There is a neat squaring of the circle when you notice that, on this issue, those who say “Things cannot change” are, in the overwhelming majority, men—and that the people they are trying to shut down who are saying, repeatedly, “Things must change” are women.
And this is all particularly inappropriate when the conversation is about how, of all things, it is the Internet that cannot change. The Internet, which was invented, within our lifetimes, by hippies. Tim Berners-Lee, who gave away the coding for free, with the words “This is for everyone”—the sentence that was so astonishing and inspiring when it lit up the stadium at the Olympic Opening Ceremony.
In short, the Internet was invented, very recently, for people, by people, and founded in optimism and idealism.
For this odd new groundswell of commentators to start claiming that the Internet is inherently dark, cruel, and cynical is a gross misappropriation of one of the wonders of the modern age. It misunderstands what it was, is, and, most importantly, could be.
Shame on anyone whose argument basically boils down to saying that: “The thing about the Internet is, it’s a place where hundreds of anonymous men can threaten to rape women—and that is how it will always be.”
That is an odd, dark denial of the fundamental decency of human nature and the law. It is illegal to act in this manner on the Internet, and the social networking sites on which it happens need to be reminded of that unambiguously.
I’m pro the mooted twenty-four-hour walkout on 4 August, not only because it is a symbolic act of solidarity—which are my favorite kinds of symbolic acts—but also because it will focus minds at Twitter to come up with their own solution to the abuses of their private company.
You know—the popularity of social networking sites waxes and wanes with ferocious rapidity. Twitter might currently be the hot thing—but it only takes a couple of bad months for it to become the new Friends Reunited, the new MySpace, the new Bebo. Another ghost town left empty when women, and their good male friends, tire of this horrible clown caravel of rape and death and threat and blocking and antagonism and cynicism and the shrugging insistence that this is how it will always be.
If 52 percent of Twitter’s customers—women—see other women being repeatedly left to deal with abuse on their own, then when a new social networking site appears that has addressed this issue, I suspect they will drain away from Twitter in a way that makes a twenty-four-hour walkout look like a mere bagatelle.
The main compass to steer by, as this whole thing rages on, doubtless for some months to come, is this: to maintain the spirit that the Internet was conceived and born in—one of absolute optimism that the future will be better than the past. And that the future will be better than the past because the Internet is the best shot we’ve had yet for billions of people to communicate equally, and peacefully, and with the additional ability to post pictures of thatched houses that look “surprised.”
How to Run a Half-Arsed Global Internet Campaign
As you might have guessed from the last piece, the building storm of threats against women on Twitter was something I felt like I wanted to act upon. The day after I wrote that piece, I did: I suggested a thing called #twittersilence, and, in the process, launched my first ever—but I’m sure not my last—half-arsed global Internet campaign. On 4 August—International Friendship Day—I suggested a twenty-four-hour withdrawal from Twitter, to both show solidarity with those being threatened and put pressure on Twitter to make their site safer for everyone to communicate on. #twittersilence trended worldwide, and made Channel 4 News, but led to, ahem, let us say a “varied” reception in the media.
Below is a report on how it went. Tldr: a mixed grill.
Come up with a half-arsed Internet campaign while on holiday. After three big lie-ins, you will be dangerously overpositive—and, also, quite simple—from overexposure to the sun. “Let’s have an old-skool, 1970s-style strike!” you will say, eating your second lunch of the day. “Withdrawing our labor—i.e., the posting of pictures of owls looking angry wearing hats, and re-Tweeting amusing cover versions of ‘Get Lucky’! That will show Twitter what’s what! And send out a message of peace ’n’ shizz! Everyone will love, and get behind, this idea!” Unless . . .
When you pick a “symbolic” date, you fail to check that this isn’t also the day the BBC announce the new Doctor in Doctor Who. As soon as you Tweet about your great “twittersilence” idea, half your potential supporters reply, regretfully, “Any other day, dude, and I’d be there. Totally. Totalmo. But—IT’S THE NEW DOCTOR. Gotta Tweet it.” You cannot blame these people. You have made a massive, fundamental error. When, at seven thirty p.m., the BBC announce it is Peter Capaldi, you regret your own, self-imposed silence. You have a great joke about Malcolm Tucker and the Daleks which, subsequently, other people make on Twitter, leaving you feeling incredibly bitter, and resentful.
It is almost impossible to prevent people from fundamentally misunderstanding the point of your campaign. Within twenty minutes of suggesting a peaceful vigil, you get people saying, “I said I didn’t want to do it—and now I’m getting death threats!” You go on Twitter to say, “Hey, chill! Don’t hassle anyone who doesn’t want to do this! I support all methods of protest and support!” Five minutes later: “My sister’s just been threatened with rape. Thanks.” It’s at moments like these you can imagine how many times Jesus must have had to say, over lunch, “Marty, Marty—hey. While no one is more admiring than me of your passion and commitment to my cause, I gotta say, this ‘Breaking Noses with Bricks for Jesus’ campaign is not really where I’m heading to right now. I’m kinda . . . ‘parables and martyrdom only.’”
When other campaigners make it clear they don’t agree with your campaign, try not to take it too personally. Don’t reread what they write, over and over again, going, “But—why don’t they like me?” Don’t think about it for four days, solidly, crying and eating Madeira cake out of the packet. Don’t start going off into weird fantasies where specific people who’ve slagged you off happen to see you carrying a stranded dolphin back into the sea, which makes them have the guilty revelation that they have got you all wrong. Don’t do that to the point of imagining the best sound track to this scene (“Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie). You’re a campaigner now! Just suck it up!
When the Daily Mail runs an online poll called “Is Caitlin Moran’s #twittersilence the action of an attention-seeking egotist?,” don’t click the “No” button on the poll. Don’t do that seventeen times. That is a classic trap, dude.
Don’t get so upset about the backlash—six Telegraph blogs in six days, Toby Young calling you a hypocrite on Channel 4 News, thousands of abusive Tweets—that you start bidding on weird things on eBay, at one a.m., to comfort yourself. When, three days later, the £7.99 viscose sky blue jumper covered in horses arrives, you will be unable to wear it—as it will essentially be the “Massive Bad-Memory Trigger” jumper. You put it in the bin, thinking, sadly, “In the bin—like my idea.”
Your friends will worry about you. This will peak when you receive an email from your friend whose partner has a Grade 4 brain tumor that starts “Oh GOD are you okay????” You find this difficult to cope with.
But don’t regret what you did. Is the world anywhere near having too many peaceful, well-meaning, utterly half-arsed Internet campaigns? No. No. And you clearly have a genuine knack for it! You could do it again!
Slash & Burn—My Life with Cystitis
Of course, you don’t need the entire Internet to bring you low, if you’re a woman. Sometimes, your urethra will do that for you.
When it comes to teenage girls learning about life through the novels of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century, there is a lot to recommend the notion. Pre-Internet, it’s how I learned, and it learned me good. I know deep wisdoms, such as “If you fancy someone hot who is already married, just wait a while—his wife might catch fire” (Jane Eyre).
However: one aspect that
raising yourself on classic novels massively and notably fails in is in the diagnosing of medical conditions, and their subsequent safe and swift methods of remedy. Because, of course, in the olden days, there were no cures. You couldn’t do anything about pain, or illness, except divert yourself with time-consuming and disgusting things while your immune system battled away on its own: slathering your chest with hot goose fat, then wrapping it in brown paper and string. Or burning feathers under the noses of the unconscious. Mmm. That’s going to cure my fatal heart condition. Smoldering wings. Thanks.
And, so, inexorably, to cystitis. Everyone has their weak spot, and mine is my urinary tract. I suffer from recurrent cystitis. I am versed in the malfunctionings of the bladder. I have an Achilles urethra. Please do not turn away from this page, believing I have been vulgar, or uncouth. None of us chooses our illnesses, and I certainly didn’t choose mine the first time I was struck with pain, at the age of fifteen, on a beach in mid-Wales.
As the sun beat down upon my head—mirroring the burning in my atrium—I ran through my internal grimoire of illnesses, culled from the books by my bedside. Was this “the vapors”? “The fever”? “The ague”? “Dropsy”? “Furuncle”? “Grippe”? “Quinsy”? Was I suffering “ill humor”? I certainly felt ill-humored. There weren’t many gags to be had in the igneous distress I felt twelve inches down from my soul. I sat in the sea and cried.
Three hours later, back in our caravan—after a journey home my memory has kindly scrumpled and binned—I told my mother I believed I had some manner of quinsy, but in my pants.
“It is the curse of our family,” she said, sadly. “I have it. And your younger sister. She has suffered for years. It is called cystitis. You will always be slightly unsure of how to spell it.”
“Caz has it, too?” I asked, surprised. I thought back, over the last few years. I just thought she had a generally negative attitude to life. But thinking about it, locking herself in the toilet for hours on end, shouting “Fuck off!” might have been cystitis, instead, after all.
My mother then explained, with an even greater sadness, that there was neither cure nor palliative syrup for cystitis, and that the only thing the world had to offer sufferers was a hot-water bottle, clutched between the knees.
Over the twelve years of agony that followed, I learned to loathe the family’s hot-water bottle: a pink one with a teddy bear on the front, which came to stand, in my mind, as the coat of arms of pain. I learned that the only real relief came from sitting in a bath—once for eleven hours, nonstop—topping it up with hot water, and crying.
In 1999, a rumor went around that a foul remedy called “potassium citrate” would help, and I swigged liters and liters of the poison—a viscid, bitter treacle that promoted impressive retching and shuddering. The experience was roughly akin to drinking griffin urine.
I came to share with Caz terrible stories of cystitis’s evil. On one terrible occasion, Caz had felt the first warning twinges twenty minutes into a seven-hour train journey from Euston to Edinburgh, and had no recourse available other than taking a bottle of whisky into a toilet, and drinking herself into numb stupor. I had it at the Glastonbury Festival, and sat in a washing-up bowl of lukewarm water, in a tent, attending the far-off “whump-whump” of the Manic Street Preachers playing, fittingly, “Slash ’n’ Burn.” Once, I had it at my husband’s boss’s garden party, in Henley-on-Thames, and had to sit, knickerless, skirt spread wide, on his lawn, releasing tiny teaspoons of terrible hot vinegar and crying behind my sunglasses while making chitchat with middle management. That was a low.
We came to refer to it as “the real Big C,” and fear its panging advent like a tiny, pointless childbirth.
Then, when I was twenty-seven, I actually went and saw a doctor about it—bent double and weeping in his chair.
“Your mother was wrong,” he said, briskly. Turned out she, too, had relied on the novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for her medical information. In the glorious, blessed, holy present, you could actually knock Pants Quinsy on the head in three hours flat with a massive dose of ibuprofen and a course of antibiotics.
In conclusion: classic literature—good for the soul beset by philosophical quandary, bad for the urinary tract beset by E. coli bacteria. I shall be presenting my findings to both the British Medical Association and the British Library.
On the Set of Girls with Lena Dunham: “She Is the Very Thing”
Sometimes, it’s glorious to be a girl—not least since Lena Dunham’s Girls started airing, in which a host of female characters are allowed to be as venal, dim, misguided, overweight, deluded, amusing, and real as men. A huge fan of the show, I went out onto the set for the second season of Girls, and I touched Shoshanna’s trousers. Bite me.
Brooklyn, July 2012. The Modish Neighborhood of Williamsburg—“Billyburg”—the Shoreditch of NYC.
It’s July hot—all the rest of New York is bare-legged, and lazy—but this particular residential street bustles, as the caravel of a location shoot has come to town. The street is lined with Winnebagos, generators, and the mandatory sprackling of hot young runners in beanie hats, lolling on doorsteps, languidly thumbing at BlackBerrys.
As you duck under the tape sealing off the street, and walk towards a small, square church—the epicenter of the hustle—you wonder, again, at the sheer logistics of making a television show. All the call sheets and vehicles and phone calls and electricity; the towels and taxis and batteries. All these people. A whole village called into being for months on end. Someone, somewhere, bears a lot of responsibility. Someone, somewhere, made this happen.
Walking into the church—momentarily gloomy—you find that someone sitting in the control room. This is where the director and the writer are glued to a monitor, flanked by a coterie of coffee bringers, note takers, technical assistants, and producers. This is the pressurized core of the whole show.
Every time I have ever walked into this still, quiet eye of a shoot, the person at the center is, without exception, a man—a man, in his forties or fifties. A man, slightly disheveled, bullishly confident, running things. This is as natural and as immutable as walking into a beehive and finding some bees. That’s just who’s always at the center. That guy, thirty years in the business, who looks like all the other guys.
But here, in the center of this operation—the hub the whole street is revolving around, for HBO’s most prominent show—is a twenty-six-year-old woman, in slip-on brogues and a leopard-print shift dress. She has a round, almost childlike face, and is texting on an iPhone with chipped burgundy nails. She chews sugar-free gum. She looks like an English student, or the keyboard player in an alt-rock band. She calls for quiet on the set, and begins the next take with:
“Everybody—let’s remember—this is a show for smart people. I read that, once, in a review.”
This is Lena Dunham. Not only is she the director on this show—Girls—but she is also the show’s creator and writer. And, in a minute, she will slip off this chair—with “GIRLS” written on the back—go into the adjacent room, and take the lead role, as Hannah Horvath, too.
Two days before this shoot, she was nominated for three Emmys, for each position she fills on the show: Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, Directing for a Comedy Series, and best Comedy Series. Her show, Girls, became the most talked-about, and controversial, show in the United States when it premiered in April.
Next week, it starts screening in the UK to an already-formed cult following, who’ve been illegally streaming it from the United States over the summer, and blogging and Tweeting about Dunham with the fervor one usually associates with a pop star.
There has never been anything quite like Girls before. There has never been anyone like Lena Dunham—running a massive, pop-culture phenomenon, on her own, at the age of twenty-six. To a generation of girls, she is the thing. The very thing. The absolute thing.
“Welcome to the ‘Women of Excellence Lounge’!” she says, gesturing to an empt
y chair. “Come and watch. We’re shooting a very exciting scene, about some delicious cookies. And, later, someone dies.”
So what has Dunham done? Two things, really. Firstly, she’s brought a wholly new depiction of women to the screen—one which women will find as thrilling, liberating, and homage-provoking as men found, say, Woody Allen’s characters, three decades before.
There are scenes in Girls that will make you gasp. In the second episode, Dunham’s character, Hannah, has pretty much the worst consensual sex you will ever have seen with her on/off boyfriend—which includes him vocalizing a fantasy that she’s an eleven-year-old, and her gallantly trying to go along with it, but failing, before he ejaculates on her chest. You are allowed to find this scene fist-bitingly unacceptable—but also very funny.
In the third episode, Hannah’s more worldly, rock ’n’ roll yet brittle cousin Jessa gets pregnant, skips the abortion appointment her friends have arranged for her (“I can’t believe she’s late for her own abortion”), gets drunk on White Russians in a bar, pulls some guy, and, while having sex with him, in the toilets, realizes her period has started as she stares at his bloodied fingers. You are allowed to both find this disgusting—but also thrill at an incident previously wholly unrecorded on television.
In the third episode, Hannah learns she has contracted a sexually transmitted disease—“Not one of the famous ones”—and has to contact all her ex-lovers, to tell them the news. She spends the whole episode trying to work out how she feels about having a sexually transmitted disease, before ending the episode changing her Facebook status to the message “All adventurous women do”—Jessa’s laconic comment on how common STDs are with a certain kind of woman.
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