Caitlin Moran is a London Times columnist and author of the recently published “How to Be a Woman”.
She was recently interviewed for New Yorker magazine concerning her views of the continued “relevancy” of the gender ideology of feminism[1]. Also, Caitlin Moran is a dunce. Sure, I could have been clever and used a synonym rhyming with Moran, but it was too easy.
The article redraws several points made in Moran’s “how to be..” notably, that only 29% of American women identify as adherents to the ideology-starting-with-F. This number prompts Moran to ask, in apparent pique: “what do you think feminism is, ladies?”
Without pretending to speak for any of said ladies, non-feminist or otherwise, a good many quite likely
think feminism is a dogmatic ideology built on hatred and violence.
After years of addressing this gender ideology and it’s adherents, I’m inclined to think the answer to “what do you think feminism is”? would be a religion of hatred, and from an informal survey of my female colleagues, I know I am not alone in this assessment.
Moran indulges in some begging of the question[2] with her statements “What part of ‘liberation for women’ is not for you? Implying liberation for women and feminism are the same thing, and glossing over liberation from what? She mentions freedom to vote, but passes over the purchase cost men alone have paid historically to earn their vote. Moran mentions the legal innovation of women not being owned by the man they marry. Except that woman have never been owned, no matter how many historical revisionist ideologues claim it.
Moran is also the apparent developer of a new technique of hyperbolic obfuscation, which although she hasn’t published it in the form of a book, we’ll call Moranology. She provides an example of this technique while discussing her related book, Moranthology.
“The idea of not being able to control my own fertility genuinely terrifies me. That one mistake might change your life. That everything I am, and do, could be ended by the repeal of laws our mothers fought so hard for, that women had waited for the entire span of humanity to come about. Because that’s what the anti-abortion movement would want: a situation where no woman is ever allowed to make a single mistake without bearing the consequences for the rest of her life. Just like we used to have, until very recently.
“Imagine a parallel in the lives of men. You go out one night, get drunk, and lose, badly, at poker. You wake the next morning, and someone turns up on your doorstep with a twenty-five-year-old man called “Ray,” tells you, “You’re now financially and morally responsible for this man for the rest of your life,” and then walks away, leaving you with Ray. That’s what not allowing women to rectify—quickly, safely, and legally—an accidental pregnancy is like. Except the Ray version is still easier, because he’s a fully grown man—not a tiny baby you have to labor out of your body, and breast-feed, and tend to at 4:30 A.M., and give up work for. Maybe risk your life or your sanity or your continence for. The unkindness of not letting women decide when they want to be parents takes my breath away. Not only for the simple inhumanity of the act but also because I feel it demeans parenting.”
“It suggests that these people think you can parent terrified, unwillingly, exhaustedly, when you simply don’t wish to. And maybe some people can. But I believe in giving a parent-child relationship the most favourable start possible. And that favourable start begins, for me, with deciding that you want the baby in the first place. Not hoping that you love it nine months down the line, after the government has invaded your body, forced your hand. Women have always aborted. Women always will. No kind government would make a thing that will inevitably happen dangerous, and illegal, again.”
Yes, this is an interview published in the online edition of The New Yorker, and not The Onion. I checked. Twice.
Moran has exactly described the reality of men’s total lack of reproductive rights, but in an apparent departure from the land of reason, sanity and reality, prefaces this all with the phrase “Imagine a parallel in the lives of men.”
She then fictionalizes men’s real, present reality of no reproductive rights, by casting the scene as a gambling debt, rather than forcible financial participation in fatherhood, which is what many men face in the the real world.
Is New Yorker magazine satirizing feminism? Or are Caitlin Moran and the online journal’s editor actually in such denial of reality that they have exactly described male reality – but failed to recognize their own writing, and have re-cast it as a hypothetical. Imagine if men had it like this?
They do, you morans.
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/interview-with-caitlin-moran.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
