Champagne socialists, on the other hand, are people who can personally pay for an open return standard ticket to Manchester that costs £329 since privatization—but recognize that other people can’t, and are suggesting that, maybe, society would function better if rail travel were cheaper so everyone could use it.
What people who denounce champagne socialists are doing is, essentially, trying to shame people who have empathy. Now, that’s a bad day down the opinion mines in anyone’s book.
Russell Brand might have got many things wrong in these early years of his flowering political awareness, but one thing he said was bang on the money: “When I was poor and I complained about inequality, people said I was bitter. Now I’m rich and I complain about inequality, they say I’m a hypocrite. I’m beginning to think they just don’t want inequality on the agenda.”
5. Dismissing people as “Tory scum”/“Posh bastards”
Equal in nobbishness to dismissing someone as a “champagne socialist”/“bleeding heart liberal pinko” is to dismiss someone as “Tory scum.”
It’s taken me a long time to come to this realization. When I was nine, my father gave me a brief, concise lecture on politics.
“If you ever come home and tell me you voted Tory,” he said, lying on the driveway, dragging on a ciggy as he dropped the clutch out of the car, “you’ll be sailing out of the front door with my boot print on your arse. In this house, we vote Labour.”
He then dropped something heavy on his leg, and swore so magnificently that my mother came and ushered me inside again.
As someone raised in what was, essentially, a hovel, by a miner and a munitions worker, in an era before the welfare state—“I’ve seen rats so big you could ride them like a horse”—he’d become a trade union rep by the age of twenty-four, disabled by thirty, and was fairly blunt about bringing up eight children on disability benefit in the age of Margaret Thatcher.
“They’re all cunts,” he explained, over breakfast.
“Kids—put your fingers in your ears,” Mum said.
“Total cunts,” he continued. “Thatcher would take the bread out of your hands if she could.”
Richie—then four—pushed his entire slice of toast into his mouth.
“Don’t think it’s safe in your mouth, kidder,” Dad said, sprinkling pickle vinegar on his fried egg. “She’ll send the fucking police round, they’ll push you over, say it was an accident, take it out of your gob, and wave your fucking breakfast around like it’s a scalp. Vote Labour,” he concluded.
Very, very often, he would conclude a speech with “Vote Labour.”
“Dad, I need five pounds to buy some sandals.”
“Eh? Wellie boots not good enough for you?”
“It’s August. I’m sweaty. I can’t ride my bike in them.”
“Tell Thatcher, not me. Vote Labour.”
“Dad—I’m in love with Gilbert Blythe from Anne of Green Gables.”
“Nice one, nice one. Vote Labour.”
“Dad, I’m locked in the toilet.”
“Vote Labour.”
So imagine my surprise when, as a teenager, I went out into the world and met people who voted Conservative, and found out a lot of them were . . . lovely. Just lovely. Kind, considerate, intelligent people. Jewish intellectuals; immigrants who ran businesses; boyfriends of friends who sat up all night drinking gin and talking about their favorite psychedelic until their friends cornered me in the toilet and said, “You’d never guess he was a Tory, would you?” in disbelieving tones.
Similarly, posh people. As feral scum from a council estate, my definition of “posh” is fairly broad—essentially, I would consider anyone who had both their own bed, not shared with a sibling, and a bedside lamp to have parents who’d “done all right for themselves.” I was brought up to believe all posh people were evil, too.
“They’re raised being told they’re born to rule,” my dad said, Artexing the ceiling in bold swirls while puffing on a ciggy. “That’s what you pay for, with a private education. Being raised to believe you are born to rule. They’ll always see you as a peasant, love. Their natural role is telling us what to do. We’re the malleable masses. The lumpen proletariat. Lions led by fucking donkeys.”
He then got some Artex in his eye, and had to go and wash it out with milk while screaming.
But, again, when I went out into the world and started meeting posh people, I found out they aren’t evil, either. They are not trying to crush the working classes. They are not calculatingly trying to strip us of dignity and opportunity.
What they are, instead—which, to be honest, is almost as fatal—is blithe (see “The Rich Are Blithe”).
6. Shaming idealism
Many, many times in my life I have not said/Tweeted/written what I really believe, politically, because I was worried about being shamed as “an idealist.” This is not something I am proud of—but it’s something I have done out of expediency, because I have seen, a million times, how saying something idealistic is used to attack your fundamental standing, credibility, and status. Indeed, as a politically progressive feminist, I can’t work out if it’s worse to be called “Utopian” or “fat.” They probably tie.
Saying something that seems currently impractical is like a small media suicide—you are seen as foolish. Stupid. Unfit to engage in the topic.
But the ultimate pragmatism is to quietly note that idealism has won, time after time, in the last hundred years. Idealism has the upper hand. Idealism has some hot statistics. Idealism invented and fueled the civil rights movement, votes for women, changes in rape laws, Equal Marriage, the Internet, IVF, organ transplants, the end of apartheid, independence in India, the Hadron Collider, Hairspray the musical, and my recent, brilliant loft conversion. Every reality we have now started with a seed-corn of idealism and impossibility—visions have to coalesce somewhere.
If we are too afraid to state our dreams—to even begin to sketch out possible futures—then we have begun to disinvent the greatest facility humans have: to invent better. To lie on our backs, staring up at the moon, and say, “One day, a man will walk there. And, maybe, open a roller-disco lounge. That would be awesome.”
7. Dismissing an entire idea because some people took advantage of it
You know how this one goes—a story is published about someone with seventeen children who’s living on welfare, and “getting” £38,000 a year, and the piece goes on to discuss the total welfare bill, before concluding that, because the system is being “abused,” welfare should be curtailed, or abolished.
The thing is, if we talked about abolishing everything that was abused, then where would we stop? We would have abolished the Houses of Parliament during the expenses scandal, and the Catholic Church when the pedophile priests story broke. Likewise schools—given the amount of abuse that has happened there, both state and private.
We’d be talking about abolishing marriage—because women are abused, and raped, in relationships. Likewise parenthood, given the numbers of parents who abuse their children.
The simple truth is, people will abuse any system. There’s a proportion of humanity that will always play the system—whatever it is. That’s what humans do. We’re just monkeys, looking for a stick to poke in a hole to get ants. Or monkeys who will steal someone else’s stick, and ants.
The question is: Is the fundamental concept that is being abused good? Right? Moral?
You don’t just give in when people abuse a system. Instead, you make the system better. Anyone wanting to give up a perfectly decent idea—indeed, a necessary, moral, and transformative one—because someone else took advantage of it is basically saying, “I am too lazy to do all the admin to improve this. I’m balking at paperwork. I am eschewing management change in favor of SETTING FIRE TO EVERYTHING AND RUNNING AWAY.”
We must never listen to anyone who confuses “an idea” with “how that idea was predictably abused by a tiny percentage of the population.”
So there
we go. A brief guide to making sure you are a fully clued-up Internet political ninja—helping shape the ideas, and tone, of your society; working as a conduit for good ideas, and not perverting them, or getting in their way. Educating yourself into being the third most glorious thing on earth, after “mid-September sunshine” and “David Bowie”: an informed and motivated voter.
The Feminisms
You know what I’m like with “the ladies.” I’m all “equality” this and “humanity” that and “stop with the raping, for God’s sake, stop with all the—sometimes literal—motherfucking raping” the other.
It’s amazing to me that it’s still considered a notable, commendable trait—“Oh, she’s a well-known feminist”—in a woman, or a girl, or a man, or a boy. That that is the unusual thing. Really, it should be the reverse. Rather than what seems like a minority having to spend time, energy, brain, and heart explaining why they’re “into” equality, the majority should be explaining why they’re not. You put the time into explaining why—in a world where every concept of justice, wisdom, progress, and rightness is a human invention—we still prefer the human concept of “some people being inferior to others” over “this is a vast, inky, cold, empty universe, and in it, we are the only humans that exist, all sharing a tiny milky green/blue world, and faced with a multitude of problems and an infinite capacity for joy, and should therefore try and stick together and accord each other some respect.”
When I wrote How to Be a Woman, I thought—given that it was 320 pages—that I’d kind of done all the feminism. As the years went by, however, feminism was a topic I returned to time and time again in my columns. I am still trying to work out how to be a woman. I think we all are. There’s still a lot of ass-hattery out there. Thankfully, however, there are also a lot of women. I reckon, if we all got together in one particularly large bar, we could probably sort it all out before the Sambuca shots started—allowing breaks to nip outside, for fags.
My Muppet Face
Anyway, let us start with silliness. The first piece in “The Feminisms” is about my most regular political statement:
In both my written correspondence from readers of The Times, and in the online comments on the website, there are three observations I receive on a reassuringly regular basis.
The first is, “When oh when will Ms. Moran stop harping on about her ‘Poor me’ working-class background?” (When the revolution comes! Amiright, comrades?)
The second is, “I have documents which prove beyond doubt that the Queen is a lizard-Jew” (in the interests of politeness I’ve tried to stay open-minded here, guys, but have to say—I might be out on this one).
As for the third recurrent complaint, I document a selection of them, faithfully, here: “Ms. Moron—why do you persistently allow yourself to be photographed pulling faces? Grimacing adds nothing. On the rare occasions I’ve seen you straight-faced, your features have looked . . . perfectly adequate.” “Any chance we could see what you look like when you’re not desperately gurning?” “My dear, your ‘wacky young me’ persona was grating at the age of twenty-three—now pushing thirty-nine, you look like someone’s drunk mother, having a stroke. Stop it. It is profoundly unattractive. Why do you persist in it?”
Well, I am glad you asked! For you see, to the untrained eye, it may very well appear as if I do spend most of my photo shoots pulling a “silly” face, in which I look like a lollygagger, half-wit, or clown.
In actuality, however, this is my cleverest face. My brainiest face. That bog-eyed rictus—which appears to be little more than a homage to the standard expression of, say, Rod Hull, of Rod Hull & Emu fame, on posters for pantomimes in the late 1980s—is, in actuality, a devastatingly realized piece of cultural critique. It is one of my most political statements. It’s where I am being the change I would wish to see.
You see, something happens to women like me when they have a picture taken while trying to look calm, attractive, and authoritative: they lose. This isn’t a blame issue. The simple fact is that my genetic legacy does not look good “in repose”—doing that calm, emotionless expression women are supposed to do when having their picture taken for a magazine or newspaper.
If you want to do a “serenely impassive” face, you have to have the kind of cheekbones you can hang your coat—and, indeed, metaphorically, your entire life—off. People like that look fine when they stay still. They look good asleep. They’ll look good dead. Indeed, if they have an open-casket funeral, they’ll probably still be able to pull someone by the end of the ceremony. Hot people be hot.
I, by way of contrast, have a fleshy Irish peasant’s face—half potato, half thumb. I know, from decades of experience, that if I’m not moving this facial shit around as much as possible—essentially juggling my features, possibly as they’re on fire, almost certainly while screaming—my default look is “sullen maid-of-all-work being forced to resentfully scrub out the dunny, on her half-day.”
And I do not wish to represent myself this way—only in dour bone, and podge. No. I want to work my face. I want to project how I feel on the inside: like a Muppet being fired out of a cannon into a large pie. On Christmas Day. I want to look alive.
This is why I “pull” those faces. Faces that are, in actuality, just what I look like, all day—rather than the real “pulled” faces, studiedly sultry or lofty, of most photos.
As unlikely as it seems, it is my intent to look like a scruffy thirty-nine-year-old Muppet, or a clown—because I would rather cut off my head than try to look attractive in a photo. I don’t want to enter that competition—for that’s what it is, when a woman dresses, and poses, like that. She gets rated. Rated against all the other women posing like that, and doing those things with her face. Pitched against Merle Oberon and Carol Vorderman, and thingy from the Kardashians.
I, on the other hand, want to be in a different category altogether—the category with Rik Mayall, and Daffy Duck, and Bill Murray in it. Where you look at their faces, and it doesn’t occur to you to comment on their jowls, or their wrinkles, or their animated yellow bill. You don’t think, “Oh, they’re fatter than last month,” or “They think they’re it,” or “Bad choice of yellow dungarees.” You just think, “They look like they’re having fun.”
And that’s all I want to look like. Like I’m having fun. And that I would help you carry your buggy up a flight of stairs, if you needed it.
I’m not trying to project some sexy authoritativeness at the world. I am being amused by the world, instead. I’m not transmitting. I’m receiving.
So, yes. To everyone who has ever written to me about my “silly” face, I want you to know that this is actually my best face, and I wrote this entire column looking like Les Dawson.
Because I want to. Because it makes me happy.
The Two Things Men Need to Understand About Women
In September 2015 there was a brief flap about a human rights lawyer, Charlotte Proudman, who “perv-shamed” an older colleague, Alexander Carter-Silk, who contacted her through LinkedIn to compliment her on her “stunning” picture.
Aside from reconfirming every suspicion I’ve ever had about LinkedIn—that it’s just a facility whereby you end up exposing yourself to endless hassle, even more hassle than their constant frigging needy emails to join them—it was also dispiriting to see how Proudman’s actions were greeted. She was—and this is, sadly, the common story for any woman who pokes her head above the parapet—bombarded with misogynist comments about her appearance, her motives, and her career. She was called a “feminazi”—A NAZI!—had her social media accounts published in an attempt to shame her, along with all the usual half-wits threatening to find out where she lived and kill her.
I would like to say I was amazed by the reaction—but then, I’ve seen it happen so many times, I could have told her in advance exactly what would occur. I think she is brave, brilliant, and right for what she did—trying to make men realize that it’s not just “giving a compliment.” It’s part of
a wider problem. It’s because there are two things men just don’t understand about women.
It is the eternal cry of men: “I don’t understand women!” Women are mysterious to men: they do not understand why we take so long to dress, the number of shoes we need, the way we can suddenly lose all confidence. Our excitement about tiny things—tiny cups and saucers, tiny monkeys, tiny ribbons. A tiny ring.
But those really are the tiny things that you don’t understand. It doesn’t matter if you never understand those things at all.
Here are the two big things that men truly don’t understand about women. The two things that, if you knew them—if you truly understood—would change the way you act, and raise your sons to act, overnight.
The first is: we’re scared of you.
Not all of you. Probably not most of you. We feel safe with our fathers—unless we have been unlucky; and our husbands—unless we have been unlucky; and our friends and brothers—unless, again, we have been unlucky.
But we are scared. Of what you can do.
Try to imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to live on a planet where half the people on it are just . . . bigger than you. We are smaller, and softer, and we cannot run as fast as men. We know you can grab us, and we would struggle to get away. We know if you hit us, we’ll go down. We know if you decide to kill us, there’s not much we can do.
Every time the murder of a woman is reported on the news, we hear the detail—“Traces of skin were found under her fingernails, denoting a struggle”—and we know . . . that’s all we can do. Scratch. We think about that more than we would ever admit to you. We don’t want to sound insecure, or morbid, around you. We just walk down any dark street with our keys between our fingers, going, “Please, not tonight. Let me get to my door tonight.”
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