from a certain part of their body.”

The idea is feminism is too important to be left to Camille Paglia. “If some completely unembarrassable broadsheet columnist has abased herself and written about all the things you’re too embarrassed to talk about,” Moran tells me, “it’s quite a good conversation starter, isn’t it?”

And nothing is spared in her remorseless communiqués from the battlefield that is the female body. The trials of hitting puberty in an overcrowded, hyper-observant household: “Is that PUBES I can see? PUBES, Cate?” announces her hippy-ish mother, to the assembled throng. Later, there will be the appalling underarm hair dye malfunction at Glastonbury.

But nothing can match the operatic awfulness of this low point in the three-month apocalypse that was her first period:

“The dog has slunk out from under the bed, and started to eat my bloody sanitary towel. There are bits of shredded, red cotton wool all over the floor, and my knickers are hanging out of her mouth. She stares at me, desperately.
‘Oh God – your dog’s a lesbian vampire,’ Caz says … I go to retrieve my knickers, and faint.”

If we can’t all relate to lesbian vampire pets, some of her observations are right on the money. “Sex hormones are a bitch,” she writes, “that have turned me from a blithe child into a bleeding, weeping, fainting washerwoman.”
I tell her I gave her book to my daughter. “How lovely!” she says. And then I read it and thought, what have I done? “Oh dear!” But she’s imperturbable. She has written about her abortion in the Times. A typical Moran tweet: “I’ve just had to ring my husband and ask where my Mooncup is. ‘You left it on top of Harry Potter,’ he said.” Mooncup? I hadn’t heard of it, either. You probably don’t want to know.

Actually, Moran’s is a book that would be equally good to give to sons. They’re more likely to get through it than The Female Eunuch, though possibly not without passing out. It offers an impressive lexicon of jolly words for female anatomy – “lulu”?; “Wookiee”? It also catalogues a lifelong, one-woman war against embarrassment and shame, hers and ours. “Well, yes, my mother was very embarrassed about everything,” says Moran. “Everything was couched in terms of not talking about things or keeping secrets or not telling people stuff, because that’s what her mother was like. Which crippled me and made the early years so embarrassing and awful.” That was then, she claims. “I used all my embarrassment reserves by the age of 18. I’m never going to be embarrassed again.”.

The Morans were an eccentric clan who “home schooled” the eight children occupying, in what sounds like the military sense, their three-bedroom home. They were often poor, ate too much cheese, courted obesity. Cate became desperately upbeat in the face of friendlessness and bullying. The book opens with her being chased by yobs calling her “gyppo”, “pikey” and, worse, “boy”. There was always her writing but she didn’t want even her diary to feel sorry for her. So instead of recording the misery, she’d write “Mum bought a pastry brush! USEFUL!”

Moran got a baguette with candles stuck in it as a cake on her 13th birthday. She has learnt to waste nothing, including the deprived childhood. The book reads, at times, like a cross between Angela’s Ashes and My Family and Other Animals. “Ha! I was really conscious of trying not to write a kind of misery memoir. I really try to keep it as cheery as possible,” she says, valiantly. This strategy has paid off in spin-offs. “We’re writing a sitcom about our childhood, me and my sister Caz. The adult stuff in the book is being turned into a film.” Her siblings all work on projects together, like some strange Waltons-esque cottage industry. “Mainly because we’re completely unemployable in any other sphere apart from talking about how weird we were as children.”

Example: Moran was crushed, aged four, to find she wouldn’t turn into an actual swan. “I’d obviously read The Ugly Duckling and taken that as literal biology.” Later, there were desperate efforts to beautify herself, like padding out her hair with terry towelling – she was mainlining Brontës – to make her look romantic. Risky on a windy day. “It was a weird look anyway, trying to look like a 19th-century gentlelady in Wolverhampton. Then revealing that you had a nappy on your head went down really badly. I’m surprised we weren’t stoned to death or shot.” For a second she sounds half-serious. “It’s amazing I got out of there alive.”

And kicking. Moran is lovely company, a barrel of hung-over, slightly manic monkeys. Also a bit scary. Professionally obnoxious journalist Toby Young took exception, in the Spectator, to a Moran tweet after he’d been on television with Germaine Greer: “God, the reliability of Toby Young to be a total c— could be used to power the atomic clock.”

Then there was her tweet-off with Kiwi expat Dan Wootton, former showbiz editor of News of the World. He was cross at Moran for joking about the Murdoch hacking scandal. “Not funny. I thought you’d have a bit more sensitivity to 200 journalists in your company who have lost their jobs,” sniffed Wootton. “Ha hah seriously?” replied Moran. “The Sun and the News of the World help fund your £250k salary,” sneered Wootton.

Did she know he’s a New Zealander? “Is he? Oh dear! Sorry. I had no idea he was foreign.” No worries, I say. Feel free. “I couldn’t understand where he was coming from, really. Like, what? I, as an avowedly liberal, right-on feminist, bleeding heart leftie pinko should be really sad that the News of the World is closing? It stands for pretty much everything I find despicable – ruining the lives of people by carrying out loads of illegal practices and constantly being really prurient.” It wasn’t just celebrities. “They would still do spreads on a bonking vicar caught out having sex in a caravan … Just tearing people’s lives apart for entertainment.”

Did the spat end there? “Oh no, because loads of my friends started sending me incredibly salacious gossip about him. Which I, as too much of a gentlelady, would not post in the public arena. Unlike him, who was uncouth enough to post my wages up on the internet for everyone to see, which I thought was extremely rude and, as far as I understand, not in any guide to etiquette.”

Indeed. Though it is an impressive sum. “It was certainly ball park-y, yes,” she confirms breezily. Well, she’s been grafting since she was 15. “It’s very much not a response to my ball-busting, amazing contract negotiating skills. It’s simply hanging around that long.”

For all the self-deprecation, she hasn’t got where she is without a healthy ego. Some have said her book should really be called “How to Be Caitlin Moran”.

But then, half a century ago, the second wave of feminism surfed in on the notion that the personal is political. This ideology has produced great improvements in women’s well-being. It has also led to a lot of whining from Naomi Wolf, and to the Spice Girls. “Saying Girl Power makes you sound like you’re into some branch of Scientology owned by Geri Halliwell,” writes Moran. Her reclaiming of feminism tends to jettison the more punishing Wimmin’s Group antics of the 70s.

“No, ladies, rest easy,” she writes. “You will not have to taste your menses today. Not on my watch.”

All good fun. The book has been chastised for not taking misogyny, or anything much, seriously enough. On the plus side, she has annoyed Germaine Greer. “Moran revisits themes I have written thousands of words about … the c-word and pornography for two – and restates my case in pretty much the same terms, with not the faintest suspicion that anyone has ever said any such thing before,” fumes Greer in her review. “When Moran describes herself between the ages of 13 and 17 as a zealous and indefatigable masturbator … I find myself hoping she will not live to regret casting off every last shred of her bodily privacy.”

A little rich coming from a woman who once contorted her nude body in a … confronting way on the cover of a magazine called Suck. “I know! Yeah. Exactly. Legs akimbo!” crows Moran. “I mean, the majority of my life hasn’t been entirely menstruating, masturbating, having painful childbirths and abortions. Though sometimes it felt like that. When you look at all the things I’ve written about, every woman masturbates. I hope they do, anyway. Every woman has body issues or food issues or worries about their appearance or worries about whether they should or shouldn’t have children – all these things. Even with the abortion chapter, you know, one in three women will have an abortion.”

Abortion. All the other chapters have jokey titles. Moran writes about the shock of discovering she was 11 weeks’ pregnant with her third child. She thought she had polycystic ovaries and went, alone, for a scan. “‘Oh my God,’ I say to the baby. ‘Oh, you outrageous thing.’ I’m sure he is my gay son – the one I always wanted. His entrance is so showy – so jazz-hands, so ‘Ta-da!’” she writes. And then: “‘I can’t have you,’ I tell him sadly.”

She describes the abortion unflinchingly. “It’s wincingly violent, like breaking the yolk of an egg with a chopstick …” When they carry the dish away, the doctor points something out to a colleague. “‘Hahah – unusual!’ the other says.” Moran writes: “The very worst thought is: perhaps something is struggling to stay alive – perhaps he’s running out of his last bit of luck as I lie there …”

I’m still haunted, just reading about it. Moran maintains she’s entirely unbothered. Not a moment’s guilt, remorse, self-doubt. How has she acquired this industrial-strength insouciance and can anyone get some? “I’ve had to really learn to have control of my emotions,” she says. “They tend to run away with me and I get terrible, terrible panic attacks. But I just knew I didn’t want a baby. It was something we’d discussed. I just knew I didn’t have it in me at all. I really felt for the kid, even though it’s not a kid. It’s not like I was in denial about what I was doing. In a way, I made it difficult for myself because I just imagined its entire future. I had always wanted a ginger, gay kid.” Maybe, she says, that actually made it easier. “Because I completely acknowledged the absolute reality of what I was doing.” It was, she says, the only choice she could make. “It wasn’t a dilemma at all.”

She wanted to write the chapter as a corrective from the trenches to the discourse around abortion. “It’s always couched in terms of ‘You’ll be devastated by this … Every year, on the date when you would have had this baby, you will remember it and feel awful. This is something that, though it may be necessary, you will always pay a price for.’ And I find that it was something that was necessary. And it didn’t exact a price for me at all. I knew exactly what I was doing and I wouldn’t regret it for a second.” As she might say in her book, ENDOV.

Perhaps when you have, at 15, put the money from your column in a prestigious broadsheet into bunk beds for your younger siblings, you learn not to overthink. So, no regrets about the little ginger, gay guy. But this is heavy stuff. Is she worried about her daughters reading her book when they grow up? “Yeah, well, I keep trying to make them read it now and they keep going, ‘It’s disgusting!’, and throwing it across the room.” You can see their point when you get to the bit about what someone once said to her during oral sex.

But she harangues them endlessly anyway. She reports the sort of discussion chez Moran should they be watching Rihanna in her underwear on MTV. “She comes from a very patriarchal society and she was signed to a record label by a big male boss at the age of 16 and then she was domestically abused by her boyfriend and now in every video she’s always being sexy,” Moran explains to her children. “We feel sorry for poor Rihanna because she’s very cold and she’s having to do her botty-botty dance.”

Some accuse Moran of being a lightweight but what is this but Marxist, feminist analysis of a sort, give or take a botty-botty dance? Her girls may realise one day that reading the book is easier than enduring her right-on monologues. “That way they can get a mummy who shuts up after a chapter.”

It must be exhausting, being Moran. She has two more books planned, the sitcom, the film, the columns … Novels are threatened. So furious and constant is her shtick, you find yourself psychoanalysing her. “I’m not paying for this,” she says graciously, “Go ahead.”

Her insistence on seeing the funny side can come across as a sort of shield. What Germaine Greer called “20-some years of blood and tears” masked by humour. “Yee-es,” Moran says. When she thinks, her voice becomes so high, dogs start to bark. “But then we all need a shield.” For women, that usually means looking sexy and in control. “I’m interested in the idea of presenting an alternative shield, which is being a bit more relaxed and honest and being able to be funny about stuff.”

If it’s a bit of an act, well, Lady Gaga, queen of artifice, is her idol. Moran went partying with her in Germany – they ended up in a club loo as Gaga had a pee without taking off her fishnets. Moran picked up a British Press Award this year for writing hilariously about it (she was Critic of the Year, as well). Most of her friends are self-invented. “All people who come from fairly grotty towns and were outcasts when they were teenagers and one day just said, ‘Okay, enough of this bollocks. I am going to reinvent myself and I am going to be better than I was before.’” You fake it, she’s fond of saying, until you make it.

She has certainly devised a distinctive look. Boots, dresses and cardie (why don’t they design dresses with SLEEVES?!). The hair, with its swoop of grey, lends her a Bride of Frankenstein-meets-Susan Sontag sort of vibe. Is she trying to buff up her credentials as a public intellectual? She shrieks at the very idea. “My Susan Sontag streak! I’m having that.” Actually, she did it once for Halloween and liked the effect. “What I like to think it projects is that I’ve seen unspeakable horror that has turned my hair white overnight and yet, like a brave warrior, I’ve carried straight on.” If you read her account of the birth of her first child, that might be true. “In reality, I’m going to my local salon and getting them to do it for 120 quid a pop.”

Gaga remade herself very intellectually. How consciously has Moran crafted Caitlin Moran? “I was in a three-bedroom council house sharing a bed with a bed-wetting sister with no money and not going to school,” she says. Point taken. The only way out was to be constantly amazing. “And the only way I could think of to be constantly amazing was a) to keep talking and b) to be drunk all the time. So, as a consequence I was a total pain in the arse.”

In a rather unfeminist fashion, she credits her husband, music journalist Pete Paphides, for sorting her. “He’s got the sanest world view in the world,” she says, and is the one most likely to clean the toilet. Early on, Paphides took her aside.

“He said, ‘People will actually like you more if you relax. You don’t have to talk, you can listen. People will really like you not if you’re fabulous but just if you’re quite polite and nice.’ That was just such a massive relief. Thank God! I don’t actually have to be Dorothy Parker.”

You must conclude, after a relentlessly entertaining hour with her, that she’s still working on that. But you have to wonder why she still battles panic attacks, so determinedly has she faced down anything and everything that might reasonably trigger one. “Ha ha. Oh well, I’m still a woman.” It’s about feeling safe, she says. Despite her precocious and ongoing success, her obvious neon-lit talent, she doesn’t. “Coming from a background that poor, you just want to have an enormous amount of f—ing money, because the idea of it all going kaput and disappearing again … You know, I have no other qualifications. My career has been enormous luck, and until the mortgage is paid off and I’ve got money in the bank …” There’s a small, anxious pause. “I am fearful,” she says. “So I just keep going.”

But she wouldn’t want to sound serious or, heaven forbid, sad. “That makes me sound like I’m f—ing Scarlett O’Hara,” she shrieks. “What really gives me panic attacks is drinking too much, then not getting enough sleep and waking up in the morning with a terrible hangover and drinking too much coffee.”

When that happens she just tells her brain to shut up and writes a book.

So, just as she reinvented herself, she has reinvented feminism in her own rackety image. “It’s like a game, isn’t it? It’s like rock’n’roll. Feminism is an idea and every-body gets a chance to play with it.” This is her chance. She’s happy for anyone else to take their shot. “Just as long as mine is the best-selling one,” she says sweetly, “I’m absolutely fine about that.”

At times, it’s clear the project was more than just a game. “When I found those diaries I heard the piping fear and confusion in my little teenage voice. I wanted to write a book to my teenage self and give her some advice. And, by extension, to any woman out there who’s confused by this shit.”

Never mind the blow-by-blow accounts of menstruation and masturbation, the BOOBS and the gags. Perhaps the most valuable experience Moran has to share in her hilarious and, in the end, quite courageous book applies to human beings of either gender. We are fearful. We just keep going.

HOW TO BE A WOMAN, by Caitlin Moran (Random House, $37.99).

Interview with Caitlin Moran from RNZ National’s Saturday Morning with Kim Hill: