|
ed9b35f
|
Don't call it sexism. Call it "manners" instead. When a woman blinks a little, shakes her head like Columbo, and says, "I'm sorry, but that sounded a little . . . uncivil," a man is apt to apologize. Because even the most rampant bigot on earth has no defense against a charge of simply being rude."
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
897209e
|
I'm so tired of this shit. Batman never had to get together a petition with 250,000 signatures on it when he wanted to change things. He just went and rammed the Batcar into the Penguin's den. Why can't I ram a Batcar into the Penguin's den? I wish I was Batman.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
6b648e0
|
Our new budget now, with no wriggle room for anything extra--not a pot of jam, or a new pair of shoes. We cannot do anything other than stay very still. We are on 11 percent less of was-never-enough-in-the-first-place.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
ee3e679
|
Boobs exist only to jiggle up and down on the chests of women between the ages of 14 and 32, after which they get too droopy, and then presumably fall off the face of the earth, into space; maybe to eventually become part of the giant rings of Saturn.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
2625a35
|
Why can't we just loosen our belts, take off our heels, and cheerfully rot, like the boys?
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
d5319df
|
As Germaine Greer puts it in The Whole Woman, "to become a mother without wanting it is to live like a slave, or domestic animal."
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
14fa0c2
|
It's exhausting being cynical. You are trying to be an immovable, angry rock in the middle of a stream. But the stream will not move. It is you that will be worn down to dull silt.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
920eb11
|
You've never potty-trained a toddler, have you, Johanna? It's like working as a ball boy at Wimbledon, but with shit. And it goes on for months. With people crying at you.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
a86eea2
|
When I hear women talking about how their wedding is going to be/was the best day of their life, I can't help but think, You just haven't taken enough MDMA in a field at 3 a.m., love.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
0f374b4
|
think about how brave it is, to do this: to queue up, and meet your hero. There's something incredibly intimate about reading, or listening, or looking at someone else's art. When it truly moves you--when you whoop when Prince whoops in Purple Rain; or cry when Bastian cries in The NeverEnding Story, it is as if you have been them, for a while. You traveled inside them, in their shoes, breathing their breath. Moving with their pulse. A fain..
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
79f9619
|
I am so hot for Chevy. I have even imagined what my first line to him will be - the one that will capture his heart. 'Chevy Chase?' I will say, at a party very closely modelled on the ones I've seen in Dynasty. 'Any relation to Cannock Chase?' Cannock Chase is just off the A5 to Stafford. LA-born movie star and comedian Chevy is going to both get, and love, this joke.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
b05f51a
|
A book is a beautiful, paper mausoleum, or tomb, in which to store ideas...to keep the bones of your thoughts in one place, for all time. I just want to say..."Hello. We can hear you. The words survived."
|
|
reading
writing
inspirational
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
efe34d7
|
Being able to wear underwear brilliantly is such a key talent for a woman that there are even competitions to judge who is the best at it: Miss America, Miss World, Miss International, Miss Universe. You can call this "the swimsuit round" all you like--we know what it really means. It's the "bra and undies round."
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
f6490db
|
Pre-internet, it's how I learned, and it learned me good. I know deep wisdoms, such as, 'If you fancy someone hot who is already married, just wait a while - their wife might catch fire.' (Jane Eyre)
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
6f133c9
|
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 me. I'm gonna begat myself."
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
a181757
|
If I don't keep this job, then my only future career-options are working in Argos, or being a prostitute,' I say, wildly. 'Maybe you could work in Argos a prostitute,' my mother says, merrily. She appears to be enjoying this conversation. 'They could list you in the catalogue, and people could queue up, and wait for you to come down the conveyor belt.
|
|
humour
humor
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
3c16635
|
Every woman who chooses--joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of her own free will and desire--not to have a child does womankind a massive favor in the long term. We need more women who are allowed to prove their worth as people, rather than being assessed merely for their potential to create new people. After all, half of those new people we go on to create are also women--presumably themselves to be judged, in their futures, for not making ne..
|
|
women
feminist
self-worth
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
80da957
|
I have discovered something amazing: some people aren't just people, but a place - a whole world. Sometimes you find someone you could live in for the rest of your life. John Kite is like Narnia to me - I've pushed through his fur coat and into a land where I am Princess Duchess, High Chatter of Cair Paravel. In John Kite, people walk down the street holding pigs, and we walk onstage holding hands into the bright light, and I fly over tiny ..
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
f9ce0b1
|
The scabs feel like I have a message on my arm. Something that needs to be read, urgently, by someone. It was only years later that I realized the person I had written that message to- the person who wasn't listening- was me. I was the one who should have been staring at that arm, and working out what the red hieroglyphics meant. Had I translated them, I would have realized those red lines read: 'Never feel this bad again. Never come back t..
|
|
depression
self-harm
self-mutilation
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
e37e159
|
I don't need to critique things, or have an opinion, or pose, with John - we just go around being alive, and pointing at things. We're just, simply, in the world. It had never occurred to me what a wonderful thing this was. Or perhaps it did, a long time ago - but I had forgotten. I am full of how great life is. I am so happy to be alive. That point of life is joy - to make it, to receive it. That the Earth is a treasure box of people and p..
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
24df509
|
At 14, I am an experiment. Inside, I am resurrected. I am in the middle of the kind of explosion of perspective that, in later years, I will pay a great deal of money to emulate in nightclubs, and at parties, in bathrooms--counting out tenners for pills in order to feel a tenth this remorseless, expanded, and inspired.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
6c297a0
|
It really is important you say these words out loud. "I AM A FEMINIST." If you feel you cannot say it--not even standing on the ground--I would be alarmed. It's probably one of the most important things a woman will ever say: the equal of "I love you," Is it a boy or a girl?" or "No! I've changed my mind! I don't want bangs!"
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
0637461
|
I'm going to say 'Amen' now. This is a deal now. We are square on this. You will sort this out. Violet will not rat on us. Amen.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
3209c50
|
in the 21st century, we don't need to march against size zero models, risible pornography, lap-dancing clubs and Botox. We don't need to riot, or go on hunger strike. There's no need to throw ourselves under a horse, or even a donkey. We just need to look it in the eye, squarely, for a minute,
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
274a1b5
|
And there's your pecking order of unhappiness, right there in a nutshell. Of all the overwhelming compulsions you can be ruined by, all of them have some potential for some perverted, self-destructive fascination - except eating.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
5972e65
|
Kriss gives me a sibling-punch. Anyone who has a sibling will know what that is--a punch that really hurts quite a lot, and that is meant to, but that you cannot take offense at, or retaliate against, because you went out of your way to get it--because sometimes you want your sibling to punch you. No one knows why this is.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
a8082f6
|
For as I sit there, in pain, I suddenly notice I have changed. I am not self-loathing anymore. These billion cheap blackbirds inside me - beaking the wires of the cage, frantic - are now on the ground, sleeping. This billion eyed mess, which I cannot comprehend, contain or name, has now disappeared - replaced by these hot, red lines on my leg and arm.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
a8f18a6
|
I will work out exactly how - with my no money, no money at all, until I actually receive my first, dawdling pay-cheque - I will get to Birmingham later. Perhaps Birmingham will, in the next week, move closer to Wolverhampton, and I can simply walk there!
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
5aa634c
|
intolerable, because then I imagine you having sex and that, inevitably, makes me want to kill myself, and everyone in this family. And everyone I've ever met. And God. I don
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
d6a3ecc
|
We should have the lady-balls to say, "Yeah--I like the look of this world. And I've been here for a good while, watching. Now--here's how I'd tweak it. Because we're all in this together. We're all just, you know. The Guys."
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
773f4f1
|
You can't meet your heroes--because they are, in the end, just an idea, that lives inside you.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
26f9f83
|
When people suggest that what, all along, has been holding women back is other women bitching about each other, I think they're severely overestimating the power of a catty zinger during a cigarette break. We have to remember that snidely saying, "Her hair's a bit limp on top" isn't what's keeping womankind from closing the 30 percent pay gap and a place on the board of directors. I think that's more likely to be down to tens of thousands o..
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
ab28c0d
|
Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawn--lit up during winter darkness; open in the slashing rain--which allowed a girl so poor she didn't even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: traveling through time, making contact with the dead--Dorothy Parker, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte Bronte, Spike Milligan. A library in the middle of a community is a cross be-tween an emergency exit, a life raft ..
|
|
library
library-funding
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
d7da5af
|
We live now in a glorious age which we might term 'Post Frozen'. Frozen - the feminist Disney movie where the idiot sexy prince turns out to be a betraying motherfuck, and the whole plot revolves around, instead, the love of two sisters.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
62d9e7a
|
Or perhaps we should just junk the whole idea of getting married in the first place. I'm generally against anything where you're supposed to change your name. When else do you get named something else? On joining a nunnery, or becoming a porn
|
|
over-spending
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
fc6dcbe
|
We need a temporary cessation in people having any opinions about any women, ever. I propose a, say, five-year moratorium on having opinions about women, in order to let one generation of girls get from one side of puberty to the other without growing up in a climate where women are constantly being scolded, chivvied, harassed, or subjected to thunderous opinion columns concluding that, yet again, some woman in the public eye has overreache..
|
|
women
opinion
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
d0567bd
|
So far, 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.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
33a0719
|
I saw what an achievement it was--the will of a small, countable number of men and women who wrote, and thought, and marched, and sang. If you'd killed the right two hundred people, this future would never have come at all. Perhaps this future had come so late because, previously, they had killed the right two hundred people--over and over, through history.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
381549c
|
There's one big difference between the poor and the rich,' Kite says, taking a drag from his cigarette. We are in a pub, at lunch-time. John Kite is always, unless stated otherwise, smoking a fag, in a pub, at lunch-time. 'The rich aren't evil, as so many of my brothers would tell you. I've known rich people -- I have played on their yachts -- and they are not unkind, or malign, and they do not hate the poor, as many would tell you. And the..
|
|
politics
rich
poor
government
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
40825eb
|
In that instance, my body had decided that this baby was not to be and had ended it. This time, it is my mind that has decided that this baby was not to be. I don't believe one's decision is more valid than the other. They both know me. They are both equally capable of deciding what is right.
|
|
woman
feminism
decision
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
d4527a3
|
He was bright, bright, bright, like a lantern above a pub door in November- he made you want to come in and never leave.
|
|
beautiful-people
energy
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
6913061
|
A male feminist is one of the most glorious end-products of evolution.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
e445c50
|
My general rule of thumb is that you're always a little bit closer to the conditions that led to the outbreak of the Second World War than you think you are.
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |
|
1a5c9a9
|
If you fancy someone hot who is already married, just wait a while - their wife might catch fire. (Jane Eyre)
|
|
|
Caitlin Moran |