Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Welcome everybody to this Mishcon Academy Session. This is part of a series of our Digital Events including podcasts and videos where we tackle some of the biggest issues facing society today. Before I introduce our guest today, Caitlin Moran, we’ve got just a few housekeeping items. So first of all, if you’ve joined us online you’ve automatically joined on mute and with your video off and Callum will kindly be taking some questions from the audience towards the end of our session. If you are in the room, please raise your hand then and we’ll bring a mike to you. If you are online you drop your questions in the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen at any time and we’ll pick them up towards the end. For those of you in the room, Caitlin is very kindly staying to sign some books at the end as well um, so we’ll do that once we are off line. So I am very excited to introduce our multi-award winning guest, Caitlin Moran. Caitlin tells me her Wikipedia entry does her any justice, she’s actually won 27 awards.
Caitlin Moran
It only says 11 on the website.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Caitlin Moran
And every time I go and try it, they think that I’m lying so if any of you want to log on to my Wikipedia entry and update it for me, I’d be very grateful, thank you.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Travesty.
Caitlin Moran
It is.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Um, we won’t list all of them but Caitlin’s team has kindly given me some key, key points to know. Um, so for those interested Caitlin was born in Brighton in 1975. Uh, grew up in Wolverhampton, lives in London. Um at the age of 13 Caitlin changed her name from Catherine to Caitlin because you found the name in a Jilly Cooper book?
Caitlin Moran
Yes, Jilly Cooper novel, yeah. I was like, I want to be her.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah. Came up with an unusual pronunciation which…
Caitlin Moran
Yeah I thought it was pronounced Catlin and I didn’t know anybody else so for 10 years I, I didn’t know it was wrong and now it just makes everyone’s life a misery and I’m so sorry.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
But you know, it’s unique.
Caitlin Moran
Yeah.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Um, so at the age of 15 Caitlin wrote her first novel which was ‘The Chronicles of Narmo’.
Caitlin Moran
Mm-hmm.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And then since the age of 18, Caitlin’s been writing for The Times, doing various things as a columnist um, interviews um, oh sorry I had a whole list that your team gave me, now I’ve lost.
Caitlin Moran
I was interviewer of the year because I went into a sex club with Lady Gaga. I was critic of the year mainly because I posted a lot of sexual fantasies about Sherlock when it was first one. Uh, I’ve been columnist of the year eight times now uh, because I, I am funny.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Uh, yeah also I’ve got here from Fiona on the team that apparently the most read section of the Sunday Times is Celebrity Watch, the column that you write.
Caitlin Moran
Yeah. Yes, yeah. I write about celebrities every week but I try not to be horrible to them because I think we can learn something from them. Not often, but sometimes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And beyond the Sunday Times as well, Caitlin has written a number of books as I am sure many, many of you are aware. So um, her, her first best seller I think was ‘How to be a woman’ which was named um, on the Sunday Times List of Most Influential Books of the 2000s, also won the National Book Awards Book of the Year. You’re an instant New York Times best seller, published in 25 languages.
Caitlin Moran
It’s actually 38, that’s another thing Wikipedia needs to sort out.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Oh sorry. Okay have a word with Fiona.
Caitlin Moran
Yes fix that.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Although Fiona has been amazing in every other respect. Um and then your 2020 sequel, ‘More than a woman’ was also a number 1. Um, similar bestsellers are your novels ‘How to build a girl’ and ‘How to be famous’. With ‘How to build a girl’ you adapted um into a film starring Emma Thompson and Beanie Feldstein which is very exciting and then with your sister you co-wrote the Channel 4 sitcom, ‘Raised by Wolves’ which won best sitcom at the Rose d’Or awards and um, your latest bestseller is the number 1 book, ‘What about Men’. Which is what we are going to focus about today. So welcome.
Caitlin Moran
Thank you, it’s so lovely to be here, thank you for coming everybody.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Um so let’s start at the start then. Uh the genesis of ‘What about Men’, we’ve got a bit of a mixed audience here. I think most of us are huge fans but can you just talk us through how you came up with the idea of writing this book after decades of being known as an avid feminist?
Caitlin Moran
Yes, so I was, I was very much the uh, women were my specialist topic, women and girls and I spent the last 10 years writing about women and girls, they are my crew and uh, every International Women’s Day is a big day for me, I go and talk about the feminism and the women and girls in various places and two years ago on International Women’s Day I was at a school, an art school in North London uh, talking to an equal amount of teenage girls and teenage boys about International Women’s Day and feminism and I got about four minutes into the third question and some boys just started going, ‘Nah, no we’re not having this, nah, feminism’s gone too far. Girls are winning and boys are losing like, feminists are Nazis’ and I was shocked. We were in a North London art school um and the thing that surprised me the most was that these boys, these disruptive boys were so angry and once you learn that when you are dealing with someone who’s angry, that underneath it all they’re scared. Anger is just fear brought to the boil. I found that incredibly intriguing that this, this recent burst of feminism that we’ve had over the last 12 or so years, has been so recent to me. This seems like I’m 50, this is like a very recent corrective, 10,000 years of the patriarchy. But to these teenage boys it was their entire lives. They had grown up with hearing people saying, ‘the future is female’, ‘girls can do anything’, ‘here’s a book about 50 amazing kickass women from history’, ‘here are fifty women who are going to change the world’, ‘here are the first women in space’. And that was a revelatory moment to me that basically, that we, we’ve missed a generation of boys and, we didn’t realise that while we were, quite correctly, talking about women and girls and improving their lives in so many ways and we still have so much more to do, to improve the lives of women and girls that we have not been talking about boys at all. Except some people have because this is the progressive left that has not been talking about boys. Into that gap has fallen the alt right. Has fallen the manosphere. Has fallen Jordan B Tate. Has fallen Jordan B Peterson. Andrew Tate sorry and Jordan B Peterson and they are the only people if you are a 15 year old boy going, I’m confused about my life. I’m scared about my prospects. I don’t know how to be man. I keep hearing masculinity is toxic, does that mean I’m toxic? They are the only people who stood up and go, I’ll talk about boys and I’ll tell you what will make your lives better. And that was the point where I was like, okay I need to write a book. I, I, I’ve waited for a long time to see if anybody else on the progressive left would write a book about being a man and masculinity and in the end it was like, okay it’s going to take, it’s going to take a busy middle aged woman to do this. I will try and start the conversation about men and boys. I will try and make it chatty. I will try and make it humorous. I will try and make it fun because I think one of the most important things whenever we are talking about progress or any kind of cultural change, is that it shouldn’t be dutiful. I think very often when I first started writing about feminism I think the reason that that book was so big and was such a phenomenon and seen to give so many women relief was that up until that point, feminism had been seen as so dry and so academic and something that you could get wrong. You had to have read the right books. You had to be saying the right phrases. You had to know the history of feminism. You had to know your first wave from your third wave and I was like, no I don’t believe that progress should be dutiful, like eating your vegetables and consuming fibre. When we’re talking about progress, it should be creative and joyful. You’re going, I’ve got something to offer you. I’ve just come up with a way that the world can be better. Here’s all these women from the past who come up with all these great ideas. I am going to tell you about all these great ideas. I have am a fan girl for the idea of things getting better. Why shouldn’t progress be fun? Why shouldn’t improving your life be fun? Why shouldn’t these discussions about what is difficult for us and what would improve our lives just be as much fun as sitting in the pub with your mates talking about your favourite pop band. So um, so that was, that was the sense that I wanted to encapsulate in, in ‘What about men’ that we should be talking about boys and it should not be, oh boys, boys, boys are trouble, masculinity is toxic. Men are doomed. Boys, boys always cause trouble. It should be no. Boys are amazing, let’s be joyful, let’s be positive but let’s talk about the problems that boys and men face right now in 2025.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah and I think that um, theme of how do we raise boys in this generation that has only heard the negative things um, is really important and the book is incredibly accessible, gets, does a great job of talking about that and a plethora of other issues, couldn’t possibly fit them all in one book um, and when we were talking about this session we had so much excitement and interest um, internally and one of the things that so many people said was, I’m raising boys.
Caitlin Moran
Yes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Um, I’d love to get into that, talking about it etcetera. Um I also had a few other points that people raised um, many of them you talk about in the book including fatherhood versus motherhood. How that’s very different. Um, as men become older, what does it mean when perhaps you didn’t curate your friendships the same way as women do, loneliness all of that but one other thing that came up was, I don’t know, going back to what you said about being um, dutiful but also using the right language, people said to me, I don’t know how to challenge things because I’m not a really angry 14 year old boy and I don’t think that Andrew Tate is a role model but how do I ask certain questions? And so they’ve tasked me with doing that.
Caitlin Moran
Yes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
So one of them Caitlin is um, as I say, you’ve spent decades talking about uh feminism, acknowledging the patriarchal challenges of society etcetera, for women so hear what you’re saying, something needs to be done and it’s fallen to you to write this but isn’t it another example of women having to take up a duty, the onus as a caregiver. Why can’t men sort themselves out?
Caitlin Moran
Well, and that was very much my attitude for the first couple of years because like I’d spent 15 years writing about women and girls and whenever I did an event like this, we’d spend an hour talking about women and girls and then the second or third question I would get from the audience would be someone going, yeah but what about men? And I’d admit for the first three or four years I was like, I don’t care, they seem to be fine and you know, I’m team tits, that’s, that’s my crew. And then I realised a couple of things. That first of all that often it wasn’t a trick question, it was genuinely, a lot of the time it was mother’s going we need to talk about boys in the same way we’re talking about girls you know, I feel there is so much advice for being a mother of girls and feminism exists so even if my girls don’t want to talk to me about problems they have in their life, there’s a million blogs and books and TV shows and movies that talk about how to be friends, how to deal with puberty like, how to deal with falling in love. There aren’t those same resources for boys. Um, and then the second thing that I thought when people go, what about men and was wondering you know, am I going to take the burden? I mean, it would just be the ultimate irony of feminism basically if women had to sort out women and then had to sort out men. But then I had a realisation that however much we talk about the problems of women and girls and however many of those problems we solve, roughly 50% of any women’s problem is men. It’s angry men, it’s abusive men, it’s sexist men, it’s the boss that brings you down, it’s the colleague who isn’t pulling his weight, it’s the, the troubled teenage son, it’s the husband who doesn’t fully acknowledge the emotional load and the domestic chores. And so, we can’t fix the girls until we fix the boys. You know, if there are men out there who are going around with these ideas about women, if there are men out there with these outdated things, if the men out there that don’t have the tools to cope with their own lives, if the men who are becoming depressed, if there are men who are lonely, if there are men who can’t contribute to fatherhood because of the way that things are structured then this becomes a problem for women as well. So that was very much my, my, my ethos. It was like, we can’t fix the girls until we fix the boys. We’re all in this together. And when you were talking about advice from parents. It’s been really interesting. I presume most people who’ve got teenage children have recently watched Adolescence on Netflix because we all just watched that in horror right? Just going, oh god this is such bad news. An amazing show but I was interested to see that once that broadcast it started a national comment, international conversation of people going, there is a crisis in teenage boys, there is a crisis in adolescent boys and I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s a crisis in fathers. It’s a crisis in this generation of fathers. In the recent Lost Boys report, there was a frightening statistic that said that teenage boys were more likely to have an iPhone than to have a father at home. And if we look at the different ways that we parent our children, again in the last 10 or 15 years, the, the way that mothers have started talking to their teenage girls has changed unrecognisably from when I was growing up. Women will sit their girls down now and go, be proud about your body, be proud of having ovaries, be proud of having a vagina, let’s go on Etsy and get you some little ovary broaches like kind of, girls talking about their bodies in a proud way and mother’s going, yes, this is women’s bodies are amazing and you be proud of it. However you are is an incredible and notable thing. The idea of a father sitting down with his son and saying, be proud of your penis seems unthinkably weird and mad. But then I assure you I grew up in the 80s and it was equally unthinkable and mad for a mother then to sit down and say to her daughter, be proud of your ovaries. So we know these things can change, we just need to see a template, we need to be aware of what we are not doing and then start coming up with templates for how we can, how we can change these kind of behaviours. And the way that we approach fatherhood is still underrated, we still do not see the values of fathers. When I write about middle age in this book the thing that I heard over and over and over again from middle aged fathers who were on their second families, their first families had imploded, there had been a divorce and they had got married again and they had started a second family. The thing those men said over and over again is, I’m enjoying it this time around. This time around I’m changing the nappies, this time around I’m there for the night feeds, this time around I’m there to play with them and when you talk to them, they wanted to be there the first time around for that first family but the pressure is so intense on young men to make something of their career at that point, the onus is always put on young men. We still presume that it will be women who will step back and go part-time and it will be the men that will work full-time. We’ve now got a position where whole families are breaking up with the subsequent impact that that has on society and the subsequent impact it has on those families, when you talk to those middle aged men very often they are like, yeah the kids from the first marriage don’t, it’s a difficult situation like you know, they took their mum’s side, like they don’t want to talk to me on the phone. Simply because we still have not looked at valuing young fathers, we wait until they do it again second time around. Now if women were talking about a problem with childcare in this way, if we had noticed this was a problem for us, we would be signing petitions about that. We would be marching for that, we would be talking about change the devastation and workplace practices because we have a feminist movement and that’s what we do. When we see a problem with women, we bitch with other women about it, we name that problem and then we start organising to change it. But because there is no such thing as a men’s movement, because men do not like to complain, because there isn’t any template for men talking about a problem in their lives and then organising together and forming a movement and changing it. You see this recurrent thing and it’s one of the most recurrent words that I use in the book, stoicism about how men feel about the problems in their lives. The, when I, there’s a chapter in there called uh, ‘why men don’t go to the doctor’ which was based on the fact that my husband would never go to the doctor and when I was speaking to a friend of mine who is a doctor, she said, there’s a difference between men and women who come into my surgery. When the women come in and I say, why are you here? They list their symptoms. When the men come in and I say, why are you here? They say, my wife made me come. Men are very reluctant to go to the doctors and there were four reasons for this; one, men were scared, they were scared they’d left it too long and they were going to get bad news. Uh, they were scared they were going to be told off, that the doctor was going to say, you drink too much, you eat too much bacon, kind of you’re a naughty boy. But the third one was men going, I don’t think I should put myself in that queue. I think women should be seen first, I think children should be seen first, I think the elderly should be seen first, I don’t want to push into the queue, it’s women and children first in the lifeboats, like kind of, I don’t want to push into that queue. And there is no hierarchy of mental or physical pain. If you are a man who is worried about a lump on his neck, you are a man who is worried about your mental health. You are just as entitled to be in that queue as a woman or someone elderly or a child. But there was this stoicism when men were talking about their problems, they just go, that’s what it’s like to be a man, I don’t want to complain, stiff upper lip, like kind of, no one wants to, no one wants to listen to a man going on about his man flu like kind of and they would just go, okay this is just what I’m going to do, I’m just going to, I’m going to firm it out, I’m not going to complain and I hate that for men. I, I, I think it is damaging for you and I think it is damaging for your boys because when you look at what people say are the problems with teenage boys, is it that they cannot reach out and get help, they do not have the same kind of close female friendship groups that women and girls have. They are not able to talk about their problems because they are being stoic and women have spent the last 100 years learning to rebel against all the ideas of being a woman. If you say women don’t do this, women should do that, women have spent the last 100 years going, women can do anything. Like kind of, we will rebel against this, we’re going to redefine what it is to be a woman. Men and boys have not yet learnt to rebel when someone says, men don’t do that or, this is what men do. They are, they go, okay I’ll be stoic, I will not complain.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Caitlin Moran
And I, I hate that for men and boys. You need to rebel.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And that idea of communication, talking about feelings and both men to men and with women etcetera, I think is a common thread when you talk about various issues of the book. I mean I should say, Caitlin and I have discussed it, it’s necessarily focussed on heterosexual man.
Caitlin Moran
Oh yes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Because there’s just too much even with that one category of men right but we have acknowledged that it’s not the same.
Caitlin Moran
Oh no gay men or straight culture yeah.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Um, and then picking up on that stoicism, I think health is a really good example of the power of that because we all know that men’s health or medicine is predominantly uh, based on research into men. We know that women have been excluded from clinical trials etcetera, etcetera. Um, there was also it turns out, Men’s Health Week, this month – 19th to 15th June. So in a bid to try and end this with some practical takeaways on a higher note, there is a Men’s Health Week every year. Um, I find it really interesting that we, I suppose, need that but also I had no idea. I looked it up specifically for this.
Caitlin Moran
Isn’t it funny though because you never hear about, I had no idea that Men’s Health Week was happening and as a journalist you are always looking for something you can peg a column on. No idea. International Men’s Day does happen. Every time there’s an International Women’s Day, you get lots of people on the internet going, when’s there an International Men’s Day, seems like it’s all about the women.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
12th November.
Caitlin Moran
Yes, it’s 12th November. The comedian, Richard Hering always goes on on the internet and does a day of duty pointing it out but like no one, I mean I think a lot of it is because women are really good at making a fuss. Like kind of like, we were just, yeah I’m going to have a week, I’m going to have an International Women’s Week, I will organise things. Women are good at organising things but there are so few events for International Men’s Day, so few things for, for Men’s Health Day and I think a lot of that is women are good at organising but women also, we also do kind of find ourselves quite fascinating. Kind of if you sit women down, we can talk about any aspect of our lives for hours like, we can, we can analyse each other’s shoes, you know, I can tell if my sister’s in a bad mood, whether she’s wearing a beret or not you know, if she starts channelling a French waitress I know she’s going through a bad time. Looking at each other and analysing it. We find every aspect of our lives fascinating and this was, but men, not so much like when I was interviewing men for this and I was asking them questions about their lives, I was like, look I know what it’s like to be a women but I have no idea what it’s like to be a boy or a man. Can I interview you and just ask you what it’s like to be man? And they’d, some of the stories they told me were extraordinary, some of these were very dear friends that I had known for ages and they were telling me stories about childhood sexual abuse, near death experiences, racism, antisemitism, like really big instances in their lives but they would get halfway through these stories and go, ah it’s a bit boring, like well that’s just what happens, like I don’t want to complain. Whereas with women if something that big happened in their lives, we would be talking about it, we would be analysing it, we’d be looking at the impact that it had on us further down the line. And when I started to go well why is it that men don’t find their lives as fascinating as women do, it seems to be, it seems to be very cultural from a very early age the difference in the way that boys and girls consume culture is really notable. Girls tend to read much more text heavy books and they tend to read books that are about normal girl’s lives, they’ll be reading Judy Blue or like Anne of Green Gables. Normal girls without superpowers who were talking about being socially awkward and making friends and worrying about their dresses and their bodies and how they are going to progress through lives. Boys tend to read much more text light, graphic heavy comic books that are about adventures and quests and heroes and something that needs to be done. It’s about cops and space and kind of you know, going on a quest and so from a very early age, girls are being given books that are literally teaching them what it’s like to be in someone else’s head. If you are reading a first person story, you are in that, that heroines head. You’re empathising with Jo in Little Women, you are like, I imagine what this is like to be. So when you sit down and talk to other women, you are used to being in other women’s head and you can ask questions about that and that is why female conversation is so different. Whereas with boys, if you are reading books about stories and quests, suddenly the kind of conversations that you are having 20 years down the line when you’re an adult and much, much different and the difference in the male and female conversation is very notable. For instance, I had for years been so confused to why so many men would spend so much time in the pub discussing whether a shark could beat a lion in a fight. Or whether Inspector Gadget could beat Robocop in a fight. I was like it’s, it’s about, you know, it’s about we’ll turn, we’ll turn conversation into sport and it’s a fun conversation. It was like, why are you doing this? And then when I was interviewing the men, they all said the same thing that when you start at school as a boy one of the first things you do is look around the classroom and look at all the other boys and work out which boys could beat you up, and which boys you could beat up. Like if it ever kicked off, you need to know immediately in that moment whether you’re going to square up to them or whether you would run away. And that blew my mind like, that is not something that girls are thinking about, that’s such a quantifiable difference in your really early experiences of how you see the world. And the other biggest thing that I found out that was the difference between boys and girls in their early years is when I spoke to so many teachers across the country and independently they all said the same thing and teachers are the wisest people for talking about how things have changed over the decades with children. So as parents we decade in quite a short space of time and just our children. Parents are seeing everyone’s children over decades and they all said the same thing, it starts at 6. Before the age of 6, boys and girls are roughly the same. They will hold hands, they will cry, they will kiss each other, they will say, I’m scared, they will talk about their problems. There’s not really much difference between boys and girls. And then at the age of 6 you hear for the first time in the classroom, boys don’t do that, boys don’t hold hands, boys don’t kiss, boys don’t cry, boys don’t talk about being scared, are you a girl? And the teachers all said the same thing here again, it’s always the most fucked up kid in the class that’s saying that. It’s the kid who doesn’t have a father present or, has an abusive father, or has an abusive older sibling and suddenly the most fucked up kid in the class is telling all the other kids how to be a boy. And when you start hearing a voice going, boys don’t do that, boys don’t do that, suddenly you’re making boys experiences and what is possible for boys much, much smaller. At the same time, particularly in this climate, we’re saying to girls, girls can do anything, girls lives are getting bigger, girls can go into space, girls can rule the world and when I talk to parents about that you can hear them gasping and going, oh my god, yes I can see that, what do I do, what do I do if the most fucked up kid in the class is the one that’s saying what it is to be a boy, what do I do? And I was like, we always need to prepare our children. We are so good at preparing girls now. We tell our girls if someone in school says, girls don’t do maths or girls can’t do sport, you say to them, girls can do anything. We need to prepare our boys in the same way. We need it so our boys are prepared so on the first day when they hear and they will, boys don’t do that. Boys are equally ready to go, boys can do anything, boys can cry, I saw my dad cry. Boys hold hands, I’ve seen footballers holding hands when they are ready to go and take a penalty. Boys talk about their problems, I’ve seen Keanu Reeves talking about mental health. Boys can do everything and just be aware that we need to fight back because it always happens earlier than we think. We think these are the kind of conversations that you are having when they get to the teenage years, when they go to secondary school but it starts at 6.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah. I mean there’s a lot to unpack there and I’ll come back to various bits and pieces um, I do think as I say, the communication piece is just a common thread to so many bits and pieces of the, the other issues. But because I am determined not to just fan girl you, I am just going to draw out a few things that um, are an answer to some of the very valid questions that people have, have raised. So um, on reading your book so many of my female friends said, I tried to get my husband, partner to read it and he just doesn’t want to, he won’t.
Caitlin Moran
Yeah.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And I know that you’ve said in the book, well, and it ties back to what you’ve said about early childhood, women tends to read books that help us understand each other, the world around us but for boys and it translates to later on in life, it’s about escapism.
Caitlin Moran
Yes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Whereas the point that people make to me is but hang on, we go on and on about how we are, reading lists in school are predominantly male, books are written from the male perspective, what is this rubbish, there’s plenty out there of male perspective. How can you possibly say there are no male role models etcetera? But I think what you are saying is, yes there’s material there from the male perspective but it’s not reality, it’s escapism right?
Caitlin Moran
Yeah. Well if you look at those books like, at the moment I’m working on uh, god no I can’t, no, legally I can’t say that, but one of the greatest books ever written about being a teenage boy is Adrian Mole, like that’s, I can’t think of any other, when we were talking about kind of like can you think of a book about a teenage, a normal teenage boy who isn’t going on a quest and is talking about sex and his feelings and his parents divorcing and being poor and I was like, Adrian Mole and then I realised it was written by a middle aged woman. So, and there is a difference like kind of, so for instance when I was researching this book, normally when I am writing a book about women I will go to the bookshop and I will get all the books about women in whatever phase of their lives I am writing about at the moment. So I trotted off to the bookshop to uh, to go and get all the books about men when I was writing this and realised there isn’t a men’s section. Every bookshop in the world has a women’s section, every aspect of our lives; teenage years, motherhood, menopause, self-help books - we love them, we will eat them up. 80% of books that are bought are bought by women and this tends to be the kind of stuff that we like to read. There is no men’s section in the bookshop. And it is the same in magazines as well. This is where you start realising its cultural and what our presumptions are of what men and women will do, we are just, they are still so divided. In newsagents women’s, men’s magazines say men’s interests and they tend to be about one subject about motorcycling, it’s about DIY, it’s about power boats, it’s about you know, whatever, cars. Men’s interests. Men have one interest and they buy a magazine about one interest. On the other side of the aisle it’s women’s and lifestyles and women’s magazines tend to be about everything. It’s about how to throw a dinner party, how to counsel a friend through cancer, how to dress for the summer, kind of you know, how to tell your children about sex. Women have lifestyles, we do everything. Men have interests, they do one thing. And it’s all these little, I, I find it because I come from a big family, I’m the oldest of eight and half of us were girls and half of us were boys and I just increasingly find it fascinating to see what the diff, what the cultural differences are between men and women because the physical, mental differences between men and women you know, whenever they’ve looked at slides and the different ways that the synapses fire, it’s like 0.4% difference between the way that women’s brains and men’s brains work. We have different hormones but our actual structures in our brain are, are almost entirely identical. So any differences that you are seeing in behaviour in men and women are cultural at which point I am like, well that’s not, if, if we see problems either with women’s lives or men’s lives, that’s not that difficult to fix because I’ve seen culture change things over and over again in my lifetime. I’ve seen the Beatles turn up and change what it is to be a man you know, before the Beatles men had short hair and, and you know, and wore brown and black clothes. The Beatles turned up and suddenly they’ve got long hair like girls, they’re wearing girl’s shoes, they’ve got heels and pointy, pointy shoes, they talk like girls, they are gossipy, smoking fags, giggling with each other, they are like a gang of girls. They wrote songs from the female perspective which had never been done before. When they married, John Lennon marries a performance artist and becomes a house husband. Paul McCartney goes to Scotland and starts re-thatching his roof. Like they’re completely different, new ideas of men and suddenly men like my dad were like, oh my god there’s a completely different way to be a man. So we know that culture can change things really quickly.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Caitlin Moran
But you always have to point out what the problems are first before you start going, oh can we, would it be fun to change this? Would it be fun to invent different kinds of men?
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah. So it sounds like you are saying some of the key agents of change then are more visible, positive male role models.
Caitlin Moran
Yes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And they are advocacy.
Caitlin Moran
Yes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
So just looking at that then, how can we advocate men for themselves or women for men without calling out detrimental behaviour um, because this is another question that I got right. That’s all very well but why should we hold back when actually if you look at statistics, whether it’s in people’s personal lives or in a workplace, it still says that women aren’t doing as well as men and I know there’s some talk there about are we asking the right questions? Is that data representative of the whole picture? But how do we do this then without being detrimental to women and I know you are also going to say the issues of feminism are beneficial to both. You’ve been hearing it a lot?
Caitlin Moran
Yeah.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
I’d love for you to explain that rather than me…
Caitlin Moran
Yeah.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
…getting it all wrong.
Caitlin Moran
Well the, the, the thing that role models is really interesting and again how quickly they can change like for instance, I remember even 20 years ago when my daughters were born, at the time I can remember thinking, the worst thing that could happen to my daughters is that they grow up and marry a British footballer. Back then, 20 years ago, British footballers were trash, they were just falling out of nightclubs, they were you know, spending millions of pounds on sex workers, they were constantly drunk, they were taking cocaine, they were just bin beasts. They were fell items. They were terrible. You look at the difference now with the England Team, particularly since the advent of Gareth Southgate, the difference, my timeline, my social media is constantly full of really lovely wholesome looking England players going to schools and talking to boys for hours, going to classes for children with special educational needs and kind of like, walking them out on to the pitch and giving them these incredible experiences. They’ve got a sense of community, they’ve got a really strong sense of class, they know what their responsibilities are, the way they support each other, the way they talk about mental health, the fact that they’ve talked about their own physical and sexual abuse in their childhoods. These are all utterly invaluable things but one of the problems is when I was, when I was writing this book, when I was talking about this book after I’d written it, and people were going, well there isn’t a men’s movement like, kind of like, and you keep saying there aren’t enough role models but there are lots of role models like you know, I can think of celebrities who talked about mental health or sexual abuse or feminism, like the problems of men like, kind of they are there and I was like, yeah but the difference again is cultural. If, if a woman comes along and does something, particularly if she is like a feminist or talking about the problems of women, women adore her like, kind of like, they, they give her a mandate, they vote for her. You look at someone like Taylor Swift like, girls are good at being fans of other girls. We will have their posters on the wall, we will tell our friends to read this book, we’ll say watch this film, watch this TV show, we will fan girl them. Boys don’t, boys aren’t as good at being fans of the things they love, they wouldn’t go you know, I you know, in the way that we would go, I love Phoebe Waller-Bridge, like I adore, I’m obsessed with her. Men are just a little bit more reticent. They’re not as good at fan girling as we are, they, they’re less likely to spread the word and that happens in personal lives as well as with celebrities for instance, I remember 10 years ago talking to a lot of Government Departments who were incredibly worried that on social media the rise of, of unattainable physical ideals was starting to make the mental health of teenage girls decline. All the girls on there were really thin, they were photo shopped, they were all white, they were all blonde, they were all perfect and the Government was starting to go, what kind of legislation can we do in order to curb this kind of imagery on social media because we can see self-harm and eating disorders are going up. And at that time, I had just seen the start of the nascent body positivity movement on social media and that was, fat teenage girls sitting on a beach with their bikinis on and their rolls out and their stretch marks, taking a picture, smiling at the camera, posting it on their social media and all their friends going, you look amazing, dancing girl emoji, aubergine emoji, like you’re amazing, slay queen slay. Girls just simply decided that they would decide what they thought was beautiful, they were not the object in the eye of the beholder, they were the beholder, they were going to behold and go, I think you look amazing. If you imagine a teenage boy, fat, sitting on a beach in his trunks with his rolls out taking a picture and posting it on his social media, the, the response from his friends would be complete stunned silence or, are you mad or, are you gay? And this is one of the problems for straight men that a lot of the behaviours that would actually make, improve their lives, would be described as gay by other men and so it, so it’s straight men’s fear of homophobia. Homophobia is weirdly one of the biggest problems for straight men because there are so many things that straight men could do like being fans of other men, like being fans of role models, like crying and talking about their emotions, post fat pictures of themselves on the beaches. They are so worried that they might be accused of being gay, that they make their own lives smaller. So, so when we’re talking about role models, those role models are there, those charities are there, any issue that I talk about in this book, there are amazing charities out there that talk about all these things. Like for instance, with loneliness, male loneliness is such a huge factor, one in four men say they have no close personal friends which I find, so heart breaking is the word I use second most in this book. I find that absolutely heart breaking.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Caitlin Moran
But there are amazing charities out there. There is a charity called Men’s Sheds, for instance, where it’s just all over the country there are sheds with men in them and they’ve got, they’ve got like tools and stuff. Men can just go there and just make something or do something and there’s an older shed Gandalf there who if they are having any kind of mental problems or emotional problems, he’ll be there to like help guide them through a conversation but you know, these amazing charities are out there but because we don’t talk about them, because we don’t fan girl about them kind of, because there is no movement, they kind of, they remain isolated instances rather than a, a sort of wholesale tide rising change in how we think about men.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yes. I mean that peer-to-peer support I think in communication is absolutely key. So think there’s a common thread there when you talk about homophobia being a massive issue for straight men.
Caitlin Moran
Mm.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
It’s the same thing as feminism right? We’ve been hearing for years and years for all these different minorities or that women are not a minority, different groups, that what is good for one minority group is good for everybody because equality serves everyone. Um, and I know you talk about some specific examples there. For example, gender pay gap actually hurts men, you touched upon the whole men and fatherhood and again that ties in with role models right?
Caitlin Moran
Yes because if women are generally being paid less at the point where they settle down when they have a heteronormative relationship, where a mummy and a daddy are heteronormative and settle down and have a baby, the women will usually take the hit, they’ll just go, well I’ll go part-time or like, I’ll stay at home and look after the kid because you are earning more.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Caitlin Moran
Whereas if we did not have a pay gap and women earned as much as men or more than men, then there would not be that sudden moment where women remove themselves from the workplace and then remove themselves from parenthood. Like the pay gap screws over men and women equally like, you want, you know, what do you want? A really well paid wife, that’s never not useful like kind of had, it’s always a useful thing.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah and it ties back to so many other things right? So, you will sometimes see that when companies, including this one, um introduce a progressive parental leave policy. So you have equal leave for both mothers and fathers, it still won’t necessarily be enough to instantly see an uptake in fathers taking that longer leave whereas women will do it because they’ve seen other women. It’s only when usually more senior men start doing it that they’ll do it.
Caitlin Moran
Well listen, there’s isn’t a culture around fatherhood again like, kind of like you know, as soon as you get pregnant as a woman like, kind of your algorithm knows, you are bombarded with this stuff. There’s so many movies about being a mother, the conversations you have, the way you dress your child like, kind of like the, you’re organising holidays with other families. Like, there’s a whole culture and language around motherhood and I realised suddenly that in a way kind of, because my husband had no culture or fatherhood and there was no real language around it, how much I’d kind of just by stepping into a void, taken things away from him at the point where he tried to buy a jumper for our daughter and I was just like, that doesn’t fit in with the colour scheme of everything else I’ve bought for her. And it was like I was suddenly like, I’m like you know, don’t you know all the reasons why this jumper would not work? You know, me and all the other mothers know that’s far too stiff and she’ll really grow out of it really quickly, it doesn’t go with anything else like, don’t you have the knowledge of how to put a capsule wardrobe together for a six month old child?
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Caitlin Moran
And of course he didn’t. So all the conversations men are having, like there is no, and the way that women can, you know, there is so much dark humour in being a mother like, kind of like, you know, we’re involved in this thing, there’s competitiveness, there’s a definite culture of being mothers.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yes.
Caitlin Moran
In a way that there isn’t with fathers. I was talking to, I just interviewed Bob Mortimer and I was talking about this and he was like, he said sort of jokingly, yeah like there should be like reviews of like buggies but like they are in What Car magazine or Top Gear like, kind of like, for men because then men would be really interested in it. You could just like, what’s the fastest buggy, like you know.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Not the safest?
Caitlin Moran
Yeah, no, no, no, what’s the most fun buggy you know, are there any buggies with four wheel drive and all this stuff and he just started ripping about what would make in men interested about buying a buggy and I was like well yeah, literally that. One sitcom where men are just talking about being fathers and you would suddenly have a whole new template for language.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Caitlin Moran
Um, you know, and it only ever takes one TV show to change things right?
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And those relationships and friendships particularly through formative stages of life, whether it’s parenthood or growing up as kids, going to university etcetera, are so important because I think it feeds into that loneliness particularly in later life, particularly I think when men are widowed…
Caitlin Moran
Yes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
…or single past a certain time. The difference between rates of reported loneliness in men and women is terrifying and it seems to come back to women curate these friendships throughout their entire lifetime and men don’t do that.
Caitlin Moran
Oh let’s talk about men in their older years because this was one of the, because we spend a lot of time talking about teenage boys and like the crisis and sort of adolescence at the moment because of Adolescence on Netflix but like writing this book I was like, at least we talk about teenage boys even if we talk about them as being a problem. No one really talks about old men and the problems of older men like that. That statistic about one in four men having, having no friends, no close personal friends, that rockets as they get older and I was looking at the mechanisms of why that happens and observing it through my husband’s life, I’ve got three WhatsApp groups with three separate, groups of female friends. I know what those bitches have for breakfast, kind of like, we, we, we’ve got holidays booked in, like we’ve got our next drinks booked in, we have AGMs every, four times a year where we discuss a distinct agenda, and then we fit in other things around it like, I know everything, I know how many stitches they had in the births like, kind of like, I know the GCSEs their kids are doing, there is nothing I don’t know about my bitches lives and I see them regular, I am on the reg with those girls. And then my husband saw me sort of like swanning off for a weekend with the girls and he sort of like very sadly went, I wish I went off for weekends with my friends and I was like, well why don’t you? And he was like, I don’t know and I was like, well let’s unpick it, like you don’t organise things like it’s not, men don’t have that. Maybe it’s because we have menstrual cycles and we’re just, we’re very aware of like how quickly a month can go and we fit things in but like, men seem to be able to let a whole year go without seeing a friend and then, and then when they do they come back and I’m like, I don’t understand the parameters of your conversation dude because like my husband will go and see his best friend, Bob and he’ll come back and I’ll be like, so how’s Bob? He’ll be like, seems alright and I’m like, well, well did they buy the house? Like, kind of like, you know, and did, has she managed to get pregnant, they were trying for a baby like, the dog has leukaemia, how’s the treatment going? And he’s like, oh I don’t know I didn’t ask any of those questions. I was like what, what did you talk about for five hours. He was like, well reggae from Birmingham in the 1960s. I was like, I’m going to ring Bob’s wife and find out what’s going on in her life like kind of, there isn’t that conversation there. And similar to the different ways that men and women organise their friendships and the kind of conversations we have within our friendships, you see that happening when, when a couple get married that women are so good at inviting their friends over for dinner, we’re the ones that go, let’s go on holiday with my friends and then suddenly 15/20 years down the line, your husband’s social circle is your friends so when you start having problems in your marriage, you’re on the phone to your friends going, he’s such a dick. He’s not on the phone to anybody because he has not seen his friend for 5 years. And like you can see this, when marriages go through problems there’s like a Council of Elrond’s of women just sitting around kind of going through every single problem in the relationship and you see the men are just like, I haven’t really got anyone to talk to about this and then post-divorce or when men are widowed, there isn’t that sense of community that they can step into and they often haven’t because they were concentrating so hard on their careers, they don’t have the same kind of close bond often with their children. It’s all generalisations but I know how common it is that if you, if you, if you were a child and you ring home, an adult child, and you ring home to talk to your family, if your dad picks up the phone he’ll talk to you for 30 seconds then go, anyway your mum’s here, bye. Kind of like it’s, it’s very, there isn’t that same relationship so. And also women plan for the future, like it’s a long game. It is without a shadow of a doubt harder being a woman through middle age. We are sandwiched between elderly parents, teenage children, our own menopauses, our own careers, our families, like you know, our friendship groups like, it’s a, it’s a fucking spread and we are knackered but it’s a long game because when women get to retirement age, we’ve got all those friends, we’re still friends with the kids and we planned ahead. And the amount of women I know who are like, yeah when I retire I’m going to learn how to samba, I’m going to buy a caravan and go round Norfolk, me and the girls we’re going to do a walking holiday over the Pyrenees, like we’ve got the whole thing sorted. But men very often, and again these are generalisations, once the career ends they are just kind of like, it’s like they fall off a cliff, they are kind of like, I don’t know what I am without work and this is why one of the things that I, I have gone from being an absolute bitch about to being so sympathetic about is the male midlife crisis. Like the male midlife crisis is one of the very few subjects now that you can with impunity make jokes about. And just if a man has got to 55 and got a tattoo and a motorbike, we’re all allowed to go, look at him being a teenager, what does he think he’s like? He’s a man baby boy, oh my god what’s he doing? Until I started interviewing those men about their midlife crisis, why they were acting like a teenager in their 50s and 60s and 70s and without exception every single one of them said, when I was actually having my teenage years, and when I was actually a teenager, I couldn’t be a teenager, I couldn’t get a tattoo or have a motorbike because I was looking after my parents, I was looking after my siblings, I was studying so hard to be the first kid in my family that went to university I couldn’t go out and have fun, I was really fat and spotty and I felt bad about myself so I never went out. They didn’t get to be teenagers during their teenage years and so to have a midlife crisis now when you are behaving like a teenager it is in the words of Eric Morecambe, all the life right events, but not necessarily in the right order.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Right. Whereas women if they say, I’m going to do things which would be akin to midlife crisis, as you say they’ve got their cheer squad saying, yes good for you.
Caitlin Moran
Yeah go on Shirley Valentine, shag a Greek waiter, that’s awesome, go on, yeah. Women have many phases in their lives, that we’re so happy to celebrate. Women do these things but as soon as men do things, you still you know, the trope of like the stupid dad on a, on an advert, like kind of in sitcoms the kind of like, you know, the man who just like can’t get things together and the women have to disapprove of it. It’s such a common trope.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Caitlin Moran
And it’s, it’s so you know, these tropes will seem as outdated and offensive in 20 years’ time as the really sexy stereotypes of women and girls seem to us now.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Let’s hope.
Caitlin Moran
Yes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
I mean I could ask you questions for another hour but I am conscious there’ll be lots in the audience. Um, one thing we didn’t get a chance to point out is as much as we’ve talked about what some of the issues are, Caitlin does have some really positive aspects in the book including some tips I think and some really practical advice as to how we can all make changes, men, women, you don’t have to be an England footballer um, and I know also there are probably going to be questions about raising boys etcetera as well. But rather than dominating, I am going to open the floor to questions. Have we got any in the room to start with?
Audience
Hi there.
Caitlin Moran
Hiya.
Audience
Hi. Um so I’ve been reading a lot lately, I keep getting fed stories and um, um articles about how single women without children are the happiest women and unmarried men are the unhappiest men.
Caitlin Moran
Yeah, yeah.
Audience
And you know, often the author will posit the question, well you know, this could get worse, women might, and for all of the reasons that you’re stating now, might decide not to get married, might decide to stay single. So it sounds like this might get worse so my question is two-fold; what are the implications for women? Do you think it’s going to get worse with all these lonely men and you know, these Andrew Tate’s etcetera out there and what can we do to change that?
Caitlin Moran
Thank you, that’s a brilliant question. What is your name?
Audience
My name is Stacey.
Caitlin Moran
Hey Stacey, thank you.
Stacey
Nice to meet you.
Caitlin Moran
So yeah, I mean there’s a lot of data at the moment and it does look very worrying. For instance, for the first time ever since we’ve started collecting statistics, the political leanings of uh, GenZ and GenA, the sort of next two generations down are wildly devoting according to gender, so young men are becoming far more right wing, young women are becoming far more left wing and progressive which we’ve never seen before. Usually generation is in lock change across the genders. So that’s one worrying thing. Then you start digging into what we, so for instance, there was big headlines a couple of weeks ago about how one in five boys in this country under the age of 20 were a fan of Andrew Tate. Everyone was like, my god one in five, one in five. That still means that four out of five aren’t fans of Andrew Tate and from all the interviews that I did, it’s definitely a phase, it’s definitely a worry. Every school in this country to my understanding has had to have some kind of assembly or parent/teacher meeting or teacher training for their teaches because of the influence of Andrew Tate, like he is just a one man bother, like he has caused so much trouble and faff because his fans will disrupt lessons by saying, just sort of asking female teachers, does your husband think you’re allowed to have a job? You know, writing on essays, MMAS – Make Me A Sandwich and handing it in to female teachers, like they are disrupting the classrooms for all these, all the other children and the teacher, it’s definitely a problem. But then when I spoke, in all the research that I received when I spoke to people, it does seem to be a phase that these boys grow out of, like it hits its real peak around sort of like 12, 13, 14. By the time you get to 16 the majority of the boys in whatever cohort or class you’re talking to just described him as being a bit of a dick. They are just kind of like, if you’re an Andrew Tate fan that’s a bit of a loser thing to do so it does seem to be a phase that they’re growing out of. And also on top of that, when we’re talking about you know, what is the future basically for humanity, if men and women and are increasingly different, and we’re reading about how kind of relationships don’t work, kind of like the difference between a single woman’s life and a married man, man’s life. I have one deep abiding belief above all about humility, humanity and it is the power of horny. Like, kind of like, like that is, that is what has formed humanity, that is why we have civilisations in progress. People just get horny and they do just want to get together with each other and if what it takes for like, Andrew Tate fans to uh, to get laid is changing their politics and becoming nicer people, I think a lot of them will like, kind of like, the power of horny is there man, it’s a powerful driving force.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Also on Andrew Tate in particular because with adolescence that whole genre is so topical.
Caitlin Moran
Yeah.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
You make the point that the thing not to do is just yell at young boys and say, you’re a fan of a criminal, it’s incredibly unhelpful and it’s even worse right? It just makes them go…
Caitlin Moran
Oh 100%, I mean there is, there is a whole chapter if anybody here is, is worried about this and struggling if you have a child or you know someone who has a child who is going through an Andrew Tate phase at the moment. I, I spoke to several de-radicalisation experts who do this stuff in schools all the time and their advice was, was very straight forward. First of all do not be confrontational. If you know, with any teenager, with any young person if you sit down and go, the thing you are doing I disapprove of and I don’t like it. You know what they are going to do, they are going to carry on doing it, they are going to double down. So the important things are, and often we also have to realise what our responses and why our response is that. We are scared. Our kids are doing something or are into someone and we’re scared so like kind of rather than being immediately reactive and going, you’re not allowed to do this. You need to ask questions. You need to understand what this world is and you never ask a teenager or a child to direct question. If you sit down and just squat in front of a child and do direct eye contact and go, are you watching pornography? They’ll go, no. If they’re in a car and they’re in the back seat and you’re in the front, you don’t have a direct eye contact and you, you formulate your question in this way, are any of your friends watching porn? Have any of your friends seen any porn that’s weird, like, are any of your friends freaked out by porn that they’re watching? They will start answering that question and when children talk about their friends, they are talking about themselves, they move in a cohort and also they, even though we, you know, the cliché of teenagers coming back from school is just some kind of like, how was school? Fine, not saying anything. Underneath it all they are desperate to talk about their lives, like they, they want that attention. Why are teenage boys spending tens of hours a week reading the advice on these Manosphere websites and watching the videos of Andrew Tate. They are desperate for information from grown-ups about how to grow up. Like, every teenager is like, how do I do it, how do I get into that world? How do I be a grown-up and if you’re are not the one giving them that advice, then they will try and find it from somewhere else. So in a way it’s a good thing when you find out your child is spending all this time online watching these videos and watching these influencers because they have a hunger, they want to know something and unless you have an utterly toxic relationship with your child, they will underneath it all want to learn about these things from you than anyone else.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Caitlin Moran
Because you know how to talk to them like, they, they are desperate for you to tell them how to be a grown-up but you need to be asking them questions first. The biggest thing that I’ve learnt about being a parent, before I had children I was fondly convinced that the majority of parenting would be me coming into a room and making a series of incredibly wise speeches that would go on for several hours about all the incredible things that I’d noticed and learnt, very poetic, very beautiful, possibly the kids writing it down and going, thank you I’m going to read these later in times of need. Uh, obviously whenever you go and give a speech to your child, they will not remember a single word of it, it will walk out the room. The best way to hide some information from a child is to put it in a wise speech that you are giving them, they will ignore it completely. 90%, 95% of parenting it’s just your children watching you. They are just seeing what you are doing and if you’re on your phone, getting your advice from the internet and watching your influencers, even if it’s just really nice ladies re-doing in their kitchens, like kind of, they are like, oh that’s where grown-ups find information like kind of I’ll go and find my information. Like you, you need to, you need to live the life that you want your children to do. If you are really anxious about the future of the world, your children will be anxious about the future of the world. If you are worried about influencers and they, they proportionately take up a huge amount of your head, they will take up a proportionate amount in your children’s head.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
So maybe read Caitlin’s book in front of your children, talk about how useful it is, what great advice.
Caitlin Moran
Well the summer after it came out all I was getting every day were ten’s, hundreds of responses from parents who’d gone on holiday, because I knew men probably wouldn’t read it so it was mainly messages from women going, I’ve just gone on my summer holidays and I’ve just shown the chapter about why men don’t go to the doctor to my husband and he is now going to the doctor. Or, I’ve just read the chapter about online pornography and made my, showed it to my son and now we’re talking about porn. Because these are difficult subjects, every… my whole thing, everything I write about is the most difficult things. Like if there is something that’s taboo or dark or difficult or confusing, that’s where I want to be and my job is to take something that’s dark or difficult or confusing and make it as warm and accessible as possible and to write about it in such a way that you can start a conversation by quoting me and it’s not your fault that you’re having that conversation. You can get to blame me. You can go, Caitlin said this about online pornography.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Caitlin Moran
Caitlin has said this about men not going to the doctors and you just get to blame me for the start of the difficult conversation and that is my, my, my avowed intent in everything that I do and it does seem to be working.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Well there you go, it’s effective and practical right?
Caitlin Moran
Mm.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
I would love to answer or Caitlin to answer a question from a man if any of the men in the room have a question? That guy, go on.
Caitlin Moran
Did you hear this gasp around the room.
Audience
Um yeah can I ask a question about uh advocacy.
Caitlin Moran
Yes.
Audience
Um so you mentioned International Men’s Day.
Caitlin Moran
Yeah, yeah.
Audience
If on International Men’s Day I was considering putting a poster out about men’s issues, whether it be suicide rates uh, educational attainment gap. As a man I’d be reluctant to do that because I think there’d be pushback and people probably say, why is this privileged man talking about men’s issues, does he not realise there is still a gender pay gap?
Caitlin Moran
Yeah.
Audience
Is that something you recognised from your research?
Caitlin Moran
You are so right because the one question I had not answered when I wrote this book was why men had not written a book about it, like this before. Just going through an entire span of a man’s life and talking about all these things and on the first night of a live tour we got to the Q&A bit and a man went, you keep saying why does it take a busy middle aged woman to write this book about men. Like why, what you, you are asking this question. I can tell you why, can you imagine if a man said it’s time to talk about men now. The feminist would kill him. And I was like, you are right, like I think it’s, it’s very, it’s very common and notable that when you get, when you get into some kind of progressive movement there’s a very notable phase that you go through of basically becoming drunk on the progressive movement. There’s a brilliant movement, uh brilliant movie called Moxie, about a teenage girl who gets into feminism and starts writing a feminist fanzine and then she basically gets drunk on the feminism and basically becomes outright sexist to the boys and makes their lives an absolute misery and eventually has to lean that that’s not feminism, that’s just sexism and anger and she tempers it back down. But I think everyone when they you know, that whole thing about there being no-one more dangerous than someone who’s read one book on a subject. When we get into a new progressive movement or a new ideology we’re just kind of like, yes and we become too extreme with it and I, I, there, there definitely is that tendency within the feminist movement and that was why in everything that I am writing about this book, it’s like look I don’t have all the answers. I’m going to start it but what I would like to do is, I think the most important thing you do in culture, is make a space and set a tone and that’s what I’ve tried to do and that’s what I think women do need to do, it’s a really common thing. It’s like, it’s still seen as funny that you would just go, oh men, oh typical men like, kind of lots of teenage girls would be like, I hate men, throw rocks at boys and after my girls had read this book and they had a lot of reasons to hate men, they’d had some very unpleasant experiences but when they read this book and realised that you’re not just talking about one or two bad men, we’re talking about the whole of humanity and all the men in the world, they were like, you know what, even as a joke I’m going to stop saying I hate men anymore. It’s really not useful, it makes men upset and sad and then it makes some of the angry and that’s not helping anybody. Like men do have a right to be able to talk about their problems. And we have got to the tipping point in this culture now where because women are so good at doing this, we’re so organised and we’ve made feminism look so much fun that we come back to those fifteen year old boys now who are just going in my lifetime I have not heard a positive conversation about men and it does take men of our generation to be able to go, okay we’re going to start that conversation and if men of our generation aren’t doing that because they’re worried the women of our generation are going to go, oh here he comes mansplaining. Like, why are men talking about anything when one in four women are still being raped and there’s a pay gap? That’s not a useful thing for us to be saying as women like, we stop a conversation there. We’re stopping progress for all of humanity if we do that. So you are completely right and I was, I was really taken by the amount of men who said some of the things, like we know what all the facts are. We would like to start a men’s movement. Like we know what the, the book stars with a really 54.48 lift to the problems for boys and men at the moment. So boys are more likely to be put on medication at school for disrupted behaviour. They are more likely to be excluded, they are less likely to go on to further education, they are more likely to be addicted to drugs, alcohol or pornography, they make up the majority of the prison population by an overwhelming percentage and similarly the homeless population. One in four men said they had no close personal friends and the leading cause of death for men in this country under the age of 50 is suicide. Like, with a list of problems like that, like women, it is impolite and incorrect and unhelpful for women to go, okay we still can’t talk about men’s problems until women’s problems have been solved. Like it’s, it’s not, it’s not a zero sum game like, we can be doing both things at the same time. So thank you so much for saying that because it’s, it’s something I’ve heard so often and I think it’s, it’s when women you know, we need to bear in mind that we, we need to be encouraging these conversations. More than encouraging, we should just be like, yeah let’s talk about all this stuff all the time, we’re chatty girls like, kind of like, you know, sometimes I get, you know, women talk about our problems all the time, like sometimes when I’m at a party and like all the women are sitting around talking about their mothers and their wombs and all the men are over by the barbecue having fun. I’m just kind of like, this is yeah, maybe I’ll go over to the men’s corner for a bit, like kind of, that’s more fun.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, see what the shed Gandalf has to say.
Caitlin Moran
Yes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Um, unfortunately we are out of time and I would say just really quickly if there was um, I read in your book Caitlin, a very short-lived men’s movement right in the 60s and 70s…
Caitlin Moran
Yes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
…so go look that up and see, see what happened. Um…
Caitlin Moran
Spoiler, it didn’t work out.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
So maybe Guy you can look into restarting that. I’ll leave that one with you. Um so I’ll just close by saying, thank you so much Caitlin um, I feel like we could talk all afternoon.
Caitlin Moran
Yes.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
But we are already over time, uh apologies to those online we didn’t get to, to take your questions but hopefully we’ve had such a varied discussion we have at least picked up some of those topics. So please do join me in thanking Caitlin for her time.
[applause]
Caitlin Moran
And Samantha, thank you so much.
Samantha Kakati
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Thank you.