Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  Like ex-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who based his crime policy on the “broken windows” theory, Moran calls for “zero tolerance” of “all the patriarchal bullshit”: a colleague’s crude “joke,” Disney princesses, Botox. To all those women who recoil from the word “feminist,” she asks, “What part of ‘liberation for women’ is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? ‘Vogue’ by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit get on your nerves? Or were you just drunk at the time of the survey?”

  It was after midnight at the Groucho, a private social club in London’s Soho neighborhood, and the next round was on Caitlin Moran. “Feminism is paying for these drinks!” she shouted, waving a cigarette.

  “The Grouch” as it is affectionately known, caters to those in the media and entertainment industries. Founded as an alternative to stuffier establishments, it was named for the old Groucho Marx quip that he would never join a club that would have him as a member. Moran reconciled that particular paradox by straddling it: ejected from the club twice in her youth for property destruction and public lasciviousness, she was in 2011 named its “Maverick of the Year” and awarded a free membership for life.

  Sitting outside on a rooftop deck Moran presided over a revolving scrum of actors, writers, and musicians. And fans. Her admirers came up in a steady stream, spanning the gamut of age, stylishness, sex, and sexual preference. It was as if she’d made feminism itself—the ultimate club that no one wanted to join—the hottest room in town. A woman with a graying topknot caught sight of Moran and genuflected; a gay man pumped his fist, shouting, “Fat! Fat! Fat!” Another man, with short-cropped hair and hipster sideburns, asked to take a photo with her. A tipsy woman in a black bubble minidress with a plunging neckline brandished a Cosmo and called out, “Zizi!,” the French word she favors for her own nether parts. “Drunk women love me,” Moran crowed. “I have cornered the market in wasted chicks who talk about their vag!”

  Regardless of how many people demanded her attention, Moran’s good humor never flagged. At one point, a friend and colleague from the London Times turned to me remarking, “You have to remember, Caitlin is someone who had no friends until she was sixteen. No friends. Can you imagine that? I think she still can’t believe people like her. The way she grew up . . . she always says she made it through because she is ebullient. That’s the word she uses. Ebullient.”

  Moran talks about her childhood almost as if she were part of a cult. She was the eldest of eight; her mother loved having babies but, once they were toddlers, much of their care fell to Caitlin. Her father had some early success as a drummer in a psychedelic rock band. He believed—the entire family believed—it was only a matter of time until he hit it big again. “We’d watch Live Aid,” Moran recalled, “and think, Once Dad makes it we’ll be friends with Bob Geldof’s kids. I’d think, This time next year . . .”

  Meanwhile, the family lived in subsidized housing in the grim, industrial town of Wolverhampton, subsisting on public assistance. There were few clothes—Caitlin wore her mother’s patched skirts or her father’s cast-off thermal underwear. Occasionally, they had no food; the rest of the time, they binged. As a result the Moran siblings were obese. They were allowed little contact with the outside world: no friends, no birthday parties. And no classrooms. Moran’s description of herself as “homeschooled” is a bit misleading: Her parents yanked her from formal education at age eleven because she was bullied. That also gave her more time to help out at home.

  Through it all, Moran was an insatiable reader and avid diarist. Before our evening at the Groucho, she read me excerpts that she’d transcribed onto her computer. “Here’s a typical one from when I’m eleven,” she said. “‘Woke up. Jam sandwich for breakfast. Went to supermarket with Dad then doctor with Mum. Ate some candy and coleslaw for lunch. I’m making pasta bolognaise for tea. Thoroughly tidied. Washed walls. Hoovered floors. Disposed of cobwebs in Eddie’s room. Washed the landing and Eddie’s room’s windows and frames. Put up a curtain rods [sic] and curtains. Finished my Agatha Christie book. Made new place to put shoes—a cardboard box under the sink! Mom says I’m very good. The dog’s missing.’”

  She glanced at me over the screen. “To have been raised like that and then to have gotten out of it . . . I sometimes get dizzy with it. The odds were just not good.”

  By thirteen, Moran realized the family’s fortunes would never change. Plagued by the fear that they’d lose their meager government allowance, she decided to rescue them in proper Jo March fashion: by writing a novel. It wasn’t very good, she admits now, but it did get published and the gimmick of her backstory—along with genuine talent and a drive forged of massive anxiety—launched her career. She began writing for a music magazine at sixteen. By seventeen, she was hosting a pop music show on national TV. Suddenly, the teenager who had rarely spoken to anyone beyond her immediate family was interviewing the likes of Björk and the band Oasis.

  This was the early 1990s, when the grunge-infused riot grrrl movement was on the rise. “riot grrrl was absolutely the university I went to,” Moran recalled. Overtly feminist, blisteringly angry, and utterly subversive, the movement rejected market-driven images of femininity: it was the word “slut” scrawled across the belly of a fleshy, shaven-headed young woman in a miniskirt and combat boots who was passing out hand-printed copies of her zine about incest. And it was the perfect fit for a girl who didn’t fit in. “When Courtney Love came along I was fifteen, and fat, and talked too much, and drank too much,” Moran recalled. “And what I really needed—and what I am eternally grateful to her for being—was a woman who just didn’t give a shit.” A year later Moran cheered when Donita Sparks, the lead singer of the all-female grunge band L7, tossed her used tampon into the crowd at the Reading Music Festival. “By comparison,” she observed now, “writing a chapter about wanking is small-fry.”

  The riot grrrls eventually disintegrated, replaced by the more palatable—and profitable—Spice Girls. “I say it jokingly, but I really think it’s true,” Moran said, “it all went wrong with the Spice Girls: obviously, the appropriating of the phrase ‘girl power,’ which to them meant nothing apart from being friends with your girlfriends. Aren’t you supposed to be friends with your friends?”

  Caitlin Moran, meanwhile, turned eighteen, became a newspaper columnist, and eventually, to her relief, joined the middle class. Yet, even today, with a husband, two children, a house, and a flourishing career, she can’t relax, can’t trust that her success is real. She is prone to panic attacks, which are only relieved by either “lying very still in bed with my husband watching really shit television while he strokes my head” or writing.

  “Writing saved me,” Moran told me. “Writing still saves me.” She ran a hand across the edge of her laptop. “This is where I live. Twitter means all my friends are in my computer. All my ideas are in my computer. I can do whatever I want in there, I’m kind of . . . bionic.”

  Moran talks faster than most mortals can listen, her references ranging—seemingly in one long spume—from the benefits of dry shampoo, to the work of Alain de Botton, to the original meaning of “Jubilee,” to the site of the world’s first public television broadcast, which is visible from the living room of her North London home.

  She greeted me there one day, dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt that read, my feminist marxist dialectic brings all the boys to the yard. Walking past rooms lined floor to ceiling with books and vinyl albums, she paused at the kitchen doorway to point out a Post-it note that had been slipped to her by a fifteen-year-old fan in Holland. It read, “too bad you’re not a lesbian,” punctuated with a smiley face.

  Next to that was a photo of Moran and her husband, a music critic and radio documentarian, taken on a windy beach shortly after they met. She was only seventeen then; her face round, her smile wide and genuine. They married when Moran was twenty-four; by the time she was twenty-eight, they had their two daughters. Such traditional choices seem
ed surprising for such a wild child. “It’s always seen as this binary thing with women,” Moran explained. “You’re either going to be rock ’n’ roll or you’re going to be a housewife. It’s either cupcakes or crack. I wanted both. And I got it.” She paused. “Well, not the crack,” then added jokingly, “I quite liked crystal meth, though. . . .”

  Moran’s oldest daughter, whom she calls Lizzie in her writing, is eleven, nearly the age Moran was in the opening scene of How to Be a Woman. She clamored into the kitchen, dressed in a school uniform of a gray skirt, white blouse, and maroon sweater, searching for her copy of The Hunger Games. “I’ll tell you,” Moran said after the girl left, “the greatest luxury is to not make your kids as worried as you were. I would rather my daughters be unexceptional but happy. Though the thing is, that they are exceptional and happy.”

  They are also feminists. As toddlers, Moran taught them to shout, “Thanks for that, the patriarchy!” whenever they scraped a knee. At age eight, when Lizzie questioned Barbie’s improbable curves, Moran had her draw pictures of what the doll ought to look like. (“An outline that was kind of representative,” Moran said. “Feet big enough to stand on and a monobrow because Lizzie has a monobrow. Hair on her legs. And she made one breast slightly larger than the other, so I was like, Thanks.”) For Halloween last year, the girls dressed as suffragettes.

  Figuring out how to introduce them to her beloved pop music has proved trickier. “I didn’t want them to reject pop,” Moran said. “But the best stuff that’s being made at the minute is by women who aren’t wearing many clothes.” It’s not sexiness that bothers her—rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be hot—it’s the lack of variety, the soul-numbing repetition of one, wildly unrealistic porn-inflected ideal for women. “Adele is the only woman for years who’s been allowed to get to number one wearing sleeves,” Moran said. For a while her politics bumped uncomfortably up against her passions. Then she found the funny. “What I finally came down to is that we would pity Rihanna,” she said. “I told my girls, ‘Look at Rihanna: She’s one of the biggest pop stars in the world. She’s really famous, really powerful, really rich. Yet in every single video she can only wear panties. Poor Rihanna! We’ll know when she is properly powerful and successful when we see her in a lovely cardigan.’”

  So many waves of feminism have washed up on America’s shores. Moran’s hopes for her own impact initially come off, like her book itself, as deceptively personal, the dreams of an awkward girl turned celebrity journalist. “I just want Tina Fey to be my best friend,” she said. “And Lena Dunham. And Oprah, too. I just want those three chicks to read it and say, ‘You did good.’ Just those three.” She paused. “And Roseanne Barr. Four. I only really want to sell four copies in America. If I can sell it to those four chicks . . . and Hillary. Okay, five. And Michelle Obama. Okay, six. If I could get those six women to read it . . .”

  Each of those women has publicly struggled with the complexities of “how to be a woman” and, in doing so, expanded the possibilities. And that, in the end, is all—and everything—Moran wants: for women to be able to truly define themselves, to author their own fates. “I absolutely do totally want a revolution,” she said. “Because I’ve got kids, and for my own peace of mind I need the world to change before they get out there. I totally need the world to change entirely so they can be safe and happy and never get to seventeen and look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m fat and inadequate and there is no place in this world for me.’

  “So that’s why I have to change the world. I have six years to make it into a feminist paradise so my little girls won’t get screwed up.”

  Elizabeth Blackburn: Why Science Must Adapt to Women

  If Elizabeth Blackburn were male, I would never have been assigned this profile. I knew nothing about her work; I’d never even taken high school biology. I certainly didn’t understand telomeres—the discovery of which would, in 2009, eventually earn her a Nobel Prize. She graciously (and patiently) explained them to me, using stuffed, chromosome-shaped pillows that were specially designed for such occasions. One of the more telling parts of this piece, which ran in November 2002, is the study in which researchers sent out fake résumés that were identical except for the gender of the job applicant. In 2017, a similar experiment was published by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank: forty thousand fake résumés were sent out—all identical except for the gender and the age of the candidate—to thirteen thousand online job listings. The result: “compelling evidence” that older workers, especially women, continue to experience discrimination in hiring.

  Elizabeth Blackburn is talking about chromosomes, which isn’t surprising: she is the biologist who in 1978 first established that telomeres, caps on the ends of chromosomes, protect critical genetic material from eroding during cell division. Seven years later, she and molecular biologist Carol Greider discovered the enzyme telomerase. Both findings offer tantalizing clues to the mysteries of aging and cancer. In as many as 90 percent of metastatic cancers, for instance, telomerase is wildly overexpressed. Blackburn’s work has launched one of the hottest fields in cell biology. Her office in the Blackburn Lab at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) is chockablock with awards; it also sports a poster depicting dancing chromosomes tipped with merry, Day-Glo telomeres.

  What has Blackburn riled up at the moment, however, has nothing to do with her research. She is focused on the Xs and Ys of chromosomes and why it is that more XX types—women—disappear from academic science. Nearly half of undergraduate science and engineering degrees are earned by women, but that number plummets to a third at the doctoral level, propped up by high numbers in fields such as psychology. Just 22 percent of doctorates in physics and 12 percent in engineering are awarded to women. At the faculty level, women’s representation shrinks to 20 percent, concentrated, after controlling for age, in the lower ranks and at less prestigious institutions. In the rarefied air of the National Academy of Sciences, women’s membership hovers around 7 percent. Blackburn is one of these elite survivors.

  “The argument has been that the pipeline will take care of this,” Blackburn says, referring to the idea that if enough women are encouraged to enter science early, the gender gap, over time, will disappear. “But the pipeline has been good for a number of years, and it hasn’t taken care of it. In biology it’s especially insidious because 50 percent of grad students are female. This has been the case for quite some time. Yet when I was chair of my department, I was the only woman chair in the entire medical school. We are putting a lot of our students off continuing—both men and women, but more women. They vote with their feet.”

  Make no mistake, Blackburn has flourished in the culture of science. But when she entered in the 1970s, the expectation was that once the pesky problem of overt discrimination was solved, women would adapt to science. Three decades later, she believes that hypothesis was wrong. To create true equality—to ensure that the best minds continue—she feels that science will have to adapt to women.

  It is no secret why women scientists flow out of the academic pipeline. Numerous studies have shown that subtle, often unintentional bias combined with a tenure process that overlaps childbearing years has a corrosive effect. A study of two thousand science and engineering doctoral students sponsored by the National Science Foundation in 1996 found that men were more likely than women to report that they were taken seriously by faculty. They were also more likely to have received help designing research, writing grant proposals, coauthoring publications, and learning management skills.

  According to Gerhard Sonnert, a sociologist of science at Harvard University who published a large-scale study on gender and science in 1995, women are often put off by the combative style that’s rewarded in scientific research, as well as the emphasis on self-promotion. “There’s an accepted language of science that has entered into the folklore and become the field,” Blackburn says. “Women don’t necessarily speak that exact same language, which is not to say that
the language they use is not as good. It is. But all those subtle ways women present things that are different from men, even their tone of voice, play into how what they’re presenting is accepted, its authority.” What’s more, women who do take on an aggressive style are often labeled “difficult.”

  Women who stick to the academic track may run into further obstacles when they go job hunting. Rhea Steinpreis, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, sent more than two hundred thirty curricula vitae to randomly selected professors, asking them to evaluate the fitness of the candidate as a job applicant. The CVs were identical in every respect but one: Half were sent by “Karen Miller” and half by “Brian Miller.” Fewer than half the professors would hire Karen; Brian was endorsed by two-thirds.

  Sometimes women fight back: In 1999 a group of female faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented a report to the president of the institution quantifying a culture that marginalized women. In addition to lower pay, they documented discrimination in hiring, promotions, and awards; exclusion from leadership positions; inequities in lab size; and hostility toward family responsibilities. Meanwhile, faculty ratios hadn’t budged in two decades. Perhaps the saddest aspect of the report was that because female faculty members had little contact with one another, they tended to see their ill treatment as a unique, isolated event rather than the result of gender bias. When they quit, as many did, they blamed themselves for their inability to thrive.

  Elizabeth Blackburn is hard-pressed to recall ever being told that because she was female she couldn’t be a scientist. Growing up in Tasmania, Australia, the second of seven children whose parents were both family physicians, she considered science a birthright. She was further insulated from stereotyping by attending an all-girls school and an all-female college.