SHE became famous for writing and talking about women but award-winning journalist and author Caitlin Moran has switched focus with her new book What About Men?
The book explores “why some men feel that women are winning and men are losing” and Moran says it’s a natural extension of her feminism. “As any woman will tell you, 50 per cent of our problems are men: bad men, scared men, angry men, misogynistic men. So you can’t fix the girls until you fix the boys”.
As someone who regularly discusses the problems of girls and women in public, Moran says she had often been confronted with the question from audience members: “But what about the men?”. For a long time she ignored the question as she was busy dealing with women’s issues. She eventually came to believe there was value in exploring men’s problems: boys are at greater risk of addiction to drugs and porn, are more likely to suffer with depression or die by suicide and increasingly at risk from online misogynist radicalisation by the likes of Andrew Tate and Jordan B Peterson.
“Feminism came up with a set of tools for understanding the problems [women face]… and what I’m saying is that men need to use these tools now.”
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A regular on The Women’s Podcast podcast, Moran was in Dublin for the final night of her latest book tour. Her wildly successful feminist handbook How to Be A Woman, published in 2011 and translated into 43 languages, has sold over one million copies. What About Men? is currently number one in the UK book charts but has also received criticism, much of it from men.
“If I’m writing a book about men, it’s not going to apply to a 4.4 billion people in the world,” she tells podcast host Róisín Ingle. “But there are nonetheless observable things about men. I wanted to start a conversation in the most warm, inclusive, silly way possible.”
“My ultimate hope is that men now read my book and go ‘Actually, I could write a much better book than that’ and then we have dozens of books where they [men] talk about their own lives, that’s what I want to happen.”
You can listen back to the full interview with Caitlin Moran in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
