Remember when feminism was about The Sisterhood?
About women clubbing together to stick it to The Man, patriarchy or
whatever they were calling the system that kept them in a state of
social subjugation?

Those days are gone. Today, if Caitlin Moran’s wildly successful
feminist tract How To Be A Woman is anything to go by,
feminism is less a universal club and more a bitchy sorority, made
up of well-connected women like Moran who consider themselves
better, more spiritual and more “real”, than other women, than
lesser women, than what the Victorians might have called “fallen
women”. Feminism is now about asserting the moral superiority of
enlightened women over unthinking, uncouth broads.

Moran is a columnist for The Times, Britain’s newspaper
of record, where she is paid a fortune to titillate that paper’s
largely Tory readership with tales of her countercultural antics.
She reports from Glastonbury (rock festival for fortysomethings),
interviews pop stars, and writes about what it is like to be
“rock’n’roll” in the “Sea of Bullshit” that is mainstream modern
Britain. (Yes, she really uses phrases like that.)

How To Be A Woman, her first book, was published in the
UK last year and is now about to hit bookstores across the U.S.
Described as “Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch as
written from a bar stool”, it is part memoir, part commentary on
the habits and hopes of 21st-century women. It has been lapped up
by British female writers, with Moran hailed as “the new face of
feminism.” Judging by a
fawning piece in Slate, it looks set to win the approval of
American feminists too.

What is striking about this treatment of Moran’s book as a
manifesto for the modern woman is that much of the book is… well,
anti-women. It expresses supreme disappointment with the behavior,
mores and grooming habits of vast swathes of womankind, especially
those of a (whisper it) working-class persuasion.

Moran’s book kicks off with a telling anecdote about her
childhood in Wolverhampton, England. She recounts being 13 years
old and 13 stone and running away from “yobs” (a British word for
gruff, uneducated people) who were teasing her.

In the process of legging it from the brutes, it suddenly dawned
on Moran that by dint of her youthful flirtation with radical
culture she was better than these yobs, who “do not look as if they
have dabbled much in either the iconography of the counterculture
or the inspirational imagery of radical gender-benders”. Moran says
she felt like turning to her tormentors and yelling: “I have read
The Well of Loneliness by famous trouser-wearing lesbian Radclyffe
Hall.”

This is a fitting story to start the book with, because, in
essence, How To Be A Woman is one long countercultural
boast, one big fat advert for the author’s superior tuned-in
outlook on life and culture in contrast with the outlook of “yobs”.
So where, for example, most men and women are obsessed with keeping
themselves fit, plucked and preened, Moran says she prefers to be
chilled out, to live “like it’s 1969 all over again and my entire
life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash”. The book is full of
such contradictorily ostentatious claims to coolness.

Moran is most keen to distance herself from those women who
have, in her view, been brainwashed by mainstream culture,
particularly by porno culture, and who therefore don’t live “like
it’s 1969 all over again”.

She devotes much of the book to the vagina and the question of
why some women — Them — insist on shaving off their pubic
hair. Apparently it is because pornography has programmed these
women to turn themselves into hairless overgrown cherubs for the
delectation of weird men. “Why do 21st-century women feel they have
to remove their pubic hair? Because everyone does in porno”, she
says.

So Moran’s refusal to shave — her possession of what she
calls a “retro vagina” — becomes yet further proof of her
immunity to the lure of porno culture and, by extension, her
intellectual superiority to the drones of womankind who dutifully
queue up for a Brazilian. This is why she goes on and on about her
“big, hairy minge”, her “lovely furry moof”, the fact that it looks
like there is “a marmoset sitting in my lap” – because this all
speaks to her ability to do what millions of women are apparently
incapable of doing: prevent the “the mores of pornography [from]
getting into my pants”.

Moran’s chief contribution to feminist thinking is
to argue that porn brainwashes women as well as men. Where 1980s
feminists fretted like latter-day Victorian chaperones over the
power of porn to turn men into rapacious beasts, Moran panics over
its transformation of women into slavishly hair-free freaks. I
guess this is progress of sorts, a more equal-opportunity form of
sneering, in which both men and women are seen as
automatons shaped by filthy films.

There is a powerful if unspoken class component to Moran’s fear
for modern womankind. She’s particularly agitated by the kind of
sexual language used by women from the lower orders. She hates
their use of the word “pussy”, which is a product of the fact that
they “get all their sex education from pornography”. In contrast,
“I personally have a cunt”, she says.

She doesn’t like the word “boobs” either, because “boobs are, by
and large, white and working class”. She prefers to call her
breasts “Simon and Garfunkel”, because one is bigger than the
other. She is bemused by “vajazzling”, whereby a woman’s pubic hair
is removed and replaced with stick-on jewels, which is a popular
practice in… guess where? In working-class parts of Britain, of
course.

She hates lapdancing, in which largely working-class women strip
for cash, but predictably she loves burlesque, in which largely
middle-class women strip for cash. Burlesque is “lapdancing’s
older, darker, cleverer sister”, she says, which is another way of
saying what is implied throughout the book — that the sexual
practices of Moran’s social set are so much better and healthier
than the sexual practices of that other social set. Moran praises
Iceland for being the first country in the world to outlaw
lapdancing clubs for feminist rather than religious reasons. Yeah!
State authoritarianism! That’s so 1960s!