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Title : furniture works international speaker stands
furniture works international speaker stands
[applause] yvonne hunter: good evening, everyone. isthis mic on? my name is yvonne hunter and i'm the head of programming for the appelsalon here at toronto public library. it is a special pleasure to welcome this evening,globe and mail columnist, johanna schneller, in conversation with caitlin moran. yh: and now let me introduce you to our hostfor this evening, johanna schneller. johanna is a canadian film journalist, televisionpersonality and a freelance celebrity interviewer for publications such as vanity fair, gq,chatelaine, and toronto life. she has also been the film columnist for the globe andmail and hosted tvontario's weekly saturday
night at the movies. please welcome johannaschneller. johanna schneller: hi. thank you all for coming.okay, now let's be honest, i have every right to be painfully jealous of caitlin moran.i'm a columnist, i write columns. they're nice. [laughter] js: but i do not write for the times of londonand i was not named columnist of the year by the british press awards in 2010, as shewas, nor was i named critic and interviewer of the year one year later, in 2011. my columnsare not so passionately received that i regularly force twitter to stop everything else it'sdoing and talk only about me.
js: i did not write, as caitlin did, the hilariousand wise book "how to be a woman" which was an instant new york times best seller. i didnot write a debut novel called "how to build a girl" that's just coming out here but isalready so beloved in the uk that i imagine people hold it when they go to sleep at night.i have interviewed some famous people but i haven't interviewed a rock band while loungingin their bathtub, in a soaking petticoat. js: lady gaga has never begged me to accompanyher to a sex club in berlin. and while i fully see the appeal of ms. moran's favourite childhoodsnack a lump of cheese on a fork, people do not shout my name in the street or cry whenthey meet me. but as hard as this may be to believe, i'm actually not jealous of caitlinmoran, in fact, i just adore her. i am simply
glad and grateful she exists, that she's outthere writing so brilliantly for all of us. her feminism is just so strident. js: her writing is so freaking bright thatif you had seasonal affect disorder, you could go stand next to it and it would cure you.and she is just consistently, thrillingly, euphoria inducingly, funny, sentence for sentence,caitlin moran is the funniest freaking writer i have ever read. raise your hands if youagree with me. [cheers] js: obviously, you agree with me, you're herewhich means you've won the lottery because the demand for these tickets was so insanelyhigh, the 500 seats here sold out in a day,
and so many people were clamouring for moretickets that we're simulcasting to more people in the atrium downstairs. it's actually onlythe third time we've done that. the other two were from naomi klein and chris hadfield,the commander of the international space station. js: so that is some company. i don't knowif you people in the atrium, if you make a lot of noise, can we hear you up here? maybenot. but we know you're down there, and so people in the atrium, welcome, people in thisroom and people of earth, please join me in welcoming caitlin moran. js: so is this thing on? you can hear me?okay, fantastic. so what was your second favourite snack?
caitlin moran: well, cheese on cheese. thatwas only a little bit further, we invented the snack cheese on cheese, which we had atheme tune for, i don't know if anybody remembers the song "girls on film" by duran duran. cm: but we took that, and misappropriatedthe lyrics, so it's "cheese on cheese, i'm having a sandwich. cheese on cheese with cheddarand leicester." and we would just simply put cheese on cheese. js: cheese on cheese. cm: yeah. even we backed out of the idea ofhaving three tiers of cheese, it was just simply... we had to stop at two.
js: cheese on cheese. okay, when did you knowyou were funny? cm: the thing is, i'm not the funniest onein my family, like kind of my sister caz that i write my tv show with, we write a sitcomabout weird, fat teenage girls in wolverhampton, and my brother jim, who is in the front rowthere, are the funny ones in the family. i'm actually genuinely regarded as a bit of adull buffoon... cm: within the context of my family. but thegreat thing is, if you live in a very big family, i'm the eldest of eight and we werebrought up in a very small council house in wolverhampton. and when you're in a very compressedenvironment with very small amount of resources, you basically hate each other and usually,you would try and kill each other, but being
funny at each other instead is a very goodway of getting through the day without actually destroying your siblings. so it's a survivalmechanism basically, it was what kept us together. js: you write a lot about your childhood.council estates were sort of like our subsidized housing, i presume. cm: yes. js: and wolverhampton. how would you characterizewolverhampton? cm: blimey! it's a punchline into jokes inthe uk, kind of like, someone would go, "and i won a week's donkey trekking in wolverhampton."it's kind of... it's the worst place you can imagine living and it is where we lived. it'sjust seen as nothing. it used to be an amazing
proud industrial town, but margaret thatchercame along and gutted it. and as a consequence, it was a town that just sort of walked aroundin shock, sort of looking very unhappy. it had, for a while, a tourist office there,to give tourist information which i can assure you, no one's ever gone on holiday to wolverhampton. cm: and a friend of mine went to do a featureon the amusingness of idea of there being a tourist information office in wolverhampton.and he sat there for 20 minutes and three people came in and went, "do you sell chips?"and that was... cm: no one there could believe that it wasanything other than a chip shop in disguise. js: all tourist information places shouldsell chips.
cm: everywhere should sell chips. js: everywhere should sell chips. cm: the only thing wrong with this otherwisebrilliant building, which probably had, it even has a 3d printer, is that it doesn'tsell chips as far as i know. that's the one thing... the only thing that doesn't makethis building my favourite building in toronto by a mile. js: so, council estate, not a thrilling town,small apartment, lots of siblings. it's not the easiest childhood. do you feel... wouldyou change parts of it if you could or do you feel that it was all on the road to...
cm: the only thing i would change is learningearlier the calorific value of certain foods. like i kind of... cm: 'cause it was a pre-internet era, so thatkind of information wasn't widely kind of disseminated. and so i just kind of went onmy gut feeling literally about what i thought food should have, and the calorie count. andso to me, sort of the duller a food was the less calories that it had, or the more ordinaryand easy to buy it was. so for instance, a potato i figured, couldn't have more thantwo calories in it. a slice of bread, probably five, tops. and it was on that kind of wonkyunderstanding that i managed to pack on a very impressive kind of 14 stone in the firstcouple years of my life.
cm: and then with the cheese as well. butthe thing is, i don't regret any of the cheese indeed. cm: i have a motto which is, "ne jamais regretbriene... " cm: "never regret the cheese," is a life mottoto live by. js: it's my motto now. in "how to be a woman",you sort of go breezily from this childhood to being a rock critic. i imagine there'ssome steps you skipped over there. can you tell us just a little bit about how that actuallyhappened? cm: the thing is, there really wasn't... imean this was a glorious time to be a music journalist or a rock critic in britain. becausewe have the music press then, the sort of
two weekly music papers, london post and nme.and we have a couple of monthly ones as well. and as soon as i found out there was sucha job as a music journalist, which is i saw a copy of the nme in our local library, andread it, and i read the reviews and went... and people would write quite pretentiouslyabout music in those days. it was a time of shoegazing kind of very experimental, kindof rock bands. so people would write things like, "this record sounds like dolphins leapingthrough a cathedral and shattering the stained glass windows of my mind." cm: and i was just reading again, "i couldwrite that toss. are people getting paid for this? i could do that." so as soon as i'dread a copy of the music press, i thought
i can do that. and when i wrote, and i justsimply wrote, i went to my local library... and this is why it's so lovely being in library.libraries made me. i went to the library everyday. i made a pact with myself i would try to readevery book in the library. and then when i discovered music, you could order music thereas well which i would bring home on a cd. and then illegally tape and then take backto the library. cm: i don't recommend that at all, but itwas certainly helpful for me at the time. and so i just went to the local library andordered a couple of albums they were talking about in nme, and wrote my reviews of themand sent them off to the paper. and they gave me a job literally straightaway. it was aseasy as that. they just read my three reviews
and went, "you can have a job." and so atthe point where i officially became a music journalist at the age of 16, i had in my collectionfour records. cm: all of which were on loan from centrallibrary in wolverhampton. so that is... cm: it was a golden era, what can i say, youhad... no qualifications were needed whatsoever. js: yeah, all of us become rock critics atage 16 because everyone can do that. now did you really do interviews in altered states?would you... cm: oh god, yeah. no, well the thing is, ikind of... i just believed that kind of... i was brought up by hippies, so i was sortof led to believe that you could learn something from drugs. as someone who did spend mostof their 20's very stoned, trying to make
a bong out of a fish tank... cm: and at one point, was interested in experimentingwith marijuana so much that i decided in my addled state that i was gonna see that ifyou got a wasp stoned and you made it have a fight with a worm that wasn't stoned, wouldthe worm now be able to beat a stoned wasp? cm: and i can tell you the answer is no. no,a worm has no kind of weapons or ability to fight whatsoever. of course, it doesn't. what'sit going to do? dance the wasp into submission? it has no hands, it has no claws, it has noteeth. the worm was very badly stung by the wasp and died. and in my most surgically alteredstate, i just thought, "i've got to stop with the drugs, man, a worm just died."
cm: "i;ve gotta cool my boots for a while.i need to go to the countryside and get my head together. this has gone too far." cm: so that was at the age of 24. but up untilthat point, kind of like being a rock critic, i just thought you should try as many drugsas you could get your hands on, and i was just very, very bad at taking drugs. wheneveri took ecstasy, i would just simply fall asleep under a table. everyone else in my generationwould be dancing and singing. i just have a very long nap, and then kind of wake upwith people standing around me going, "are you alright?" i was like, "yes, i've justtaken ecstasy." "are you sure?" cm: it kind of affects everybody else verydifferently. cocaine, i was such an ass hat
when i took cocaine that the very last timei took cocaine, i was in a bar, a very swanky bar in london, with the band blur, who i lovedvery much. and i was sitting on a bar stool and i was explaining to them, in between lines,why i was the fifth member of blur. cm: as i was making my final decisive point,which was, "i've heard all of your albums," i fell backwards off the bar stool. and thatwas the point where i thought, "cocaine's not good for me either." i gradually kindof went through all these drugs and found out they were all a complete waste of time,so yes. and it was very much encouraged in those days. it was just a fun thing to do.we didn't have the internet, we had to make up our own, you know... had we had the internet,i'm sure we wouldn't have been doing cocaine.
js: yeah. i'm sure. cm: i'll tell you what, those cat gifs, ifind them far more stimulating now, far more satisfying than any drug i ever took. 100most important cat pictures of all time ever, they're not lying, they really are! they are...they are awesome pictures. js: yeah, i'm pretty sure nobody does cocaineanymore, now that the internet's there. js: so what was your worst interview disaster?have you had like an epic fail? cm: oh god, yes. i interviewed paul mccartney,and paul, i find difficult to deal with my mind, because i was brought up on the beatles,and for a very long time, i kind of wanted him to be my dad, and then adolescence kickedin and then i wanted to have sex with him,
and i had these two thoughts in my head atthe same time. and that was very confusing, and then... so i was probably not the rightperson to be put into an interview situation with him. and i was really pre-menstrual atthe time. thing is, when people talk about being a journalist, they never kind of mentionthat you can go in there very hormonal and really screw things up! you're just sort oflike... cm: i'd recommend hugely, if you're a massivefan of the beatles and you, on one hand, want paul mccartney to be your dad and on the otherhand, you want to have hot sex with him, don't then go in there on a massive menstrual wiggyfreakout and interview him. because you'll do what i did, which was first of all, assoon as i walked into the room, burst into
tears. cm: and then asking the question which, istill, i feel is a very clever question, which was, "paul mccartney, if, heaven forfend,you should ever get your face horrifically mashed up in a terrible car crash, would you,paul mccartney, rebuild your face as back to paul mccartney? or would you choose, perchance,another face?" now... cm: that is a really clever question, becauseit's basically saying, "do you still want to be famous? would you now like anonymity?you spent all this time being paul mccartney, everywhere you go people freak out! like theperson who's interviewing you now, crying. would you like, one day, to be treated normally?would you like to find out what it's like
to be anonymous again, and walk around andnot be observed and stuff?" that is a clever question, paul mccartney, for paul mccartneythat was a clever question. paul mccartney did not think it was a clever question. cm: paul mccartney went, "oh that's a horriblequestion! oh, i don't like to think of myself dying in a car crash, oh no! oh no, you sillygirl! oh i'm not gonna think about that." and was visibly quite tetchy with me, at whichpoint my heart broke. and i don't think i've interviewed anyone since then, actually. cm: i just thought, "i fucked it up with abeatle! this is really bad!" yeah, that was awful.
js: was that your first and last questionto paul mccartney? cm: i'd managed to ask three others, but yeah,it was a very truncated and poor interview, i was kind of... it was a bad one. but then,i am a very bad interviewer, it was endlessly amazing to me that i won interviewer of theyear. when i went to interview lady gaga, i had my questions to ask her, we just kindof... she just basically detected that i was a booze hound within about 10 seconds of interviewingher, and just went, "shall we go to a sex club afterwards and get really drunk?" andi was like, "yay!" you don't need to be asking any questions at that point. i went and interviewed...is benedict cumberbatch big here? is he? js: yeah.
cm: 'cause i know him. he's big everywhere.it's in the news. js: i don't know what you mean. cm: i went to his parents' house to interviewhim, and we got very, very drunk, and at this point, you would think it would be an amazingchance to ask him really personal questions. especially because previously his mum hadtaken me into a corner and went, "get him a bird, he's single, get him married, gethim a bird right now!" "yes, surely, i will, mrs. cumberbatch. i'm on that right away,that's why i'm here!" cm: so he's horrendously wankered in his house,and we're both just rolling around drinking wine. and at that point, i could have askedhim any question, i could have... anything
personal, i'm sure he would have told me.and the only question i asked him was, "can you do your impression of sherlock holmes,please?" cm: and that's not even the right term! he's an actor, "can you act sherlockholmes? do your impression." he did, he did. cm: he spent five minutes flumping aroundbeing sherlock holmes, and then i went, "can you be the dragon from the hobbit?" whichhe does the voice of, and he spent 10 minutes being a dragon. 0:16:41 s3: so it was fucking awesome, i wasplaying him like a karaoke machine, it was amazing! js: i am now going to drink a lot more beforei go in and do interviews. i'm obviously...
i've missed the entire thing. now, when youwrite your column, and various criticism that you still do, i am in awe of how you do itbecause you just sort of merrily shred people to bits. but you do it in a friendly way,like you're pointing out spinach in their teeth and you're just helping them out. youknow what i mean? how did you hit upon that? cm: fear of being punched in the face, tryingto temper anything that i say in the kind of lovely fluffy way. well, i spend most ofmy time trying not to be controversial, 90% of my energy is put into... because i writeabout socialism and welfare, and mental illness and feminism, and menstruation, and body dysmorphia,and abortion, and progress and technology, and revolution, and kind of, things that canhave people going, "you're just trying to
be controversial." i never want anyone tosay i'm being controversial, i don't want to cause trouble. i simply want to changethe world. cm: but if you write about these things emotionally,or angrily, people will not listen to what you're saying, they will just respond to theanger and emotion in your voice. and this is something i've really noticed for onlineactivists. if there's any advice i wanna give anybody here, if you're an online activist,this is why these things descend into arguments and stuff. you are communicating these things'cause you are angry. if you wanna change the world, if you're arguing against racismor sexism or transphobia, it's because you're angry and you're scared because you've experiencedall these horrible things.
cm: but if you turn it into therapy and youbecome angry, and you become emotional, people, nine times out of 10 will not hear what you'resaying, the actual facts that you're saying, the changes that you're suggesting. they wouldjust hear your anger and emotion and they will argue back with you. they will becomeemotional as well. and so many times, i've seen so many conversations that could havebeen incredibly valuable which then ended up being two groups of very hurt, angry peoplebeing hurt and angry at each other. and that's why humour's so important. cm: and that's why generally, i kind of won'ttake part in a debate that you can't bring humour into because humour instantly calmseverything down, reminds everybody kind of
we're playing with words here. we're not usingwith weapons, we're not throwing things at each other. let's cool everything down andkeep playing with language and ideas. and so that's the main thing that i try and domy writing. and i think the other thing that i try and do is try and make anybody who readsit feel that they could write it, too. i kind of... i see a lot of writers who kind of usetheir talent and power to kind of make themselves separate or to give themselves power. andthe way that i try and write is to try and share and so that's... js: oh thank you, thank you. cm: one angry person going "yes!"
cm: "i was once screwed over by a very powerful,evil writer!" cm: there are many of them. js: yes, yes. cm: i'm not saying if you've got some informationand you wanna change the world and stuff, kind of like you wanna be sharing out thereand trying to be a conduit and trying to be a place that information can pass through,that's why i love twitter and that's why sort of like online activism is my baby and thati love it so much and i see so much good work being done out there. because you just canpass on information so quickly the way that we've never been able to do before in history.and it's mainly that we're cycling very fast
through a lot of ideas and sorting out a lotof stuff that we've needed to sort out for tens of thousands of years. cm: and i've always thought that... my mainthing is women, but anyone who comes from an oppressed minority. all we'd ever neededis a space, just somewhere where no one else is telling us what to do and no one's builtanything around us before. we just need a space where we can talk and communicate witheach other, and we can sort things out. and that's what the internet is for the firsttime ever, this infinite space on the internet, and we can therefore... that's our new foundland. that's our new planet, that's our new galaxy that we found. and it's very importantto not get scared of it, to keep maintaining
your rules on there, doing what you want todo on there. and post as many funny pictures of cats as possible because it calms... cm: it calms everything down. there's alsoan amazing picture of bruce springsteen, the young bruce springsteen, which i hugely recommend.a couple of people know that picture. just google "caitlin moran, twitter, bruce springsteenpicture". do it now if you have your smartphones out. it will not... cm: it will not disappoint you. it's a veryinspiring picture for me. he's topless. and the thing is... cm: the thing is you're looking at the youngboss going "god, he has beautiful man tits."
and then the third or fourth time you lookat it, you realize there's something going on in his trousers that can only be the movementof a massive badger. it's the something... cm: it's just all going on down there. js: i wonder if he would change his face ifhe was in a terrible car accident? cm: "bruce, would you change your crotch ifyou were in a terrible car accident?" js: terrible. cm: that's a good question, i'll ask him. js: if it was mashed? cm: yeah. [chuckle]
js: now, is anything off limits in you writing?do you draw any lines for yourself? cm: i won't write about my children's personallives. i say that but if it was something really funny, i would. but i believe... cm: i'd like to think that i believe thatbecause i'm a good parent and a good mother. but it's actually because i respect that theirlife is their future copy. and as a copyright issue, i don't wanna kinda trample on theirlives. but i think it's very important that they kind of be able to speak. so i don'teven talk about my husband, unless it's a funny conversation. but kind of the actualmechanics and the day to day thing of my children's life and my husband's life, i leave. but anythingelse, no. and i've never seen a taboo that
i didn't want to just go in there and justbust and just kind of hit with spoons and kind of... cm: if it's anything you're not supposed totalk about, that's the shit that you need to pull out into the light and deal with asmuch... again, shine searchlights on it, to make people stand around and go, "right! we'retalking about this now." and that was why i wanted to talk about sex so much in thebook because, particularly, for teenage girls, teenage sexuality is... we're kinda scaredof teenage girls being horny. we've kind of rather they just turned off their sexualityaltogether and certainly not discuss it. and we don't want other people talking about teenagegirls' sexuality.
cm: and yet, the world is full of over-sexualizedteenage girls in pornography and in all the imagery we see. so they get to look at itand it's okay for it to be out there, it's okay for it to be commercialized and commodified,but we can't talk about it and discuss it in books? girls can't be honest about theirexperience? and particularly, masturbation. that is why i opened the book with a wank.that's kind of... cm: our big news show in the uk is callednewsnight. and so they came out with a big piece about syria and the presenter came overand went, "so, caitlin, you start your book with the character masturbating, why is that?"so i said, "oh, it's just a very relaxing way to kick things off, isn't it?" and...
cm: and then i realize as i said that, itmade it seem like i was now about to start masturbating... cm: on newsnight. and that was quite bad. js: "in fact, i think i will, right now,"yeah. cm: "let's all have a wank!" cm: but i think it's very important. teenagegirls, i always say to teenage girls, if you've got these three hobbies, you can't go farwrong. one, long country walks. it's important to get there, get out there, get a bit offresh air in your lungs. two, masturbation. three, the revolution. with those three things...
cm: you will do quite well. cm: 'cause that itchy feeling that girls getinside them, that kind of self-loathing thing, like girls are kind of like, "i'm too fat.my hair's wrong. i don't know what to wear. i don't know what to say, i can't speak upin meetings and stuff." we're led to believe that it's self-loathing, it's not. it's knowingthat you're wrong. you are in a world that is not built for you and was not built foryou, it was not designed around you. and it will be 'cause we're gonna go out there andchange it. you know, kinda of being taught to each successive generation and they knowhow they're gonna change things, as we're doing now.
cm: but that uncomfortable feeling is thatthis world doesn't work for you, it's not been built around you and your needs. everythingto do specifically with being a woman is seen as not normal. the book had to be a woman,every single chapter in there is something that women have to keep secret, and it's allthe things that make you different from men. it's masturbation, menstruation, abortion,eating disorders, fantasy love affairs, whether you want to have a child, whether you don'thave a child, sexism in the work place. they're all the things that we have to just deal withand pretend that... cover them up. and we use all our energy suppressing these things,and these are the things that make us feel not normal, because to be a normal is to bea man.
cm: and it's not hating on the men, you'vebuilt an amazing world and we love you to bits. but it's very clearly a world not builtaround women. because the sheer fact that menstrual blood is still seen as wrong, andso then we can never talk about it, we never see it in a film, we never see it in television,it's never a plot driver, nothing ever happens. you never see... cm: you never see it in a movie. but i'veseen millions of gallons of the other kind of blood where people are having their headsblasted off or their legs cut off, all kind of torture or having their skin pulled off,and that blood seems fine. you can see that in trailers, kids are watching that. and yetthey've never seen a woman, like kind of going,
"oh, for god's sake, look at my sheets." cm: and that's... you know, not only is thatthe normal blood, but this entire world would be empty without it. it is literally the lifeblood of our planet. if we weren't bleeding every month, this would be an empty room andan empty stage. and yet, when a girl starts her period, most little girls, the first thingthey feel is shame. "i've gotta hide this." and i keep on trying to explain to men...when teenage girls... when you're a child and you become a woman because you start yourperiod, it's kind of presumed that we can deal with it okay. i'm 39 and every month,i'm still like, "what? really? this shit again?" cm: when you're a little girl and you startyour period... i keep saying to men, "imagine
if you're a boy, and you're just playing withall your little cars and your trucks, and your trains and stuff, and one day someonedumps a load of gravy in your pants." cm: "and that's gonna happen every month withoutmuch warning for the next 30 years. you'd be furious!" you know, we're not... womenaren't anymore geared up to deal with that level of heinous bullshit than men are andyet we do. it's kind of... being a woman, the reason we feel weird is 'cause it is notnormal to be a woman at the moment, but that's the next thing we need to work on, feelingnormal. control of the word "normal", i think, is the key thing at the moment. js: i'm not sure what to say.
js: where did your feminism come from? likehow was this borne in you? cm: well, quite a lot of it was my brotherjimmy's fault. we were... put your hands up, jimmy, put your hand up, so people can lookat you, yes. js: thank you, jimmy. cm: yes, i'm the eldest of eight and therewere five girls and three boys, and the girls were given the bullshit jobs like cookingand cleaning, and changing nappies and looking after the children. and the boys only hadone tough job and that was emptying the bins which is an easy job. you're just "pfft",it's done. i mean, it's just literally emptying a bin, just, "done!" it's not like cookingfood for like 10 people. and it was just very
clear to me that our parents were quite sexistin their divisioning of the jobs. boys were being given the sort of simple boys... houseworkwas not seen as a boy's job, and housework was seen as a girl's job. cm: so, that was the... basically, in thesort of furious desire to prove that things weren't fair was the start of... so, my feminismwas emotional first, and then i found the word feminism, i was like, "ah, yes." andwomen must always keep using the word feminism, it's very important. don't ever go girl poweror equalism or anything like that. cm: that is, you know... by all means enjoythe word play and the fun with semantics, but feminism is still the only word that we'veever had that means making women equal to
men. that is a specific task with some specificparameters, and that's the only word that we've ever had to deal with that. and, youknow, when i... the reason i wrote "how to be a woman" was i just got bored of beingin bars with younger women, and they'd go, "i'm not a feminist." and i go, "right, okay.okay, you are allowed to say that if this is what your life has been like. you werenot educated equally to boys, you did not have the chance to go to university. whenyou got married, you became your husband's property and so were your children." cm: "if you were ever sexually assaulted orraped, that was not considered a crime, and the person who did that to you was not prosecuted.when you had a job, which you had to give
up when you were married, the wages that youearned were either given to your parents or to your husband when you were married. you'renot allowed to own property in your own name, and you're not allowed to vote. okay, if thatis the life that you've led, it is absolutely fair enough to say that you are not a feminist.i will absolutely doff my hat to you." cm: "if on the other hand, you've lived thelife in complete reverse to that, the reason that you've lived that life, is 'cause thepeople who call themselves feminists came before you, and they sorted your shit outfor you." cm: they are, you know... every woman... almostwithout exception, every woman in the first world lives a feminist life, because of thefeminists who came before her and allowed
her to live that feminist life. and it's theonly time i ever get touchy, whenever a woman says to me, "i'm not a feminist," my replyis always, "get a dictionary, bitch." cm: yes, you are. js: now, i wanna ask you about another pieceof phraseology. you know, i've read the clippings of your reviews and people are constantlycalling you a bad girl, a bad girl journalist, and i find it a little bit infuriating. i'mnot sure people would say... i just wanna know how you feel about it. have you embracedthat? do we reject that? what's your response? cm: oh no, sweetie, i'm a 39-year-old motherof two. i'm not, in any way, a bad girl. i'm usually in bed by 10 o'clock. once a week,that's not the case, and i'm up until dawn
doing my amy winehouse impression standingon top of patio furniture. cm: but the rest of the time, i lead a soberlife. no, well, it's just... no, i don't want the idea of being bad. i've always just wantedto be smashing lovely. my big childhood heroes were anne of green gables. she was a cheerfulgirl who just wanted to do good. and stuff like annie, in the film "annie," kind of like,jane eyre, kind of like. it was definitely good girls who wanted to change the world.i'm not bad, it's weird what you would think bad is. it's bad that i talk about recognizingthe joy in your life, and living everyday and enjoying it, and whilst at the same time,trying not to be a dick to everybody in the world, and pushing for equality, and theseare the only things that i say. you know,
i never advocate hurting anybody or wearingshoes that are not flattering. cm: i would say i do, generally, use my powersfor good instead of evil. so, i'm not bad. js: no, no. cm: don't call me bad! i'm a good girl. js: i wouldn't have thought so. there's alsothe terminology of like, "woman writer" which a lot of people reject, fair enough, theywant to erase that distinction, but how do you feel about that? cm: oh god, i don't know if i'm getting itin other countries, but i just don't get it in the uk anymore. kind of like, no. peoplestopped noticing that i was a woman quite
a long time ago now, which is really good. cm: i think also, as well, it's a very usefulthing to just, to not care. that was the thing, kind of... it's about realizing the voicesin your head, generally, the voice that you have in your head is probably the one thatyour parents used to talk to you. then in your teenage years, you may get to a pointwhere you kind of consciously realize the voice that's in your head, sort of narratingyour life, is your parents, and you may wish to reject that and get a new voice. and thefirst voice that i consciously use as the voice in my head, was that of courtney love,from the band hole. cm: because she just didn't care, and i soneeded a girl that didn't care. she's brilliantly
widely read, she can quote all of these fantasticthings, but she would just get on stage and she just didn't care. and i needed a girlwho didn't care at that age, and these days, i kind of appear to have the voice of, i think,mrs. doubtfire in my head, just kind of goes like... cm: "ooh, off to bed with you now!" cm: "you look tired. time to go to bed." it'sa very bad impression of mrs. doubtfire. but always being conscious of who the voices arein your head is a very key thing. it can liberate you once you realize that you can just startbeing nice to yourself in your head. js: yeah. and one of the great things in yournovel is you explore that kind of place where
girls are... where they're willing to putthemselves in uncomfortable positions. and they're willing to be... they're kind of exploringthe limits of being miserable and figuring out who they are and... so, what's the valueof putting one's self in, not harms way, obviously, but uncomfortableness' way? cm: well, a big thing in the book is you basically...one of the things i want to do is write about female teenage sexuality frankly, becausewe live in a world of... i think my generation has taken quite a long time to realize whatthe younger generation is doing. we're still a little bit like, "teenagers and sex!" they'reon their mobile phones watching animal sex, animal porn, kind of two girls one cup, likethis weird freaky stuff.
cm: they're watching goldfish being shot outof orifices. this is the first thing they google and search for, and this is how they'regetting their sex education. they are seeing things we can't imagine. and so i wanted towrite a book that would, hopefully, get there before porn. i wanted to for... an older wiserauntie to write a very explicit book that wasn't just about sex, but about masturbationas well 'cause it's very key for girls to know, "oh, i can sort it out myself. i don'thave to wait around for someone else to sort this out. i can simply make myself happy,and it hasn't got any calories in. and i can do it pretty much anywhere, i'll just go doit in a wardrobe now." cm: it's a very flexible hobby. so, i wantedto write frankly about female sexuality. getting
there for this generation, that are in someways being really brutalized in their sexuality, in their sexual hinterlands, by the very explicitpornography that's out there at the moment. so, the idea of writing a book about that.so basically, she... i wanted to reclaim the word "slag", reclaim the word "slut", andi realized that would take quite a long time, so instead i came up with two new words. thefirst one is "lady sex pirate". cm: and the second one is "swashfuckler". cm: and people are going, "why have you writtenabout a teenage girl who goes out and sleeps around so much? aren't you worried that you'regonna influence teenager girls to go out there and sleep around more?" and i was like, "howcould anybody possibly influence teenage girls
to go out there and sleep around more thanthey will?" that is what they will do. that is what i did, that is what all my friendsdid, that is what you do. teenage girls are horny. let us acknowledge that, and let themhave a book, or some role models, or some advice in their heads that they can have,where they can just go, "okay. the things i need to remember as i go out there in theworld is to remember my humanity, and to keep myself safe, and to keep my sense of humourabout these things." cm: and in the book, i make it very explicit,"if you're a teenage girl going out there and sleeping around, most of the sex thatyou have is going to be terrible." cm: "it's going to be absolutely appalling.but what you have to understand that life
breaks down into two categories of experience.the first one is amazing experiences and the second one is awful experiences which laterturn into amazing anecdotes." cm: and that is the majority of teenage sexthat girls will have. that is, and as anyone of my age knows, when they are in the pubwith their female friends, those are the stories that you tell each other, the kind of, "youwon't believe what happened! it fell off!" cm: "i've never seen one that colour." cm: it's all those stories. indeed, actually,the passage... i wanted to give my advice for... this isn't the story. i have to makeit clear that this story did not happen to me, this is the story of a friend of minewho had sex with a man whose penis was, as
she puts it, "medically inadvisable." cm: because it was so very large. cm: so, i wrote... it was a very long bitbut i'll just do the bit which is, well she's now having sex with a man called big cockal. you may be able to tell everything about him from that. she's having sex with big cockal. "while i'm having sex with him, i find time to compile in my head a little list ofhints and tips for a future putative health sheet, which would be entitled "ladies, howyou too can deal with an unfeasibly large penis" by a friend. cm: "tip number one, when in the missionaryposition, place your palms flat on his chest
and brace, brace, brace, brace with your arms!" cm: "this limits thrust depth. it also pleasinglypushes your tits together, so it's a kind good tip for looking hot when taking yourselfies. tip number two, in doggy, you can subtly but essentially keep crawling awayfrom the penis." cm: "and making it impossible to get morethan the first five inches inside. during our 10-minute session, i managed to make awhole circuit of the bed on all fours." cm: "as al ardently pursues me, kneeling.a speeded-up film of this would make al look like lawrence of arabia. very slowly ridinghis camel, me, around a putative bed-set fuck arena."
cm: and then all of the next chapter, unsurprisingly,is about cystitis. cm: i have to say, i got so much pleasurein watching my brother's agonized face... cm: as i acted out both missionary and doggyin front of him. does it remind you of charades from last christmas? cm: and i won. js: so, again, it's very hard to follow thatwith a question, but i will. so, you mentioned body dysmorphia and woman's bodies. what doyou want girls to know about their bodies? what is your essential message of good thatyou want to... cm: oh, well, i do this thing 'cause i'vebeen doing stand-up in the uk. for the last
tour, i just decided to see if i could bea stand-up comedienne, and did this stand-up tour, which was amazing. and i, basically,themed it around the lessons that i've learned in my life. and it starts off... i talk aboutthat thing about having voices in your head and courtney love being the big voice in myhead. and how i started off as a very scared teenage girl, a very fat, very scared, completelyself-loathing teenage girl. and through the years of very carefully making sure that thevoices in my head were on my side and were nice to me, and through learning to... there'sno come back if you don't give a fuck. this is something that women need to know. cm: if you stop caring what people think,not going around and being a dick and being
rude and being horribly shouting at people.when you genuinely don't care what people think, there's no come back, nothing happens.they don't come and punish you and go, "you're not a nice lady anymore." you can just simplycarry on living a very free and happy life. and to a point where, and i realized thiswhen "how to be a woman", the first book was coming out, and i went into my publishersand there was a big meeting, big board room meeting. and they were like, "we've got someideas for what the cover should be." and i went, "it just so happens i have, too." cm: and they said, "what's that?" lookingquite scared. and i said, "well, i've just invented this thing called my feminist's smile."and they looked even more scared and they
went, "well what's that?" and i said, "okay.well, it's this. it's basically, that i'm going to draw eyes on my tits, like this,on my bra... cm: and then i'm gonna draw a nose here andthen i'm gonna manipulate my belly fat into a big smiley mouth... cm: and that will be... cm: that will be making it smile. cm: drop that back in there. and... cm: and i would do this on stage to illustratejust how reconciled with my body i am now. and how i just don't give a fuck, like i know...and get girls coming up afterwards crying,
going, "when you flopped your belly out, istarted crying." i was like, "to be fair, i did too before this was [unknown]" cm: and they're like, "no. i couldn't workout why i was so emotional, then i suddenly realized that every time i've ever seen abelly like yours, it's in a tabloid or a gossip magazine. and it's on a woman and there'sa huge circle of shame around it, with arrows kinda pointing at you, that go 'she fuckedup. feel bad, feel bad.' and you were there and you didn't care and you we're floppingit around making it into a big smiley face." and then it made me feel really emotionaland we would all hug and we would all hug, and then i would let them get their belliesout and we'd do smiley selfies together.
cm: and it was a very liberating thing, soit's that kind of... and this is why i love lena dunham, every time lena dunham gets herlittle adorable belly out, it's like a revolutionary song to me. she's gonna just bring up a generationof girls to go, "fuck it. i'm gonna flop my belly out and pull my tights right up likethis and wear clothes that don't quite fit, and i'm gonna be awesome. i'm gonna be onethe most talked about and powerful women in my industry at my age. and i'm gonna blowpeople's minds." i love her to bits. cm: and also, i think she's the first personto really tackle internet pornography as well because hers is the first generation to bebrought up post that free internet hardcore explicit pornography. and her characters arethere, trying to act out that explicit hardcore
pornography. and you see how wrong it goes.it hurts. they fall off the sofa. when she has to pretend to be like a girl in a paedophilefantasy, she goes too far and goes, "i've got my little satchel." then adam's like,"no, that's horrible. stop it. stop it." cm: and that's, of course, that's what it'slike and i'm so glad that my daughters have got someone like her on their side tellingthem, "this is what it's like." a girl like that saying, "this is what it's like." js: and you'll be interviewing her on stagein london when she comes on her book tour, right? js: that's a perfect synchronicity. i thinkthe whole world may explode.
cm: yes. i'm going to squeeze her belly likethis. js: how is that not the cover of the book?i would like to really put your publisher to task there. cm: oh, in the future. don't worry about that. js: it's interesting, you know, that you mentionlena because i've just read her book as well and she's encouraging people to be brave bysort of admitting her fears and her anxieties and stuff like that. and i sort of feel likeyou were doing the same thing in the kind of reverse way, like you're just encouragingthem sort of not to be fearful in the first place. is that fair enough?
cm: well, you need to... i mean, the thingis with any kind of... you need a consciousness raising, so everybody needs to admit theirfears, kind of, you know, this is important for girls to talk about what makes them scared.but then you kind of wanna have a stretch around it to go, "okay, how do i get pastthe point of being scared?" there's no point in endlessly confessing. it's not ideal. youdon't want to be endlessly confessing for your entire life. "i'm scared, i'm scared,i'm still scared. i still haven't dealt with stuff. i still care. i'm still scared." cm: so the idea is, you say what you're scaredof and it's like, "okay, how do i move forward?" and there's a million ways that you can dothat, checking the voices in your head, kind
of like changing the people that are aroundyou, joining different groups. just telling the part of your brain that cares to shutup is a great one. i just kind of... every time i think that i'm about to start feelingself-conscious about something, i just go, "shut up! shut up, brain, shut up!" and justcarry on. cm: but yeah, it's all about progress, really.i like sharing, but it's like, "okay, we've shared. now what are we gonna do?" clearly,we need to change things. there's a million things. and one of the things that i lovemost is sort of like when people realize that kind of everybody can change the world ina tiny way. it would just be the tiniest thing but that's what we're here to do and the onlyway the world ever does change is by everybody...
you often see people going, "well you don'thave all the answers to everything." this is one thing that's often sort of like derailedactivism. it's kind of like someone comes along with some ideas for some stuff overhere and they're like, "yeah, but you haven't got all the answers to this stuff over hereas well. so why are we even listening to you, you ass hat?" cm: and it's like... everybody's got a littlejob that they'll do. these people will do this bit and these people will do that bit.we've got to stop waiting for superheroes to come along in any form of activism andkind of go, "this is the one true leader. and this one book, or this one dissertation,"whatever it is they've done, "is the bible
and we will follow them." we've been waiting...we keep expecting that to happen in feminism, that some woman will come along who can lead3.3 billion women in the world. well, of course, they can't. one of the rules for working outif some sexism is happening is to go, "well, does this apply to the boys? are the boysdoing this?" cm: and the boys are not waiting for one manto come along in a movement that is equal to feminism and solve all of their man's problems.we would never expect that to happen in a million years. so you've got to remember thatfeminism is, rather than wait for a super hero, is a patchwork quilt. and we all sewour little bit and stitch it together, we all do it collectively. and the other thingwe need to remember about feminism is, it's
not a set of rules, it's a set of tools. wheni went on my tour, we had merchandise, which was brilliant, i design merchandise, feministnecklaces and tea towels and t-shirts. cm: and we gave all the profits to a women'srefuge, so it's just fucking awesome and sexy and fucking liberal and right on. and thetea towels had the five rules of feminism. and the five rules of feminism, if you donot know them are this: rule number one, women are equal to men. rule number two, don't bea dick. cm: rule number three, there are no more rules.that's it. feminism is just simply the belief that women are equal to men and just remembernot to be a dick in your feminism. and then after that, it's up to you to invent it. feminismis only ever gonna be as strong as who's involved
in it and who's inventing it. at the pointwhere thousands of women feel that they're creating and inventing their own feminism,feminism is strong. at the point where you think there's only one or two people who arein charge of feminism or are waiting for their next book to come out or their next lecturetour, feminism will die. it is what you make it. it is the people in it. cm: it is a popular movement that needs massand ideas and creativity and energy. and the reason that i love it, my feminism is cultural,rather than political. i believe in politics, i believe in legislation. i believe in change.i believe in marching. i believe in all these things but culture just works so much quicker.you can go on one march and that will last
a couple of hours. but culture march is forever.you make a film, you make a movie, you make a book, you write a poem, you have a blog,it's out there marching everyday for you. and it affects things so quickly. and thebig sort of comparison i have in the uk, is in the uk when we rebooted dr. who over there.do you watch dr. who... cm: it was written by an amazing man and oneof my friends, russell t. davies. cm: and... yes. woo! oh, the nerds are here.hello, darling. s?: wooh! cm: we will hug later. and when i was a kid,the worst thing you could say to a boy in the playground was, "you gay lord, you bender,you queer." you know, to call someone "gay",
worst insult you could give to a boy. russellt. davies, a gay man, takes over dr. who, introduces a bi-sexual super hero called captainjack harkness. he's basically like a han solo that goes, not both ways, but all ways. cm: so clearly, even better than han solo.and he kisses the doctor on tea time, bbc primetime, on a kids' show. not only was therenot a single letter of complaint but on the monday morning when i went into my kids' school,there were boys in the playground fighting over who would play the role of captain jackharkness in the game they were playing. cm: now, again, we need legislation and weneed change. the equal marriage law that we just had recently passed in our country wasone of the most beautiful things that's ever
happened to me and my friends. but no equalitiesminister in the world can make 10-year-old boys want to play a bisexual character inthe playground. that's something only culture can do. that some things... sometimes youdon't wanna argue what's right and what's wrong, you just make it cool instead, andthat is the shortcut and that is the end of my thought. js: so i agree that this is something we musttalk about all the time. why are we still talking about this? why are we constantlyredrawing the world for women? cm: because we're still, at the beginning,i think there was this kind of misbelief that kind of the point where women got the vote,kind of like, "boom!" suddenly we'd be equal
and we'd have the female einstein and thefemale mozart and the female beatles and women would rule 50% of the world and would formtheir own companies, and build their own armies and empires. and that's not what happenedbecause women are still working out what they are. there's such a complete absence, nottotal absence, but compared to what we know of men and the way that men have been ableto shape their lives and talk about themselves and share their experiences and pass theirexperiences on through history. cm: there's so little of what women are allthe way through history. we were crushed, we were treated like animals. we were notbelieved to be equal, and it's so recently that we've been accepted as humans. thoughwe're only at the very beginning of working
out what women are, what we want to do, whatthings are we gonna do the same as men did, and what things are we gonna change? whatways are we gonna work together? one of the things that i'm most excited about in feminismis that if women do truly become equal to men, how will that change men? you know, we'reall gonna be stepping up together and then when the men change, how will the women changeto cope with these newly brilliant, enlightened men that are dealing with these enlightenedwomen? cm: it's a no lose situation. that's the greatthing about equality, when you're constantly raising people up all the way through... theworld clearly, visibly becomes a better type of place in quantum time. but this whole kindof feeling that we should have sorted feminism
out 30 years ago and this is kind of like,"oh god, women are being so inefficient. why are we not ruling the world?" we're stillworking out what we are. we're still having to really close and carefully piece togetherhow we're going to operate things. what are our moral frameworks? how are we gonna attackthings differently? cm: and it's so... like the column i'm writingtoday, it's so insidious, like i remember reading an interview with yoko ono 30 yearsago where she was just sort of like casting her eye over things. she was just going, "forinstance, the news. why does the news always end with a sports roundup?" she was like,"don't you find that... that's just weird to me." she was just kind of like, you knowkind of, "we watch all this stuff about war
and death and battle and in a male dominatedworld, and then we go to sports, which is a male dominated sport which is again, aboutbattle and power and winners and losers." cm: she was like, "i know it's something thathas millions of fans and supporters and pumps billions of dollars into the economy, butso does the fashion industry. so does the pop industry." would it be so weird that ifat the end of the news you had someone reading the new donna tartt book and the beautifulparagraph that she'd written about their encapsulated love? or kind of pharrell williams' "happy"comes out and the whole world is dancing? is that any less of a news event than a sportsteam winning a game? cm: when you start talking about how you'regonna change the world, and reordering it,
and the things that we assume are normal,but little instances like that, i think, yeah, it's gonna take a long time for us... i hopewe never stop talking about what women are and how we wanna change the world. i thinkit will constantly change. i certainly intend to write a lot more books about it. cm: i have a mortgage to pay. i hope... frankly,i hope we bitches never sort our shit out. cm: i can keep milking this stuff for years.i might start putting things in there, so it could screw us up more. and then, i'llcome and cure it later on, like the pharmaceutical industry does it. maybe, i'll do that. js: can you feel your success? are you awareof what your impact is? do you have a sense
of... cm: well, i think in any other scenario ifsomeone stood up on stage and showed you a bra on which they'd crudely drawn some eyesand then a flatbed belly, you'd be carted off to a mental hospital, so i have to presumei've had some success in that that was applauded rather than taken as a pitiful cry for help. cm: i like... to me, 'cause i never reallyleave the house. i just stay at home and write every day. i kind of write about 15,000, 20,000words a week and then, i hang out with my kids. that's kind of all i do. so i don'treally go out. when i go out now, kind of, i'll be stopped five, six times, as i go downthe street. and if i'm in a place where alcohol
is served, basically, any woman with eyelinerwho's had two drinks will come up to me and say, "thanks for all the wanking!" and i'llgo, "that was my pleasure." cm: but the thing i like about it most islike you have power, you have success, i just use that as a mandate to push further becauseyou can just be even more frank and even more truthful and kind of even more bold in yoursuggestions for what the future is. if you know you've got some people behind you, that'skind of... that's what i like about... that's something i've enjoyed lately. js: 'cause there are perceived boundariesin women's storytelling, aren't there? like there are places we're not supposed to go.
cm: and the great thing is, this is the otherthing as well i like, if anybody here wants to be a writer, or have any interest in thearts whatsoever, what you've got to do, whenever you see a taboo, rather than going, "oh, that'sa place i mustn't go," you go, "oh my god, this is fields and fields worth of materialthat no one else is, for some weird reason, touching." kind of almost to the point whereyou just sort of wondered, "did someone who wanted to preserve all this material for themselveskind of pretend... " cm: it's like those episodes of scooby-doowhere they're like, "don't go in the castle 'cause there's a ghost there," and it's justthe caretaker with a sheet over him, kind of like, there's no reason why the mysteryteam can't be in that castle. there's no reason
why we can't be writing about masturbationand menstruation, and abortion and kind of our true feelings about love and our children.whenever you see a taboo, then that's just... it's a whole world that no one else has talkedabout, and we have no need to be scared of this now. cm: again, just look for 20 seconds what isonline, what our 10-year-old children are watching and laughing over. they are watchingthe most explicit stuff. the idea that we, as adults, can't write books or make filmsor make tv shows or have conversations or write blogs about our true feelings and experiencesis completely insane because no one else in the world... the next generation do not havethese rules and do not have these taboos.
we need to step up. let's learn a little bitof bravery from our children. but if they do ask you if you wanna see the video "twogirls, one cup", say no. js: i'm gonna throw it open to questions fromyou guys in a minute, so people should begin lining up at the microphones if you have somethingthat you wanna ask caitlin, and i will ask you one last question. cm: can i specify there are no maths questions. cm: very bad on the math. js: ask math questions at your own peril. cm: literally nothing going on there.
js: so, you've talked sort of about what theusefulness is of telling the truth to us, in the world. what, for you, personally, arethe pleasures and terrors of being known? what do you like about it, personally, beingso open and going to all those places? cm: oh, apart from the money? cm: no, i just can't... when i was a kid...so, we didn't go to school, we were taught at home, and that could have been an amazingthing. my parents could have been the kind of parents who were like, "i'm gonna takeyou on a country walk, and kind of i'll point out the names of the trees and the odd geologythat we were walking over and the history of this area, and that is the way that i willbe a home educator." they didn't do that.
they just left us in our front room with avideo player and we just simply watched classic mgm musicals whilst eating cheese. cm: and in many ways, that was a great education.but by the age of 11, i was kind of like, "i need to sort this out myself," and i wouldgo to our local library every day, and i just read everything. i read as widely as possible,autobiographies. the great thing about an autobiography... any book, any book worthits salt, the author will have put everything they know at that point in that book, so whenyou read it, you eat their life. you've become one whole person, cleverer. so by the timeyou've read 50 books, it's like you've lived 50 lifetimes. you suddenly have all theseexperiences. there're so many things i could
describe to you. i think i know what it'slike to walk through the atacama desert on a camel 'cause i read rosie swale's book aboutthat. i think i know what it's like to be the headmistress of a 19th century girls'boarding school in yorkshire 'cause i've read a book about that, kind of like all theseexperiences. cm: and so, when i write books, and the booksi loved were the ones where you just, "yeah, someone's told me something, i've got somethinghere. there was a point to that book." so many books you're just like, "oh, someone'sjust enjoying writing." that's fine, and sometimes there's some very beautiful books, but it'slike, "no, i wanna get something, i wanna learn something, i want to have gone somewhere,i wanted to feel like i've eaten a whole person
when i've read that book." so that's whati wanna put in my books, everything i know at that point about that subject, i wannaput in it. cm: and when i was writing this book, i thoughti was genuinely writing it to girls out there, kind of generally to girls, maybe particularlyteenage girls. and older girls to remember what this shit was like, and younger girlsto go, "here's what's coming at you!" and then i realized at the end that i wasn't writingit for all those girls out there i thought i was writing for, i was writing that bookto me when i was 16. everything in that book is what i just wish someone had told me. andthat's the feeling of satisfaction when you've written something that you like. "yeah, thatis all the things i know and think right now."
press "send". js: well, thank you so much for pressing "send". [background conversation] js: ooh, all right. s?: hello, fellow english woman. cm: hello! s?: hello! cm: let's have tea. s?: okay.
cm: in camden time. s?: am i too close to here? i want to saythat i've loved everything that you've said. the one thing that you haven't addressed andyou haven't talked about is... cm: maths. s?: well, maths, okay, there are a lot ofthings, but one of the fundamental things is that women have the babies. s?: so how can we... i know we can be equalbut we can't be the same, and we have to take time out that the men don't have to. so theycan carry on up their ladder while we stop for one, two, three, four children.
cm: well, this is one of the big things, andone of the things i'm campaigning to do. when i say "campaigning", i just mean tweetingin between smoking and drinking tea. cm: is for us to stop ever referring to childcare as a feminist issue or an issue for women. this is how it is routinely referred to inmost countries. and there couldn't be anything more obviously the concern of humanity, bothmen and women, than our children. we make them together... cm: they are the future of our species. ifwe fuck this up, if women stopped wanting to have children, it becomes impossible, again,empty room, empty stage. so the key thing is to just never, ever, ever allow anybodyto say that this is a problem for women or
a problem for feminism, and i'm just talkingfrom a journalistic point of view. i would make my editor... if i were the editor ofthe times, i would make it so no women were ever allowed to write columns about childcare, and how we would solve that problem again. i would make all the male columnistsdeal with that stuff instead. because to get the boys on board, you need to start talkingabout this stuff. so that would be my... i'm lucky i've got a husband who's just amazing,and kind of basically sort of gave up work to look after our kids once i sat in a corner,chain smoking, and going, "feminism, feminism, feminism!" cm: so that worked out quite well for me.hello.
s?: hello. the first time i heard of you,i have a daughter who lives in the uk, and she did a little work for you, years ago,and she told me that you were the coolest person she had ever met. katherine ryan, idon't know if you remember her or know of her. cm: no, where was this, what was it? s?: i'm her mom. it was a few years ago. s?: she's a stand up comedienne in the uk.anyway... cm: oh god, katherine ryan, she lives aroundthe corner from me, yes! s?: yeah, in [name of city].
cm: this is awesome! oh my god! s?: i'm kathbum's mum! s?: i follow you on twitter, i really enjoyednancy. and the first time i read any of your work was before you really blew up in northamerica. and i was in the uk and you were introduced to me, your first book, throughmy daughter, and you were introduced as the coolest woman she had ever met. and i havethree daughters and i just wanna say, i'm really thrilled to see someone who is talkingabout feminism because i tried to teach my daughter about some of the feminism ideasthat i had, and one of them being "no man is better than the wrong man." and they alwaysthought that i was insane, so thank you for
bringing this to the forefront again for youngpeople. and also, you had a contest with tim minchin a while ago about who got to spendtime in the pub with you. s?: and i love tim minchin, too. cm: oh, he's lovely. s?: but if i could ever spend time in a pubwith you, i would totally vote for that, so thank you. cm: oh, thank you. oh, thank you very much,thank you. i can say you have raised a brilliant feminist daughter. kath ryan's a comediennein the uk who's absolutely fucking brilliant, and we worked on a tv show together. and ihave to say, we were the only two women on
it and i was in charge of the show. and itried to tell the boys what the brief was for this tv show, which was that we're notgonna be horrible to anyone, this is gonna be a feminist tv show where we're never horribleto anybody, we just kinda boggle at things instead. there's no bitchiness, no snark. cm: and the men just didn't get it and katherinewas the only one who got it, who was the only one who was really funny. she was just...you have raised a beautiful daughter. and tim minchin is a lovely, lovely man and i'mstill kind of recovering from the hangover that i got from drinking with him two weeksago where, as i always do, i dragged him over to the piano and made him do the entire scorefrom jesus christ superstar.
cm: and i've got to stop doing that, it'snot cool. i need to stop that. [laughter] hello. s?: so i guess anyone, but especially anywoman, who is outspoken and a public figure faces a lot of criticism and you talked alittle bit about not giving a shit. but i wanted to ask you about differentiating betweenvalid criticism and the bullshit that gets thrown at you. and how do you figure out whereto have empathy and where to learn versus where somebody's just trying to pull you offyour podium? cm: well, yeah, no, i've learned a huge amount...the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life literally that didn't involve havinga baby stuck in my cervix...
cm: was i got accused of being racist on twitter.i interviewed lena dunham and i didn't know that in the us... i don't remember to whatextent this was, but there've been criticisms that she was racist because she didn't haveanyone of colour in her show. and i just got a load of people who were very angry aboutlena dunham. i was tweeting about i've interviewed her, the feature's in the times tomorrow,"hoorah, you're all gonna love lena dunham." and some very angry people just went, "well,i hope you've taught her about how she's so fucking racist," kind of like, "i just reallyhope you've addressed this issue." and i just never had anybody talk to me like that ontwitter before, and i was just kind of like, i've had a bad day. i couldn't believe anybodywas telling me how to do my job.
cm: so i just went, "no, 'cause i don't givea fucking shit. this is just a ridiculous spurious thing. if you wanted to write racismin the entertainment industry, talk about the commissioners, talk about the people whohave power who need to be going out there and finding talent of all different coloursand religions and sexuality, and giving those people the power to run shows and the budgetsto run shows. but having to go at the artists who are at the very end of this thing, who'vegot their own struggle and trying to do their own shit and have got their own agendas, completelymisunderstands how the whole thing works." obviously, i didn't put all of that in a tweet'cause you've only got 140 characters. cm: so then there was this huge thing aboutkind of like the people thought that i was
going, "i don't give a shit about representationof people of colour in the entertainment industry," which is so... anything i've ever writtenis about equality and freedom and choice and expanding the lexicon and... anyway. so thatwas horrible, but it meant that... so when you're accused of that, you're kind of like,"oh my god, am i? have i never known this? this is bad. do i need to go and read moreabout this? i need to go and find more about this and find out if i am secretly racistand i've been lying to myself?" cm: so, i just went and followed every singleactivist that i could find, wrote a shit ton of blogs, wrote a shit ton of fucking novels,and it did educate me. i did learn enormous amount about it, that i could find reallyconstructive and i can advise other people
and it just taught me and educated me aboutthese issues, so it was good. it was the most horrible way to do it. i was getting deaththreats and i was crying and weeping, and suicidal and depressed, and i have these voicesin my head, and it was horrible. so, it's not the best way to educate someone. i wouldgenerally just go... cm: there's a better way to educate peoplethan that, but i used it as a learning experience. i've watched a lot of oprah winfrey and thisis what you do, you use it as a learning experience. and i grew as a person. so it was useful,but i would never want to educate someone like that, because someone who is mentallymore fragile than me, i think, might turn their internet off and never go back onlineagain. so it was, it was a learning experience,
but a really horrible one, much like givingbirth to children was. i learnt to use contraception after that. cm: hello. s?: well, hello. i wanna ask another horriblequestion. cm: oh, it's not maths again, is it? s?: it's easy. i love your courage, i loveyour bravery, i love seeing your stomach. that was really amazing. have you ever gonetoo far? what have you done that you wish you could take back, or what have you writtenor said that you regret? cm: oh, god. i mean, literally, nothing kindof... i try to be a very kind person, other
than the aforementioned tweet where i justwent, "i don't give a shit," with absolutely no context at all, which was a bad thing.other than that, nothing. 'cause everything i've ever said is just about me. i've nevergiven away anyone else's secrets or broken anyone else's confidence. i've never put anyoneelse down. i've always tried to encourage other people. everything i say isn't doneto shock or to be controversial, it's to just go, "this is the normal stuff. we need tobe able to talk about this stuff, it's weird that we're not. i'm kinda freaked out thatwe're not talking about this now. given it's 2014, this is bizarre." so no, i really don'tregret. i've tried to be a good lady. [laughter] s?: don't we all have secrets?
cm: wow, are you... cm: are you my mum? cm: this is really weird. no, not really...i haven't got any secrets. other than when i was 11, i used to sometimes wipe my bumon a towel instead of toilet paper because it felt more luxurious. cm: but other than that i have no secrets. js: and now you no longer have that one either. s?: yes. whoa! that was heavy. that was likewhoa! s?: hello, i am feeling quite nervous to askthis in front of a room of peers of women
and it's amazing that you are here. so, thankyou for coming. cm: oh, hello! thank you. s?: there is currently a war going on betweensex workers and the government. s?: and it's preventing from keeping womensafe. it is endangering women. cm: all right. it's okay, it's okay. s?: and i'd like to know how you can win thiswith humour, and not with anger. cm: thank you, thank you. cm: this is something i've written quite alot about, because i just think you just have to look this with calm common sense. i justthink that if we invented sex work now, we
wouldn't make it illegal. we just wouldn'tprosecute it. this is a world where you can have your bum hole bleached by a beauticianif you wanted to change the colour of it. this is a world where we devolve the careof our very tiny babies and our dying elderly to strangers who are committing this incrediblyintimate acts in taking care of them. this is a world where we go in to talk to therapistsabout the most extreme thoughts that we have and again, leave ourselves completely vulnerable. cm: kind of like in human interaction, wedo intimate things. this is a world of intimate things where we do... we accept that we dointimate things in exchange for money. and i cannot see how sex work is any different.if you look at the legislation that's needed
to run a brothel, for instance, it's exactlythe same health and safety regulations that you have to run a public swimming pool. that'sthe hygiene levels that you need, it's exactly the same things. so women being able to puttogether carefully. cm: i don't like the sacrificial aspect ofillegal sex work. this idea that kind of we leave girls to go and work on the outskirtsof cities. this is what we used to do in medieval times, where we'd leave sacrifices on theoutskirts of villages in the woods for like creatures and bandits to come and take them.this idea that women are driven out of the safe places and left at the edges of towns.and they are the girls that get murdered. they are kind of on the news in our country,whenever there's a murder, it's kind of like,
"and she was a sex worker." cm: and you can hear people kind of sighingand go, "okay, well, those are the girls that get murdered." that's what happens to thosegirls, those are the girls we leave outside, they're not the ones that we protect. andall of our fucked-upness about sex work just stems from a really understandable historicalproblems with biology that kind of... there had to be women who you had sex with, andthen the ones that you kept virginal that were the breeding stock that kept the matrimonialline intact, and then passed on the money and the name. and so you had to separate thesetwo things out. the fucked-upness about female sexuality comes from an era where we didn'thave antibiotics and we didn't have contraception.
and so we had to separate these two girlsout. we had to split sexual women out from kind of reproductive pure women. cm: this day and age, we don't think thatnow and if we do, we need to take a good hard fucking look at ourselves. i think we arecompletely reconciled to the idea that women can have... that we don't need to have womenthat are for sex and women that are not for sex. these are people that we need to protect.these are people who should be equal and not left in dangerous dark corners to be pickedoff by the worst people. these are people that could be paying tax in our country, thatcould be treated as in the same way that we treat people who give any other kind of careor any other kind of service in a consenting
way that we have in any other industry. andthank you for asking me that question. s?: thank you for saying that loudly. cm: thank you. s?: there's a message that we hear often,associated with motherhood and that is that women don't feel like they've truly come intotheir womanhood until they've become mothers. you are a mother of two and yet you wrotein "how to be a woman", that if you want to know what's in motherhood for you as a womanthen in truth, it's nothing you couldn't get from reading the 100 greatest books in humanhistory. and then you go on to talk about what you learn from books. and then at thevery end, you say, "no one has ever claimed
for a moment that childless men have missedout on a vital aspect of their existence and were the poor and crippled by it." how doyou answer to the people who say that a woman is not truly a woman until they've becomea mother? and how then do you temper that message to those people who have found valuein becoming a mother? cm: well, that's why i wrote those two chapters.the first one is why you shouldn't have children. i can't remember which way i rounded it, actually.one of them is why you should have children, the other one is why you shouldn't have children.because i learnt an enormous amount from motherhood, mainly to use contraception. cm: but you know, going through that amountof pain, giving that amount of care, giving
that amount of love is an enormously learningexperience. but the idea that that's the only way... basically, there's this idea that womendon't become properly grown up, they don't become kinda like the elders until they'vehad children, which is something we don't attach to men at all. and just the idea that,through... i give the full list of things that you could do that would give you theequal experience of having had children, which i truly believe. i wrote that chapter formy sister caz, who from the age of 11, has been absolutely strict on the fact that shewill never have children. indeed, she worked out that she would happily trade in her womband ovaries for lungs because she intended to start smoking later on.
cm: and she would like, if she could havetwo pairs of lungs instead of a womb and ovaries, that would be great for her. she was kindalike, "i'll do a swap if you want." so yeah, so no, i mean, it's just very... it's really...it's just... poor fucking jennifer aniston, like kinda still just being asked every week,"are you pregnant yet?" like kind of... if i was jennifer aniston's manager, i wouldstart a jennifer aniston's womb account on twitter and i would, every day, just posta twitter update, "still empty, none of your fucking business." cm: "still empty, none of your fucking business."like this obsession with getting jennifer aniston pregnant is weird. it's like we'resome kind of medieval feudal lord, just kind
of like, "when will she be with child?" youknow what? i'm perfectly fine with rachel green from friends not having a kid. i thinkwe can all chill on that one, let's leave it there... so yes, no, those two chaptersare there because motherhood is an incredible and astonishing thing, but so are a millionother things as well. and you can live an absolutely astonishing life without havinghad kids. you know, batman, didn't have a baby. s?: hi, caitlin. so first, just an observation,i loved all the age groups that i'm seeing in this room today. it really is remarkablewhat you've been able to pull together. you mentioned that you're 39, so my first questionis i'm wondering what you're gonna do for
your 40th birthday? and it's tied to the idea,similar to jennifer aniston, that at each age, as we go through as women, there seemsto be more things, different things that we have to kick off, right? and change and moveforward, and change for the next generation that's coming. so maybe some of your thoughtson the idea of women having to handle age so much differently than men do. cm: i just like work, i'm not scared of work.like clearly, it's quite difficult to be a woman, and if you give me a huge pile of injustices,i'll just slowly methodically work my way through them and if i get older and that pilegets bigger, i'll just keep on shovelling through the shit. kind of like, that's whatwe have to do, we have to be resigned to it.
but there's definitely never been a bettertime to be a woman. we're not getting burnt at the stake. you know, we have lycra. cm: we have have batiste dry shampoo, we havebenedict cumberbatch. we have the new robyn album to look forward to. it's all gravy,really, compared to 1,000 years ago. for my birthday, i'm very slowly trying to get theauthentic ghostbusters uniform together. there's an army jumpsuit that they've now discontinuedbut which i had to buy for $300 from a warehouse in alabama, and i'm now gonna treat myselfthis birthday to the knee pads and elbow pads, and then next year, it will be the utilitybelt and then i intend to get an unlicensed nuclear accelerator for my back.
cm: and then i will be bill murray, and allmy dreams will be true. js: so, sorry, we'll have these last two andthen... okay, alright. last three. so i'm sorry we're gonna cut the line off here becausethen we're gonna have signing. go ahead. s?: i just wanted to say that i loved yourbook, and i specifically bought it for my sister when she was struggling. she was unsureabout herself, men, all that stuff. so it really helped her and it also helped me becausei was very hesitant of the word "feminist". [laughter] and my sister tried to bring mearound to it, and your book definitely did that. and she loved the fact that it broughther feminism back as well. and the reason i was hesitant was because of the whole "feminazi"term that goes around. i'm wondering what
your opinion is about that? cm: i just love the internet's ability tojust stick the word "nazi" onto anything. cm: just extraordinary. [chuckle] i don'tknow, i mean just anything like that, you just have to ignore it, these are just sillyboys. i mean the thing is as well that like, you know, you're gonna be having so much funbeing a cool feminazi than they're gonna have sitting there shouting at feminazis. you'regonna be off with a bunch of girlfriends planning the revolution, right? cm: they're sitting there at home, kind ofcry-wanking and typing with one hand. cm: you're already won, baby, you know? it'sjust fine. enjoy the extra chromosome, it's
all good. js: thank you. s?: so i often prescribe your chapter on "abortionand how to be a woman too" when i need an example of an abortion story, because thereare so few and they all seem to fall within this narrative of a good, compassionate abortion,the woman was raped, or there was incest, or a fetal abnormality, something along thoselines. and it's understandable because it is so stigmatized and because there have beenso many violent instances of anti-choice tactics in the past. but i was wondering if you coulddiscuss how we can move past that and how we can convince more people to share theirstories, and make that a less stigmatized
choice for women. cm: well, i only wrote that chapter becauseanother woman shared her story. there's a brilliant journalist in the uk called zoeywilliams who's just writing her first book and she wrote a piece where she wrote abouther abortion, and the first paragraph was that, she just went, "every account i've everread of an abortion always starts with, 'well, it was a very difficult choice and the after-effectswill haunt me forever.'" and she went, "that just isn't what happened with me. it was avery easy decision because i knew whether i did or didn't want to be a mother again,because i know what a big job that is and i knew, i couldn't do it. and i don't feelbad about it because i know it was exactly
the right choice." cm: and i was just like, "i'd never read anythinglike that." so that allowed me to write an entire chapter about it. and i hope by writingthat, other people can write their stories. it'd be amazing if you could have a blog wherewomen can tell their stories about how it worked all great for them. because you'd onlydo generally see is the really bad stories. and as the years have gone on, i got moreperspective on this. cm: i finally only put two and two togetherrecently. if you look at the stats on birth rates since the introduction of contraceptionin the first world, it immediately shears off. before the proper introduction of contraceptionin the first world, average family size is
like four, five, six kids. as soon as reliablecontraception is brought in, all women have two or less children. they immediately havemuch smaller, and that is their choice. as soon as they have choice, they can do it.women will always, almost certainly always choose to have smaller families, manageablefamilies. cm: and suddenly, you just get this massivehistorical perspective of women who didn't have access to contraception, abortion toplan their lives, where they're basically becoming pregnant against their will, to havesex once can mean that you're pregnant. and then you're pregnant again, and you're pregnantagain. these women are just reproducing themselves into the ground. they're falling to pieces,they're exhausted. the mortality rates in
childbirth is just horrific. and this waswhat happened before women... the beautiful thing of technology that allowed us to becomefree. cm: and it's such an important right to protectbecause it could so easily slide back to the point where women are once again reproducingthemselves into the ground with no traction over their own lives. and i have to say, it'sbecoming a mother that has made me realize how important it is that women choose whenthey want to be a mother because that is a big fucking job. cm: people thought i was trying to be controversialin some way, and holy bugger, it was by being a mother that made me realize how importantabortion is. but the simple truth is, nine
times out of ten when something bad is happeningin this world, when somebody's hurting someone, when some violence breaks out, when there'ssome misunderstanding going on... crimes are committed by people who were not brought upproperly, who were not loved, who did not have the energy and time and care that needsto be put into making a human being safe and functional and safe to place around otherpeople and who will go through life having productive life rather than being a tickingtime bomb. cm: and that's why you can't ever go intothat job half assed. you might get away with it. but i'm not a gambling person. i knewafter two, i was too tired to know that i would make a third perfect, strong, functioning,healthy person. i could have just skimped
on that and that would have been my thirdbad unhappy kid going out there and causing these problems. so, it has an economic benefitto our country. it has a social benefit to our country. cm: and again, this is a culture formed byfeminism. this is a culture formed by abortion. the abortion rates stay pretty much constantin countries whether it's legal or illegal. half of the abortions that happen in the worldare illegal, half are legal. and so, when you say, you're going to outlaw abortion,you're not outlawing abortion, you're outlawing safe, legal abortion. these abortions willhappen anyway. you're just putting women's lives at risk if you make them illegal. thisis a society formed by abortion, it always
has been and it always will be. whenever womenget that chance, they will take that choice because this is what they choose. they choosesmall families. they choose being able to do those two jobs properly and then move onewith their lives. so, thank you for that question. s?: hi, i just wanna say the chapter aboutthe big knickers was probably the funniest thing i've ever read in my life. i pickedup the book and zipped up. and i just couldn't it read it. i was on the train at that time.i was bawling my eyes out. i really just wanted to know what your reaction was to that recentheadline in the telegraph of the uk when... i think the heading was "mother of three headsup the bbc" and how are we ever gonna get past that kind of bullshit? thank you.
cm: yes, that is bullshit. well, the greatthing about that... so this is for those of you who didn't see it, the new chairman ofthe bbc is a woman and the headline was "mother of three heads up the bbc" whereas, have youever seen a headline that goes, "father of two takes over exon." it just doesn't happen.well, the great news is, i don't know if even two years ago there would have been the outcryabout that there was. everybody just laughed at the telegraph and the telegraph lookedlike dicks. cm: and everyone went, "this was your headline?is this a paper run by children and animals?" is everyone in your office 300 years old going,"oh, young fillies, they're heading up the bbc!" monocle falls out.
cm: so, yeah, that's a lovely last questionto ask then because you know what the feminism was in that thing? everyone fucking laughedat them. they looked like a bunch of pricks. there are a lot of really funny blogs writtenabout it. and they won't do that again. so, no one had to march, no legislation has tobe published. just a lot of women laughed at them and it stopped. s?: all right, i wanna thank the... js: well, listen caitlin, we can't thank youenough for coming. we are gonna put you to work still, i'm sorry. i'm gonna ask everybodyto sort of sit tight and let her make her way to the back where she will be signingthings. do not mob her. do not mob her, on
her way back... cm: don't touch me with violence, i'll laughat you. js: she will speak to you when you get inline. thank you all so much. thank you for coming. yv: thank you both.