Moranifesto

by Caitlin Moran

  And legal access is the key thing. Of the forty million abortions that happen worldwide every year, only half happen in countries where it is legal. The other half happen anyway—illegally. Unsafely. Of the twenty million women who abort illegally, 47,000 die. Whether it is legal or not, across the world and throughout time, women abort. And when you look at the reasons given to the World Health Organization by these women, you can see why. It is a list that invokes mercy, and solidarity with the women, in all but the most determinedly ideological of hearts: 73 percent “cannot afford a baby now”; 48 percent have relationship problems; 13 percent have an unhealthy fetus; 1 percent were raped.

  The simplicity of why women choose to seek an abortion is devastating: they feel they cannot look after a child. Cannot. I assure any anti-abortionist they may disregard their sneaking feelings that forty million women a year have abortions foolishly, recklessly—that it is done with the same selfish giddiness as binge drinking, or twerking, and therefore to be discouraged by the high-minded, for the greater good of society.

  A woman who is so convinced she would be a bad parent that she is prepared to take a pill and bleed for four days, or else find herself with her legs up in stirrups, has made a very serious decision about what is good for both her and society. And yet because abortion is shameful, women stay silent over their grateful need for legal access to it, and we continue—despite that forty million—to think of abortion as some fringe activity, done by “others”—never our daughters. Our mothers, wives, and sisters. Our bosses. Our politicians.

  When those American states voted to curtail access to legal abortion, I wanted every woman in that building who’d had an abortion to stand up and say, simply, “I have had an abortion.” Not just the politicians—the PAs and the cleaners, the electricians and the press officers.

  And then on—outside the buildings of legislature, and into the streets: every woman—one in three—on strike that day, in a symbolic withdrawal from the running of the country. Spanish women should have done just the same. Both countries would have ground to a halt.

  And the symbolism would have been apt—for when women are denied safe access to abortion, their lives grind to a halt. Our societies grind to a halt. Forty million a year suggests nothing less. What do anti-abortionists think, exactly, that the world would do with those extra forty million children a year—born to unwilling mothers? For whose benefit, exactly, would we be assembling this unhappy battalion?

  Women have abortions. They always have, and they always will. The only question is: in safe, legal clinics—or back to pennyroyal, hot water, and desperate prayers?

  Oh, Hillary. Suddenly, I Love You.

  The thing about feminism, though—thank God—is that it’s not all heartbreaking, horrible stuff about rape and fear and lack of control. This is, still, the best time it has ever been to be a woman: there are extraordinary forces at work out there, bringing change seemingly every day. Our daughters will be, at a rough calculation, 37 percent less fucked up than we were—they live in an age of miracles, wonder, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Aung San Suu Kyi, Melissa McCarthy, Caitlyn Jenner, and Hillary Clinton running for the White House.

  Look, I like the woman—but I’ve never been a superfan of Hillary Clinton. You know? I like a couple of her singles—but I’ve never seen her live, or bought a T-shirt.

  Previously, I liked her in the way I suspect most bright, ambitious women who, at some point in their teenage years, also had to wear a massive pair of unflattering spectacles, like her: a nod of recognition to a fellow traveler on the same, difficult path. Someone who has also tensed up every time the men start talking about who they want to bang (never you, but still discussed in front of you—thanks). Being called a “ball-breaking bitch” for wanting to work hard. Becoming increasingly depressed as you realize just how prepared society is to allow generation after generation of brilliant young women—women who could transform the world—go to waste, because of institutional sexism and fear of their otherness. Going blind every time you drain a boiling pan of pasta, because it steams up your glasses real bad.

  I did go through one, brief “big love for Hillary” phase, back in 1992—when she got into all that shit for explaining why, despite her husband running for president, she wasn’t giving up her job as a lawyer to “support” him.

  “I suppose I could have stayed at home, and baked cookies, and given teas,” she mused, “but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

  At the time, this caused massive controversy. It was presumed that Hillary was throwing shade on all stay-at-home, baking wives—despite that sentence not running: “I suppose I could have stayed at home and baked cookies and given teas—like a loser.”

  Or even—which would have been more truthful—“I could have baked cookies—but I cannot cook them faster than Bill eats them. He is the Big Dog, and, frankly, you can just buy cookies for sixty-nine cents a packet in Walmart, so, you know, my gigantic IQ made a decision there.”

  The logic of the fury against Clinton essentially centered on the fact that she had been able to make a choice about her life. It was sobering, as a seventeen-year-old, to witness this: that women just can’t say they don’t want to make biscuits and would prefer to be a lawyer, instead.

  (Let’s flip-reverse this for a minute: Imagine if Andy Murray’s new wife announced she intended to run for Parliament, and Andy Murray gave an interview explaining that he would still continue to play tennis—and people became utterly furious about this, and accused him of shitting on all other, “normal” men who don’t play world-class tennis. That he was shaming them. The whole thing was berserk, recidivist nuts.)

  So, yeah—I was wildly pro-Hillary, for those bad months. The months of insanity. Then, for the next twenty-three years—whevs. No Hillary thoughts at all.

  But last week—when Hillary announced that she would be running to be the first female president of the United States—I felt a sudden joy. Actually, it was more than that—it quietly and unexpectedly blew a small part of my mind. Fizz. Crack.

  Because in that one second—as I imagined the very real possibility of her becoming president—she rewired my entire, subconscious chronology of being a woman.

  I hadn’t even realized it, but my unexamined presumption was that for women, it’s all downhill after the menopause. You make your big bang—you do all your running and fighting and growing and deal making—in your fertile years, and then, when your ovaries quit, you step back to grow herbs, retire to a cottage-cum-hovel, and do a bit of soothsaying on the side.

  Don’t get me wrong—I was looking forward to my years of “going hag”: I had intended to finally accept all those invitations to appear on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and 8 Out of 10 Cats, where I planned on terrifying all those young cocky male comedians by appearing with my hair all massive and white, like Mad Madam Mim, and schooling them in how to deliver a Marxist-feminist dialectic monologue that was still twelve times funnier than whatever spiteful, ass-clown lolz they were milking out of the concept of Kim Kardashian being a whore with a big arse. It was gonna be ace.

  But! With Hillary’s announcement, that all exploded. For suddenly, there is the very real possibility that we will live in a time where a woman becomes the leader of the Free World at the age of sixty-seven.

  And in a stroke, this gives women a whole extra act in our lives. Another thirty years, minimum, in which we can continue to grow in power, wisdom, accomplishment, ambition, and balls. The whole female narrative arc is reinvented like that—from slow decline to soaring upward thread. Clinton has made the sexual power of being a young woman—so often our gender’s greatest currency—look as nothing compared to what you can get in your seventh decade: the world. You have chosen the world over baking cookies.

  That’s what can happen from now on.

  I Have Given Up Heels. Like, Totally.

  Some of the revolutions are smaller than a female preside
nt, of course.

  I came to a decision last week that, frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t make years ago: I’ve given up on high heels. I’ve taken them all from the box under the bed, and put them in the kids’ dressing-up box. The silver wedges, the green velvets, the black leather peep-toes with the bondage straps around the ankle. Even the canary yellow ones that looked like they were from the 1930s, and made me feel like a Broadway chorus girl called Lola. All gone, now.

  All gone, because I just can’t summon up the energy to lie to myself anymore. The lie I’ve been telling myself for thirty years is that, while I cannot wear these shoes in the daytime—to go shopping or to work in them would, obviously, be painful—I can wear heels in the evening, to “important” events.

  “You look great!” I would say to myself in the mirror, as I adjusted the buckles and made sure my stocking seams were straight.

  “You’re totally walking in these shoes in a sexy way!” I would say to myself as I walked very, very carefully down the steps and onto the pavement. And got into a cab, because I couldn’t walk to the Tube in heels.

  “Spending nearly fifty quid on cab fares in order to wear heels to a party is totally fine!” I would say to myself as I arrived at the party—regarding any further staircases with gloom, and hand-rail-clutching totteriness.

  “Dancing wouldn’t have been fun anyway!” I would say as I remained sitting on my chair when the disco started.

  “I’m sure you haven’t looked like that all night!” I would think when I looked up and caught my reflection in the mirror, and realized that my aching feet had made my posture terrible, and that I looked like an old, paunchy woman. Well, an older, paunchier woman.

  I thought I had no option, you see. If you’re going to a black-tie event, that means wearing a dress—and if you’re wearing a dress, you have to wear heels. Smart black cocktail dresses look weird without heels. Most evening wear looks weird without heels. You could boldly wear trainers, like Lily Allen in 2005—but that seems too contrary. You’re not trying to make a massive style statement. You just want to look normal, and nice. Appropriate.

  And so you put on the Blisteze pads, and the heels, and the dress, and pay the cab fare, and don’t dance, and gradually slump in pain, and then—if you’re me—fall down a flight of stairs and break three ribs, and think, “You know what—fuck this. I’m tired of being scared of stairs, and spending every important event I go to worried I’ll fall over and show my knickers. I’m going to do what men do.”

  For when men go to evening events, they can run upstairs, and dance, and get the Tube there and back, thus saving £50—because they wear a suit, and some nice shoes, which they might have polished, but that is pretty much the extent of their primping. They are safe and comfortable and happier and better off, simply because they are not wearing a short tight dress and a pair of heels. And they can wear the same suit over and over—they would be utterly confused by the common female panic of fretting that we cannot wear a dress, or a pair of shoes, “Because I wore it last time.”

  Men spend no more than ten minutes thinking about how they will look at a black-tie event. Women start thinking about it weeks in advance.

  Recently, I have started thinking that the answer to most of my feminist questions is: “Just do what the men do. All that shit they do really seems to be working for them.”

  And so I have. At the last two events I went to—award ceremonies, black tie—I did as men do. I wore a suit. A tuxedo jacket, shorts, a silk blouse, and flat shoes: flat green-and-gold brogues from Marni, that I can walk to the Tube in, and dance in, and stand in with perfect posture, enjoying my evening.

  And it felt amazing—to be able to walk around with my hands in my pocket, whistling. To feel ease. To know I need never feel anxious about what to wear to a posh event again: I’ve got my outfit, and my shoes, and I don’t really need to think about them again for the next five years—unless it’s to go wild, and maybe buy a new blouse.

  I felt like I’d discovered an astonishing secret. Women kept coming up to me, and going, “I wish I was wearing what you’re wearing. I’m going to have to take these shoes off in a minute.”

  And at the end of the evening, they all got into cabs, to go home. I, meanwhile, walked to the pub with the men, and stayed out until three a.m.—spending my cab money on champagne, and dancing.

  So, yes. I have finally given up heels. And it is just jim-dandy.

  The REAL Equality Checklist

  For a while, I pondered—will we actually know when we have achieved the revolution? Will we ever be actually told? Fearing that there was no official index for the Great Glorious Day of Equality, I quickly knocked together my own checklist, for ascertaining exactly that thing.

  I was pondering, last week, how—in a complex and busy world—we would actually know when women have become equal to men. Some people argue women have already overtaken men; other people argue women are still at least two generations from parity; statistics often show a confused picture; and, as yet, there is no gigantic golden bell that will be rung out on the day that it’s conclusively proved, once and for all, that we’re all on a level playing field, with adjacent toilet facilities, sufficient for both sexes, to boot.

  In the absence of someone forging the Great Golden Bell of Equality, I’ve made a quick tick list of things we should be keeping our eyes on, viz., female status in Western society, which I’ve now pinned up on the fridge, with a Sharpie, to tick off, as and when they occur.

  Wages to reach parity (white women still earning 85p to every male £1 in the UK, women of color earning even less—64p).

  Equal number of female CEOs in the Forbes 100 (current score: fifteen—out of one hundred).

  Houses of Parliament to represent the blah blah blahdy blah.

  Women to be able to eat a sausage for breakfast when they fancy it, without feeling bad about it, and wanging on about it for the rest of the day like they’re a lay sister who’s just killed a unicorn. (“I should probably go for a lunchtime swim . . . and just have Cup-a-Soup for tea . . . just nibbling on a rice cracker . . . oh God, my trousers feel bad, I SHOULD NEVER HAVE EATEN THE SAUSAGE.”) Ladies, FYI—you should always eat the sausage.

  A woman to go up and collect her Oscar in a comfortable pair of shoes, like all the men—rather than turning up already in agony, then spending the rest of the evening leaning against walls, tables, chairs, etc., missing out on important business-deal conversations, while her iPhone beeps with Google updates from bitchy tabloids about how her red carpet look was “a howler,” and how she looks like she’s “spilling out of” her dress, when Russell Crowe is “spilling out of” his trousers and no one gives even half of one shit.

  For everyone to realize how weird it is for every TV show to pair a man “of golfing age” with some hot chick who could be his daughter or granddaughter (This Morning, The One Show, Strictly Come Dancing, every Children in Need ever—particularly the one with Terry Wogan, 498, and Fearne Cotton, 12: brrrrr). The BBC’s Light Entertainment department often looks like one long “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.” Why can’t we have some badass woman in her sixties bossing some pleasant-on-the-eye boy-faun around? I’d set the Sky+ for Joan Bakewell showing Barney Harwood from Blue Peter a thing or two.

  No more references to a woman who likes alcohol, sexual intercourse, opinionated conversation, and partying as being “laddish.” For anyone who thinks these are the sole preserves and interests of men—the Wife of Bath wants to have a word with you. Put your curly-toed drinking shoes on.

  For a female former child star to come along who indicates her shift into adulthood not by suddenly rocking up in her knickers and doing a video where she fellates random objects—but by making an album about, say, parallel universes, the Underground Railroad, or that bloke who built Monument in London as a massive telescope, and then lived in it, instead.

  But, on the other hand, for everyone to also be cool with the fact that a certain proportion of f
ormer child stars will want to express their new-found adulthood by exploring their sexuality in a series of red-hot videos, and it not being subsequently discussed, for months on end, as if the world is going to hell in a handcart (see Miley Cyrus).

  It being perfectly acceptable, in an office environment, to rest your breasts on the desk when they hurt.

  A female hero who is as complex, odd, and sometimes unlikeable as Batman, Sherlock Holmes, Holden Caulfield, John Self, or Jack Bauer.

  And who doesn’t have a single scene where she faffs around on a MacBook in a vest top, showing side boob, late at night.

  For us to never again find out, at the midpoint in the story, that the reason a female protagonist is driven is because she was sexually abused as a child. Do women really only want to achieve things if they’ve been horrifically traumatized in their earlier lives? Must the Hero Origin Story always be one of shame and ruin? Suggestions for other things that could motivate a female character: she’s a sentient adult in the twenty-first century who needs to pay her rent; she has a very annoying mother; it’s her job. Just imagine, for a minute, how weird it would be if, in the middle of The Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart suddenly broke down and admitted that the only reason he wanted to find the Maltese Falcon is because, actually, he had a “bad uncle” who touched him in the wrong place once on a caravan holiday. Exactly. This is how weird women are made to feel all the time. Until the Great Bell rings out.