Before we start, let’s be clear: This is a great big hoot of a book. There are lines in it that will make you snort with laughter, situations so true to life that you will howl in recognition. It is very, very funny. So, you could read it just for that, for the entertainment value.
However, if you are female, and particularly if you are a female under 30, then, tucked around the jokes, Moran has provided you with a short, sharp, feminist manifesto. It’s not academic: She doesn’t present a research paper into gender differences in pay or interview women who have suffered domestic abuse. Instead, she uses her own life to examine the everyday niggles of everyday womanhood — hair removal, getting fat, tiny pants, expensive handbags — as well as the big stuff such as work, marriage and kids. She pins each topic out like a live, wriggling, sexist frog, ready for dissection. But, instead of cutting it into little bits, as, say, Germaine Greer would, Moran tickles it so hard that the frog has to beg for mercy and hop off.
Moran, a columnist for the London Times, writes very quickly, so How to Be a Woman is timely. (In fact, if you’re a regular reader of her columns, you’ll be familiar with some of the book’s topics — her wedding, the joy of bras, meeting Lady Gaga.) The book is also on point: Like the best columnists, much of what she says is something you’ve already thought of, but not articulated, not quite. And, like I say, it’s funny. Humor is, of course, the coolest, sharpest weapon in humanity’s social armory, and it’s one that feminists, supposedly, lack. (Though we might mention Tina Fey, Joan Rivers, Nora Ephron ...)
So, perhaps, the very fact that How to Be a Woman is so hilarious is its greatest strength. However, the parts of this book that I loved the most were actually the most serious. There are moments when Moran writes about her unconfident younger self that make you want to clutch that small person to you and say, “It will be all right.” And her account of giving birth and — particularly — of her abortion are exceptionally moving. Not because they are feminist. But because they are true.
The book’s structure loosely follows Moran’s life, from child to thirty-something, with the feminist analysis woven in between. If you wanted to be picky, there are a few occasions when this analysis doesn’t quite work. Her conclusion about pornography is pretty woolly.
There are times when her test for sexism — equating it with a lack of politeness — will not work. But, for this reader at least, that is made up for by her seven-page rant about the delight of pubic hair that includes this observation: “Lying on a hammock, gently finger-combing your Wookie whilst staring up at the sky is one of the great pleasures of adulthood.”
And Moran’s final, simple argument, that there should be more of us, more, different women taking up more space and having more power in the world, is spot on. Why should women only be allowed to be seen and, particularly, heard if they are deemed acceptable enough to do so? Acceptable meaning “pretty and of the right age.” You only need to go online, to read the blogs and tweets of the thousands of anonymous women out there to realize that we have as much to say, and can say it as cleverly and wittily, or as irritatingly and crassly, as men.
Moran has written for the Times since she was 17. She has won awards for her criticism and interviews. She is not an “ordinary” woman by any stretch of the imagination. However, the very nature of being female in the UK means that you share the same life architecture as most other women. Your life is structured in much the same way: To be blunt, you are sold the same shite. Brazilians, Botox, babies before you’re too old: Even if you know that you want none of these things, it can be hard not to be affected by an overbearing general atmosphere that tells you that you do. You must.
It can be hard not to be cowed.
The joy of this book is just that: the joy. What Moran is really arguing for is more female happiness. Women spend too much of their time worrying, beating themselves up, going along with time-wasting, restrictive, often expensive, sexist mores. The triumph of How to Be a Woman is that it adds to women’s confidence. It reminds us that sexism, and all that is associated with it, is not only repressive, it is tedious and stupid. It is boring. Best give it a body swerve and get on with having fun.
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