Sunday, April 21, 2013

How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran


Missing ideas/chapters on how to be/become a woman:
- Gym class and locker room
- Losing her virginity – maybe this chapter is missing because that is one “typical” way that girls become women
- Violence against women (physical and verbal)

Writing Style
- Using colons for quotes, instead of commas
- Large vocabulary
- Doesn’t focus on “poor me” and she isn’t whiney

Judy Blume wrote the books on how to become a woman when we were kids!

Finishing the Book
One thing we discussed was that no one had actually finished the book by the time of our meeting.  What made it so hard to finish reading?  It wasn’t particularly difficult to read.  It didn’t have many characters having conversations.  It wasn’t sad or depressing.  It also didn’t have a face-paced action plot to keep you flipping pages.  But, “being a woman” is a topic that we all have experience with.  So, when she talks about getting her period, we all remember our own stories.  When she talks about being classed “fatso,” we remember the names we were called.  So, what was your “worst birthday.”

 QUOTES

“I Am A Feminist!” Page 69
I still don’t have any friends, either.  Not one – unless you count family, which obviously you don’t, because they just come free with your life, wanted or not, like the six-page Curry’s brochure that falls out of the local paper, advertising Spectrum 128k home computers and “ghetto blasters.”

But on the plus side, I am not alone because – as with a million lonely girls and boys before – books, TV, and music are looking after me now.  I am being raised by witches, wolves, and unexpected guest stars on late-night chat shows.  All art is someone trying to tell you something, I realize.  There’re thousands of people who want to talk to me, so long as I open their book or turn on their show.  There are a trillion telegrams with important information and tips.  It may be bad information or a misconstrued tip – but at least you are getting some data on what it’s like out there…  You are getting input.

Books seem the most potent source (of input): each one is the sum total of a life that can be inhaled in a single day.  I read fast, so I’m hoovering up lives at a ferocious pace, six or seven or eight in a week.  I particularly love autobiographies:  I can eat a whole person by sundown.

And every book, you find, has its own social group (of other authors) – friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever ends.

Page 80
We have to remember that snidely saying, “Her hair’s a bit limp on top” isn’t what’s keeping womankind from closing the 30 percent pay gap and a place on the board or directors.  I think that’s more likely to be down to tens of thousands of years of ingrained social, political, and economic misogyny and the patriarchy, tbh.  That’s just got slightly more leverage than a gag about someone’s bad trousers.

I have a rule of thumb that allows me to judge… Are the men doing it?  Are the men worrying about this as well?  Is this taking up the Men’s time?  Are the men told not to do this, as it’s “letting our side down”?  Are the men having to write bloody books about this exasperating, retarded, time-wasting bullshit?  Is this making Jon Stewart feel insecure?  Almost always, the answer is:  “No.  The boys are not being told they have to be a certain way.  They’re just getting on with stuff.”

Page 82
Being polite is possibly the greatest daily contribution everyone can make to life on earth.  But at the same time, “Are the boys doing it?” is a good way to detect spores of misogyny in the soil, which might otherwise seem a perfectly fertile and safe place to grow a philosophy… I finally decided I was against women wearing burkas… I would definitely put this under the heading “100 percent stuff that the men need to sort out.”

“I Need a Bra!”  Page 97
The relief of taking off a bad bra is immeasurable.  It’s like a combination of putting your feet up, going to the bathroom, having a drink of cold water on a hot day, and sitting on the steps of a trailer having a smoke.  Bad bra removal is a measure of your friendships.  If you would feel comfortable going round to someone’s house at the end of a long day and saying, “I’m just going to take my bra off,” you know you are intimate friends.

“I Am Fat!” Page 100
We are basically auditioning each other as friends.

Page 101-102
I’m 16, and these are my best clothes, and this is my best day, and a loft of pigeons flash past us, wings like linen, and it’s autumn, and the sky goes on forever, and I can wait for him… “Did they call you Fatty?”… So that’s the first time I ever felt the world stop – although not the last, of course… It’s a swear word.  It’s a weapon.  It’s a psychological subspecies.  It’s an accusation, dismissal, and rejection.

“I Encounter Some Sexism!” Page 126
These days, a plethora of shitty attitudes to women have become diffuse, indistinct, or almost entirely concealed.  Fighting them feels like trying to combat a moldy mildew smell in the hallway, using only a bread knife.  Because – like racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia – modern sexism has become cunning.  Sly.  Codified.  In the same way a closet racist would never dream of openly saying “nigger” but might make a pointed reference to someone black having natural rhythm or liking fried chicken, so a closet misogynist has a vast array of words, comments, phrases, and attitudes that he can employ to subtly put a woman down or disconnect her, but without it being immediately apparent that that is what he is actually doing… he places a packet of Tampax on your desk.  “Given how emotional you’ve been, I thought you might need these”…

“I Am In Love!” Page 147
You are no longer an observer but a participant.

It’s amazing how much you can find to say when there’s one big thing you’re too afraid to say: “This isn’t working.”

If it doesn’t work, it’s simply because I didn’t try hard enough.

Page 150
The people around you are mirrors… You see yourself reflected in their eyes.  If the mirror is true, and smooth, you see your true self.  That’s how you learn who you are.  And you might be a different person to different people, but it’s all feedback that you need, in order to know yourself.  But if the mirror is broken, or cracked, or warped… the reflection is not true.  And you start to believe you are this … bad reflection.

“I Go Lap-Dancing!” Page 163
I can’t believe that girls saying, “Actually, I’m paying my university fees by stripping” is seen as some kind of righteous, empowered, end-of-argument statement on the ultimate morality of these places.  If women are having to strip to get an education – in a way that male teenage student are really notably not – then that’s a gigantic political issue, not a reason to keep strip clubs going.

“I Get Married!” Page 173
If we were inventing things from scratch, surely we would decide to throw a gigantic celebration of love right at the end of the whole thing – when we’re in our sixties and seventies, the mortgage is paid off, and we can see if the whole “I love you forever” thing actually worked out or not.

“I Get Into Fashion!” Page 191
All the other women buy lots more clothes, I think. They have lots more clothes than me.  They are doing things differently.  I’m not doing what the women do…  I’m not being a proper woman, I think , staring at my wardrobe.  All the other women are “putting together outfits” and “working on their looks.”  I am just “putting together the cleanest things.”  Now I’ve got some money again, I should sort this out.

Page 206
The following eight hours (of a fashion shoot) were the worst of my life that haven’t ended in an episiotomy…  I left that studio, eight hours later, sweaty and in tears.  It was the ugliest I’d ever felt.  Without even the aid of being able to smile – “look mysterious, and sexy. Kind of… vague” – I was reduced entirely down to the clothes on my back and how my body looked in them. And in these styles, rather than the ones I’ve carefully collected as being “helpful” to me, I was a total failure.

(Movie stars) were just wearing (shoes) for photographs.  They know it’s just for photograph.  We – the customers – are the only ones who are buying this stuff and then trying to walk around in it all day; move in it; live in it.

Why You Should Have Children Page 218
Fairly early on in the event, you will have the most dazzlingly simple revelation of your life:  that the only thing that really matters in the whole goddamn crazy mixed-up word, is whether or not there’s something the size of a cat stuck in your cervix, and that any day when you do not have a cat stuck in your cervix will be, buy default, wholly perfect in every way.

In short, a dose of pain that intense turns you from a girl into a woman.  (Childbirth) is one of the most effective ways of changing your life.

Page 219
You basically come out of that operating theater like Tina Turner in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, but lactating.

“Role Models and What We Do With Them” Page 249
But, of course, on being freed, people who’ve been psychologically crushed don’t immediately start doing glorious, confident, ostentatious things.  Instead, they sit around for a while, going, “What the fuck was that?” trying to work out why it happened, trying – often – to see if it was their fault.  They have to work out what their relationship is with their former aggressors and come up with new command structures – or work out if they want command structures at all. There’s a need to share experiences and work out (a) what “normal” is and  (b) if you want to be it.  And , above all , it takes time to work out what  you actually believe in – what you think for yourself.   If everything you have been taught is the history, mores, and reasoning of you victors, it takes a long, long time to work out what bits you want to keep, which bits you want to throw away: which bits are poisonous to you, and which parts salvageable.

Page 255
For women, finding a sympathetic, nonjudgemental arena is just as important as getting the right to vote.  We needed not just the right legislation, but the right atmosphere, too, before we could finally start to found our canons – then, eventually, cities and empires.

“Abortion” Page 266
For mothers must pretend that they are loving and protective of all life, however nascent or putative it might be.  They should – we still quietly believe, deep down inside – be prepared to give and give and give, until they simply wear out.  The greatest mother – the perfect mother – would carry to term every child she conceived, no matter how disruptive or ruinous, because her love would be great enough for anything and everyone… Women should be, essentially capable of endless, self-sacrificial love… On a very elemental level, if women are, by biology, commended to host, shelter, nurture, and protect life, why should they not be empowered to end life, too?