"And then came the backlash!" Caitlin Moran in Can Dish It Out... shocker!
She wrote a bad book -- which is selling like hot cakes anyway -- but she needs an excuse for why not everyone loves it.
Previously: Media Studies is vital; PPE is a ‘Mickey Mouse’ degree.
The hedge-fund-hearted, soulless Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, used the Telegraph to attack universities again.
The great thing about being an extraordinarily well-paid newspaper columnist and successful author like Caitlin Moran is that you can buy your strawmen in bulk. Not for you the small distractions of the freelance opinion slinger; no, you can construct armies of Wickermen to explain why your haters hate you so and, despite the entreaties of Taylor Swift, you do not, in fact, have to shake it off: You can publish a riposte in The Times, pretending to be mildly amused while clearly being absolutely livid that anyone dared to question your authority.
Moran’s latest book is called What About Men? and it is one of the worst books I have had to review in my 20 years as a grubby little hack. As I read it, the words of Mark E. Smith in How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’ drifted into my head:
The Observer magazine just about sums him up E.g. self-satisfied, smug
My review for Perspective is not online yet but I can share this section with you as a flavour of how I feel about the book:
What does Moran’s book say about me or most of my friends and male relations? Precisely – and I’m sure with her many jokes about balls, Moran will appreciate this phrase – cock all…
Moran’s book is relentlessly heteronormative, and its model of masculinity is as regressive and restrictive as the ones she disdains. Defenders of this book – which will sell millions regardless – will argue, “It’s just for laughs, who cares?”
But it’s not about men at all. Like everything Moran writes, her subject is: Caitlin Moran. Men are this book’s vehicle for anecdotes about Caitlin Moran, and the thoughts of Caitlin Moran. [This] is someone who has gone years without experiencing the mortifying silence of no one laughing at their gags. Moran is a star and, when you’re a star, people laugh even when you’re talking balls.
I’m not alone in this:
Tom Nicholson in the i writes:
In trying to explain men in broad brushstrokes, [Moran] tends to boil them down into a testosterone-scented goo. Boys have bad handwriting; girls have good handwriting. Boys banter; girls “have in-depth discussions about their feelings, hair, pets, favourite pencil cases, colouring-in abilities, and ambitions to, one day, run for Parliament”. It gets very wearing.
For The New Statesman, Will Lloyd was brutally effective:
Moran lives for groaning. As a style, Moran-ese is aggressively demotic, creatively sweary, swift and glib. It reads like it comes very easily to her. It confuses candour (“I have touched 14 penises in my life”) with honesty. It leans heavily on replacing words with twee-whimsy Slanglish instead; so “anal sex” becomes “botty fun”, and “urolagnia” becomes “getting widdled on by Mexican twins”. Clichés are subverted in the same way: “If you’re tired of fanny, you’re tired of life,” writes Moran, with Dr Johnson screaming in his tomb…
… What About Men? does, at least, give us a clear picture of the world Moran would like to live in. It’s a padded, soft-play world in which men have role models who “honestly talk about the joys of going for a good poo”, where normal men have “normal relationships with their normal willies”, where there is finally a “male equivalent to the dancing-girl emoji”. It is a world without tragedy, where average people live average lives and everybody laughs at the same transparent jokes about farts and balls and cocks. Ultimately our differences are marginal, and in MoranWorld, man or woman, bro or hoe, gentleman or lady, “we’re all just one of The Guys”.
As I read What About Men?, I imagined how the book would go down with The Guys – some of the guys I’ve known all my life. The book is addressed to them: the default straight problematic males of the Western world. I imagined Moran barging into our rooms while we made desultory chit-chat, or played video games, or watched the football. I imagined her asking us to talk about our problems, and telling us that she could de-puzzle our enigmatic identities by making us talk more about our “normal willies”. I imagined the silence and the embarrassment, and wondered again: has Caitlin Moran ever met a man?
Meanwhile, in The Guardian, which elsewhere offered up a soft soap review with the clear purpose of maintaining good relations with Moran and her publishers, Stuart Jefferies raged:
What About Men? is the kind of will-this-do book whose last chapter actually begins: “This, then, is the last chapter of this book.” Then continues, “I will admit – a lot of my motivation for writing it was a very petty urge to be able to say, ‘Well no man has got around to writing a book like this, and so, as usual, muggins here – a middle-aged woman – has to crack on, and sort it all out.’”
… As Truman Capote wrote of something else, this isn’t writing, it’s typing. Sometimes Moran doesn’t even type. She cuts and pastes. For instance, she prints Hollywood star Mark Wahlberg’s loony daily fitness regimen. Perhaps the point here is to show how men are tyrannised by unrealistic body images, but how refreshing it would have been for Moran to cut and paste, say, Proust’s questionnaire. “My favourite occupation: Loving. My dream of happiness: I am afraid of destroying it by speaking it. What would be my greatest misfortune? Not to have known my mother or my grandmother. What I should like to be: Myself, as the people whom I admire would like me to be.” That’s a real man with relatable experiences beyond Moran’s philosophy.
Unsurprisingly, none of these reviews is addressed in Moran’s column, with its deluded headline I wrote a book about men’s problems. Then came the backlash. Instead, just as she has done every time she has received significant criticism, Moran conjures up an army of imaginary idiots who just don’t get it:
It’s weird, writing a controversial book. Particularly when you really didn’t think you were writing a controversial book. Indeed, when your presumption about the book was that you were making the most mild, good faith and fairly obvious set of observations, which everyone would greet with relaxed variants on “Fair enough!”, or even, “Hurrah!”
… Two weeks before the book came out — before anyone had read it — the Twitter reaction was so furious I had to close down my “mentions”, as it was becoming genuinely unpleasant. Men, it seemed, were very, very angry about the whole idea of the book. Why? Well, their objections largely broke down into two intriguing camps. The first were all like, “How dare you suggest men have problems with communicating their emotions? That is an incredibly old-fashioned and patronising generalisation.”
… Part of the reaction, I think, is that it’s a woman who’s started the conversation. As I note in the book, while every bookshop in the country has a “Women” section, there is no “Men” section. Essentially, I think there was disquiet about the idea of some titty David Attenborough — me — trying to document straight white men as a class, like any other.
The column hums with the same delusion that permeates every page of What About Men? namely that Caitlin Moran is the guru that men have been waiting for and that she is the one to fix them. She does not see the irony of her — however much she lards it with ‘bantz’ — essentially framing herself as the problem solver in the same way that odious creeps like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate have before.
It is faux-naive for an author who has published multiple books to shout about criticism happening “two weeks before the book came out”; at that point, there were review copies in many people’s hands and Moran had published a series of articles (including one where she compared men to dogs) based on the book in The Times and elsewhere.
The objections weren’t coming out of a clear blue sky.
Moran’s tactic for getting the next tranche of sales for What About Men? is to frame it as a “controversial book” while hooting on about how (undeniably) successful it has already been:
Anyway, last week, What About Men? went straight in at No 1. So, another question: is a question controversial if so many other people want to ask it too?
The truth is that Moran’s book is just bad and boring with it. It’s a “will this do?” examination of a big topic that many people — men and women — have looked at both as academics and popular authors. Moran’s premise that no one was writing about this so she had to weigh in is a false one constructed only to justify the book’s existence; it shows a terrifying ego at work as well as total contempt for the people she’s writing about and her readers alike.
Nothing I say will stop the Moran juggernaut; she has the promotional power of the News Corp machine behind her and the complicity of many other columnists and commentators as well as a cadre of celebs she has sidled up to over the years and flattered in her saccharine profiles. But she should know this: People don’t like your book not because it’s controversial or truthtelling but because it is god awful and so smug with it.
Stick this newsletter edition on the pile of inspiration for the next vainglorious, “needless to say I had the last laugh” column.
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Witheringly on-point, Mic. Extra points for MF Doom and Frank Sidebottom in the graphic. ✌️😁
Jesus. Jeeeeesus.