Caitlin moran

I expected more from Caitlin Moran

I first met Caitlin Moran at Julie Burchill’s flat in Bloomsbury. This was in the early 1990s and she was a precocious teenager who’d written a play and published a few pieces. Julie had asked her to write for the Modern Review, a magazine I co-owned with Julie and her then husband Cosmo Landesman, and Caitlin’s stuff was really good. After that, she became a kind of junior member of our gang and I remember liking her a great deal – she was warm and funny and didn’t seem remotely intimidated by older, more experienced journalists. It was obvious that she was going to have a brilliant career. I tried

Worth catching the virus for: Saint Frances reviewed

Two films about young women this week, one at the cinema, if you dare, and one to stream, if you don’t. Saint Frances requires the daring and I’d dare, if I were you, as it’s splendid and funny and tender and involving and taboo-busting, and if you do contract a deadly virus, it’ll be worth it. Only kidding. Of course it won’t. But, on the other hand, the government is currently encouraging us to venture into town to save Pret A Manger and I think this has more to say than a baguette. Or one of those pricey salads. Saint Frances is written by and stars Kelly O’Sullivan who started

Let’s hear it for the girls

Whether by accident or design, Zoë Ball took over the coveted early-morning slot on Radio 2 this week just as Radio 4 launched another of its Riot Girls series, celebrating ‘extraordinary’ women writers, those who have overturned convention, risen up against the status quo, proved themselves to be just as capable as their male oppressors (if not more so). Ball launched herself on to the airwaves on Monday morning at a pace it was hard to keep up with when it was still dark outside and the house had not yet warmed up. Her first track, that key statement of how she intends to reshape the breakfast show, give it

Caitlin Moran repents for choosing Corbyn

Labour’s dismal showing so far in the local elections was predicted by many. However, the results still appear to have come as a nasty surprise to some former Corbyn cheerleaders. Step forward Caitlin Moran. The columnist has taken to social media to apologise publicly for backing the beleaguered Labour leader: Moran then went on to claim that she had done more research into what sports bra to choose than into Corbyn’s policies: As Corbyn voters are now discovering, it’s worth keeping abreast of who you support.

The importance of being trolled

Ever since a Twitter troll was elected 45th President of the United States, the Twitterati has agonised over who to blame. But since it was Twitter that gave American voters unfettered access to Donald Trump’s brain, they really ought to be blaming Twitter itself. It’s not possible to say anything balanced or nuanced in 140 characters — that’s a format for jokes, insults and outrage. If you want to seize the world’s attention today, you must troll or be trolled on Twitter. And since this is the one skill at which Trump is utterly unrivalled, he’s now busy trolling both America and himself. When a man with barely any followers

Caitlin Moran promises to run for Parliament if Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister

Although George Osborne is currently lagging behind Boris Johnson in favourability polls, he can take heart that an intervention by an unlikely figure could hamper his rival’s leadership appeal in certain Tory circles. Caitlin Moran — the Times columnist who led a 24-hour boycott of Twitter in 2013 — has pledged to run for Parliament if BoJo ever becomes Prime Minister. Yes, Moran, who was one of Russell Brand’s loudest cheerleaders — describing his turn on Question Time as ‘brilliant’ — during the comedian’s ‘revolution’, has her sights set on the Commons if Boris is successful in his leadership bid. Speaking at the Hay Festival, she said that while she prefers to work from the sidelines

Women don’t need feminist instruction manuals

Another day, another instruction manual is published on how to be female. ‘Girl Up’ by Laura Bates, author of ‘Everyday Sexism’, is out this week. It is intended to be a handy guide for women on all the ‘lies they told us’. Who are they? ‘They’ means anyone who disagrees with the contemporary feminist line: that women are weak, vulnerable and oppressed. But ‘Girl Up’ is merely the latest instalment in a series of feminist manuals. It began in 2011 when Caitlin Moran – the world’s most annoying woman – published ‘How To Be a Woman’. Ever since, media savvy feminists have continued to reel out book after book of female

A new taste of Twitter nastiness

Whenever I hear a leftie complain about being abused on Twitter, I think: ‘You should try being me.’ A case in point is the journalist Caitlin Moran, who has often taken up the cause of feminists threatened with violence. Among other things, she campaigned for a ‘report abuse’ button in the hope of making Twitter a safer place, more in keeping with ‘the spirit that the internet was conceived and born in — one of absolute optimism’. A noble sentiment, but I couldn’t help taking this with a pinch of salt after the abuse I’ve suffered at the hands of feminists on Twitter. Take the time I appeared on a

The end of feminism

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoffeminism/media.mp3″ title=”Charlotte Proudman and Emily Hill debate whether feminism is dead” startat=35 fullwidth=”yes”] Listen [/audioplayer]It would be easy to believe from the papers these days that women have never been more oppressed. From the columnist Caitlin Moran to the comedian Bridget Christie, a new creed is preached: that we are the victims, not the victors, of the sex war. Feminists claim we are objectified by the builder’s whistle, that a strange man attempting to flirt with us is tantamount to sexual assault. Suddenly, just as it seemed we women were about to have it all, a new wave of feminists has begun to portray us as feeble-minded — unable

Raised by Wolves review: council-estate life but not as you know it

Journalist, novelist, broadcaster and figurehead of British feminism Caitlin Moran, who writes most of the Times and even had her Twitter feed included on a list of A-Level set texts, is now bidding to break into the sitcom business. Can one woman shoulder this ever-increasing multimedia load, along with the fawning tide of adulation that follows her everywhere? Wisely, she enlisted the help of her sister Caroline to create Raised By Wolves (Channel 4, Monday), a wily reimagining of their home-schooled childhood (alongside six siblings) on a Wolverhampton council estate. After a 2013 pilot, it’s back for a six-part series, with the hyperactive, motormouthed Germaine (the fictionalised Caitlin) played by

Emer O’Toole is a joyless bore compared with my heroine Caitlin Moran, says Julie Burchill

Looking at the brightly coloured front cover of this book, I felt cheerful; turning it over and seeing the word ‘gender’, my heart sank. When I was a kiddy in the early 1970s, the word (especially when combined with ‘bending’) seemed full of fun and flighty possibilities — David Bowie in a dress, Marc Bolan flouncing about on Top of the Pops like a little girl at her birthday party, Danny La Rue making my mum snort Snowball down her nose on a Saturday night. Now gender-bending appears to have boiled down to a bunch of hatchet-faced transsexuals demanding to use the Ladies, ‘no-platforming’ veteran feminists who have worked all

Spectator books of the year: Julie Burchill on Julie Burchill

I couldn’t work out whether Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl (Ebury, £14.99) was aimed at mature adolescents or immature adults, but I loved it anyway — even before I came across the very pleasing mention of myself in Chapter 20, and the even better one in Chapter 24. Tamar Cohen’s The Broken (Doubleday, £6.99) was that miracle — a novel about the disintegration of a middle-class marriage which didn’t make me sneer once, thanks to the cliché-free freshness of the writing. But my favourite book of the year has to be Unchosen: Memoirs of a Philo-Semite (Unbound, £14.99) by Julie Burchill: a wonderfully cool-headed and unbiased writer I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot

Want a fun job? You just have to pick the right parents

Recently one morning, as I was weeping over Caitlin Moran’s (daughter of Mr and Mrs Moran of Wolverhampton) brilliant book How to Build a Girl — specifically, the heartbreaking way she writes about coming from an impoverished family — a report came on to the radio with the glad tidings that working-class white children are now doing worse in schools than any other ethnic group. Said one Graham Stuart, the Conservative chairman of the education select committee, ‘They do less homework and are more likely to miss school than other groups. We don’t know how much of the underperformance is due to poor attitudes to school, a lack of work

It’s not hate that Caitlin Moran can’t stand. It’s being disagreed with

Hell, it’s been tough, but I think I’ve pulled through. I went out this morning to buy some cigarettes and there were plenty of people about, doing stuff — so the world has not changed beyond recognition these last couple of days. Everyone else seems to have made it. I hope you made it OK, too, without the need for counselling. Here we all are, huddled together, clutching at each other for warmth in the post-apocalyptic gloom. But we’re still standing. We managed to survive Caitlin Moran’s 24-hour boycott of Twitter. Moran is a journalist who decided to boycott Twitter because, incredible though it might seem, people keep saying nasty

Claws out for Caitlin Moran

The ladies of the London chatterati are at each other’s throats. Left-wing identity politics has been eating itself since the New Year, when the leading feminists of Fleet Street went into battle over who is the better feminist. The  great titan-esses are actually secret subversives determined to surrender their cause to subconscious patriarchy. Well, that’s what you would think if you believe some of the words that have been thrown at the likes of the Times’ Caitlin Moran or the Observer’s Julie Burchill and Suzanne Moore in recent weeks. The barbs are getting sharper. The promotional materials for Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies, the latest offering from Hadley