How to be A Woman

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 27 March 2012 10:36:25

Part of my "chilling" over the last couple of days has involved reading Caitlin Moran's How to Be A Woman. It's a book I know some of you have read because I've heard it referred to in various posts around these parts before. Somehow it took until I found it as a cheap book in the paperback section of the supermarket for me to read it. I am glad I have though as it made me laugh and think and reassess my view of feminism.

I have to admit I'd become one of those awful types who would use the term feminist but then be the person complaining how political correctness had gone too far and wasn't it awful how the young men in our society were being let down as a result. I still feel a bit like that but I understand, I think, after reading this book why the term still really means something.

What Moran does is take you on a journey through the late 20th century/ early 21st century world of "ordinary women" and then swap it for a surreal world which you knew existed but which really wasn't your reality before leading you back into the "everyday" world of many women.

The book is overall a good analysis of the issues, apart from the abortion one which I think she over simplifies. I essentially agree with her analysis and final conclusions but I know as somebody who found myself saying to a confused doctor I disagree with abortion more than I don't want the baby and then loved the result to bits that it is more complex. More importantly I also know many childless women who are desperate for a child and their situation is not acknowledged or addressed in this book - indeed it is probably the big missing area. She looks at people who don't want to marry but she doesn't acknowledge those many women married and unmarried who want a child but can't and who would be deeply wounded by her discription of the abortion choice. The issues they face and the way funding cuts may impact  this group of women, aswell as the way patriarchal assumptions about family make it hard for single women who want family are perhaps areas which might be addressed in the same way as the "not getting married" chapter. Still it's semi-autobiography and v. funny and you can't/ shouldn't get everything out of one book.

The most powerful thing in it for me was when she was talking about a discussion she had been having with one of her gay friends. He told her that "they notice you're a woman straight away. I used to think they didn't notice I was gay too. But they do." (p140). The point here being that people notice you are "different" and start viewing you on the basis of what they think they know about that group. They start telling you about yourself in a way that suggests they have a knowledge about you and your feelings because of the perceptions they hold about that group, (who they are not part of). They do it through trying to help and be loving - I've noticed this. In recent weeks I have experienced alot of those "conversations about how difficult it is to be a gay man - explained to me by a straight man" in relation to the whole candidating experience, (particularly the getting a no this year) and about the experience of TOH's f to m transition and finding myself in a same sex opposite gender relationship.