Caitlin Moran - How to Be a Woman (2011)

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You think it doesn't really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise

Caitlin Moran
The problem with battling yourself is that even if you win, you lose.

Caitlin Moran
In my family, my fat family, none of us ever say the word 'fat.' 'Fat' is the word you hear shouted on the playground or in the street - it's never allowed over the threshold of the house. My mum won't have that filth in her house. At home together, we are safe.... There will be no harm to our feelings here because we never acknowledge fat exists. We never refer to our size. We are the elephants in the room.

Caitlin Moran
A male feminist is one of the most glorious end-products of evolution.

Caitlin Moran
Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside jigsaws.

Caitlin Moran
I am fully aware of what the word 'fat' means... It's a swear word. It's a weapon. It's a sociological subspecies. It's an accusation, dismissal, and rejection.

Caitlin Moran
When you live in a small house with five younger siblings, it's actually far more sensible- and much quicker- to cry alone.

Caitlin Moran
You wanted to become a doctor to help people and feel better at the end of your job, I think, watching them, as the nurse takes my hand. But I don't think you do feel better at the end of the day. You look like humans have constantly disappointed you.

Caitlin Moran
For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who - against all the odds - got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. Show a girl a pioneering hero - Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc - and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed.

Caitlin Moran
When a woman says, 'I have nothing to wear!', what she really means is, 'There's nothing here for who I'm supposed to be today.

Caitlin Moran
But as the years went on, I realised that what I really want to be, all told, is a human. Just a productive, honest, courteously treated human.

Caitlin Moran
Why on earth have I, because I'm a woman, got to be nice to everyone?

Caitlin Moran
If you can find a frock you look nice in and can run up three flights of stairs, you're not fat.

Caitlin Moran
I want a Zero Tolerance policy on All The Patriarchal Bullshit.

Caitlin Moran
Feminism has had exactly the same problem that "political correctness" has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means.

Caitlin Moran
But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story - in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless plots and scenarios for this thing that never actually happened.

Caitlin Moran
A 'sign of weakness' for a male celebrity is being found to be unfaithful, or unkind to an employee, or having crashed their car while stoned out of their tiny minds. A 'sign of weakness' for a woman, on the other hand, can be a single, unflattering picture.

Caitlin Moran
Feminism, as it stands, well... stands. It has ground to a halt.

Caitlin Moran
When I hear women talking about how their wedding is going to be/was the best day of their life, I can't help but think, You just haven't taken enough MDMA in a field at 3 a.m., love.

Caitlin Moran
There is the sheer emotional, intellectual, physical, chemical pleasure of your children. The honest truth is that the world holds no greater gratification than lying in bed with your children, putting your leg on top of them in a semi-crushing manner, while saying sternly, "You are a poo.

Caitlin Moran
Batman doesn't want a baby in order to feel he's 'done everything'. He's just saved Gotham again! If this means that Batman must be a feminist role model…then so be it.

Caitlin Moran
What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be. Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.

Caitlin Moran
Who doesn't have a friend who worships her lover with a passion that seems baffling to everyone that knows them? Before you met him for the first time, she'd talked him up like he was a cross between Indiana Jones, Barack Obama and The Doctor. When you finally meet him, he's a quiet little thing who looks like a baked bean in glasses, and actually says 'harumph' as spelt.

Caitlin Moran
When Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York in 1993, his belief in the 'Broken Windows' theory led him to implement the 'Zero Tolerance' crime policy. Crime dropped dramatically, significantly, and continued to for the next ten years. Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Windows issues in our lives - I want a Zero Tolerance policy on 'All The Patriarchal Bullshit'.

Caitlin Moran
There are some women out there who are just going to look better with a mustache: that's statistics.

Caitlin Moran