RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: My name is Rudyard Griffiths and I am the moderator of the Munk Debates. We’re doing a series of pre-debate interviews with the fabulous women thinkers who are appearing in tonight’s debate: Are men obsolete? Up first is Caitlin Moran, the British author of the bestselling book How To Be a Woman, which has stormed the shores here in Canada and in the U.S. Caitlin, it is terrific to have you here.
CAITLIN MORAN: Lovely to be here. You know, you’re my first ever Rudyard, so —
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Really? I’m surprised. It is, as you know, an English name. There aren’t a lot of kids running around —
CAITLIN MORAN: It is one of those things that we exported and forgot about. We have to come abroad to remember our history.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Hear, hear. Let’s start by talking about your very strong support and enthusiasm for feminism, your belief that the struggle for equality should be at the forefront of every woman’s thinking.
CAITLIN MORAN: Yes.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Why do you think that a lot of women your age and younger don’t share your enthusiasm for that kind of capital-F feminism?
CAITLIN MORAN: Because the word, much like the name “Rudyard,” just dropped out of use for a while and everyone just sort of forgot what it meant. I mean, we had feminism up to the early ’90s, which was an amazing time for me to be a teenager. Björk, Alanis Morissette, riot grrrl bands, and Courtney Love were our female pop stars, and we used the word “feminism” a lot; even boys used the word “feminism” a lot. Kurt Cobain said, “I’m a big feminist.” Then the Spice Girls came along and we stopped using the word “feminist” and we started using the words “Girl Power” instead. And so, for the next generation of girls after me, the word “feminism” is seen as something from history: it is understood as a word about very angry women in dungarees shouting that they hate men. The thing is, I love those shout-y, angry women in dungarees saying, “I hate men.” One hundred and fifty years ago, men generally thought that women were on par with animals. We needed a lot of angry women to come along and change things. They gave us the vote and made things like domestic abuse and rape illegal. I’m of the non-angry feminist generation. I find life incredibly amusing. I would like to laugh at the ridiculousness, which is a luxury of modern feminists.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Great answer. What are the new kinds of barriers and boundaries that feminism needs to find to confront and break down? Women have won the right to vote, people are much more conscious of violence against women, at least in the Western world, maybe not so much in India, so where are the new boundaries?
CAITLIN MORAN: I think quotas are a key issue. Although there are many arguments for and against quotas, I’m very much in favour of them in the workplace, including for parliament. People try to argue that if you have quotas that dictate that an organization has to be 50 percent women and 50 percent men, then you will end up with people who are wildly unqualified and who come in and break the photocopier and screw things up. We already have people who are wildly unqualified in the system; people who go to work and break the photocopier, clutter up the office, and screw things up: it’s men. If you’ve got 100 percent men in an office, they’re not all going to be amazing — a portion of them are going to be terrible. So why not replace the men who aren’t capable with women who are capable? I think it’s very important to have 50/50 quotas. It doesn’t even matter if some of the women who get in there because of quotas are terrible at their jobs; as anybody who has ever worked in an office knows, you only need three people — max — in there to get anything done. Anyone else who’s around is just there in case other people get lonely; you might need someone to chat with on your way to the toilet.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: You’re opposing tonight’s thesis of men’s supposed obsolescence. How do you respond to —
CAITLIN MORAN: Aren’t you enormously grateful that I’m not saying that men should be exterminated?
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Thank you.
CAITLIN MORAN: We’re not going to come around and just put you all in big dumpsters —
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: My Y chromosome will live to see another day.
CAITLIN MORAN: If I win. If I lose, you’re doomed! Every single man in this room is [makes throat-slitting gesture] at the end of the day.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Yes, give us a bit of a taste of your rebuttal to that kind of argument. Is it that the rise of women isn’t a sure thing, or is it that the decline of men is something that is exaggerated, or a bit of both?
CAITLIN MORAN: We can’t keep having arguments about men versus women: this is what screws us up. As a feminist, one of the phrases that annoys me the most is “this is a feminist issue.” Childcare is a perfect example. If men and women both have to work, as an economic necessity, then the big question is who will look after the children. That is not a “feminist” problem. The issue of childcare obviously affects mankind. We need to stop separating problems into “problems of men” and “problems of women.” Every time we describe something as a women’s problem, men are like, “Okay, we don’t need to bother with that.” Or when you say, “This is a problem of men,” women go off and do something else. We need to phrase everything in terms of the common humanity — we’re in it together. So I think that is the simple answer. I also just have massive residual fondness for men. I live quite near to them; I could give birth to one or even marry one of them; I happen to be related to a few. I’ve just got some quite good memories of you guys.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: But Caitlin, are you concerned that there is a growing underclass of men in the United Kingdom, similar to here in North America —
CAITLIN MORAN: Yes.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Men who are excluded from the workforce, who have lousy scores in terms of educational attainment, in terms of earning power: this is a big sociological issue.
CAITLIN MORAN: Absolutely. I’ve read Hanna Rosin’s book The End of Men. It’s a very attention-grabbing title. I think a lot of people have sort of mistaken the issue as middle-class women with soaring academic prospects dumping all over working-class men. As someone who comes from a working-class background, my politics are Marxist before anything else, so I’m very against that notion. It is an issue that needs to be identified, so there is no point in ignoring it. Whenever you talk about any sort of societal change, the first few steps involve identifying and describing the problem, and then bringing it to the public discourse, which is what Hanna did with that book. The next thing to do is think about how we want society to be organized. And that is very much what I want to talk about tonight. I think men are struggling in some areas and we need to ask ourselves if we want that; if we don’t, then how can we change it? How will change affect us? Will it be good or bad for us?
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: What is your advice to men? Do you think the workplace has changed to the point that certain female attributes are now better understood and more rewarded materially? Should men discover their feminine side or should men kind of double down on being men?
CAITLIN MORAN: I don’t know. I never have any advice for men in the way that I do for women.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: But you wrote a whole book for women.
CAITLIN MORAN: Yeah, but —
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Help me out here!
CAITLIN MORAN: You’re not my normal subject. I really don’t know anything about you at all other than what I’ve seen Luke Skywalker do in Star Wars. If you have any problems akin to Luke, like if your aunt and uncle have been killed and your visor has gone out, and you have to rely on the Force to get to the Death Star, I can help you through that, but in terms of working in an iron-hammering factory and balancing that with childcare, I’m all out of ideas. One thing I do know is that it doesn’t generally work for women to try and integrate into male realms — women need to find their own space to do things. I think that is why the Internet has been so important, particularly for women trying to break into film and television writing — these genres of writing have been dominated by male narratives. What is really nice about the Internet is that you can be any kind of female you want. Look at all the female activism and other forms of female creativity you see on the Internet. In these cases, women didn’t need to break into pre-existing male constructs, we just needed to be given some space and get on with it ourselves. Women are overtaking men in many areas as a result.
For hundreds of thousands of years, men have been doing everything and dominating the discourse, so anything that women say now is generally going to sound quite new, fresh, and weird. Lena Dunham is a perfect example. There are a million more stories like Lena’s but we’ve just never given women the space to vocalize them before.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Two final questions, and do take your time with both: Why has Britain never seen another Margaret Thatcher?
CAITLIN MORAN: Oh, because the first one was so horrible! We all got ’round together in the pub afterwards and said, “Let’s not do that one again. That didn’t work out too well.”
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I mean, ideology aside, your country does not do a great job on female leadership.
CAITLIN MORAN: Well, you haven’t had any female presidents yet. Have you? I don’t know. I haven’t checked.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: One, briefly, but she wasn’t elected. We’re working on it. We do have four provincial premiers — the largest provinces, both by economy and population, are now run by women.
CAITLIN MORAN: Alright, you’re doing much better than us. The structure of Parliament in Britain is furiously un-female friendly: the long hours, and the fact that everybody has to run down to Westminster to work makes it nearly impossible to balance your life. All the female MPs that I know are campaigning incredibly hard to change that. But yeah, we’re rubbish at it and we know it. I mean, no one more than the British likes to sit around and go, “We’re British and we’re rubbish.” So, yes, we are really behind on this.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Finally, is there a man in popular culture, either a fictitious figure or a director, writer, or artist, that you think really gets women right; someone who you think really gets the shifting power dynamic between the sexes?
CAITLIN MORAN: Oh gosh, yes! Well, Joss Whedon, who created Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was amazing. All of his female characters are incredible and he has given several fantastic lectures about writing strong female characters. Russell T. Davies, who rebooted Dr. Who, does simple things, like he won’t put women in high heels when they are running in a scene, and instead they are just running around in boots. A simple acknowledgement that women can’t run in heels makes a big difference!
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Especially from a giant space alien.
CAITLIN MORAN: Exactly. Although with zero gravity it might be more likely.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Caitlin, thank you. You’ve been generous with your time.