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a7ac13c
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For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who - against all the odds - got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. Show a girl a pioneering hero - Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc - and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed.
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women-s-liberation
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Caitlin Moran |
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4ae1a4c
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But as the years went on, I realised that what I really want to be, all told, is a human. Just a productive, honest, courteously treated human.
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feminist
inspirational
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Caitlin Moran |
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2027563
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Who doesn't have a friend who worships her lover with a passion that seems baffling to everyone that knows them? Before you met him for the first time, she'd talked him up like he was a cross between Indiana Jones, Barack Obama and The Doctor. When you finally meet him, he's a quiet little thing who looks like a baked bean in glasses, and actually says 'harumph' as spelt.
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relationships
women
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Caitlin Moran |
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790d4c9
|
You can always tell when a woman is with the wrong man, because she has so much to say about the fact that nothing's happening. When women find the right person, on the other hand, they just... disappear for six months, then resurface, eyes shiny, and usually about six pounds heavier.
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Caitlin Moran |
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982e5d4
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But the problem with battling yourself is that even if you win, you lose. At some point - scarred and exhausted - you either accept that you must become a woman - that you are a woman - or you die. This is the brutal, root truth of adolescence - that it is often a long, painful campaign of attrition. Those self-harming girls, with the latticework of razor cuts on their arms and thighs, are just reminding themselves that their body is a batt..
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Caitlin Moran |
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37a9d7b
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And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.
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Caitlin Moran |
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506a1f7
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It's the silliness--the profligacy, and the silliness--that's so dizzying: a seven-year-old will run downstairs, kiss you hard, and then run back upstairs again, all in less than 30 seconds. It's as urgent an item on their daily agenda as eating or singing. It's like being mugged by Cupid.
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parenthood
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Caitlin Moran |
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6a0119e
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I've seen this idea put forward a hundred times - that a proper feminist would do her own hoovering, Germaine Greer cleans her own lavvy, and Emily Wilding Davison threw herself under that horse, hands still pine-y fresh from Mr Muscle Oven Cleaner. On this basis alone, how many women have had to conclude, sighingly, as they hire a cleaner, that they can't, then, be a feminist? But, of course, the hiring of domestic help isn't a case of wom..
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Caitlin Moran |
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c05cee4
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I can write, because writing--unlike choreography, architecture, or conquering kingdoms--is a thing you can do when you're lonely and poor, and have no infrastructure, i.e., a ballet troupe or some cannons.
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Caitlin Moran |
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44d9b15
|
A 'sign of weakness' for a male celebrity is being found to be unfaithful, or unkind to an employee, or having crashed their car while stoned out of their tiny minds. A 'sign of weakness' for a woman, on the other hand, can be a single, unflattering picture.
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Caitlin Moran |
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c2a1320
|
The people around you are mirrors, I think. You see yourself reflected in their eyes. If the mirror is true, and smooth, you see your true self. That's how you learn who you are.
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feminism
life
how-to-be-a-woman
self
person
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Caitlin Moran |
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f9cf47c
|
I'm learning a whole new thing: that sometimes, love isn't observable or noisy or tangible. That sometimes, love is anonymous. Sometimes, love is silent. Sometimes, love just stands there when you're calling it a cunt, biting its tongue and waiting.
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Caitlin Moran |
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361581f
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The motto I have penned on my knuckles is that this is the best world we have--because it's the only world we have. It's the simplest math ever. However many terrible, rankling, peeve-inducing things may occur, there are always libraries. And rain-falling-on-sea. And the moon. And love. There is always something to look back on, with satisfaction, or forward to, with joy. There is always a moment where you boggle at the world--at yourself--..
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Caitlin Moran |
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309a128
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There are some women out there who are just going to look better with a mustache: that's statistics.
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Caitlin Moran |
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194ef1a
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When statistics come in saying that only 29 percent of American women would describe themselves as feminist - and only 42 percent of British women - I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of 'liberation for women' is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? 'Vogue' by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just D..
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humour
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Caitlin Moran |
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911db3f
|
So what is the best vegetable? Well, we all know that: it's the potato. The vegetable you can't screw up. You can throw a potato , run away from it - and, an hour later, it's turned into a meal. Try doing that with broccoli, or a trifle, and it will laugh in your face.
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vegetables
potato
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Caitlin Moran |
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0f9777e
|
A self-made man" - not of woman born but alchemized, through sheer force of will, by the man himself. This is what I want to be. I want to be a self-made woman. I want to conjure myself out of every sparkling, fast moving thing I can see. I want to be the creator of myself. I'm going to begat myself"
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women
inspirational
growing-up
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Caitlin Moran |
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69020c5
|
If you would feel comfortable going around to someone's house at the end of a long day saying, "I'm just going to take my bra off," you know you are intimate friends."
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humour
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Caitlin Moran |
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a0f11fa
|
The real problem here is that we're all dying. All of us. Every day the cells weaken and the fibres stretch and the heart gets closer to its last beat. The real cost of living is dying, and we're spending days like millionaires: a week here, a month there, casually spunked until all you have left are the two pennies on your eyes. Personally, I like the fact we're going to die. There's nothing more exhilarating than waking up every morning a..
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Caitlin Moran |
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b679a38
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This is the terrible thing about learning everything from books--sometimes you don't know how to say the words. You know the ideas, but you cannot discuss them with people with any confidence. And so you stay silent. It is the curse of the autodidact. Or "autodidiact," as I said, on the same shameful day. Oh, that was a conversation that went so wrong."
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Caitlin Moran |
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e57df90
|
When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won't often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women's attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I'll take bet..
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Caitlin Moran |
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2976dbd
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I have a rule for working out if the root problem of something is, in fact, sexism. And it is this: asking 'Are the boys doing it? Are the boys having to worry about this stuff? Are the boys the centre of a gigantic global debate on this subject?
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women
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Caitlin Moran |
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5aad7e2
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And - as a woman reconciled in her own body - I feel I can argue with anyone's god about my right to end a pregnancy. My first conception - wanted so badly - ended in miscarriage, three days before my wedding. A kind nurse removed my wedding manicure with nail-polish remover, in order to fit a finger-thermometer for the subsequent D&C operation. I wept as I went in to the operating theatre, and wept as I came out. In that instance, my body ..
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women-s-rights
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Caitlin Moran |
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38da4d0
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The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang. In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.
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Caitlin Moran |
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f80545f
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So what do you do when you build yourself up - only to realise you built yourself with the wrong things?
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Caitlin Moran |
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fda3374
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I'm going to lie this one right on the line, right here, right now: I'm pro big pants. Strident feminism NEEDS big pants. Really big. I'm currently wearing a pair that could have been used as a fire blanket to put out the Great Fire of London at any point during the first 48 hours or so. They extend from the top of my thigh to my belly button, and effectively double up as a second property that I can escape to at weekends. If I were going t..
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Caitlin Moran |
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64c5fdb
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You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 ..
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Caitlin Moran |
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34e0ee3
|
Here's the amazing thing about sex: you get a whole person to yourself, for the first time since you were a baby. Someone who is looking at you--just you--and thinking about you, and wanting you, and you haven't even had to lie at the bottom of the stairs and pretend you're dead to get them to do it.
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Caitlin Moran |
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9a85d73
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People with no upper-body strength, who read poetry. These are my people.
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Caitlin Moran |
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04806d7
|
Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
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Caitlin Moran |
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8f25e7c
|
Your mind is the projection screen every writer steals; it is the firing of your neurones that makes every book come alive. You are the electricity that turns it on. A book cannot live until the touch of your hand on the first page brings it alive. A writer is essentially typing blank pages - shouting out spells in the dark - until the words are read by you, and the magic explodes into your head, and no one else's.
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Caitlin Moran |
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cfb90dd
|
But I do have conversations about the Patriarchy and I am having them with gay men. At eighteen, I am discovering what generations of women have long known. The natural ally of the straight woman is the gay man because they are others losers too.
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gay-men
patriarchy
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Caitlin Moran |
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482fa67
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hearing women singing about themselves - rather than men singing about women - makes everything seem wonderfully clear, and possible
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women
music
singing
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Caitlin Moran |
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3a1cd79
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Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside jigsaws.
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religion
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Caitlin Moran |
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b528dcb
|
it's technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism you wouldn't be allowed to have a debate on a woman's place in society. You'd be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor -- biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men's card game -- before going back to hoeing the rutabaga field.
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Caitlin Moran |
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c6d5800
|
I will never tell anyone when I feel bad again. I will never confide a weakness. It does not work. It makes things worse.
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Caitlin Moran |
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3e5814b
|
the only plan I've come up with is writing. I can write, because writing--unlike choreography, architecture, or conquering kingdoms--is a thing you can do when you're lonely and poor, and have no infrastructure, i.e., a ballet troupe or some cannons. Poor people can write. It's one of the few things poverty, and lack of connections, cannot stop you doing.
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Caitlin Moran |
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d97bdc2
|
What art should be about,' they will say, 'is revealing exquisite and resonant truths about the human condition.' Well, to be honest - no, it shouldn't. I mean, it can occasionally, if it wants to; but really, how many penetrating insights to human nature do you need in one lifetime? Two? Three? Once you've realised that no one else has a clue what they're doing, either, and that love can be totally pointless, any further insights into huma..
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Caitlin Moran |
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839cfe1
|
You can be whatever you want--so long as you're sure it's what you actually want, rather than one of two equally dodgy choices foisted onto you.
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Caitlin Moran |
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58b5e88
|
When young people are cynical, and snarky, they shoot down their own future. When you keep saying "No," all that's left is what other people said "Yes" to before you were born. Really, "No" is no choice at all."
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future
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Caitlin Moran |
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efb4b2b
|
You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.
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Caitlin Moran |
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a2948d8
|
The real cost of living is dying, and we're spending days like millionaires: a week here, a month there, casually spunked until all you have left are the two pennies on your eyes.
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Caitlin Moran |
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47178bd
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I believe in music and gin and joy and talking too much and human kindness.
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Caitlin Moran |
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ed2eee0
|
While motherhood is an incredible vocation, it has no more inherent worth than a childless woman simply being who she is, to the utmost of her capabilities. To think otherwise betrays a belief that being a thinking, creative, productive, and fulfilled woman is, somehow, not enough. That no action will ever be the equal of giving birth.
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Caitlin Moran |